Semantic Instability in Manon Lescaut

 

Quoted passages are my own translations with the original French provided in endnotes.

 

     The Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut has proven a popular favorite.  Reprinted hundreds of times, Manon is as well the subject of no less than six operas, three of which (Auber, Puccini, Massenet) remain in the repertoire.  Once sufficiently transgressive to be censored, the text is now taught as an exemplar of classic prose style. 

     Surely the principal appeal of the story is the emotional intensity of its characters.  The narrative’s energy derives from the immoderate love of the Chevalier de Grieux, conceived at first seeing his beloved  and never thereafter flagging and the attachment of Manon to a life of luxury which she pursues constantly, only to die when it seems beyond her reach.  Today readers are likely to interpret their behavior as self-destructively addictive.  Yet such a reading is surely at least in part anachronistic.  Though this sort of psychological analysis is not directly derived from the text, several inconsistent interpretations of their affair are suggested, leaving the question of the meaning of the sad story of the Chevalier de Grieux and his beloved Manon at once overdetermined (with multiple explanations) and underdetermined (with none clearly victorious over the others).  At different points in the narration the action is variously described in terms of Christian morality, a question of sensibility, a predetermined fate, and a matter of social class.

     The author as well as his main character being clerics, it is unsurprising that Christian morality plays a role.  To encourage improvements in morals had been a standard justification for literature for centuries.   The frame narrator justifies his story in the “Avis de l’Auteur” as “a terrifying example of the force of the passions” [1].  He hopes his work will serve for the purpose of “moral instruction” [2].  Furthermore, the narration ends with the Chevalier’s apparent reform and return to his family and to a more regular life in less ethically perilous waters.  After that, presumably, nothing happens worthy of note.  One might read all the novel’s suffering as the consequence of moral lapses.  Manon is consistently a loose woman, albeit one with considerable good-natured charm and, apparently, a certain genuine attachment to the Chevalier, while he, by cohabiting with her while unmarried, brings disaster after disaster upon himself and falls into not only defying his father and lying, but theft as well and even murder.

     This didacticism, though, is no stronger than either the Abbé’s or the Chevalier’s consistency to their vows.  In fact, Manon Lescaut is a novel of sensibility, a genre that generally celebrates access to emotions and the development of strong feelings.  Though fainting is more characteristic of women than men in late eighteenth century life and literature, the Chevalier’s swoon when he hears of Manon’s faithlessness from his father is testament to his emotional sensitivity.  He thinks well of himself and even Manon, with her thoroughly predictable disappearances and betrayals, seems more absurd and childish than malicious.  To her sexuality is natural and its use inevitable.  For him reform, dull and eventless in  comparison to the wild swings of fortune during his affair with Manon, is still possible, while she must die.  The author’s protestations of moral purpose resemble those of Defoe and Richardson and even the medieval Pearl-poet who in Cleanness who provides a lurid account of goings-on in Sodom likewise in the service of moral instruction.

     An even broader, though shallower, approach is suggested by the Chevalier himself when he reflects on his problems and decides all is due to fate, to “those specific blows of fate attached to the ruin of a wretch from which virtue cannot defend a person and which wisdom cannot foresee.” [3]  The only response is then passivity.  “Let us leave our fortune in the care of heaven” [4].  This serves primarily as an excuse when the Chevalier feels like dodging a sense of his own responsibility for his difficulties.  It is as well the attitude Manon expresses when she first enters the story and says of her plight, “It seems to have been the will of Heaven, since there was no way to avoid it.” [5] 

     Quite often his decision-making is governed neither by Christian dictates nor some irresistible ἀνάγκη, but rather by the standards of aristocratic behavior, the prizing of honor that results from good breeding.  Class is linked to morality at the outset when the frame narrator notes that he addresses people “of a certain order of spirit and good breeding” [6].  Tiberge appeals to his honor in attempting to reform him [7].  He sees Manon’s brother as “a brutal man with no principles of honor” [7], and the Chevalier regularly evaluates his own behavior by considering what is expected of members of his class. 

     Should one’s acts be governed by Christian (or secular) moral dictates?  Is extravagant love a sign of a noble sensitivity?  Is every event inevitable and predetermined?  Each of these options is raised but not settled in the novel.  This shifting among interpretations of behavior arises not from sloppiness, however, but from precision.   Since the Chevalier himself (and some might suspect also his creator) vacillated among the alternatives of simple resignation, Christian ambitions, and the desire to act honorably, all the while drawn ever further downstream by an overwhelming erotic passion, it is surely right to include all these elements in his representation.  There is no more certainty in the world of the Chevalier de Grieux than in that of his author or one of his readers.  Just like the fictional character, all people respond to a variety of registers of value, acting now for an ethical reason, then in an effort to impress, again with religious principles in mind, and sometimes – not necessarily due to weakness or foolishness -- simply submitting to experience.  The Chevalier is no more inconsistent than we are.

 

 

 

1.  “Un exemple terrible de la force des passions,” page 32, line 17 in the 2016 Flammarion edition edited by Hélêne Bernard.  Other references to destiny are found on pages 18, 45, 82, 100, 221.

2.  “Instruction des mœrs” p. 32, ll. 30-31.

3.  “Je la lui représentai comme un de ces coups particuliers du destin qui s’attache a la ruine d’un misérable, et dont il est aussi impossible a la vertu de se défendre qu’il l’a été a la sagesse de les prévoir.” p. 82, ll.  1306-1309.

4.  “Laissons au ciel le soin de notre fortune.” P. 198, ll. 1912-1913. 

5.  “C’était apparemment la volonté de Ciel, puisqu’il ne lui laissait nul moyen de l’éviter” p. 44, ll. 244-245.

6.  “Personnes d’un certain ordre d’esprit et de politesse,” p. 32, ll. 37-38. 

7.  P. 86, l. 1427.

8.  “C’était un homme brutale et sans principes d’honneur,” p. 74, l. 1077.

The Pose of Naturalism in Zola’s Germinal

 

     Germinal remains, after over a hundred years, strong stuff.  Zola’s prose continues to deploy the luxurious richness of concrete specific detail found in Flaubert and Balzac, but here the facts alone are merciless and painful.  The excruciating miners’ lives, the consequence of an oppressive economic system, only seem the more miserably unjust when set off by a few scenes of the bourgeois comfort of their bosses.  The book seems in many ways tragic.  The workers, after suffering terrible privations and numerous casualties, gain nothing from their strike.  The unmerited suffering of the poor, rather than being (as in Christianity) redemptive, only degrades and brutalizes them further.   Yet the title is clearly hopeful with its reference to the 1789 Revolution and to germination, here referring to the coming of radical change, an implication made explicit in the final passage.

 

Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages.  And very soon they would crack the earth asunder.  (trans. By L. W. Tancock)

 

Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre. 

 This incongruity between the ugliness of the miners’ degradation and the beauty of the utopian vision of a better economic order represents a more general tension informing the work as a whole.  While claiming to construct narratives out of lived experience alone, Zola consistently allowed observed facts to be overruled by his thematic enthusiasm as well as by emotion, literary convention, and allusion.   

     Zola’s Naturalism was for him a “scientific” method which he regarded as uniquely appropriate for his day.  In The Experimental Novel (1893) he explains that his approach to writing fiction is based on the rigorous research principles of Claude Bernard, the physiologist.  Quoting with approval Bernard’s characterization of the scientist as “the photographer of phenomena,” Zola notes that for the novelist no less than the biologist “his observation should be an exact representation of nature... He listens to nature and he writes under its dictation.”  Just as in the laboratory the scientist forms hypotheses first suggested and then tested by empirical facts, Zola maintains that the writer must survey the scene and formulate possible explanations for events, while remaining, like other researchers, ready to follow the data wherever they may lead.  For him this is possible because in his view human actions are the inevitable result of heredity and environment, just as evolutionary changes proceed independent of any creature’s choices and, in pre-Einsteinian physics, a mechanistic view is possible in which every event is theoretically predictable.  As Zola puts it, “There is an absolute determinism for alI human phenomena.”

     He rejects “the work of the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural,” and declares “The metaphysical man is dead; our whole territory is transformed by the advent of the physiological man . . .. This view of the matter is a new one; we have become experimentalists instead of philosophers.”

     Zola went to some pains in pursuit of this goal of scientific objectivity.  In researching Germinal he visited northern French mining towns at least one of which had recently been through a strike and even descended into the pits under the pretense that he was a government representative.  He had set himself the ambitious goal in his twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle of providing a comprehensive vision of Second Empire France recording not only its nature but also the process of historical change.  Such a picture could, he thought, only be generated through an accumulation of facts.

     Yet the author’s own emotions and the usages of literary convention often take precedence over the data of lived experience.  Though he conceived his project as dispassionate -- he uses the word “impersonal” and insists that “naturalism is not a personal fantasy” -- he nonetheless did not hesitate to include tendentious, melodramatic, and sensational material, elements that in fact made his work moving and popular even as it deviated from his theory. 

     Each of these thematic or affective aspects of his fiction is complicated by a certain ambivalence.  For instance, the most straightforward theme of Germinal, shaping much of the story, is certainly the denunciation of capitalism and the promise of socialism.  While this novel is one of the very best of tendentious revolutionary narratives, arousing sympathy for the exploited and anger against their callous masters, it avoids a reductive cast of heroes and villains while maintaining an unqualified support for socialism.  The miners and their families are not idealized.  All, including Étienne, the outsider, are flawed.  A few, like Jeanlin, can even kill without reason.  Some, like Catherine or old Bonnemort, are so victimized that they possess little other identity.  Many are subject to the temptations of the pleasures available to the poor, principally sex and drinking.  

     Meanwhile, the advocates of change are likewise imperfect tribunes of the people.  Étienne is capable of being seduced by his new celebrity as well as by the whims of an excited mob.  Meanwhile, Pluchart is a professional activist who seems more anxious to promote his own career in the Socialist International than to put himself on the line with the workers, and Souvarine is a Russian anarchist so seduced by violence that he holds himself aloof for much of the action and then sabotages the mine elevator, causing unnecessary workers’ deaths.  

     Rasseneur, the one-time miner who operates a tavern, supports the workers, but feels rivalry with Étienne’s more radical leadership.  Maigrat, the owner of the village shop, offers credit but also sexually exploits his customers.  Even higher on the economic ladder, Zola finds mixed characters.  M. Hennebeau, manager of the mine, is so miserable in his marriage that he fancies he would rather be one of his workers.  His nephew Négrel is already affluent, and is in addition engaged to Cécile Gregoire, the owner’s daughter, yet in the end this capitalist works tirelessly to save the trapped workers and embraces Étienne as a brother.  Deneulin, owner of a smaller nearby mine, tries to act in a responsible fashion, modernizing his operation even though he thereby reduces his profits, and for his pains he is gobbled up by his richer competitor. 

     The contradiction that exists between Zola’s straightforward view of a socialist solution which one might with justice term “idealist” and his more nuanced “realistic” depiction of the actors involved is not the only compromise of the “scientific” Naturalist theory  in the novel.  Lurid, sensational stories in fiction may indeed be equaled by lived experience, but such material is often emphasized in popular works like ‘thirties pulp fiction or Tarantino’s movies from the ‘nineties.  Incidents in Germinal like the women’s bacchante-like mutilation of Maigrat after his death, Bonnemort’s sudden murder of Cécile, and the underground consummation of love between Étienne and Catharine are possible but unlikely, included in order to heighten the story’s impact and to attract readers. 

     Each of these incidents is only barely plausible.  Maigrat’s end seems to owe a good deal to Euripedes.  Bonnemort’s act expresses, as Zola tells the reader, a lifetime of suppressed resentment.  A physician might find his act improbable for a stroke victim, but it is a powerful symbol of the potential explosive energy inherent in every worker.  While it is difficult to conceive of people near death as Étienne and Catharine are when trapped underground as inclined toward or even capable of sexual activity, their love it makes a touching, even sentimental, scene with the two characters with whom  the reader has been most in sympathy, forming a kind of denouement that, amid the ruination of the end, prefigures the novel’s hopeful final words.

     Clearly only literary convenience makes Étienne the tenuous connection of the miners’ saga with the larger Rougon-Macquart cycle.  Though a few references appear relating to other novels, such as the protagonist’s hereditary vulnerability to alcohol, no knowledge of other works is necessary for the reader of Germinal.  The entire encyclopedic concept is entirely artificial in spite of the pretension to scientific objectivity.  Zola’s ambition to render his times in such precise detail that he would be a dispassionate scientific observer, exhibiting neither abstract principles nor personal traits, but simply copying with accuracy the world around him can scarcely overcome one insuperable obstacle.  Every turn of Zola’s plot is the result of his own conscious decision.  His choices are surely based on his own life experience but they  are far from inevitable; the author’s claim to objectivity is untenable.

       Zola clearly distinguished his Naturalism from Balzac’s Realism in his essay Différences entre Balzac et moi (1869), saying “My work is less social than scientific.”  (“Mon oeuvre sera moins sociale que scientifique.)  in his view Balzac’s aim was to be wholly descriptive, simply to illustrate that “there are lawyers, idlers, etc. just as there are dogs, wolves, etc.  In a word, his work seeks to be a mirror of contemporary society.”  (“Il y a des avocats, des oisifs etc. comme il y a des chiens, des loups etc. En un mot, son oeuvre veut être le miroir de la société contemporaine.”)  In contrast for him “My great project is to be purely a naturalist, a physiologist.  In place of social concepts like royalty or Catholicism he meant to substitute scientific laws such as those of heredity” (“Ma grande affaire est d'être purement naturaliste, purement physiologiste. Au lieu d'avoir des principes (la royauté, le catholicisme) j'aurais des lois (I'hérédité.”).  He here disclaims any intention of suggesting themes, whether “political, philosophical, or moral.” For him his story is “the simple relation of the facts of a family, showing the internal mechanism that makes it act.  I accept even anomalies.”  (“Un simple exposé des faits d'une famille, en montrant le mécanisme intérieur qui la fait agir. J'accepte même l'exception.”)

     That last phrase provides the author a useful wild card.   In fact Germinal and Zola’s other novels are shaped by literary convention, as well as by ideology, taste, and a host of elements.  Zola outlines not a new, more scientific form of literature but rather a new posture meant to enhance the reader’s impression of  verisimilitude.  The Naturalist method, rather than delivering art over to science, constructs a new novelistic artifice.  By the profession of objectivity Zola advances his own thematic interest in asserting that the actions of individuals are the foreseeable result of their heredity and environment.  The claim that he is merely transcribing data from life is a rhetorical device to convince the reader that the novelist has been faithful to lived reality.  It is the nineteenth century version of the eighteenth-century writers who presented works of fiction as authentic letters or otherwise reflecting real events. 

     One’s critical estimation of Zola is in no way diminished by the idea that his Naturalism is a calculated effect rather than some new sort of objectivity.  Writing, after all, can be nothing but marks on a page which makes at best a highly selective and refracted use of the sense data of experience.  The literary devices used by writers can only be judged by  their effectiveness in context, and Zola in Germinal has told a dramatic, significant, and well-crafted story.  While the claim of Naturalism is a pose, it is neither more nor less “false” than the pretensions of some writers to relate the doings of divinities.  Everything in art is symbolic.  Whereas Bernard in studying the liver quite properly sought results “objective” enough to be replicated by other researchers, Zola’s view of the miners arose from his passion and the narrative in which it is contained owes more to literary tradition and to the author’s own imagination than to transparent, quasi-scientific reportage.  

Rereading the Classics [Montaigne]

Page references in the notes in parentheses are to the Modern Library Giant with the 1603 translation by John Florio, the friend of Giordano Bruno and very likely of Shakespeare. My own copy, purchased well-used, already browning and worn fifty years ago, is still quite serviceable.


Montaigne’s attitude does not vary through the thousand pages of his essays. His curiosity, learning, skepticism, tolerance, and taste are all evident from the first essay (on “By Divers Means Men Come to a Like End”) to the last (“Of Experience”). The reason for this consistency is announced at the outset of his work when he declares to his readers “it is my selfe I pourtray.” He aims not at sublimity but rather “mine owne genuine, simple and ordinarie fashion, without contention, art or study.” For this project he found it necessary to invent a new form, the essay and a new formulation of skepticism based on “natural judgement.”

Though born to a high position and corresponding social responsibilities, he retired from public life in his late thirties [1] to cultivate his private studies and to record his thoughts in an ever-growing volume.
For the reader this desertion of many social duties and the resulting introspection resulted in the most delightful of books. Since Montaigne is primarily interested in his own regard for what he studies rather than in final truths about the object itself, all topics come to seem equally fruitful and all conclusions tentative. Freed from the Procrustean demands of dogma to regularize his vision, which he recognizes as inherently flawed, he may, like a poet, be loyal to the precise recording of impressions. In this way he produced an altogether new sort of prose, a candid “trail map” of consciousness utterly absorbing to any reader who finds pleasure in meditative ratiocination or who relishes the sensibility of others.

What other volume can one open at random to find such entertaining and irresistible data as these, chosen only just now and wholly, I guarantee, at random.

1) With a vivid and persuasive image, he says our unnecessary appetites crowd out the natural like visitors outnumbering the residents of a city. A few lines later, Montaigne provides a series of stories of beasts in love with humans. (418)

2) “A physitian boasted unto Nicocles, that his Arte was of exceeding great authority, It is true (quoth Nicocles) for, it may kill so many people without feare of punishment by Lawe.” (690) [2]

3) He sketches out a marvelous set-piece, the description of a performance
sponsored by the Roman emperor Probus featuring first, thousands of ostriches,
bucks, stags, and boars imported to be hunted by the common people, followed by a day of lions, leopards, and bears “to be baited and tugged in pieces,” and finally three hundred pairs of gladiators. (817)

Sauntering through his pages is, so far as I am concerned, the best way to read Montaigne, with little concern for form and less for conclusions, but with a continual delight in his unpredictability, erudition, candor, and style. Only a relaxed and expectant audience can appreciate the divagations of the scant two page account “Of Smels and Odors.” (Bk. 1, Ch. LV) The essay begins not from direct observation, but from a book, noting Plutarch’s report that Alexander’s body had naturally a “sweet smelling savour,” but this bookish opening, it seems, was designed to lead directly to its inverse in all-too-real lived experience. Most people, Montaigne says, are “cleane contrarie” to Alexander, which is to say, they stink. He continues to develop the polarity between unpleasant body odor and a “clean” smell, which is to say, no smell at all. He indicts perfumes as a partial mask of fouler scents. Then succeeds a whimsical account of his mustaches as guardian of his nostrils of service in avoiding not only stench but even contagion. This suggests Socrates’ reputation for resisting plagues, implying that not only world conquerors but also wise men may develop semi-supernatural powers. Physicians might, he thinks, make better use of what today enjoys a bit of a vogue as aromatherapy. This leads to a recognition of the role of incense in religion which slides rapidly into the use of spices in cuisine. The reader next relishes a snapshot of the extravagant kitchen of Charles V, the vapors from which would perfume the whole neighborhood of the palace. He concludes by noting his distaste for the “fennie and marish” location of Venice and the “durtie uncleannesse” of Paris. The rapidly shifting focus is reminiscent of montage in filmmaking or successions of images in poetry.

His style, too, is lush and sensual, though at the same time colloquial. Montaigne indulges to the full a “late” fondness for citation, bricolage, architectural sentences, and endless paragraphs, running for pages, as though they confess their inability ever quite to contain their meaning, but which approach ever closer with each telling detail. He cites the ancients because he realizes we have no evidence for anything beyond our own experience and what we can learn of the experience of others. He piles one quotation upon another, knowing that it is never enough, the case will not be settled, we will be collecting evidence to the end of our days, and, if we reach no satisfying conclusion, we will at least have diverted ourselves in the most human of ways.

Montaigne’s method led to an extraordinary modernity, not just in the assumption that the subjective is for better or worse inevitable and not a choice at all, but also in its complement, a tolerant pluralism, both ethnic and religious. His essay “On the Canibales” goes so far as to treat the West Indian natives as representatives of a better-than-golden age, “little bastardized” by civilization. (164) Even their poetry he finds to have the loveliness of ancient Greek. (170) Though they killed and ate captives of war, they were impressed that the Portuguese were yet more “smartfull” and “cruel” and had to teach the Indians ingenious methods of torture. (436)

There is however, a philosophic basis for Montaigne’s sensibility, though it is not my project here to refine the schema of some critics that portrays him moving from Stoicism through Skepticism to Epicureanism. I am a tourist only in philosophy, satisfied to call him a skeptic throughout. What matters to me in his thought I hardly distinguish from Richard Rorty. In my own figure I would call his philosophy consistently paradoxical in that it requires a rejection of the ordinary claims of philosophy, a rejection the Renaissance Frenchman shares with Zen and Dada but with few in his own day. What could be plainer than the personal medal he had coined engraved with the maxim of the great skeptic Pyrrho “epecho” (“I abstain” or “withhold judgment”) and the French “Que sçay-je?” The likeness of Pyrrho’s expositor Sextus Empiricus was prominent among the savants he had carved in the woodwork of his personal library. His Christianity was sufficiently doubtful that his book spent centuries on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. [3]

The fullest exposition of his skepticism and the longest individual essay is “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond.” Sebond, a professor of theology at Toulouse, had argued that reason was not incompatible with faith. To him illumination can arrive only through divine revelation, primarily in scripture, but, once one has learned the basic facts of god’s reality, the entire creation will testify further to the divine will. Similarly, human logic, once harnessed to the Church’s teachings, can amplify and reinforce religious truth. Montaigne’s father had, toward the end of his life, asked that his son undertake a translation of Sebond’s Theologia Naturalis, perhaps to strengthen his own faith as well as the faith of other French readers. Montaigne praises Sebond’s wit and piety, and, after translating the work, went on to write his own defense of the theologian’s ideas, ostensibly adding another polemical work on behalf of Christianity. But he deviated considerably from his learned and orthodox source.

For Montaigne grace is more elusive and reason more deeply suspect than it was to Sebond. Montaigne argues for a radical skepticism that insists we cannot know anything at all. Though he makes occasional orthodox obeisances to Christian doctrine, his rhetoric mounts an ever more devastating attack against the possibility of attaining any sort of truth at all. Backed into a corner of utter unknowing, he will then plaintively note that only through god’s favor can one be sure of the indubitable truths of religion. But to the reader, and, one suspects, to the author, they did not seem at all so certain.
Montaigne speaks to us directly, and many have commented on the extraordinary modernity of his colloquialism (and eloquent it is) and his lack of ethnocentrism. Perhaps even more dramatically contemporary is Montaigne’s desperation in his final grasp after some sort of redemptive assurance which seems always futile, Sisyphean, Existential. It is both a cliché and a fact that Montaigne exemplifies the Renaissance assertion of the individual. His break with the corporate body of the Church and his wavering faith are part of the price he paid for his integrity.

The result, however, is a thoroughly radical doubt. With charming modesty he says, though “Knowledge is, without all contradiction, a most profitable and chiefe ornament . . . yet I doe not value it at so excessive a rate as some have done.” (385) This elegantly understates his view. For Montaigne the celebrated case of Martin Guerre whose impersonator deceived even his wife for years suggests that nothing can be certainly known. (933) He cites Plato saying that nature, far from shadowing forth eternal truths is “nothing but an aenigmaticall poesie,” which he describes, in a compressed version of Plato’s cave [4] as “an overshadowed and darke picture, enter-shining with an infinit varietie of false lights.” All philosophy, he concludes, is itself no better than a “sophisticated poesie” whose propositions “are all dreames and mad follies.” (481)
He concedes that “Atheisme” is, course, “execrable” (386), yet he finds no reason whatever to embrace religion’s dogmas. Even Augustine, he notes, admitted that “many things may be, and have been, whereof our discourse can never ground the nature and the causes.” (398) His voice seems more desperate than confident when he argues that only the divine can make man more than man (547) and that “it is faith onely, which lively and assuredly embraceth the high mysteries of our Religion” (388) Faith itself can be suspect, too. For Montaigne the fact that children and the aged tend to piety implies that religion were “bred by imbecility.” (393) Similarly those who find god only in times of affliction have a flimsy sort of belief. (392) A pretense to certainty may cloak what amounts to nothing more than a means of social control. (457) Well aware that god has been conceived in a great variety of forms (459), he expresses a sympathetic awareness of non-Christian religious systems, declaring that due to the “generall blindnesse” of our minds, humans must have images to worship. “As for me,” he continues “I should rather have taken part with those who worshipped the Sunne.” Heliolatry is at least potentially monotheistic, but Montaigne further says he prefers to follow “those that worshipped the Serpent, the Dogge, and the Oxe” than to credit the “hurly-burly of so many Philosophical wits” (461) Quoting Xenophanes’ celebrated claim that the beasts would imagine beast-gods, he extends it to imagine the theology of a pious goose. (477)

How feeble, he says, is religious belief when everyone can see that people pay more regard to the opinions of their neighbors, kinsmen, and masters than they do to what they claim to believe to be god’s will. The universality of a fear of death indicates men do not truly believe. (391) Montaigne agrees with Hamlet that only “feare” “keepes a foole joined to his bodie.” (443) It is clear that in general Christians behave no better than Turks or pagans, and the organized church is notoriously corrupt. [5] Most people merely “perswade themselves” that they believe. “Justice . . . is used but for a cloake and ornament.” (389) For him conviction – of anything at all, mind you, and not just the consolations of faith -- is nothing but accommodation to our own weakness and ignorance, asserted in the interests of pitifully egocentric opportunism. He categorically declares that it is beyond human power to know “the least part” of the universe. (396) All opinions are but “smoke and wind.” (435) All the great thinkers have “sported themselves with reason, as of a vaine and frivolous instrument, setting forth all sorts of inventions, devices, and fantasies, sometimes more outstretched, and sometimes more loose.” The whole is endlessly variable, amounting to nothing but “dreames” and “devises.” (490)

His own intellectual lineage is obvious since his pages throng with classical citations while Biblical ones are all but absent. He admits to being “altogether ignorant” of Scripture, (387) though he scrupulously shrinks from explicit agnosticism or heresy. His closest ancestor in thought is surely Pyrrho, (449) the radical skeptic for whom the knowledge that we can know nothing at all leads to a relaxation, a release of mental tension that allows the ataraxia sought by Epicureans and Stoics as well as by Buddhist monks and Shaivite saddhus. For him the celebrated glories of philosophy seem nothing more than parlor tricks to pass the time. “Difficulty is a coin that wisemen make use of, as juglars do with passé and repasse.” (453) He mercilessly pares away pride, insisting on “ the emptinesse, vacuitie, and no worth of man.” (395) The demonstrations of philosophers may be at first appealing, but fact is that their opposites could be proven just as convincingly. “Nothing seemeth true, that may not seeme false.” (his italics, 451) Where can truth be sought, when no two sages agree, and “reason yeeldeth appearance to divers effects? (525-531) There is little room for compromise when “humane science cannot be maintained but by unreasonable, fond, and mad reason.” (535) “Philosophie presenteth unto us, not that which is, or she beleeveth, but what she inventeth.” (484) He cannot remind us often enough that the dubious consolations of philosophy amount to nothing but “foolish vanitie” built upon “fond ridiculous foundations.” (436)

Much of the essay, in fact, goes beyond even skepticism to a chastening of all human pretensions. For Montaigne people cannot even claim an intellectual advantage over beasts. “What sufficiency is there in us, that we must not acknowledge from the industry and labours of beasts?” Apart from the fact that we cannot make out their consciousness with any precision, they clearly have superior senses in some ways. Even the activities of spiders have depths we cannot plumb. (401-3, 541) A hog may act is a more sensible manner than people. (436) The mad may indeed enjoy greater felicity than the sane, (442) and the naked cannibals are at least as civilized as Europeans. The “primitive” New World natives are calmer and happier than over-sophisticated European hypochondriac neurotics. (438, 444) Whatever powers our minds may possess are as often as not overturned by illness, intoxications, and stupefaction. (494) The “spittle or slavering of a sick dog” can vanquish even Socrates’ reason. (495) “The least things in the world wil turne [our reason] topsy-turvy.” (509)

Not knowing even themselves, (505-6) people’s opinions are a sort of natural phenomenon like winds (519) and for this reason, acceptance of generally received truths is the best policy. “Keepe your selves in the common path, it is not good to be so subtill, and so curious.” (503) In fact the ignorant and the foolish are not only happier than people of a more intellectual cast, they are also better lovers. (437) Montaigne quotes Horace to the effect that the illiterate’s erection is the equal of his better’s. (433)

The picture is bleak indeed, though balanced by the writer’s evident delight in the multifarious and endlessly fascinating world about him. He argues along with the ancient Stoics and Epicureans that positive pleasure is a phantom; the best one can experience is a lack of pain. He quotes Ennius: Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali. Even sex is only a release of tension; true ataraxia is undesirable if not unattainable. (439)

Montaigne approaches a sort of via negative mysticism, but he is far too susceptible to emotion to find real transcendence. He does indeed call man “a thing of nothing,” (445) but nirvana means nothing, an it may well be that Ultimate Reality is better known by our not knowing, by the divine “cloud of unknowing,” as the medieval author had it. When Montaigne condemns any proposition – especially anthropomorphism -- about the divine, citing Cicero and Plato, he might also have noted the line from Exodus . [7] “but my face shall not be seen” or Maimonides or Aquinas, for that matter.

Montaigne concludes his third and last book with a citation from Horace which from his pen is far from dryasdust, but rather poignant, and heart-felt, and touching. The author hopes in his “old yeares” to be sound of mind “nor wanting musicke to delight my eares.” He had spent his entire life in the energetic exercise of that definitive human characteristic, adeptness at manipulating symbols, both in the exhilaration of composition and in the connoisseurship of appreciation of his fellow humans. The ancient concept of philosophy, in Greece as in China and India was the study of how to live a good life. In this sense Montaigne was among the wisest of philosophers.


1. He was persuaded to assume the local role of mayor of Bordeaux.

2. Montaigne had a suspicious distrust of doctors and for years refused their treatment of his kidney stones.

3. Among the authors forbidden by the Church before the end of the list in 1966 were Dante (only the Monarchia), Rabelais, Descartes, Hume, Pascal, Rousseau, Flaubert, Balzac, and Stendhal.

4. Bk. V, the Republic.

5. Montaigne ingeniously notes that, though this fact might lead one to unbelief, another might find it miraculous that so crime-ridden a body as the Catholic Church can maintain its sacred role. This becomes then another instance of wholly ambiguous truth, both substantial and empty at once. (I am thinking of Nagarjuna with those adjectives.)

6. Odes, Bk. I, 31.

7. Exodus 33:20. For Maimonides see, for instance, The Guide for the Perplexed, I, 37; for Aquinas Summa Theologica, I, Q, 3.

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.”