Lands of All Play and No Work: Cockayne and the Abbey of Thélème

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses either to lines of “the Land of Cockayne” or to chapters of Gargantua.   Translations from Rabelais are makeshift, but my own. 

 

      Eve and Adam were chagrined to discover that even in the Garden of Eden, there were rules, and in the twentieth century the Rolling Stones still complained “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”  St. John of the Cross adopted a contrarian approach, concluding that “In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,/ Desire to have pleasure in nothing,” [1] but, several hundred years later, Freud treated the pleasure principle and its frustration as the most universal of motives.  People feel sufficient wistful longing for a world that never was, where limits no longer contain individual desire, that they have sometimes sketched dream-like pictures of impossible sensual utopias. 

     “The Land of Cockayne” (ca.1330) is contained in a book called the Kildare Lyrics which contains, for the most part, devotional and moralizing poems, an unsurprising subject matter as the collection was probably made by a Franciscan friar. Most are vigorous with vernacular and convey orthodox Christian sentiments, often in highly conventional treatments. [2]  The frolicking light-hearted tone of the first poem, “The Land of Cockayne,” is unique.  The poem is set “Fur in see bi west Spayngne,” perhaps in the neighborhood of the garden of the Hesperides, Hy-Brasil, or Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young.  In this land the residents enjoy uninterrupted pleasure (24), prominently including unlimited eating and drinking.  The catalogue of available culinary pleasures includes buildings made entirely of food and rivers of “oile, melk, honi and wine” (46).  A place of superabundant luxury, among the delights of Cockayne are precious gems on every side and the aromas of all the spices of the Orient. 

 

In the praer is a tre,

Swithe likful forto se.

The rote is gingeuir and galingale,

The siouns beth al sedwale,

Trie maces beth the flure,

The rind canel of swet odur,

The frute gilofre of gode smakke.

Of cucubes ther nis no lakke.  

                                                (71-78)

 What is more, fanciful whimsy is afforded free play.  There is no dirt, no flies, fleas, or lice (37).  In Cockayne the church windows are photochromic and adjust themselves to provide appropriate light.  The monks are so “heigh of mode” (125) that they flit about in the sky in play when they are not busy acting like stallions in teaching the nuns “a prayer,” “up and down” with “legs in the air” (165-167).

     In spite of the distractions, food is the primary appeal of the land.  In Cockayne cooked fowl fly to the diner to offer themselves.  Through the glorious plenitude of food in this land of wish-fulfillment one may glimpse the sometime rigors of a medieval diet.  The fascination with food is the obsession of the periodically deprived.  The dream of a full larder, often unrealized, had earlier found expression in the Classical cornucopia associated variously with Gaia, Plutus, Demeter, or Abundantia and the Dagda’s cauldron of plenty (the coire ansic) in Irish lore. 

     The speaker’s attitude toward this embarrassment of riches is unequivocal delight.  The monks flutter down from the sky for evensong, attracted by the exposed white buttocks of a “maidin,” (136) and the tone is altogether jolly.  Far from censorious, the poet’s attitude is “ribald,” with the sort of harmless innocence of adolescent fantasy difficult to imagine in the present era. 

     Though readers have sometimes taken the poem as a fiercely critical satire of clerical corruption, such a motive finds no support whatever in the text.  The poem opens with the speaker finding Cockayne so appealing, it is preferable even to Heaven.   

 

Þoȝ paradis be miri and briȝt.

Cokaygn is of fairir siȝt.

                                            (5-6)

(Though Paradise be merry and bright, Cockayne is a fairer sight.)

 And the poem ends with what looks very like instructions on how to “win” the prize of spending time in such a marvelous place.  One might atone for time in Cockayne by spending seven years wading in pig excrement but it sounds as though the author considers that a fair enough bargain.

 

Whose wl com þat lond to.

Ful grete penance he mot do.

Seue ȝere in swine-is dritte.

He mot wade, wol ȝe i-witte. ⁠

Al anon up to þe chynne.

So he schal þe lond[e] winne.

                                              (177-182)

(Whoever wishes to visit that land must perform a heavy penance.  Seven years in pigshit he must wade, up to his chin, you may well know, in order to win that land.)

 The poem ends with a prayer to God, not to protect Christians from worldly temptations, but rather kindly asking that the reader may one day enjoy the opportunity to experience Cockayne.

     Far from moralistic, the poem is an ebullient, light-hearted acknowledgement of the sensual inclinations of humans (indeed, of all organisms).  It no more implies acceptance of free love or gluttony than enjoyment of a Chaplin short requires endorsement of kicking people from behind.  Rather like the world of a silent film comic, the poet’s Cockayne is Carnivalesque; norms may be harmlessly transgressed in an interval of festive gaiety even if they revert to their default settings the next morning.  The low mimetic focus on appetite is far more conducive to comedy than to realism or idealizing, but the laughter is entirely hearty and sweet-tempered, far from the Swiftian “fierce indignation” of satire.. 

     The poem need not contradict the principles of a religious vocation.  Readers sometimes look for more consistency in literature than they do in life.  The same poet may write a tenderly respectful lyric and one of selfish lust, possibly even with the same evening in mind.  Both may be equally “true.”  The pious monk to whose book we owe the preservation of this poem may have seen no impropriety at all in having a wry laugh at the spectacle of human weakness.  “The Land of Cockayne” has preserved such a spell of sublime mirth in reaction to the human condition.  It is funny and warm and oh-so-human, the opposite pole from anything as serious as a polemic.     

     Two hundred years later, another presumably sincere monk, another Franciscan, in fact, at the beginning of his career, imagined an equally permissive territory, Gargantua’s Abbey of Thélème, where the sole rule of the order is notoriously “Do as you like” [3]  Far from being rooted in egoistic desire, this rule against rules expresses humility.  When Gargantua offers to reward his ally the valiant Friar John with the creation of a new and innovative religious establishment of his own design, the monk’s reply is charmingly modest: “But how” says the monk, might I be able to govern others when I am not able to govern myself?” [4]  Accordingly, Thélème invites both men and women to live together without any vows whatsoever. 

     Not only are the residents free from oppressive rules, they live in opulent luxury.  They go about in the finest clothes, covered with jewels.  Even their dressing is no chore, thanks to the attentions of their “masters of the wardrobe” [5].  They amuse themselves in a huge multi-story library.  Each is able to “read, write, sing, play musical instruments, and speak five or six languages” [6].  In addition, they enjoy the aristocratic amusements of hunting and hawking as well as agreeably passing time in each other’s society.  This is the greater pleasure, as they are all themselves beautiful people; neither men nor women may be admitted who are not “good-looking, well-built, and with a pleasant nature” [7].  The inscription over the abbey’s door invites “noble gentlemen” and “ladies of aristocratic birth” [8] while barring greedy professionals such as lawyers and usurers whose goal is the mean accumulation of wealth. Such mean money-grubbers are distasteful and likely to be ugly. 

     Moral excellence is bound up with intellectual achievements and aesthetic cultivation, indeed, with idleness, in this world in a fantasy of a sensitive and elegant ruling class, resembling nothing so much as the almost exactly contemporaneous world of Castiglione’s The Courtier.  It is as though Plato’s philosopher-kings did not have to bother with ruling, but could devote their entire lives to entertainments.  Contrary to history’s evidence, which has no lack or malicious and rapacious nobles, freedom makes them altogether virtuous.  “Because free people, well-born and educated, familiar with honest society, are by nature and impulse propelled always to virtuous acts and away from vice, by an impulse they call honor.“ [9]  The abbey is a post-industrial paradise in which people may develop their sensibility and, in fact, enjoy life without regard for the Reality Principle. 

     People in the “Land of Cockayne” found utter satisfaction in sensual delights of food and drink and love with only a few signifiers (like the beautiful tree, sweet odor, precious stones, and lovely birdsong   to betoken luxurious beauty. (67-100)  Placed in such a setting, with every appetite instantly satisfied, the reader might well imagine agreeing with the author’s encomium.

 

Þer n'is lond on erthe is pere.

Vnder heuen n'is lond iwisse.

Of so mochil ioi and blisse.

(21-⁠24)

            (No land on earth is its peer.  Under heaven there is no land, I                 know, of so much joy and bliss.)

      Since in Cockayne the only acknowledged human desires are physical, the tone is comic, in an ebullient Carnivalesque mode in which the human dependence on food and sex is ridiculous and insistent, but nonetheless endearing.  In the Abbey of Thélème the animal pleasures are taken for granted and the stress is on imaginative delights, culture, art, and civilized company, the sophisticated manipulative play with symbols that most distinguishes our species from the beasts.  Thus, while Rabelais’ tone is extravagant and fanciful, it contains as well a program for how to live life well that goes beyond a full belly, and among the fanciful and humorous elements notes of high seriousness are discernable. 

     While a dramatic contrast is evident between the riotous “low” aim of Cockayne’s utopia and the more “noble” and cerebral occupations of the Thélèmites, the two libidinal Edens have in common that each is enabled by the abolition of labor.  In Cockayne the unlimited availability of everything good means that competition need not exist.  There can be no motive for theft, no distinction between the industrious and the idle or, in the end, between the vicious and the virtuous when each individual is the recipient of superfluous unearned wealth.  The Abbey seems to be underwritten by Gargantua’s endless purse, so its residents need tend only to themselves.  The lifestyle of the inmates of Thélème is supported by an entire townful of workers: goldsmiths, jewelers, embroiderers, tailors, goldworkers, velvet-makers, tapestry makers, and upholsterers.” [10]  Of course, every high culture from ancient Athens through Heian Japan and Victorian England has been created by a leisure class of intellectuals and artists supported by the labor of others.

     Something not far from a land of “all play and no work” in which labor is pleasant and voluntary was conceived by William Morris in News from Nowhere and during the nineteen-sixties seemed actually possible to the theorists of “post-industrial society” [11], though working hours never shrank much and, in recent years, have been rising.  The work of Marshall Sahlins suggesting that hunter-gatherers who needed only to work fifteen to twenty hours a week to satisfy their needs were the original “affluent society” made the possibility of a largely work-free life more plausible.  

     In Genesis work seems to have arrived only to the fallen world where it seems very much like a punishment linked closely with mortality: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”  Perhaps the thrill of sexuality and the comfort of a good meal can only exist with the contrast of field-work or housework.  Even if pleasure cannot be experienced by one who does not feel pain as well, the thought of constant bliss (or at least well-being) is itself beguiling enough to inspire such dreams as the fabulous land of Cockayne and the wonderful Abbey of Thélème. 

 

  

1.  Ascent of Mt. Carmel 1.13.11.

 

2.  One poem “The Song of Michael of Kildare” identifies its author as "Frere Michel Kyldare,” and as a "frere menour."  Among the collection is a touching lullaby “Lollai, Lollai, litil child” and a verse reminiscent of Sei Shonagon “Five Hateful Things” beginning “Bissop lorles.”

 

3.  Ch 57 “Fay ce que vouldras.”

 

4.  Ch.  52  “Car comment (disait-il) pourrait-je gouverner autrui, qui moi-même gouverner ne saurrais?”

 

5.  Ch. 56 “Maîtres de garde-robes.”

 

6.  Ch. 57 “lire,  ecrire, chanter, jouer d’instruments harmonieux, parler de cinq et six langages.”

 

7.  Ch. 52 “belles, bien formées, et bien narturées.”

 

8.  Ch. 54 “Compagnons gentils” and “dames de haut parage.”

 

9.  Ch. 57 “Parce que gens libres, bien nés, bien instruits, conversant en compagnies honnêtes ont par nature un instinct, et aiguillon, qui toujours les pousse á faits vertueux, et retire de vice, lequel ils nommaient honneur.”

 

10.  Ch. 56 “orfèvres, lapidaires, brodeurs, tailleurs, tireurs d’or, veloutiers, tapissiers, et haut lissiers.”

 

11.  The term was popularized by Ivan Illich, Daniel Bell, and others after arising a few years earlier among the more utopian strains of leftists and cultural revolutionaries.  More recently, advocates of a guaranteed annual income have argued that not everyone need work.

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.”