Carnival in Hell: Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus

 

 Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  Translations of excerpts are my own; the German is provided in endnotes. 

 

 

     Grimmelshausen’s picaresque novel, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, like Goya’s engravings of scenes during the Peninsular War, provides a vivid picture of the disasters of war. Set during the Thirty Year’s War, one of the most destructive conflicts in history, in which the population of German lands was reduced by two-thirds through violence, disease, and starvation, the narration is full of blood, unrestrained cruelty, and sadism. Like Brecht’s play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder which borrows the era and tropes on one of Grimmelshausen’s characters from a sequel to Simplicissimus, the material is grim and the work is unapologetically anti-war, though the main character, like workers throughout history, is willing to enlist in one army after another.  Yet the tone of this often violent narrative is paradoxically profoundly comic in the profound Rabelaisian vein Bakhtin called carnivalistic.

     The depredations of war on the German countryside are depicted in frightful detail. Tortures and peculiar sexual humiliation like kissing the victor’s anus are described [1] and the reader learns of the chaos and horrors of battle [2].  The verses that accompany the fascinating symbolic frontispiece of the book declare that the author’s purpose is to encourage readers to “abandon folly and live in peace” [3].  By the author’s estimation the human race is a bestial lot: “People are in  part more swinish than hogs, more fierce than lion, more lecherous than goats, more sly than foxes, more voracious than wolves, more foolish than apes, more poisonous than snakes and toads, yet all alike eat human food and only through their shape can they be distinguished from beasts.” [4]

     Human rapaciousness is evident not only in  the barbaric conduct of war; the entire structure of feudal society is shown to be profoundly exploitative.  Though many aspects of Grimmelshausen’s own background are obscure, he cannot be said to have had a privileged upbringing.  Orphaned at an early age, he either enlisted or was conscripted into a Hessian military unit while still a child.   While he later held various administrative positions of local importance under noble lords, his novel contains numerous critiques of the feudal order.  Though the utopia described by Jupiter is infected with German chauvinism, it nonetheless suggests the possibility of a society free from economic or religious discord.  Jupiter calls for an end to “corvées, watches, contributions, assessments, wars, or any other burdens on the people” as well as ending conflict among the Christian sects [5]. 

     Grimmelshausen questions the socio-economic hierarchy at the very outset, confusing categories by maintaining that Simplicissimus’ father was in a way like a monarch, having a palace (his home), lackeys (sheep and goats), arms (pitchforks and spades), a mode of life he calls “truly noble” [6].  He asks what title Adam had boasted [7], rather as John Ball three hundred years earlier had posed the question, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”  This radical point of view simmers throughout the story.  At other points, to note only a few examples, Simplicissimus criticizes the practice of making military officers only of aristocrats, notes that only the poor are punished for their crimes, and laments that people are judged less by their own characters than by the opinions of their superiors [8].   When Simplicissimus dreams, he thinks of society as a tree with the workers, the only productive ones, as its roots.  

But the root was made up of people who count for little, like craftsmen, day laborers, mostly farmers and that sort, who nevertheless gave the tree its strength, and again rebuilt it when it lost some from time to time; indeed, they made up for the loss of fallen leaves from their own resources, to their own even greater ruin; besides, they sighed over those who sat on the tree [soldiers[, and not unjustly, for the entire burden of the tree rested on them, pressing them so much that all the money from their pouches, even from behind seven locks, slipped away.  [9]

     Who is the character who can so critically assess his own superiors?  At times he is a court jester, the figure considered traditionally to enjoy a particular privilege of speaking truth to power [10].  In this role he is able to “uncover all follies and criticize all vanities, for which role my position at the time suited admirably.” [11]  He is identified as a fool simply because he tells the truth [12]; his job is to “delicately point out their faults to this person and that” [13].

     Simplicissimus’ position as a “fool,” is expressed as well by his being called a calf (cf. the English term mooncalf) and by his display (like Midas, Apuleius, and Bottom) of asses’ ears.  While his lack of experience makes him in some ways ludicrous, it also signifies his purity.  He is like the young Parsifal, a genuine naïf, ignorant of the ways of the world and thus able to react in a fresh and spontaneous way [14].  His childhood is a sort of Eden, while the world around him is decidedly fallen. 

     The vogue for picaresque novels had been initiated with Lazarillo de Torres (1554) and Simplicissimus clearly belongs to the genre.  Considered in this light, the narrative is an amusing account of a trickster figure.  The bleak view of the world of unpredictable extreme violence is offset by the hero’s survival, generally through cunning means.  The reader can enjoy his adventures, since, no matter how often he falls, he always bounces back for another round.  As a trickster, he generally succeeds by means of outwitting his antagonists. 

     Though he had at first been described as a tabula rasa [15], he becomes something close to a culture hero with his inventions and innovations [16].  He resorts to trickery to get the best of a besieged city, a landlord, and his fellow soldiers [17].  Further, though he began knowing nothing whatever of God, he becomes something of a divine instrument.  His initial instruction by the pious hermit, his friendship with Herzbruder who is in a way his spiritual double, and his eventual retirement to the contemplative life at the end mark the foundation of his values in Christianity.  With his “clear conscience and sincerely pious mind”, he is shocked at the sinfulness of everyone around him, many of whom make idols of money  or food. He seems, in fact, to some “an oracle or the voice of God “ [18].  Overlaid atop the folkloric elements of Simplicissimus’ character is a strange sort of hagiography, in which the main character’s early misdeeds are followed by a conversion experience [19] and at the end as ascetic a hymn as one might imagine taking leave of the world [20].  Here Simplicissimus reminds the reader of other fables of spiritual growth such as Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West, Langland’s Piers Plowman, or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

     And yet, it is difficult to take this old confidence man at his word.  He has earlier demonstrated such élan vital, such ebullience, rivalling the comically swollen appetites of Gargantua and Pantagruel.  Grimmelshausen’s affirmation of things as they are is evident in his style.  The picaresque template itself is bouyant, comic, optimistic.  The book mingles genres as though a single model would be too restrictive including stories within stories, sometimes verses (as in Bk. I, ch. iii) or a dialogue (Bk. I, ch. vii).  Often the language boils over in a rich plentitude, as when Simplicissimus lists the daily round of activities at his Edenic childhood home (Bk I, ch xi) or when he catalogues a long paragraph of examples of memory (Bk. II, ch. viii) or the much longer learned catalogue of heroes of humanity (Bk. II, ch. x).  Sudden rhetorical effusions belly out at times, such as when he describes a scene of gambling in a rich manner that recalls the paintings of Pieter Breughel the Elder.  The passage is lengthy, but it represents a host of similar pyrotechnic displays of language throughout the book.

 

Quite a few were missing, a number did win, only to squander what they got.  Because of that some cured and thundered.  Consequently some were cursing; some cheated , some received sword-blows.  Hence the winner laughed and other bettors ground their teeth.  Some sold their clothes and anything else they cherished, while others won back their money.  Some wanted honest dice while others wanted loaded ones in the game and introduced them surreptitiously.   Others then tossed them away, smashed them, tore them apart with their teeth and tore others’ coats from their shoulders.  Among the loaded dice were some from the Netherlands which one had to roll in a looping motion.  These had such pointed backs like the skinny donkeys the soldiers rode that they rolled fives and sixes.  Others were from the highlands, the sort that one had to toss from a Bavarian height, others from Hirschhorn, mad heavy on the top and light on the bottom, while others were filled with quicksilver or lead, yet others with trimmings of hair or with sponges, chaff, or coal.  While some had pointed corners, others were rounded; some were like long cobs while others resembled broad tortoises.  Every one of these varieties was made for nothing but cheating.  T hey did the very thing they ere made to do.  One could equally well rock or gently let them slide.  It didn’t help with knots,  not to speak of two fives or two sixes or, on the other hand, two ones or two twos.  With these scoundrels they pinched, plotted, and stole each other’s money, which they might well have robbed or at any rate risked life and limb or otherwise gained through hard effort and work.

 

     While this passage is more than ordinarily sustained, such effusions occur throughout [21] Simplicissimus and the author’s poetry can (for instance in his best-known lyric “Komm, Trost der Nacht”) sound almost mystical.  The unmistakable tone is one of acceptance and affirmation of a monstrously flawed world.  If the final message of Rabelais is the motto of the Abbey of Thélème “Do as thou wouldst,” Simplicissimus’ might be “struggle but celebrate.”  Grimmelshausen recognizes the suffering inherent in life which people then multiply with added cruelty absent in nature, and yet his hero jumps in whole-heartedly, eager to play the game and suffer the blows and witness all the absurdity of human behavior with a mordantly ironic eye when the scene is too dreadful to laugh out loud.  Others might paint a rosier view; unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine a truer.

 

  

 

1.  Bk. I, Ch. xiv.  See also the tortures for dissenters in even Jupiter’s utopia, Bk. III, ch. v.

2.  Bk. I, Ch. xxvii.

3.  “Entferne der Torheit und Lebe in  Ruh.”  The artist is unknown. 

4.  “Wie teils Menschen säuischer als Schwein, grimmiger als Löwen, geiler als Böck, neidiger als Hund, unbändiger als Pferd, gröber als Esel, versoffener als Rinder, listiger als Füchs, gefräßiger als Wölf, närrischer als Affen, und giftiger als Schlangen und Kröten waren, welche dennoch allesamt menschlicher Nahrung genossen und nur durch die Gestalt von den Tieren unterschieden waren.”  Bk. II, ch. 7.

5.  “Daß man von keinem Fronen, Wachen, Kontribuieren, Geldgeben, Kriegen noch einziger Beschwerung beim Volk mehr Wissen.”  Bk. III, ch. iv.  Bk. II, ch. v describes the plan to reconcile divided Christianity.  The racial component here (the primacy of Germany and the recognition of  England, Sweden, and Denmark as essentially Germanic) is disturbing. 

6.  “Sehr adelig.”  Bk. I, ch. i.

7.  “[Er] fragte, wie man der Menschen ersten Vater tituliert hätte?”  Bk. II, ch. x.

8.  Bk. I, ch. xvii; Bk. IV, ch. xiii, and Bk. II, ch. ii.

9.  (Bk. I, ch.  xv)  “Die Wurzel aber war von ungültigen Leuten, als Handwerkern, Taglöhnern, mehrenteils Bauren und dergleichen, welche nichtsdestoweniger dem Baum seine Kraft verliehen, und wieder von neuem mitteilten, wenn er solche zuzeiten verlor; ja sie ersetzten den Mangel der abgefallenen Blätter aus den ihrigen, zu ihrem eigenen noch größeren Verderben; benebens seufzeten sie über diejenigen, so auf dem Baum saßen, und zwar nicht unbillig, denn die ganze Last des Baums lag auf ihnen, und drückte sie dermaßen, daß ihnen alles Geld aus den Beuteln, ja hinter sieben Schlössern hervorging.”

10.  This role is referred to in Bk. II, ch. iv; Bk. III, ch. xi, and Bk. III, ch. xiv.

11.  “Alle Torheiten zu bereden und alle Eitelkeiten zu strafen, wozu sich denn mein damaliger Stand trefflich schickte.”  Bk. II, ch. x.

12.  “My lord himself said, ‘I toom you for a fool, since you spoke the truth so unashamedly.”  (Mein Herr selbst sagte: »Ich halte ihn für einen Narrn, weil er jedem die Wahrheit so ungescheut sagt.).  Bk. II, ch. xiii.

13.  “Dem einen und dem andern seine Mängel artlich verweisen möchte.”  Bk. II, ch. xiv.

14.  Cf. representations  of the infant Jesus, Jung’s “wise child,” etc.

15.  “Einer leeren ohnbeschriebenen Tafel.” Bk. I, ch. ix.

16.  Some of his marvelous inventions re described in Bk. III, ch. i.  He is an expert at making powder and artillery pieces in Bk. V, ch xxii.

17.  See Bk. III, ch. ix for the duel and siege, Bk. III, ch. xxiv for landlord, Bk. IV, ch. x for his comrades-in-arms. 

18.  “Ein reines Gewissen und aufrichtig frommes Gemüt.”  Bk. I, ch. xxiv.  “Ein Orakel oder Warnung Gottes.”  Bk. II, ch. xiii.

19.  Here in Bk. V, ch. ii., though Simplicissimus had seemed to be religious in earlier scenes. 

20.  “Etliche fehlten; etliche gewannen, etliche verspielten: derowegen auch etliche fluchten, etliche donnerten; etliche betrogen und andere wurden besäbelt. Dahero lachten die Gewinner, und die Verspieler bissen die Zähn aufeinander; teils verkauften Kleider und was sie sonst lieb hatten, andere aber gewinneten ihnen das Geld wieder ab; etliche begehrten redliche Würfel, andere hingegen wünschten falsche auf den Platz und führten solche unvermerkt ein, die aber andere wieder hinwegwarfen, zerschlugen, mit Zähnen zerrissen und den Scholderern die Mäntel zerrissen. Unter den falschen Würfeln befanden sich Niederländer, welche man schleifend hineinrollen mußte, diese hatten so spitzige Rücken, darauf sie die Fünfer und Sechser trugen, als wie die mageren Esel darauf man die Soldaten setzt. Andere waren oberländisch, denselben mußte man die bayrische Höhe geben, wenn man werfen wollte: etliche waren von Hirschhorn, leicht oben und schwer unten gemacht: andere waren mit Quecksilber oder Blei und aber andere mit zerschnittenen Haaren, Schwämmen, Spreu und Kohlen gefüttert; etliche hatten spitzige Eck, an andern waren solche gar hinweggeschliffen; teils waren lange Kolben, und teils sahen aus wie breite Schildkrotten. Und alle diese Gattungen waren auf nichts anders als auf Betrug verfertigt, sie taten dasjenige, wozu sie gemacht waren, man mochte sie gleich wippen oder sanft schleichen lassen, da half kein Knüpfens, geschweige jetzt derer, die entweder zween Fünfer oder zween Sechser und im Gegenteil entweder zwei Eß oder zwei Daus hatten: Mit diesen Schelmenbeinern zwackten, laureten und stahlen sie einander ihr Geld ab, welches sie vielleicht auch geraubt oder wenigst mit Leib- und Lebensgefahr oder sonst saurer Mühe und Arbeit erobert hatten.”  Bk. V, ch. xiv.

21.  See, for instance, the description of the dinner in Bk. I, ch. xxix or the following list of drinkers’ activities in Bk. I, ch. xxx. 

 

Notes on Recent Reading 8 [Bakhtin, Lewis, Brown]

Rabelais and his World [Bakhtin]

     Bakhtin’s book has made a significant contribution to the understanding of Rabelais (as well as explaining his centuries-long misinterpretation), but, even more importantly, it establishes a new category of humor that shapes the reader’s understanding of comedy itself. That the author did his important work under Stalin’s regime is the more remarkable
     Bakhtin’s revealing information on topics such as folk observances, vituperative speech, Cyprian’s Dinner, and the Easter laugh would alone make the book worth reading. The application of these data to Rabelais was ground-breaking; such analyses as the discussion of the wedding customs of the Bum-bailiffs in Book Four (to take an example almost at random) are persuasive, magnifying rather than diminishing the strength of the texts.
     But the greatest achievement of Bakhtin’s book is to define a unique form of comedy, one associated with the Carnival holiday, a universalizing humor embracing all of humankind, the wise and comely as well as the ridiculous, a sort of grand upwelling of spirit in which the dualities of pain and pleasure, life and death dissolve in laughter. Rabelais and his World is a rare book of criticism. A work of art in itself, it illuminates a text but teaches the reader as well about literature in general and even, perhaps, a bit about life.


It Can’t Happen Here [Lewis]

     I do recall the pleasure of a suburban sixth-grader looking for allies in his opposition to the “booboisie” (to use Mencken’s term). The satiric shots in Main Street may have had targets already a generation gone, but every one of them was pointed in the correct direction. I fancy, though, that even then I suspected Lewis of being a bit flat, his points repetitive, his analysis shallow and too easy.
     In fact It Can’t Happen Here is best read as a potboiler, a genre on which Lewis had cut his teeth. As a boy’s adventure story it is almost readable, while artistically and on the political thematic level, it is a labored exercise. The view from Sauk Centre made the small fish, the petty bourgeoisie, look like the ruling class. Poor taste can seem a greater issue than greed, a small-town Babbitt a more despicable enemy than a robber baron. But Lewis never goes in to what really motivates even the follower in fascism: the aggression, economic insecurity, and scapegoating that can combine to make a rank-and-file Nazi or Tea Partier. His stormtroopers are vulgar rubes who dress in drag and blackface for “good, old-time Elks Club humor.” Jessup, the Vermonter who might as well have been Midwestern, thinks that those who “mind their own business” very likely rank higher in heaven than such “plumed souls” as the abolitionists.
     Lewis had interrupted his education at Yale to spend time in Upton Sinclair’s short-lived experimental community, the Helicon Home Colony, but it may be that neither Yale nor the communards transformed him altogether. I am pleased to report that he does declare for some sort of Cooperative Commonwealth at last which places his social thought still in advance of the early twenty-first century.


Wieland [Brown]

     A decent read yet today, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland resembles its British predecessors of earlier decades as an epistolary seduction novel while emphatically Gothic, like books in the more recent fashion.
     In the new American land, the author poises himself delicately between many of his oppositions. The Lockean reliance on perceptions is here traduced by false sense impressions while the pious man falls prey to monstrous delusion. The characters are only recent Americans with ties yet to Europe, and the action occurs in a kind of historic breather between the French and Indian and the Revolutionary Wars. The sensational Gothic side-show attractions of spontaneous combustion and “biloquism” are neither fully accounted for as in the Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural” nor are they as mysterious as in Walpole. The potential Eden of the American forest turns hellish. Its residents sidestep Europe’s centuries-long accretions of injustice only to enact a more monstrous scenario.
     The reader may wonder, though, whether Brown is in fact subtly playing both ends of these dualities or if he is simply careless. Carwin is never really motivated and Louisa is quite forgotten by her author (until the very end). The description is Romantic to a fault, but, especially when representing emotional states, it is repetitive and over-amplified.
     The book is particularly susceptible to self-reflective readings in which Carwin’s voices are a figure for the author’s speaking in the first-person narration. The plot depends on misunderstanding and missed communications as well as on things unknowable to the characters. In fact it is sufficiently underdetermined that the reader at the end is likely to feel unsatisfied.

Carnival [Portugal]

The promise of Carnival is immense. Denying the power of time and claiming a moment of life victorious, it occurs at the chronological boundary between winter and spring. Like Saturnalia or the ancient komos, the customs associated with the time just before Lent tend to return humanity (albeit temporarily and in imagination) to a utopian golden age without distinctions. There are no performers and spectators -- the entire world is carnivalesque and the spectacle, rather than a work of art, is reality itself. The emphasis on the body is democratizing, universal. The laughter is upwelling, non-specific, laughter at the cosmos. For this reason, as Bakhtin demonstrated in Rabelais and his World, it is beyond good and evil, containing aggression as well as love, death as part of life, comic suffering, and foolish joy. The impulse of carnival arises surely in the most archaic yea-saying practices of springtime ritual, celebrating nature’s Phoenix-like rebirth from its own corpse. Carnival provides an annual excuse to imagine social equality in an inclusive community in which an abundance of all good things – notably represented by food and drink – is available to all and the censorious mandates of everyday life may be treated lightly or flouted altogether. We had heard that Carnival in Nazaré, on Portugal’s Atlantic coast, was a grass-roots affair. The locals eschew the popular Brazilian tunes, composing songs every year anew about the town’s own scenes and issues. If it promised little of the all-out sensual assault one hears of in Trinidad or Rio, or the marvelous music and glitz of New Orleans, lesser in scale than even nearby Torres Vedras (where we meant to go until we found we couldn’t book a room), Nazaré offered instead a most participatory festival in which we thought perhaps even a visitor might feel the publicly-shared humanity at the heart of Carnival, reflecting the universality of our species’ nature, our passions and concerns. The stage for Tuesday’s parade was on the edge of the beach just beneath our balcony at the Hotel Mar Bravo. It featured the legend “Carnaval 2012 ca crise é pu pescoce” which I am told could be translated “the [economic] crisis is strangling us,” but one could never have guessed the message from the flipped-out jolly clown depicted next to the words. The music had blasted for hours, becoming almost hypnotic and the streets were crowded by the time the parade began, and floats began to pass by in the most glorious variety. The king and queen rode to their thrones in a cannibal’s pot. Was the giant face of a disturbed-looking European looking forward whose other half, looking back, was a gleeful Chinese, complete with queue, a political comment? A couple of ladies in traditional dress carrying racks of drying mackerel such as one sees daily on the beach led a troupe of women in the costume version of the same outfit dancing with mock racks of drying fish. There were not one, but two representations of surfers off the nearby point on which the Virgin Mary had performed a miracle. A group of men in tutus delighted the viewers no less than the dance school teens who followed them. Some floats were drawn by cars, some by tractors, not a few were simply pushed along. There were a number of more casual participants. A family had entered the parade playing what they please on flute, trumpet, and drum. They marched along, pausing now and then to chat with friends. Another family had cobbled together a modest sort of hand-drawn float using a toy wagon, a bit of papier-mâché and crepe. Was the car with hand-written signs declaring “love is not a crime” the local gay liberation? Viewers on the sidelines stepped into the street for a block or so to blow a toy horn in exuberance, then they head to the sidelines to buy a bag of fava-type beans and a beer. Even the elders were jiving, many people danced, raising their arms like Pentecostals in an upwelling of spirits as spontaneous as the mood of the dogs playing along the shore. When the parade had passed by twice after circling back, performances began on the stage. The king and queen were ceremonially seated to gaze with approval as kids danced, the men in tutus danced, anyone who wanted to come on stage to dance or sing or simply take a turn passing under the raised shepherds’ crooks of some celebrants who seemed to be impersonating Biblical figures. As dark approached, a drama I suspect of very ancient roots was enacted. A frame representing a metal detector was brought on stage and a judge seated with court officers in attendance. A new procession approached, carrying a dummy who was the defendant, but his wife was quite human and pled his case warmly. A burlesque priest appeared to offer aid. Eventually, as sun set, the dummy was convicted, carried out toward the ocean, and burned on the sand. I believe a fish was buried with him. Earlier that afternoon, we had lunched at outdoor café seats in a tiny square just off the beach. We ordered a seafood caldeirada, a fish stew akin to bouillabaisse. When a huge and brimming pot emerged from the kitchen, I reminded the waiter that we had asked only for a single order, planning to share. Told that this massive heap of clams, cockles, ray, and shrimp with a few vegetables and potatoes was indeed a single serving, we set to. In moments we were enjoying a memorable meal with a clay pitcher of the house wine. We fell into conversation with our amiable neighbors, a clown and a man in kilts, with occasional comments by two youths in pink fright wigs occupying the next table. The meal could not have been more satisfying. The full belly is perhaps the most eloquent and succinct expression of Carnival.

Rereading the Classics [Rabelais]

     In a few months, I shall visit Portugal. We have engaged a room in Navaré on the coast during the days of Carnival and shall blame only ourselves if we are kept awake by revelry. I have, in anticipation, been thinking of Bakhtin’s study of Carnival customs and of Rabelais. While dealing with Stalinism and his own osteomyelitis, Bakhtin found in the great Renaissance monk an irresistible source of laughter, a way to cope with being human, with belches and farts and pains and death and murderous hypocrites in power all the while.
      Now, of course, physicality has always been a major source of humor, puncturing pretensions and downing idealistic flights of fancy. It is the stock in trade of clowns, of commedia dell’arte, and of a good many contemporary comic actors like Jim Carrey. Though comedy often springs from the most material human attributes, the abstract logical mind is the another major source, perhaps equally significant. This reflects the human predicament: as Pascal had it, neither wholly angelic nor wholly bestial. [1] Thus cerebral humor like incongruities and puns generate a laugh as well as pratfalls and stomach gurgles. [2]
     The physical side has attracted the most attention to Rabelais. His reputation for obscenity and crudity is, in the end, inconsistent with his utter normalcy; his body-consciousness strikes the reader as unusually healthy. In spite of the basic impulse of monasticism to reject the world, Rabelais embraces physicality, not with resignation but with joy. Life, death, eating, excreting are such fun, such loci of energy that they inevitably spawn great torrents of words. Rather than fleeing their humanity, Gargantua and Pantagruel magnify it through their gigantism, and the language does its best to keep up.
     His book, however, is as erudite as it is vulgar. Of course, the manipulation of symbols is indeed more distinctly human than intestinal gas, at which bovines, for instance, far surpass us. Surely the mind is the single characteristic that most distinguishes our species, the most critically important in the development of homo sapiens. Semiotic use belongs to humanity as pouncing to cats or webs to spiders, and Rabelais delights in language, the most sophisticated code in existence. His book is filled with effervescent examples of what the medievals called amplificatio, piling it on, compiling great catalogues, adding one largely synonymous figure to another, listing authorities as though presenting a learned argument. He makes endless allusions, employs every sort of rhetoric and verse imaginable, and elaborates commentaries on commentaries for the sheer exhilarated joy of it. Knowing no bounds, he invents outlandish names and words, and shuffles foreign tongues together. Such Whitmanic/Joycean exuberance in a learned French monk!
     Loving language, he loves literature, and book-studies of all kinds. He is full to overflowing; he is encyclopedic. He mixes high and low styles in a way that would have seemed barbaric to the ancients. In the list of Gargantua’s games one feels the pulse of life even more than in Breughel’s painting. In Xenomanes’ description of King Lent [3] are a hundred surrealist images. Few others construct such grand textures of words out of playful high spirits alone.
     His rhetorical figures correspond precisely to the author’s world-view. He is constitutionally filled with a buoyant delight at existence, inspired by learned studies no less than by a fine dinner or an admirable sunrise. This delight in simply being alive is stronger in some passages than others, but never absent through the entire work. This is surely in fact the work’s most significant theme. It may be true, as the Buddha said that life is suffering, but it is no less true that life is joyful, and it can only be salutary to look through the eyes of one who expresses the other half of the undeniable self-contradictory truth. As Rabelais says, echoing Aquinas in his initial address to his readers: “to laugh is natural to men.” [4]
     Pantagruelism, according to its creator, arises from “a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune” [5] But in fact, what the translator calls “jollity” is in French gaîté, and this word has a long history in French poetry. Among the troubadours “gai” was used to imply a sort of sublimity bordering on divine afflatus. [6] Thus gai saber came to be used for the “sciences” of poetry composition and of lovemaking as in the 14th century Consistori del Gay (or Gai) Saber. Rabelais in the stirrings of the Reformation and Nietzsche with the 19th century “death of God” both saw the world opening before them.
     Nietzsche says in his Fröhliche Wissenschaft, “Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.’” [7]
     In a temperament of a soberer sort, George Santayana thought of the world as a grand mardi gras, saying “It is a great Carnival, and amongst these lights and shadows of comedy, these roses and vices of the playhouse, there is no abiding.” [8] In fact, Pantagruel’s whole story, like that of Dante or of Monkey in Journey to the West is a journey toward enlightenment.
Less foregrounded, but a natural consequence of Rabelais’ sensibility, is his political radicalism, his uncompromising sharp satire of the ruling class of church and state, and his admiration for More’s communist utopia. Bakhtin was on the money, as many subsequent critics have agreed, when he associated Rabelais’ attitude with the social practices around Carnival in which social order was overturned, at once revealing temporarily the artificiality of the everyday and reinforcing its essential reality by playfully enacting its opposite. All laughter has an element of letting go, of a sudden release of repressed ideas. [9] When Epistemon’s throat is cut and he finds himself in the underworld, social roles are reversed. [10] Kings and conquerors are reduced to beggary, while the philosophers prosper. Of course, in the Abbey of Thélème, with its slogan “Do as thou wouldst,” the inmates need not support themselves; indeed, like nobles, they have troops of workmen to provide their needs. Their behavior is decorous due to the aristocratic virtue of “honor,” really an aesthetic category. Still, Rabelais’ book must be counted among those that presaged the breakdown of Roman Catholic hegemony and of European feudalism, though what followed was not liberation but new varieties of Protestant intolerance and capitalist exploitation.
     Am I the only reader to suspect a poignant note in the constant barrage of good humor about drinking alcohol? To me it sounds as though, for all the ebullient story-telling, all the optimistic brio, all the hearty Renaissance self-celebration, the subject in the end must seek some anesthetic or analgesic at least to make it through the night. Even the healthiest of monkish physicians felt the need for a chemical fix when it seemed that reality was gaining on him. In addition the fantasies of titanic meals may be seen as the inversion of the sort of starvation anxiety Bettelheim found in stories like Hansel and Gretel. Clearly, the fantastic liberty of actors like Pantagruel and Panurge gains its appeal from the compromised and highly programmed lives most people live. Similarly, Rabelais’ frequent “jolly” references to people identified as physically ill (most often “syphilitics” and “gouty ones,” two conditions that were associated with over-indulgence) reinforces the fact of mortality and the transience of worldly things. Just as in ancient Greek and Chinese poetry, the recognition of the illusory nature of pleasure heightens its enjoyment even as it adds a dark shadow to the scene.
     Glorious as I find him, Rabelais is not, indeed, to everyone’s taste. For those of us who like to believe in the power of words, it is gratifying to find that the Church is still after him as it was during his life. The Catholic Encyclopedia says of Rabelais’ book, “It is impossible to analyse it” yet adds as well the caution: “as a whole it exercises a baneful influence.” I would not blame the pious fathers for doubting that the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel was a believer in original sin.
     He is also capable of offending George Orwell who calls him precisely what he is not: “an exceptionally perverse, morbid writer, a case for psycho-analysis.” Orwell marvels that “anyone can find something ‘normal’ and ‘hearty’ in coprophilia,” [11] and suggests that Rabelais’ reputation can only exist due to people’s failing to actually read his book.
     Orwell wrote on the eve of the immensely and deservedly popular translation of an abridgement by Samuel Putnam. Urquhart/Motteux is good fun but can tire the reader. J. M. Cohen’s Penguin version is complete and reliable as well as inexpensive and easily available. Donald M. Frame’s The Complete Works of François Rabelais is the best current scholarly version for serious students who don’t read French. I can only think that the more people who read Rabelais, the better. He is an enormous spirit and we can all use the tolerance, good sense, and profound learning as well as his high spirits which delighted not only in food and drink but in the most entertaining play of all, the play of the mind.






1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées 329.

2. For the gastric sounds I am thinking of Chaplin’s “stomach duet” with a charitable prison visitor in Modern Times, for which he created the noises himself by blowing bubbles into a pail of water.

3. Book IV, chapters 30-32 contains such figures as “his lungs like a fur-lined hood,” “his imagination like a peal of bells,” and “if he blew his nose, it was salted eels.”

4. Rabelaisian it may sound, but the line is directly from the Summa Theologica, LI, 1.

5. “Une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites.” In Urquhart’s edition, though by this point translated by Motteux, from the prologue to Book IV. Motteux was also an early translator of Don Quixote, though, according to Samuel Putnam, he was very free, adding obscene material in particular and omitting at liberty while emphasizing the “slapstick.” His death in a brothel led to a sensational closely watched trial.

6. See, for instance, the Contessa de Dia’s “Ab joi et ab joven m’apais,” William IX’s “Pos de chantar m'es pres talenz,” and Peire Vidal’s “Ab l’alen tir vas me l’aire.”

7. Aphorism 343 of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft in Walter Kaufmann’s translation. Nietzsche owes to Emerson for these concepts. Among the many commentators, Harold Bloom regards Nietzsche as “Emerson’s belated rival.”

8. Santayana 34 in "Carnival" from Soliloquies in England and later soliloquies.

9. For Freud, humor arose from a rejection of reality and a triumph for the pleasure principle, the superego temporarily allowing the ego to gain id satisfaction from introducing tabooed topics. Among the likely sources of comedy, then are sex and scatology, heterodoxy and revolution.

10. Rabelais owes a debt, here, to Lucian’s Menippus.

11. The line is from a dismissive review of Albert Cohen’s now-forgotten Nailcruncher that appears in George Orwell, My country right or left, 1940-1943, p. 45-6. I am curious as to what episode Orwell thought could properly be termed “coprophilic.”