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Rabelais and the Low Road to Modernity

In 1532, or conceivably 1531, a rather old-fashioned looking volume appeared at the booksellers in Lyons with the Title Pantagruel. Les horribles et espouventables faictz et prouesses du tresrenomé Pantagruel Roy des Dipsodes, filz du grant géant Gargantua (Pantagruel. The horrifying and dreadful deeds and prowesses of the most famous Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, son of the great giant Gargantua). It recounts the fantastic adventures of a young giant named Pantagruel and his young friend Panurge in war and peace; the author is given as 'Maître Alcofrybas Nasier', an anagram of 'François Rabelais'. In 1534, or possibly 1535, a kind of prequel to the story of Pantagruel appeared in the form of a narrative of the adventures of his father Gargantua: La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel (The inestimable life of the great Gargantua, father of Pantagruel). 1546 saw the publication of a third volume, Le tiers livre des faicts et dicts heroique du bon Pantagruel (The third book of the heroic deeds and sayings of the good Pantagruel), where the author is openly named as 'François Rabelais, Doctor of Medicine'. Le quart livre des faicts et dicts heroiques du bon Pantagruel (The fourth book of the heroic deeds and sayings of the good Pantagruel) was published in 1552, the year of Rabelais' death.

What is a contemporary English-speaking reader to make of a series of four books written in an incessantly punning, not yet standardized, sixteenth-century French with lashings of Latin, Greek, Basque, Italian, Gascon, German, Limousin, and several other real - and some imaginary - languages by an absconded monk turned physician, which satirizes archaic social customs, monastic and legal institutions, forms of education and dress, eating habits, and obscure philosophical doctrines and literary genres? Since virtually no one can read these texts unprepared, not even modern Francophones, we are all in one way or another dependent on translations and an appended explanatory apparatus.

Translation-dependence is, of course, a common characteristic of everyone's access to most of world literature. No single individual can be expected to read The Tale of Genji, The Bhagavad Gita, The Oresteia, Mrs Dalloway, Salammbô, The Dream of the Red Chamber, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Gilgamesh, to take a few random examples, all in the original. There is, however, a striking difference between reading a translation of Genji and reading a translation of Rabelais. It is not just that we need a translation of Rabelais' text, but that the text itself depicts a world in which an irreducible variety of languages and dialects - real or imaginary; rustic or polished; fully understood, half-understood, misinterpreted, not understood at all, or inherently incomprehensible - are constantly rubbing up against each other. It is not insignificant that one of the two very first people Pantagruel encounters (in Chapter 9 of Pantagruel) when he arrives in Paris is Panurge, who greets him in thirteen different languages, some of which Pantagruel not only does not understand, but cannot even securely identify (unsurprisingly given that some of them are imaginary languages), but who then turns out to be a native of Touraine. So even if someone addresses you in Dutch, Spanish, or Danish, or all of them successively, you cannot exclude the possibility that he is actually a landsmann from the very same region of France. Pantagruel's other early encounter (in Chapter 6 of Pantagruel) is with a student who originally speaks to him in a bizarre and barely comprehensible, because hyper-latinate, 'French', but eventually lapses into the almost equally obscure patois of his native Limousin. Even if one encounters a 'known' language one can't be sure it will be spoken in anything like its 'standard' or 'pure' form. In fact the idea of a 'standard French' didn't exist in the sixteenth century, and this episode might be thought to throw some doubt on the well-foundedness of the whole idea of a 'pure' idiom, except to the extent to which this is an artificial sociological construct which is externally imposed on people. 'French' in some sense derives from Latin, but adding ever more Latin does not result in a 'purer' French, rather it produces something neither fish nor fowl and easily comprehended by no one.

Language itself is a central concern of Pantagruel and the successor volumes. It is an important fact about our world that different languages exist, and that interpreting them is an unavoidable, ceaseless, and difficult task. That our need for translations is universal and that any translation is uncertain and potentially fallacious may seem rather trivial claims, but much of Western literature presents action in a world that is resolutely monoglottal. In the Aeneid how are Dido and Aeneas represented as conversing? Surely Dido would speak Punic to her sister, in Book IV, lines 416ff, just as, presumably, Aeneas tells his story in Books II and III in (some dialect of Mycenaean?) Greek, yet Dido's speech to Anna and her monologue intérieur at Book IV, lines 534ff are given in the same flawless Latin as Aeneas' tale. For Virgil, speculations about how Dido and Aeneas spoke to each other are as pointless as asking how many children Lady Macbeth had or whether Mrs Dalloway could speak Italian. For the purposes of the Aeneid the realities of variation between languages do not matter. Virgil's Latin is to stand as the fully transparent medium for presenting what Dido and Aeneas are conceived to have 'really said and thought'.

Issues of translation and 'interpretation' were especially pressing in a society like that of sixteenth-century France, which was deeply informed by a 'religion of a book'. For a long time, the text of The Book had been effectively beyond question: It was the so-called 'Vulgate', a standardized edition of the Old and New Testaments in Latin produced in the fourth century AD. By Rabelais' time, 'Vulgate' had become a misnomer because although Latin could have been construed, at least notionally, as the 'common tongue' of everyday speech (sermo uulgatus) in the West when this translation was originally made, by the sixteenth century this was no longer true. Yet the ipsissima verba (the very words themselves) of this text had acquired a veneer of sanctity through long use, and the Catholic Church clung to it tenaciously. In the sixteenth century the standing of the Vulgate came under pressure from two sides. If, it was argued, the Vulgate had come into existence as Scripture in the then common everyday language of the times, why not do the same for the sixteenth century, when Latin had ceased to be the language of everyday speech, and translate Scripture into the various vernaculars? If so, who had the authority and power to say whether or not the translation was 'correct'? Given the role of appeals to the Scriptures in all domains of life, the power to certify a translation or a set of interpretative notes, or (in some cases) to punish those who produced unauthorized or deviant versions, was power indeed, and so, understandably enough, the Catholic Church wished to reserve it for itself. The Church hierarchy was hostile to any project of translating Scripture into a vernacular. That was one side of the story: the issue of turning the Christian Scriptures into the vernaculars (or not). The other side of the story was that the Vulgate was itself a translation of an original, so why use it as a basis for a rendering of the Scriptures into the vernaculars (if one decided to do this)? Why not go back to the Greek originals? What then if it turned out that the Vulgate was mistaken in its rendering of the Greek? Or that the Vulgate reading was only one of a number of different possible translations? Suppose that the Greek text itself turned out not to be self-evidently inviolate and uncorrupted, but to exist in different versions which exhibited variations, so that an editorial decision needed to be made about which of these variants to accept? Given the extent to which certain important doctrinal and organizational issues might be seen to depend on accepting the reading of the Vulgate as the definitive one, one can easily see how even studying Greek - an activity to which Rabelais devoted much time and energy - could come to be seen as a potentially subversive act.

In this highly charged atmosphere where power and authority, religion, politics, and issues of translation and interpretation were deeply intertwined, one can see how the pressure to take a position on hermeneutics and to join one party or another became intense. The 'wrong' decision could cause you to end up knifed in the gutter or shackled to the stake awaiting combustion, and there was no safe recognized 'neutral' position one could adopt hors de la mélée. Even to suggest that such a position was possible was itself to make a highly inflammatory contribution to the struggle, because it could be taken to mean that ideological squabbles either did not matter or could not be settled. Those who...