In brief
François Rabelais’s five books follow a family of giants. Gargantua is born through his mother’s left ear shouting for drink, is ruined by scholastic tutors and remade by a humanist one, comes home to win a war that began over a batch of cakes, and builds an abbey whose only rule is to do as you please. His son Pantagruel studies at the universities of France, adopts a clever, cowardly, ragged rogue named Panurge, and defeats an invasion. In the third book Panurge wants to know whether he should marry, and nobody he asks can tell him. So they all put to sea to consult an oracle, passing islands of lawyers, monsters and papists, and at the end of the fifth book a bottle speaks one word.
The author was a monk who left his monastery, a working doctor, and a man protected from the theologians by powerful friends. What he wrote is exuberantly filthy, and it is also a serious argument about education and freedom.
The argument
The opening prologue sets a trap. “Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades” is how Rabelais greets his readers, and then he tells them that Socrates was like the Silenes, painted apothecary boxes with costly drugs inside. So, he says, a reader must act like a dog with a bone: “break the bone, and suck out the marrow” (Prologue to Book I). A few sentences later he mocks anyone who hunts for allegories. Critics have fought over that prologue for decades, and I think both halves mean what they say. There is marrow, but you do not get it by following instructions.
The most marrow is found in three places. Gargantua’s letter to his son (2.8) is the humanist programme in a page: learn Greek, Hebrew, Latin and the sciences, be “an abyss and bottomless pit of knowledge”, and remember that “knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul”. The Abbey of Theleme is the second. Its rule is “Do What Thou Wilt”, and its justification is one of the great optimistic claims about human nature: “men that are free, well-born, well-bred” have an instinct that pushes them to virtue (1.57). The small print is in that sentence. The freedom belongs to the well-born.
The Third Book is where the argument turns on itself, and it is the best thing in Rabelais. Panurge asks for advice. Pantagruel, in effect, tells him to do what he has already decided, and Panurge keeps asking (3.9). He tries lots, dreams, a sibyl, a mute, a dying poet, a theologian, a doctor and a philosopher who answers only “There is some likelihood therein” (3.36). He interprets every answer in his own favour. A judge named Bridlegoose is shown deciding lawsuits by dice with results as good as anyone’s (3.39). No authority can do your judging for you, and Theleme’s freedom looks harder here than it did at the abbey gate.
The shape of the book
The order of the books misleads. Pantagruel came first, around 1532, under the anagram Alcofribas Nasier, as a cash-in on a popular chapbook about a giant. Gargantua, about the father, followed in 1534 and now stands as Book I. The Third Book came in 1546 under Rabelais’s own name, and the Fourth in 1552.
There was no plan, and the giants show it. Pantagruel can shelter an army with his tongue in Book II, yet by Book III he converses in rooms like anyone else. The form changes too. The first two books parody chivalric romance. The third is almost pure talk. The fourth is an odyssey of islands, each one a joke about a human institution, with its great set pieces: Panurge’s revenge on the sheep-dealer Dingdong, whose flock leaps overboard after one ram (4.8), and the storm in which Panurge howls while Friar John works (4.19).
The strangest and loveliest moment comes near the end of it. Far out at sea the crew hear voices in empty air. These are the sounds of a battle fought the winter before, frozen and now thawing (4.56), and Pantagruel throws “whole handfuls of frozen words” on the deck. Rabelais never says what they mean.
The doubtful fifth
Rabelais died in 1553. Part of a fifth book appeared in 1562 and the whole in 1564, and its authenticity has been doubted from the start. Other books had already been published in his name, and more than one fifth book is known to have existed. M. A. Screech, in the Penguin translation, thinks it has nothing to do with him, and warns against reading its meanings back into the four genuine books. Donald Frame thought Rabelais probably left some materials that someone later padded out. J. M. Cohen judged chapters 17 to 48 so unlike Rabelais as to seem another writer’s. No one can prove the matter either way, and most modern scholars treat it as at best partly his.
This matters because the book’s famous ending is here. The company finally descend to the temple of the Holy Bottle, and it utters “the word Trinc” (5.44), which the priestess Bacbuc glosses: it “signifies drink”. She gives Panurge a book that is a flask: “taste me this fine chapter, swallow me this rare gloss” (5.45). It is a beautiful conclusion and almost too neat, and it may have been written by someone who had read the first four books as carefully as we have. Treat every claim about what Rabelais finally meant with suspicion if it rests on Book V.
The voice and the translators
Rabelais writes in lists, mock proofs, parody law, parody scripture and sudden plain sense. The genealogy of Pantagruel runs through dozens of giants (2.1). The library of St Victor catalogues imaginary titles such as “The Codpiece of the Law” (2.7). A Limousin student says “We transfretate the Sequan” for crossing the Seine (2.6), and Pantagruel shakes the Latin out of him until he speaks his own dialect.
The free English text is a work of literature in its own right, and it is not quite Rabelais. Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty was a Royalist who fought at Worcester, went to the Tower, wrote a scheme for a universal language and, by legend, died laughing at the Restoration. His Books I and II came out in 1653, with Book III following posthumously in 1693. Terence Cave notes that his version is half as long again as the French, because he cheerfully adds to Rabelais’s copiousness. Peter Anthony Motteux, a French-born London journalist who also oversaw a Don Quixote, finished the job in 1694. J. M. Cohen called his part “no better than competent hackwork”. Both adapted the satire on Catholics. The Gutenberg edition is complete in all five books and restores some of Motteux’s cuts from a later copy, so what you get is all of Rabelais plus a great deal of Urquhart. In Panurge’s many tongues (2.9) the old editor’s note admits that Urquhart turned Rabelais’s bad English into worse Scots.
What Joyce took
James Joyce denied reading it. On 31 May 1927 he told Harriet Weaver he had never read Gargantua and Pantagruel itself, and predicted that nobody would believe him. The source for that letter and for much of what follows is Jacob Korg’s essay in the Journal of Modern Literature (2002).
Ulysses makes the denial awkward. In the last episode Molly Bloom recalls one of the books her husband brings her, “the works of Master Francois Somebody supposed to be a priest about a child born out of her ear because her bumgut fell out” (episode 18). That is an exact summary of two chapters. “Her bum-gut, indeed, or fundament escaped her” (1.4), and the child “issued forth at her left ear” (1.6). Her word is Urquhart’s word. Joyce might have got this at second hand, but somebody was reading closely.
The part of the record that can be proved is about the Wake. Joyce admitted reading some chapters of L. Sainéan’s La Langue de Rabelais (1922–23), and in Joyce et Rabelais (1972) Claude Jacquet showed that he copied many of its words into a notebook, about 150 of them, in Sainéan’s order, and used them in Finnegans Wake. A Provençal dance becomes “Malmarriedad”. The old phrase that Urquhart gives as “He would flay the fox” (1.11) becomes “flayfell foxfetor”. John Kidd reported that Joyce also owned a two-volume French text, now in Austin, Texas. Korg’s conclusion is that Joyce knew Rabelais better than he admitted, and used him.
What he took beyond that is resemblance, not proof, and it should be labelled so. Rabelais’s catalogues stand behind the mock lists of the Cyclops episode, or at least beside them. Panurge begging for food in more than a dozen languages, some invented, is the nearest thing here to the Wake’s page-by-page polyglot. Both writers treat language as a bodily appetite. Joyce may have feared looking derivative, which would explain the denial. Rabelais has his own Ulysses jokes too: Panurge claims fortunes “more wonderful than those of Ulysses” (2.9), and Epistemon, back from Hell, reports “Ulysses, a hay-mower” (2.30).
The people
Gargantua
Gargantua comes from folk tale, not from Rabelais, and in Rabelais he turns from a boy who eats six pilgrims in a salad (1.38) into the dignified father who writes the letter. The change is the book’s education theory acted out.
Pantagruel
Pantagruel starts as a greedy infant giant and ends as a calm Christian Stoic who forgives Panurge everything. He is the least funny person in the book by design. The prologue to Book IV gives his name to “a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune” (Prologue to Book IV).
Panurge
Panurge is the reason people finish Rabelais. He is coward, thief, scholar and practical joker, “of a middle stature”, with “three score and three tricks” for coming by money (2.16). Falstaff is his nearest relation in English.
Friar John
Friar John of the Funnels saves his abbey’s vineyard by clubbing the invaders with the staff of a cross (1.27) while the other monks pray. He is what Rabelais thinks a monk should be, which is someone with work to do.
Alcofribas
The narrator is a character too, a showman who swears to everything. In Book II he walks into Pantagruel’s mouth and finds a country there, with cities and a man “planting coleworts”. “Is there here a new world?” he asks, and the man answers that it is never a jot new, and that people do report another earth outside (2.32).
How it was made
Rabelais was born at or near La Devinière, near Chinon, between 1483 and 1494; the date is unknown. He was a Franciscan and then a Benedictine, and his Greek books were confiscated after the Sorbonne banned the study of Greek in 1523. Around 1527 he left without permission, studied medicine at Montpellier and in 1532 became physician at the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyon, where he wrote Pantagruel for money. Cardinal Jean du Bellay took him to Rome as doctor and secretary, and the du Bellay family protected him for years. The Sorbonne condemned the first two books in 1543 and the third in 1546. The Paris Parlement suspended the fourth in 1552. He resigned his parish at Meudon in January 1553 and died in Paris that year.
Readers and critics
Calvin attacked Rabelais as well as the Sorbonne, which gives some idea of how he was read. The modern debate began with Abel Lefranc, who in 1922 called him a militant atheist. Lucien Febvre replied in 1942 that such unbelief was hardly thinkable in the sixteenth century, and Screech made the case for an Erasmian Christian humanist, now the majority view.
Two readings changed everything else. Erich Auerbach’s chapter in Mimesis, “The World in Pantagruel’s Mouth”, took the world inside the mouth as a key to the book’s shifting scale. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965) read the book as carnival, in which the grotesque body and popular laughter overturn official order. Not everyone is won over. Orwell called him “an exceptionally perverse, morbid writer, a case for psychoanalysis”.
Afterlives
The book gave English the word gargantuan and French the phrase mouton de Panurge for a person who follows the herd. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy are direct descendants. Balzac wrote his Droll Stories in imitation, Daumier drew Louis-Philippe as Gargantua in 1831 and was prosecuted, Doré illustrated the book in 1854, and Aleister Crowley took Theleme’s rule for his religion.
How to read it
- Know what the free text is. Urquhart and Motteux are complete and enormous fun, and loose: Urquhart is magnificent, Motteux duller.
- Get a modern version for accuracy. M. A. Screech’s Penguin (2006) is closest to the French and notes its sources. Donald Frame’s (1991) contains the complete works, and Burton Raffel’s (1990) is the liveliest of the American versions. J. M. Cohen’s Penguin (1955) is still readable. Avoid abridgements such as Putnam’s Viking Portable if you want the whole.
- Start with Book I. It is the most finished and the easiest way in. Read Book II for Panurge, then treat Book III as the main course.
- Skip when you must. The lists are there to be enjoyed by the handful, and no one is checking.
- Treat Book V as an appendix. Read it for the Bottle, and keep it separate in your mind.
- For Joyce, read 1.4, 1.6 and 2.9. Then read Molly’s passage and the Cyclops lists in Ulysses.
Read next
- Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (1511). The book that taught Rabelais how a serious Christian could make jokes about the Church.
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605). The other great early comic book about reading, and another of Motteux’s jobs.
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67). Rabelais’s most devoted English pupil, quoting him at length.
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939). A sleeping giant and a polyglot gullet, by a man who said he had not read the book.