Some books are dear to us even if we can’t quite identify the reason: in such cases, were we to delve deep enough, unsuspected affinities would likely turn up, abounding in insights into hidden aspects of our personalities. There are other books, however, that serve as our traveling companions for years, for a lifetime, and the reason is clear, accessible, and easy to put into words; among that latter group, I venture to cite, with reverence and love, Gargantua and Pantagruel, the immense but only work of François Rabelais, mon maître. This book’s odd fate is well-known to us all: how it sprang from the life and learned leisure of Rabelais, a monk, physician, philologist, traveler, and humanist; how it grew and proliferated, with absolutely no plan, for nearly twenty years, and for more than a thousand pages, the most dazzling inventions piling up in total imaginative freedom, half robust folk epic of buffoonery, and half steeped in the vigorous, sharp-eyed moral consciousness of a great mind of the Renaissance. On every page, you encounter, audaciously paired, brilliant, or bawdy, or saccharine scurrilities, and, along with them, citations (authentic and otherwise, nearly all summoned from memory) from Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew texts; dignified and high-flown exercises in oratory; Aristotelian subtleties that prompt a giant’s laughter, others endorsed and sanctioned with the good faith of a man who lives a pure life.
If we add to this fundamentally irregular weave, and the frequently daunting language, the violent lambasting and satirizing of the Roman Curia, it becomes clear why Gargantua and Pantagruel commanded only a limited readership over the centuries, and why so many have been tempted to pawn it off, suitably amputated and revised, as children’s literature. Still, I need only open it to sense in it the book of today, that is to say, the timeless, eternal book that speaks a language we will always understand.
That’s not to say that it treats the fundamental themes of the human comedy: quite the opposite, for you’d seek in vain the great traditional poetic inspirations—love, death, religious experience, the whims of fate. Because in Rabelais you will never find brooding, insight, personal reflection: every word he wrote is alive with a different, witty, outgoing state of mind, essentially that of the innovator, the inventor (not the utopian); the inventor of stories grand and small, the bosin, or sideshow raconteur. For that matter, this revival is no coincidence; we know that the book had an obscure precursor, lost without a trace centuries ago—a country fair almanac, the Chroniques du grand Géant Gargantua.
But the two giants of his dynasty are not mere mountains of flesh, preposterous drinkers and eaters: at the same time, and paradoxically, they are the legitimate epigones of the giants who waged war on Zeus, and of Nimrod, and Goliath, and they are also enlightened princes and joyous philosophers. In Pantagruel’s great scope and hearty laughter the dream of the ages is embedded, that of a hardworking and productive humanity, which turns its back on the shadows, striding with determination into a future of peaceful prosperity, toward the golden age described by the ancient Romans, neither in the past nor in the distant future, but within reach, provided the powerful of the Earth do not abandon the paths of reason, and hold fast against enemies both within and without.
This is not idyllic hope; it is robust certainty. You need only will it, and the world can be yours; all you need is education, justice, science, art, the law, and the example set by the ancients. God exists, but in the heavens: man is free, not predestined, he is faber sui, the maker of himself, who must and can rule the Earth, a divine gift. And so the world is beautiful, filled with joy, and not tomorrow but today: because to each of us the illustrious delights of virtue and knowledge are given, and also the bodily joys, likewise a divine gift, of dizzyingly sumptuous banquet tables, “theological” drinking parties, and tireless lovemaking. To love human beings means to love them as they are, body and soul, tripes et boyaux.
The one character in the book who is human in size, who never spills over into the realm of symbolism or allegory, is Panurge, a remarkable backward hero, a distillate of restless, inquisitive humanity, in whom, to a far greater degree than in Pantagruel, Rabelais seems to offer us a sketch of himself, of his own complexity as a modern man, his own contradictions unresolved but cheerfully accepted. Panurge—the charlatan, buccaneer, clerc, variously hunter and prey, courageous and fearing “nothing but danger,” starving, penniless, and dissolute, who makes his entrance begging in every language, living and extinct—is us, is Mankind. He’s not exemplary, he’s not “perfection,”* but he is humanity, alive in that he seeks, sins, enjoys, and learns.
How can we reconcile this intemperate, pagan, worldly doctrine with the evangelical message, never rejected or forgotten by Rabelais, the shepherd of souls? It is in fact impossible to reconcile: this, too, is typical of the human condition, to be suspended between the mud and the sky, between nothingness and infinity. Rabelais’s very life, or at least what we know of it, is a tangle of contradictions, a whirlwind of activities apparently incompatible with one another, or with the image of the author that we traditionally reconstruct from his writings.
A Franciscan monk and, later (at the age of forty), a medical student and physician at the hospital of Lyon, a publisher of scientific books and popular almanacs, a scholar of law, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, a tireless traveler, an astrologer, a botanist, an archeologist, a friend of Erasmus, a forerunner of Vesalius in his use of human cadavers for the study of anatomy; a remarkably freewheeling writer, and at the same time the curate of Meudon, who enjoys for his whole life the reputation of a pious and god-fearing man—nonetheless, he leaves a portrait of himself (deliberately, one would gather) as a silenus, if not actually a satyr. We are a considerable distance—indeed, at the opposite extreme—from the Stoic wisdom of righteous moderation. Rabelais’s lesson is one of extremism, the virtue of excess: not only are Gargantua and Pantagruel giants but the book itself is gigantic, in heft and in impulse; gigantic and fabulous are the exploits, the ribaldry, the diatribes, the travesties visited upon both mythology and history, the detailed lists.
Gigantic above all else is the capacity for joy to be found in Rabelais and his creations. This disproportionate and luxuriant epic of the gratifications of the flesh reaches heaven, unexpectedly, by another path: because a man who experiences joy is like a man who experiences love—he is good, he feels gratitude to his Creator for having created him, and therefore he will find salvation. As for that, the carnality described by the deeply learned Rabelais is so naïve and inborn that it will disarm any intelligent censor: it is healthy and innocent and irresistible, like a force of nature.
Why do we feel that Rabelais is close to us? He certainly doesn’t resemble us; in fact, he’s rich in the very virtues lacking in the man of today—so beaten down, hampered, and weary. But he feels close to us as a model, in his cheerfully curious spirit, his jovial skepticism, his faith in tomorrow and in man; and again for the way he writes, so alien to categories and rules. Perhaps we can trace back to him, and to his Abbey of Thélème, via Sterne and Joyce, the now triumphant style of “writing however you like,” without doctrines or precepts, pursuing the thread of imagination exactly as it unspools, by spontaneous demand, different and surprising at each turn, like a carnival parade. He is close to us, mainly because in this outsized painter of worldly joys we sense the firm and enduring awareness, ripened through a long succession of experiences, that there is more to life than this. It would be hard to find a single melancholy page in his entire body of work, and yet Rabelais was familiar with human misery; he is silent about it because, a good doctor even when he writes, he refuses to accept it, his impulse is to heal it:
Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escrire
Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme.
* Here, and throughout Other People’s Trades, an asterisk indicates that the word or phrase is in English in Levi’s original text.