The essayist Michel de Montaigne celebrated with great optimism the crossing of borders. He notes anecdotally at one point in his Essays (1580–92) that, when he travels abroad, he does not search out fellow Gascons—“laissé au logis [I have left enough of them at home]” (3:9).1 Rather, he seeks out difference, eats local food, and talks with local people—he aims to leave behind both Gascony the territory and Gascony the locus of his own self.2 This ethical openness, which allows crossing civilizational boundaries as well as geographical and political ones, is the same hopeful face of the sixteenth century that we find in Montaigne’s famous reversal of perspectives in his textual diptych about the New World, the two essays “Des cannibales” (On Cannibals) and “Des coches” (On Coaches).3 These essays remain paradigmatic for discussions of early modern responses to alterity.4 This optimism, however, was not typical for the period—indeed, not typical for most periods. Montaigne’s two essays are essential for any student of the origins of modern ethnography, alongside authors such as Jean de Léry, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and José de Acosta. However, it behooves us as readers to remember that their spirited mocking of Europe’s inability to look beyond its own borders—“Tout cela ne va pas trop mal; mais quoy ils ne portent point de haut de chausses! [All this is not so bad—but what, they don’t wear breeches!]” (1:31)—was polemical and atypical. The ability for satire to function so well through a comparable reversal of perspectives in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) more than a century after the publication of Montaigne’s Essays retroactively reminds us just how unusual was Montaigne’s earlier desire not only for actual mobility, but for the mind’s self-displacement in a decentering project of reappraisal of Christian Europe.
On the Ottoman Empire’s Uncertain Borders
It is hardly surprising that sixteenth-century French literature’s exploration of boundaries between Europe and the Ottoman Empire often lacked Montaigne’s sensitivity to issues of cultural relativism. However, despite a self-evident Eurocentrism, these boundaries, as they were defined by writers and cartographers, do not constitute fixed frontiers. We must acknowledge huge general ambivalence. In this respect, the lack of political borders around Turkey (labeled Anatolia) in Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570) can be seen as strikingly mimetic vis-à-vis the geographical and cultural imagination of early modern borders. In Ortelius’s seminal atlas, country and continent names literally float above territories that themselves are not always clearly defined by borders on the map. Indeed, France’s connections to the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century were ambiguous and varied. The Ottoman Empire was a source of both fascination and fear, in both popular and learned cultures. Lest we too quickly read sixteenth-century orientalisms—then as now, the West’s East was the West’s creation—through the nineteenth-century colonial variety studied by Edward Said in his Orientalism, we should remember that since its capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Empire had been a major and frequently victorious player in the period’s geopolitics. The Ottoman Empire was not, in its relationship to sixteenth-century France, a downtrodden colonial Other. As David Viktus has noted in a more general sense, “many of the images of Islam that were produced by European culture in the early modern period are imaginary resolutions of real anxieties about Islamic wealth and might.”5 The anxiety, as Barbara Fuchs observes, was not merely of actual invasion, but also related to the “possibility of achieving a cohesive ethnic and religious self for the emerging nation,” that is, for France.6
It is a fair assumption that the thoughts of early modern French people were often shaken by fear of being invaded by the Ottoman Empire, resulting not only in many long (and obviously biased) texts about Turkish customs and Islamic belief, but also in a regular and sizeable production of often anonymous pamphlets destined for immediate consumption, such as the Derniers advis nouvellement venus de Constantinople (Latest News from Constantinople) (1573) or the Advis d’une victoire obtenue par l’armée impériale contre celle du grand Turc (News of a victory obtained by the Imperial Army against that of Great Turk) (1593). Fear, as Montaigne knew and as contemporary events remind us, engenders all kinds of fantasies. It is, as Montaigne noted, “une estrange passion: et disent les medecins qu’il n’en est aucune qui emporte plustost nostre jugement hors de sa deuë assiette [a strange passion like no other, so the doctors tell us, that knocks our judgment out of correct balance]” (1:28).
Thus, as France and other European countries were attempting to found colonies in the New World, they were also constantly aware of the fragile borders within the Old World. Unsurprisingly, concerns and representations flowed between the New and Old worlds, with old enemies found in new locations, as for example when, in 1570, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo famously entered Cuzco, Peru, to see a Moorish castle inhabited by New World natives dressed up as Moors.7 Similarly, Columbus had associated the cotton scarves worn by the inhabitants of the island he named Trinidad to almaizares, the veils worn by the Moors in Spain.8
King Francis I saw in Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566) a political ally against the all-powerful Habsburgs of Europe, headed by Charles V (1500–58), who had recently defeated the French king at the Battle of Pavia (1525). The pact made in 1536 between Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent was a relief to some, but to others a sign of betrayal.9 Although an ally sometimes welcomed inside the political geography of France, the Ottoman Empire remained in a civilizational marchland of miscomprehension and distrust. Following the Ottoman seizure of the Holy Lands in 1517, many European Christians called for new crusades, but beyond the binary logic of Crusade rhetoric, few opinions recorded in contemporary texts about the Ottoman Empire or about the East in general were universally accepted. One best-seller, Bartolomej Georgijevic´’s De afflictione tam captivorum quam etiam sub Turcae tributo viventium Christianorum (On the miserbale [sic] affliction of those Christians, whiche liue vnder [the] captiuitie and bondage [of the Turks]) (1544), available in various languages, including Latin, Italian, and French, was the tale of a Hungarian pilgrim who, as a pilgrim in the Holy Land, was captured by the Turks. Unsurprisingly, the text details the brutality faced by the author and thus provided a negative account of the Ottoman Empire. At the other end of the spectrum, a work by Teodoro Spandugino, translated into French as La genealogie du grand turc (On the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors) (1520), publicized a much more positive image of the Ottoman Empire as an efficient and well-ordered society.10 The writings of Guillaume Postel also often offered a sympathetic defense of the Ottoman Empire, as at the beginning of his De la république des Turcs (On the Republic of the Turks): “all those who have written [about the Turks] talk only . . . of odious things and of vices, making no mention of virtue, which for any people, however barbarous, cannot be universally the case.” Before we too quickly applaud, let us remember that Postel’s defense must be seen within his larger project of universal concord, wherein Jew, Muslim, and Christian would all live happily—under a French Christian King. No one border, these remarks suggest, whether political, cultural, or geographical, separated France from the Ottoman Empire. There were, so to speak, many Frances and many Ottoman Empires, a situation reflected in the rich literary output of sixteenth-century France. Where the borders stood and what kinds of borders were perceived depended largely on the position from which each author wrote. The point is worth laboring over because, throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there were actually, as has often been repeated, more books published about the Ottoman Empire than about the discovery of the New World.11
Rather than anthologize the various borders that existed and how French literature created or crossed them, for a glimpse of which one might turn to the contemporary writing of François de Belleforest, my modest goal here, in what could be taken as an exordium on the necessity for global perspectives when reading the period’s literature, is to explore two pairings of texts: in each pairing, one text belongs to the traditional canon of early modern literature while the other is written by a French pilgrim to the Holy Lands. In both genres the real and the fictional interweave and it thus makes sense to read them together. The writings of pilgrim authors are particularly eloquent with regard to the present questions because the pilgrim himself—early modern pilgrims were almost always men—embodies a geographical and civilization palimpsest that must remain central to any inquiry into France’s own perception of itself within the global context. For an early modern pilgrim to travel from France to Jerusalem to celebrate his Christian faith, a journey imitated mentally by those who stayed at home, consequentially resulted in a process of estrangement from Christianity by traveling to the Holy Land, which, because of the 1517 Ottoman victory, were now a foreign and Muslim land. This estrangement may not have been the pilgrim’s avowed goal, but it was a fundamental part of the journey and constitutive of much pilgrim literature. In pilgrim texts, the non-Christian was far from anecdotal, but rather integral to the plotting of the Christian’s journey. Christian pilgrimage to a Muslim land was indeed most umheimlich, for the center of Christendom was situated outside its own borders. Thus, to fully experience one’s European Christianity is to revisit the religion’s early days in Palestine, now part of the Ottoman Empire and thus (potentially) removed from the original symbolic ordering of space. Despite the Reformation, and despite the stance against pilgrimage taken by Erasmus, Rabelais, and others, the number of pilgrims to the Holy Land actually increased as the century progressed toward the Counter-Reformation, so their point of view is far from mere curiosity.12 The uncanny palimpsest is usefully summarized, for comically mocked and thus clearly described, by an opponent of pilgrimage, the Calvinist Agrippa d’Aubigné:
If [the pilgrim] is not shipwrecked, and if the plague does not kill him, nor seasickness, nor the heat, if his ship is not attacked by a Turkish pirate, if this pirate does not throw him into jail, and if he does not indoctrinate him by pummeling his spine with blows of a stiff whip, [the pilgrim will be able] to behold Jerusalem and the supposed location where, according to mendacious Turks, Christ was laid to rest.13
The emphasis is clearly on the European pilgrim’s purposeful blurring of the limits between a locus formerly Christian and the contemporary real presence of Muslims within that space, who map that space for the visitor. D’Aubigné’s enflamed formulation is eloquent about the power of territorial representation and the boundaries that certain spatial practices force us to cross. The pilgrim’s journey works against itself, away from France into Muslim territory and away from autonomy to dependence on a foreign Other, in order, ironically, to travel toward the most sacred spaces of Christendom that lay as if a palimpsest underneath the real visible lands.
Not Quite Traversing the Fantasy of the Turk: Pierre de Ronsard and Henri Castela
The Hymnes of Pierre de Ronsard, published in 1555–56, are the work of a poet-philosopher.14 Generally considered a collection serious in tone, often abstract, and concerned primarily with intellectual and theological matters, they would seem far away from the terrestrial expanses of the Early Modern globe.15 Yet, in the “Hymne des daimons,” a poem central to the collection, the poet-philosopher’s wings appear scorched by the heights of intellectual flight, to the point that the horizontal expanses reassert their significance and reveal concrete reality. The first step in approaching this shift is to apprehend the poem’s vertical structure. The foremost gesture of this hymn is to separate creation into “deux extremitez” (two extremities), God above from humankind below, with daimons (demons, or spirits) as intermediaries capable of moving between the two realms.16 The daimons live “dessoubz la Lune” (beneath the Moon) in the “Air gros, espaix, brouillé . . . au milieu des nuages [Thick air, portly and hazy . . . amidst the clouds],” of sufficient weight so as not to float back up to Heaven, which is reserved for God and angels. They change shape at will like the clouds that surround them. Some breathe air; others survive by sucking in moisture. These daimons can be either good or bad spirits, partaking both of the power of the gods and of human imperfection; they accompany humans in their deeds, either helping or hindering, a definition that ultimately leads back to Plato (Symposium 202 D). The good spirits, says Ronsard, “descend from the air into these lower realms, / To keep us informed of the will of the Gods” (vv. 209–10). The bad ones, on the other hand “bring to Earth / Plagues, fevers, idleness, storms, and thunder” (vv. 223–24). Ronsard goes on to establish a typology of the various daimons, concluding with the terrible description of the worst spirits which “craftily enter into our bodies, / And by tormenting us, leave us almost dead” (vv. 409–10).
Throughout the hymn, Ronsard thus establishes a clearly defined vertical order stretching between high and low, divine and earthly, pure and corrupt. The typology welds together, as was common at the time, elements of ancient philosophy with Christianity. Thus, the daimons we find in Plato, Hesiod, and Homer are recast for the Christian readers of sixteenth-century France. The particular syncretism of this hymn has often been judged severely. Albert-Marie Schmidt spoke, for example, of Ronsard’s “prodigious erudition,” marred, however, by its being “disordered and incommodious.”17 Of interest here is how, as the hymn closes, Ronsard allows the vertical order he has established to break—or rather fall down, suddenly and without comment, into a horizontal order that defines not the theologically impregnated distance between heaven and earth, but the global spaces, political and cultural, of the sixteenth century. This switch between vertical and horizontal, between a philosophical-religious construct and political realities occurs in the final apostrophic address to God:
Ronsard prays that the less benevolent of the spirits that populate his sublunar system be stolen from the vertical structure and exported horizontally to the Ottoman Empire. The presence of the Turk and the Muslim here is acousmatic (that is, hidden, menacing, offstage), not as in Pythagoras who lectured from behind a screen so that his physical presence might not distract from the weight of his words, but like a wolf’s offscreen howl in a horror movie—everywhere, nowhere, menacing. Apart from painstaking identification of the specific sources of Ronsard’s demonology—Michael Psellos, Ficino, Lucius Apuleius Platonicus, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, and so on—critics have focused very little on these verses: the actual expulsion of malevolent spirits to “le païs des Turcz” (the land of the Turks) has attracted even less attention—perhaps because, in one sense, it is so obvious that Christian Europe would stand in opposition to the Islamic Turks. Moreover, readers of Ronsard are used to his collapsing together places real, literary, and imagined. The Gastine forest about which Ronsard penned his famous sonnet was, unlike the Arcadian landscapes of classical poets, a precise and geographically locatable site.18 It thus comes as no surprise that Ronsard’s containment area for malevolency has a real name: the Ottoman Empire! Like and yet completely unlike a pilgrim, Ronsard situates part of his Christian worldview beyond the borders of France and beyond the strict territorial limits of Christendom. The spirits whom Ronsard wishes to send off are divine messengers, prophets, and saviors. The demon is an intermediary being that puts humanity in contact with the divine, whatever form this takes. Sending such spirits to the “païs des Turcs” is ultimately, however, an uncanny gesture in the sense that the same “païs des Turcs” also contains, since 1517, the Christian Holy Land. The sudden shift between vertical and horizontal axes, between the Christian divine and earthly Turkish corruption, is thus more telling than it first appears. It is, of course, a sign of European prejudice and of the human propensity to situate one’s culture as the axis mundi, but the point here is rather the spatial palimpsest-making that underpins Ronsard’s text: the Christian Holy Lands are in the Ottoman Empire, and it is there that Ronsard sends his malefic spirits.
To realize Ronsard’s spaces more completely on Earth, let us turn to a text by Henri Castela, a Catholic priest who penned both a travel narrative about his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the first full-fledged pilgrim guidebook. His texts, published at the dawn of the seventeenth century, prolong Ronsard’s hinging together of horizontal and vertical planes and equally express an underlying fear of cultural pollution. Castela notably exhorts the would-be pilgrim, in an overturning of Montaigne’s ethical openness, to avoid dialogue with local inhabitants. The most efficacious means to do this, he says, is to adopt a rather extreme attitude: one should pretend one is both deaf and mute. This need for bodily closure to avoid pollution is taken up again, revealing an even deeper, sexualized, sense of fear, when Castela offers the advice that pilgrims should not explore nightlife in the Middle East for fear of being sodomized.19 Eyes, ears, and anus must all be wide shut. At one point in his travel account, Castela and a companion are walking “amidst very large and dreadful mountains and forests” at around four in the afternoon, “afraid to see themselves in such a dangerous place,” unable to stop themselves from crying for fear of being devoured by wild beasts.20 They pray to God that an angel be sent to help them find their way. Rather than an angel, at least in a first instance, it is a local inhabitant who appears, carrying “his sword on his side and an axe in his hand.” Castela immediately suspects him to be a volleur (thief) and he is henceforth referred to, for no narratively motivated reason, as either a volleur or a brigant (robber). Despite—or, more likely, because of—their fear, Castela and his companion nevertheless offer him wine and food, which he readily accepts. In order to eat, he puts down his sword and his ax. The reader assumes that conversation is about to occur. At this point, we are told, the local looks at the two travelers with “a furious gaze.” There is no indication in Castela’s narrative exactly why the local gives them this furious glance. He had been asking them questions about whence they came and where they were going. The only possible explanation is that Castela had been following his own advice about playing deaf and mute. Rather than replying to seemingly banal questions, Castela says that he and his companion did not respond for fear of revealing that they were lost, and that they thus pretended “not to hear/understand [entendre] him.” This is when the text announces that “the thief looked at [them] with a furious gaze.” There is no textual trace of an actual threat: the local inhabitant put down his arms, partook of tea, and spoke; the two Europeans sat there, frightened, and played dumb. The conclusion to the event is that the local’s stomach is gripped by an unexplained but timely pain (“Une certaine douleur le saisit”) and he is consequently unable to stand up—“about which my companion and I were in amazement.” At this point a miracle occurs: the European pilgrims hear the singing of a young boy who has—their initial prayer thus comes true—“[la] voix d’vn Ange [the voice of an Angel].” Having been fed European food and European fear, the local inhabitant is neutralized and the pilgrims’ prayer for an angel guide is fulfilled.21 Ronsard, had he been able to read Castela’s account, might well have chuckled with contentment.
Ronsard’s demonology, in the present reading, becomes not just a compendium of ancient and Renaissance philosophies, but also a tracing of a boundary between Early Modern France and the Ottoman Empire. Castela’s narration of a supposedly real event tessellates closely with Ronsard’s philosophical poem, bringing together the realms of the angelic and the demonic with geographic displacement between European-Christian and Turkish-Muslim spaces. One might say that Castela’s texts provide what film analyst Michel Chion calls désacousmatisation—the phantasmatic presence of the Ottoman Empire of Ronsard’s hymn is here revealed and embodied.22 Both Ronsard and Castela articulate how fear is forced upon a foreign body. Whereas Ronsard’s plural “Turcs” points to a disembodied whole, Castela invokes similar divine intervention, again saving the European Christian from his own worst fears, in terms of a fantasy singularized and localized in a specific encounter. The désacousmatisation is only, and can only be, partial. The horizontal geographic space, tightly bound to vertical religious space, yields an ambiguous and incomplete revelation of the Other. The spatialization of the early modern globe, despite the rediscovery of Ptolemy, the ongoing refinement of Portolan charts, and progress toward more empirical mapping, continues to reflect Christian ideology.23 Crossing a border, whether in philosophical text or travel narrative, requires not just a movement in space, but also a complex dialogue with one’s religious mapping of foreign spaces. Castela, who recounts his game of playing deaf and mute, finally gets no closer to the Ottoman Empire than did Ronsard, even though this foreign space is the locus from which he writes. Yet, his firsthand account liberates Ronsard’s text from the clutches of the ethereal and the philosophical by singularizing the encounter between cultures. Both texts, it would seem, work to inscribe the Other in a shared space between and constituting (one of) the borders between France and the Ottoman Empire.
Digesting Abroad: François Rabelais and Denis Possot
Castela’s insistence upon the closure of orifices while traveling in the East should remind us that the limits of the body can stand in for the frontiers that separate and connect cultures: to remain in Europe, for Castela, is to protect his bodily integrity while in the Ottoman Empire. Such an emphasis can be further explored by attending to European textualizations of the Muslim diet, for the food and wine that pass (or do not pass) the lips relate directly to the establishment of both boundaries and connections between cultures. A suitable geographical locus for such inquiry is Jaffa, the entry point into Palestine for sixteenth-century pilgrims arriving by boat. As well as being a literal port of entry to the historical center of Christianity, Jaffa is the port whence embarked Jonah, following God’s commandment to preach in Nineveh (now Mosul, Iraq) on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, a coincidence that did not escape the attention of pilgrim authors. According to the biblical account, God sends great winds over the sea, and a mighty tempest ensues. Jonah tells his companions, “Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you” (Jonah 1:12). The sailors listen, then cast Jonah into the water where he is swallowed by a whale. Eventually, says the Bible, “the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land” (Jonah 2:10).
Few pilgrim authors missed the central importance of this episode, and they generally allude to it as they arrive in the Holy Lands. Having survived the dangers of sea travel, they arrive safely in Jaffa—Jonah’s itinerary in reverse—but only to face a different kind of swallowing. Whatever textual consolation the Jonah allusion provides to pilgrim authors, arrival in Jaffa is also often presented in pilgrim narratives as a moment when the supposedly self-evident differences between European pilgrim and the local inhabitants of Jaffa are put under extreme tension. Indeed, in the case of Jean de Cuchermoys (writing in 1490), arrival in Jaffa is one of only two places in his narrative where the author says I—only to recount however how he had to don a disguise in order to reenter the pilgrim galley so as to collect more belongings, having just been robbed by a “traystre More” (treacherous Moor).24 For similar reasons, Castela will advise pilgrims to disguise themselves, for example by specifically not wearing the typical pilgrim tunics adorned with the red crosses of Jerusalem.25 The tension under which cultural difference is placed in Jaffa is perhaps strongest in the context of the Muslim diet. In Denis Possot’s pilgrimage account, first published in 1536, similar anxiety is experienced on arrival in Jaffa. Under the control of both the ship’s captain and the local authorities, the pilgrims are ushered off the boat into a “big vault, a kind of covered cellar” that is long, wide, and as tall “as a small church.”26 As reassuring as this comparison might be for Possot, he next says that it was “filthy,” because “the Turks, Moors, and others who frequent the port use it as a toilet.” Having cleared a small space for themselves, the pilgrims sit down and are served food, often melons and cucumbers. However, as Possot explains, “no wine is to be found in the city of Jaffa, for the Turks never drink it, except when hidden away [en cachette].” We must take Possot as being wholly literal: the “covered cellar” where Christian pilgrims are enclosed on descending from the boat is indeed a place of “hiding away.” It thus comes as no surprise to the literal-minded reader—and such literalness is wholly appropriate—that “Turks and Moors would come to look at us, some of whom would take, openly and without asking, some of our victuals, principally wine, for they only drink it secretly [secretement].” The cachette that houses Muslims’ nonadherence to Islam is thus literalized in this space just as, in the very same space, Christians often disguise themselves as Turks. The Turks and Arabs, who drink wine only in secret, according to Possot, are thus depicted as being in a space that is hidden away from and outside of the Ottoman Empire and/or Islam. The textual trace of the paradoxical journey from Christendom to its decentered origin thus involves the writing of a heterotopia27 wherein Christian and Turk seek self-disguise to remain true to themselves by being Other. Within Jaffa’s cachette, the limits between France and non-France are negotiated in the dark, but pilgrim authors bring this decentered and performative borderland into public knowledge.
The encounters and exchanges of the type detailed in Possot’s account of arrival in Jaffa can be expanded through Rabelais’s Pantagruel (1532), his first work, published under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier. Pantagruel the book is, as any reader quickly notices, textured by an author fascinated with what lies beyond the borders of France; while he lived in Rome, Rabelais would peruse market stalls to acquire curios imported from Cyrpus, Greece, and Constantinople, and his texts carry the traces of just such a fascination.28 In Pantagruel, we find Panurge’s famous account of “how he escaped from the hands of the Turks.” Taken captive in Mytilene—the capital of Lesbos and thus a reference to French defeat at the hands of the Turks in 1502—Rabelais’s devilish trickster is wrapped in bacon “like a rabbit” and “broached upon a spit,” soon to be devoured by his captors. The lardons (bacon strips) that encapsulate Panurge, although part of Rabelais’s satirical humor, cannot be written off merely as “an obvious invention, given Islamic abhorrence of pork.”29 Rather, they must be read as a sign pointing toward boundary formation. Indeed, the origin of Panurge’s encounter with Turks is situated in a statement of his difference from them: “I . . . was telling of how these devils of Turks are most unfortunate in that they never drink a drop of wine. Even if there were no other harm in Muhammad’s Qur’an, that would still be enough to stop me following his law.” This statement is not “an inherently minor point that simply reflects Panurge’s carnal priorities.”30 Rather, as in Possot, the border between Christian and Muslim is drawn along the lines of confessional dogma—who drinks wine, who does not drink wine. In Possot, the Muslim crosses that border by drinking Christian wine: it is this transgression that gives the border meaning. The border-creating transgression has a similar function in Rabelais. Panurge, roasting alive, prays that God will intervene and free him, which indeed comes to pass as soon as his captor falls asleep. It is central to the episode that Panurge frees himself thanks to his teeth: Panurge does not, here later in the chapter, use his teeth to eat. Rather, he uses them to free himself: “When I saw [that my captor] no longer turned me for roasting . . . I took the non-burning end of a firebrand between my teeth and threw it into the lap of the man trying to roast me.” He then takes up another firebrand and launches it at a straw bed which sets the town ablaze. Once Panurge has managed to escape, “a short villainous Turk . . . snatched at my bacon [mes lardons],” but Panurge thumps him away. Shortly after this, he is offered sustenance, but refuses—because there is only water, not wine, to wash it down. Finally, as he leaves the burning town, the first attempt to snack on his bacon is taken up again when “more than six, even more than thirteen hundred and eleven dogs, both small and large, set off, fleeing the fire.” They chase after his bacon, literally.
The dogs, of course, stand in metaphorically for his Turkish captors. It was indeed common for sixteenth-century Europeans to refer to Turks, Muslims, and Saracens as dogs.31 Polemical texts, too, often carried titles that played on that appellation, such as the gruesome Sensuyuêt les faictz du chien insaciable du sang chrestien, ql se nôme Lempereur de Turquie (1526) (The Deeds of that Dog who is Insatiable for Christian Blood, known as the Emperor of Turkey). The dogs thus run after Panurge, “smelling the scent of [his] lecherous [paillarde] half-roasted flesh.” Luckily for Panurge, he tells us, his good angel had taught him the cure for “toothache”: he remembers the lardons wrapped around him, takes them off and throws them at the dogs in order to halt their pursuit. Rabelais’ trickster knave thus exposes his body, losing what has been referred to as his “substitute foreskin”—another reference to Panurge’s bodily difference vis-à-vis the Turks.32 In mirrored reversal, the Turkish “dogs” chase after a food that they should, in theory, not want to eat—both wine and pork are, of course, forbidden in Islam, as detailed in the Qur’an (e.g., 2:173, 5:3, 6:145, and 16:115). The frontier between East and West is thus recreated by the figure of each differing from himself. The fact that the Turks (represented by the dogs) chase after a food they should disdain is essential to the plotting of boundaries, for it equates border crossing and encounter with difference as self-difference, as already seen in Possot. In other words, both Possot’s and Rabelais’s texts suggest the following: what the Other prohibits himself is what he seeks in his Other (wine, bacon, circumcision). One might surmise that this is the reversal of the exchange in Ronsard and Castela, which might be summarized as: that which is not wanted is written onto the Other. In the Rabelais-Possot comparison, the French narrator in each case claims to tell of his own border crossing, but actually displaces this into someone else’s border crossing, as if the reversal negates any possible legitimacy of the claim of meeting the Other. For this reader, the key expression in the whole Rabelais episode, which captures in a nutshell the episodes in both Rabelais and Possot, is when Panurge creates a new expletive. Amazed that his fellow Turks linger with Panurge while their town burns to the ground, Rabelais has a Turk cry out, “Ventre Mahom! [By Mohammed’s Stomach!],” as if the Prophet’s stomach (that is, dietary restriction) emblematizes the crossing of borders and explains the present catastrophic situation.
Nothing Just Happens
If certain early modern texts quite openly call our attention to France’s complex relationship to the Ottoman Empire (the works of Rabelais are a prime example), many others (like Ronsard’s Hymnes) require of the reader a switch in reading practices in order to read globally. Reading Ronsard’s Hymnes as has been done here surely implies a change in perspective similar to the one that informs the switch between understanding Camus’s L’étranger as a tale of pure existential angst—Mersault just happens to kill an Arab—and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s reading, followed by Edward Said and others, which resituates the text within the colonial context of France’s presence in Algeria.33 Of course, and as already noted, Turkey was not Europe’s downtrodden colonial Other, and models for rereading the Renaissance must remain sensitive to the specific historical context. When reading canonical literary texts, whether by Rabelais, Ronsard, or others, alongside traditionally minor genres such as pilgrimage writing, we are reminded how central to early modern France were its negotiations of cultural borders with the rest of the world. It is not enough, the pilgrim writings remind us, to turn away from the literary text toward “historical documents” in order to successfully leave Europe behind in the hope of engaging with the concrete realities beyond or behind literary fiction. It would seem rather, as attempted here, that the tenuous borders that define France and its Others need to be read across genres with a sensitivity for their own problematic reiteration and redefinition. We should, of course, celebrate Montaigne’s cultural relativism and build on his example as we negotiate our own era, but it is just as important to continue to reread and reevaluate the less exemplary texts that, without overtly trying to deny the presence of the Other, nevertheless provide insight into how texts always offer, often despite themselves, a map of the world.34
Notes
1. All translations are my own.
2. On Montaigne’s textual reworking of Gascony, see Tom Conley, “Montaigne’s Gascoingne.”
3. A recent reading of this diptych is provided by Tom Conley, “The Essays and the New World.”
4. For a survey of issues in early modern alterity, see L’esprit créateur 48, no. 1 (Spring 2008).
5. David J. Vitkus, “Early Modern Orientalism,” 210.
6. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, 3.
8. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 86.
9. M. E. Yapp, “Europe in the Turkish Mirror,” 143.
10. On Georgijević, see Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature (1520–1660), 189–95; on Spandugino, see 169–79. Rouillard’s book, although published in 1938, is still essential reading for the general topic of connections between France and the Ottoman Empire. A more modern perspective is provided by Frédéric Tinguely’s excellent L’écriture du Levant. A useful bibliography of travel narratives to the Ottoman Empire is Stéphane Yérasimos’s Les voyageurs dans l’Empire ottoman.
11. Guillaume de Poste, De la république des Turcs, 1.Geoffroy Atkinson, Les nouveaux horizons, 10.
12. Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud, Le crépuscule du grand voyage, 214.
13. Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les tragiques, 7:564–70.
14. All references to Ronsard’s Hymnes are to verse numbers in the Oeuvres completes, 2:486–93.
15. An attempt at defining the Ronsardian hymn is provided by Michel Dassonville, “Eléments pour une définition.”
16. Philip Ford, Ronsard’s Hymnes, 139.
17. Albert-Marie Schmidt, La poésie scientifique, 79. See also Hélène Moreau, “Les Daimons ou de la fantaisie,” 220, and Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges, 205.
18. H. M. Richmond, “Rural Lyricism,” 197. See also Louisa Mackenzie, Poésie est un pré, 164.
19. Henri Castela, La guide et adresse, f. 60 r.
20. Henri Castela, Le sainct voyage, 22. Other quotations in this paragraph are at 23 and 24.
21. My reading differs from that of Wes Williams in his pilgrimage and narrative. Williams’s summary states, “They share a meal. But then, suddenly, the stranger makes for the pilgrims ‘une hache en la main, avec un cruel et hideux regard’” (264), a reading that inverts the order of events recounted in Castela’s text, wherein the local appears with arms but then puts them down before eating. This is only a minor critique of William’s otherwise splendid book.
22. For the notion of désacousmatisation, see Michel Chion, La voix au cinéma.
23. See Phillip John Usher, “Chopping up Columbus’ Pear.”
24. Wes Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative, 199, 203–6.
26. Denis Possot, Le voyage de la Terre Sainte, 152. Other quotations in this paragraph are at 152 and 153.
27. I use the term heterotopia in the sense given to it by Michel Foucault in his well-known article “Des espaces autres.”
28. Richard Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie, 143.
29. Ian Morrison, “Rabelais: Christendom and Europe,” 44. Morrison’s reading is somewhat redolent of William Aren’s denial that cannibals ever existed in his The Man-Eating Myth (see Lestringant, Le cannibale, 31). The danger of Morrison’s reading is exemplified by his conclusion that because the episode is so fanciful, “no serious criticism [of Turks] can be inferred” (44–45).
30. Morrison, “Rabelais: Christendom and Europe,” 44.
31. See Jean-Luc Nardone, La représentation de Jérusalem, 40.
32. Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation, 57. Hampton’s interpretation (in his second chapter) is essential, offering a reading of the connections between nationhood, conceptions of Christian charity, and the Turkish Other, based on a subtle negotiation of how literally the episode should be read. Full engagement with Hampton’s reading compared to my own would require more space than is allotted here.
33. A productive discussion of readings of Camus in this domain is provided by Emily Apter’s “Out of Character.”
34. This idea in the context of early modern writing has, of course, been spearheaded by recent work in the field, a good entrance to which would be Tom Conley’s The Self-made Map, Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions, and Frank Lestringant’s Mapping the Renaissance World.