GUY SCARPETTA: I RECALL YOUR WORDS: “I AM ALWAYS surprised by how little influence Rabelais has had on French literature. On Diderot, of course. On Céline. But apart from that?” And you recalled that Gide, in response to a survey in 1913, left Rabelais out of his pantheon of the novel but did include Fromentin. And what about you? What does Rabelais mean to you?
MILAN KUNDERA: Gargantua-Pantagruel is a novel from before novels existed. A miraculous moment, never to return, in which an art had not yet come into being as such and therefore was not yet bound by any norms. As soon as the novel begins to assert itself as a special genre or (better) an autonomous art, its original freedom shrinks; aesthetic censors arrive thinking they can decree what does or does not correspond to the description of that art (what is or isn’t a novel), and an audience forms and takes on its own habits and demands. Because of that initial freedom of the novel, Rabelais’ work contains enormous aesthetic possibilities, some of which have been realized in the novel’s later evolution and others never have been. Well, a novelist inherits not only everything that has been done but also everything that was possible. Rabelais reminds us of that.
GS: So then, Céline is one of the few French writers, perhaps the only one, to draw explicitly on Rabelais. What do you think of his text?
MK: “Rabelais missed his shot,” Céline says. “What he hoped to do was develop a language for everybody, a real one. He wanted to democratize the language … bring the spoken language into the written language.” Céline felt that the academic style has won out: “No, France can no longer understand Rabelais: the country has gone precious.” A kind of preciosity, yes, it’s a curse of French literature, of the French mind, I agree. On the other hand, I do have reservations when I read in that same Céline piece: “Here’s my essential point: all the rest (imagination, creative power, the comical, and so on), none of that interests me. Language, nothing but language.” At the time he wrote that, in 1957, Celine couldn’t have known that this reduction of the aesthetic to the linguistic was going to become one of the axioms of the future academic foolishness (which he would certainly have detested). In fact, the novel is also: characters; plot; composition; style (a range of styles); the nature of imagination. Consider, for instance, that pyrotechnic play of styles in Rabelais: prose, verse, joke lists, parody science discourse, meditations, allegories, letters, realistic descriptions, dialogues, monologues, pantomimes…. Talking about some “democratizing of the language” doesn’t begin to explain that profusion of forms: virtuosic, exuberant, playful, euphoric, and highly artificial (artificial doesn’t mean precious). The formal richness of Rabelais’ novel is without equal. This is one of those possibilities forgotten in the later evolution of the novel. It was rediscovered only three centuries later, in James Joyce.
GS: In contrast to that “forgetting” by French novelists, Rabelais is an essential reference for many foreign writers: you’ve mentioned Joyce, of course; and we might look at Gadda, but also at some contemporary writers: in my own experience, I’ve always heard the most fervent talk about Rabelais from Danilo Kiš, Carlos Fuentes, Goytisolo, or you yourself…. So things go on as if that source of the novel genre was unrecognized in its own land, and claimed abroad. How do you explain that paradox?
MK: I’d only dare speak to the most superficial aspect of the paradox. The Rabelais that entranced me when I was about eighteen is a Rabelais written in an admirable modern Czech language. Because his antique French is hard to understand these days, for a Frenchman Rabelais will always be more old-fashioned, more archaic, more interesting for a scholar than for a reader who comes to know him through a translation (a good one).
GS: When was Rabelais translated into Czech? By whom? How come? And how has the translation fared?
MK: He was translated by a small collective of excellent romance-language specialists who called themselves “the Bohemian Thélème.” The Gargantua translation appeared in 1911. The whole set, the five volumes, was published in 1931. On this point: after the Thirty Years’ War, Czech as a literary language nearly disappeared. When the nation began to be reborn (like other Central European nations) in the nineteenth century, the challenge was: make Czech a European language equal to the others. Bringing off a translation of Rabelais—what a dazzling proof of a language come to maturity! And in fact, Gargantua-Pantagruel is one of the finest books ever written in Czech. For modern Czech literature Rabelais has been a very important inspiration. The greatest Czech modernist of the novel, Vladislav Vančura (who died in 1942, shot by the Germans), was a passionate Rabelaisian.
GS: And as to Rabelais elsewhere in Central Europe?
MK: His history in Poland was almost the same as in Czechoslovakia: the translation by Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński (also shot by the Germans, in 1941) was magnificent, one of the greatest written texts in Polish. And it was that Polonized Rabelais that enchanted Gombrowicz. When he speaks of his “masters” he cites three in the same breath: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Rabelais. Baudelaire and Rimbaud were the usual reference points for all the modernists, but claiming Rabelais as a model, that was rarer. The French Surrealists didn’t much care for him. To the west of Central Europe, avant-garde modernism was childishly antitraditional, and it was expressed almost exclusively in lyric poetry. Gombrowicz’s modernism is different. It’s mainly a modernism of the novel. And besides, Gombrowicz was not interested in a naive challenge to the values of tradition; rather he wanted to “re-value” them, “trans-value” them (in the Nietzsche an sense: Umwertung aller Werte). Rabelais-Rimbaud as a pair, as a program: now, here was such “transvaluation of values,” a new perspective, one with significance for the great figures of modernism as I myself conceive it.
GS: In France’s education tradition (the one expressed, for instance, in the literature textbooks), there is a tendency to put Rabelais back into the “spirit of the serious,” to make him out simply a humanist thinker, to the detriment of the qualities of play, exuberance, fantasy, obscenity, laughter that suffuse his work, of that “carnival” element that Bakhtin made much of. What’s your feeling about this diminution, or mutilation? Should we see it as a rejection of that element of irony toward all orthodoxies, toward all “positive thinking,” that you’ve said characterizes the very essence of the novel genre?
MK: It’s even worse than a rejection of irony, of fantasy, etc. It’s an indifference to art, a rejection of art, an allergy to art, what I’ve earlier called “misomusy” (detestation of the Muses): they’re removing Rabelais’ work from any aesthetic consideration. Now that historiography and literary theory are becoming ever more “misomusistic,” writers are the only people who can say anything interesting about Rabelais. One little recollection: an interviewer asked Salman Rushdie what he loved best in French literature; he replied, “Rabelais and Bouvard et Pécuchet.” That answer says more than any number of long textbook discussions. Why Bouvard et Pécuchet? Because it’s a different Flaubert from the one who wrote L’Éducation sentimentale and Madame Bovary. Because it’s the Flaubert of the non-serious. And why Rabelais? Because he’s the pioneer, the founding father, the genius of the non-serious in the art of the novel. With those two references Rushdie underscores the principle of the non-serious that is precisely one of those possibilities for the art of the novel that lay neglected throughout its history.
(1994)