By Eric Mader
A word
is in order about the special role played by [Rabelais] in this book. There are two essays on him, both of them
stressing the resistances he offers to the modern critical theorist (resistance
being a matter of central relevance to my argument in this book). The reasons for this are not only that
[Rabelais] cannot easily be assimilated to current ideas about "writers,"
"the text," or "the heroic author," but that his work is at
once occasional, powerful, and--from the point of view of systematic textual
practice--incoherent. To read
[Rabelais] seriously is to try to apprehend a series of events in all their messy
force, not to admire and then calmly to decode a string of high monuments. In addition, his own social role was
that of the critic involved with, but never possessing, power: alert, forceful,
undogmatic, ironic, unafraid of orthodoxies and dogmas, respectful of settled
uncoercive community. . . .
--Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (27)
Rabelais
is indeed, to use one of his most celebrated metaphors, a hard bone to crack.
His work hints everywhere that analysis will be fruitless unless carried out
with massive erudition and painstaking rigor. One might say this is the case with any literary work as
culturally removed from us as Rabelais', but there seem to be particular aspects
in which Rabelais is difficult, aspects which earlier critics presented either
in terms of a learned but eccentric individual or a rambunctious century of
tumultuous change in every realm.
Recent criticism has trouble saying anything very interesting about
Rabelais. For example, psychoanalysis
might be used to great effect when studying other texts in the tradition of
Western grotesque literature: the tales of Hoffmann or the novels of
Dostoyevsky prove endlessly amenable to even undergraduate techniques of
psychoanalytic reading. However, to
apply psychoanalysis to Pantagruel with
anything other than an anthropological breadth and seriousness, one that
musters moreover a deep understanding of Rabelais' historical moment, seems
something of a waste of time. His
characters are too polymorphous, his range of reference too wide, his sense of
subjectivity too fluid and untroubled.
Rabelais does not have enough of the requisite modern variety of
repression to make for the kind of unveilings and reconstructions that
psychoanalysis usually calls for.
Because of Bakhtin's
early book on Rabelais I was thinking initially it might be worthwhile to apply
some of the critic's later notions (heteroglossia, the dialogic nature of discourse) to
sections of the pantagrueline oeuvre.
But one soon finds oneself in the same boat as with Freud. Rabelais' work, on its very surface, is
nothing less than an explosion of voices--a glossolalia of voices. Rabelais has not built a careful ideological construct in
the manner of a nineteenth century novel, within which one can hear the
would-be stifled voices of an underclass.
Rabelais stages his contradictions in the open, which has led to the
confusion of many early critics as to what he is trying to say, what he could
possibly mean, what this writer wants.
Que
voulait-il . . . ce Rabelais, dans sa plenitude d'homme? L'argent? C'est peu probable.
La gloire? Ce n'est pas
impossible. L'amour? Mais la femme n'existe pas dans
l'oeuvre pantagruelique. . . .
Alors? (T, 16)
[What
does he want . . . this Rabelais, in his human plenitude? Money? It's hardly likely.
Glory? It's not
impossible. Love? But woman doesn't exist in the
Pantagrueline work. . . .What then?]
I quote
this little meditation of Lucien Febvre's from the back cover of the Folio Tiers
livre in order to show
to what extent the Rabelaisian resistance to many sorts of criticism--nay to
staid modern comprehension--has come to be associated with Rabelais' work. In this case the ideological
befuddlement is used to promote Rabelais' book. Readers should perhaps feel liberated by a writer who cannot
be pinned down as to his politics.
Because of this
general befuddlement many will insist on the uniqueness of Rabelais, on his
unparalleled slipperiness. This is
of course an insistence leading nowhere.
It leads nowhere precisely to the extent that it is indicative of a
stubborn desire to interpret Rabelais as a "novelist," as a
"humanist writer," as a "French Catholic" of the same mould
as modern French Catholics, as a man with either a cryptic agenda or a
preternaturally messy mind. It
sets up Rabelais as if he were a nineteenth century writer, and then says:
"Look, he is like no other."
But the genre of the novel was not set when Rabelais was writing. The writers against which he is judged
to be unique hadn't yet come. And
besides, there are many other writers that resist easy encounter and
interpretation in ways similar to the ways Rabelais does. In my epigraph to
this paper I have replaced the name Swift with the name Rabelais, if only to
show a critic grappling with the same problems in his attempt to understand
another, if quite different, comic writer.
This paper will focus
on the narrative of the body in Rabelais, approaching the problem of
understanding via three different critical methodologies. I should point out ahead of time that
this short study of the body in Rabelais can be nothing more than very sketchy
and speculative. One would need
much more time than I've had, and, what is more important, much more erudition
than I have, to do the topic justice.
Nonetheless I hope to reveal something of how different modern critical
discourses can or cannot tell us much about this important element in Rabelais'
work.
My initial understanding
of the body in Rabelais was of course heavily informed by Bakhtin's Rabelais
and His World. I hope to sketch the basics of that
understanding here, and to show how it was further modified by a consideration
of Rabelais through Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. I will also consider Rabelais in
relation to Mary Douglas' cultural-anthropological approach as presented in her
book Natural Symbols.
The
tiresome redundancy of Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World leads one eventually almost to forget the
power of his general concepts.
Among these concepts one must include: the carnivalesque; the
cosmological roots of the grotesque; the "lower bodily stratum"; and
the vertical hierarchy of the medieval world. Although Bakhtin's book could easily be knocked down to half
its length without losing anything of its argument, it is also true that
Bakhtin's style has something akin to Rabelais' in it. There is an ever-metamorphosing,
yet somehow stable movement forward through the pages of Bakhtin's book.
Bakhtin's notion of a
"body of the people" strategically raises the image of a giant, thus
putting this critical notion in tune with the giant heroes of Rabelais' work. The medieval body of the people evoked
by Bakhtin can be imagined as an obese gargantua of a human being, more
massively built in the belly and the haunches than in the head. Though clumsy in its movements, it is
unstoppable. It is constantly
feasting, though it also indicates a continual decay through the tremendous
amount of excrement it puts forth and through its obscenely swollen
intestines. It is childlike and
hermaphroditic in its sexuality.
It moves forward in space and time like one of those dolls called weebles--its head held up both by faith in
divine providence and by the prodigious heaviness of its lower body. These are the salient features of the
medieval monster that is Bakhtin's "body of the people," a congenial
monster in many respects, and, it is important to note, the monster upon which
Rabelais will put a ruffled collar, a handful of jewelled baubles and the sagesse of the most rigorous Renaissance
education.
Bakhtin's monster is
a figure of the narrative movement and structure of Rabelais' work. For one, there is throughout the
chronicles an almost gratuitous change in perspective and dimension. The text moves forward in a series of
synchronic events (the chapters) that are only roughly integrated with a
diachronic structure. At best one
can map the chronological sequence: birth, education, old age. In most cases, however, one merely has
the flat chronology of war or adventure or debate: events, in other words, that
happen between the protagonist's education and death. There is also a gratuitousness in the work's purported
foundations. The textual
background of the Gargantua
is an obscure fourteen stanza composition in verse (of the Renaissance literary
genre known as the enigme:
G, 51-57, ch. 2)
while a prophesied historical future is offered in a mock Apocalyptic poem
(interpreted by Frere Jean as the description of a tennis match rather than a
telling of things to come; G,
431-439, ch. 58). There is
throughout a constant and seemingly random shifting of narrative focus, with
the result that the reader feels he is always getting only what Rabelais is in
the mood to give at the time of writing, rather than what might have been
demanded by the narrative needs of a more self-consciously structured
text. Also, showing little in the
way of a classical sense of textual measure or economy, Rabelais allows himself
repeatedly what Freud would call polymorphously perverse pleasures: that of
compiling pantagrueline lists (the list of games in G, 185-191, ch. 22; the list of weapons in
T, 65-67, Prologue, for example); that of the technique
called coq-a-l'ane (the
plus, mais non mieulx sentant [more, but not better smelling] poem that
is chapter II of the Gargantua;
the legal battle between M. Baisecul and M. Humevesne recounted in chapters
XI-XII); and that of the proliferation of verbs or insults (the description of
Diogenes's barrel-working in the prologue of the Tiers livre, 67; the volley of insults that leads to
the cake-bakers' war: G,
217-218, ch. 25). All of these
pleasurable encyclopedic effects are seemingly the textual work of that very
child-giant described above as "the body of the people": a
child-giant which Rabelais has somehow, and somewhat paradoxically, educated.
From this mainly
Bakhtinian viewpoint the economy of Rabelais' text is the economy of the body:
the body knowing no strict narrative structure, no steadily objective time, no inherently
bodily reasons to
conform to the dictates of artificial sense or measure. The only movements the body knows
inherently are the movements of energy and fatigue, lack and satiation, growth
and decay. Further, all of these
are experienced in continuum rather than in strictly defined synchronic
periods. This bodily continuum is
the very continuum of Rabelais' text.
And it is Bakhtin's notion of a collective "body of the
people" that leads us to a new realization of the movement of Rabelais'
writing in history. The idea of a
quasi-eternal body of the whole people over time makes the borders between energy and
fatigue, lack and satiation, growth and decay, even life and death virtually
non-existent. Bakhtin taught us to
apply this notion to the Rabelaisian chronicles--that massive borderline book
in which the same quasi-eternal effects are seen formally. The body of the whole people over time
transcends the birth and death of any individual within the people's body: it
thus em-bodies historical continuity even as it breaks the boundaries of
individuality. Rabelais' writing
plays this same game with time in his constant subversion of narrative decency:
his texts destroy the reader's expectations by constantly changing focus; they
everywhere undermine verisimilitude through the shifting size of his
protagonists; they repeatedly mix high culture and low in an endless and
multiform medley that suggests movement and growth more than it does any
particular ideological message.
One should hardly be
surprised that some modern readers openly censure Rabelais for "never
ending," or for allowing his giant at one moment to cover an army with
half his tongue and at the next to sit at a standard-sized dining table with
his friends. This censure of
course reveals things both about modern readers and about Rabelais' work. We live in age that privileges the
notion of a rational subject engaged in a predominantly rational social order
built against the background of an empirically knowable world. It is a world in which the borders have
been defined. Even fiction, even
humorous fiction, is expected to respect certain rules. Rabelais' work is part of something
very different.
Bakhtin presents us
with a Rabelais both scholarly and folkish, a Rabelais halfway between royal
physician and greensauce hawker.
Out of this dichotomous existence (one imagines Rabelais literally
stretched between these "two worlds") Bakhtin identifies the general
dynamic of Rabelaisian imagery.
The writer effects an endless uncrowning of the trappings of
"official medieval culture," using his pen to throw them down into
the "regenerating" "lower bodily stratum." Once thus knocked down they must be
reinterpreted in the light of this lower bodily stratum even as they are reborn
through its regenerating power.
Bakhtin's obsessive use of these terms is noteworthy. Each of the quoted terms in the
previous sentences shows up in Bakhtin's book no less than fifty times (and
probably more) as he goes haphazardly from one segment of Rabelais' work to
another, analyzing everything in terms of
these general concepts.
Usually Bakhtin's
method works. He is most
impressive and most characteristic in his analysis of the "famous swab
episode" (G,
ch.12). Here one sees clearly the
validity of Bakhtin's model. Under
consideration is the following text:
Je me torchay une foys d'un
cachelet de velours de une demoiselle, et le trouvay bon, car la mollice de sa
soye me causoit au fondement une volupte bien grande;
une aultre foys u'un chaprom
d'ycelles, et feut de mesmes;
une aultre foys d'un cache coul;
une aultre foys des aureillettes
de satin cramoysi, mais la dorure d'un tas de spheres de merde qui y estoient
m'escorcerent tout le derriere; que le feu sainct Antoine arde le boyau cullier
de l'orfebvre qui les feist et de la damoiselle qui les portoit!
Ce mal passa me torchant d'un
bonnet de paige, bien emplume a la Souice.
Puis, fiantant derriere un
buisson, trouvay un chat de Mars; d'icelluy me torchay, mais ses gryphes me
exulcererent tout le perinee.
De ce me gueryz au lendemain, me
torchant des guands me ma mere, bien parfumez de maujoin.
Puis me torchay de saulge, de
fenoil, de aneth, de marjolaine, de roses, de fueilles de courles, de choulx,
de bettes, de pampre, de guymaulves, de verbasce (qui est escarlatte de cul),
de lactures et de fueilles de espinards,--le tout me feist grand bien a ma
jambe,--de mercuriale, de persiguire, de orties, de consolde; mais j'en eu la
cacquesangue de Lombard, dont feu gary me torchant de ma braguette.
Puis me torchay aux linceux, a la
couverture, aux rideaulx, d'un coissin, d'un tapiz verd, d'une mappe, d'une
serviette, d'un mouschenez, d'un peignouoir. En tout je trouvay de plaisir plus que no ont les roigneux
quand on les estrille. (G,
130-131, ch.12)
[Once I wiped myself on a lady's
velvet mask, and I found it good.
For the softness of the silk was most voluptuous to my fundament. Another time on one of their hoods, and
I found it just as good. Another
time on a lady's neckerchief; another time on some ear-flaps of crimson
satin. But there were a lot of
turdy gilt spangles on them, and they took all the skin off my bottom. May St Anthony's fire burn the bum-gut
of the goldsmith who made them and of the lady who wore them! That trouble passed when I wiped myself
on a page's bonnet, all feathered in the Swiss fashion.
Then, as I was shitting behind a
bush, I found a March-born cat; I wiped myself on him, but his claws
exulcerated my whole perineum. I
healed myself of that next day by wiping myself on my mother's gloves, which
were well scented with maljamin . Then I wiped myself with sage, fennel,
anise, marjoram, roses, gourd leaves, cabbage, beets, vineshoots, marsh-mallow,
mullein--which is red as your bum--lettuces, and spinach-leaves. All this did very great good to my
legs. Then with dog's mercury,
persicaria, nettles, and comfrey.
But that gave me the bloody-flux of Lombardy, from which I was cured by
wiping myself with my codpiece.
Then I wiped myself on the the
sheets, the coverlet, the curtains, with a cushion, with the hangings, with a
green cloth, with a table-cloth, with a napkin, with a handkerchief, with an
overall. And I found more pleasure
in all those than mangy dogs do when they are combed. (Cohen tr., 66-7)]
Bakhtin
reads this text as an almost systematic re-evaluation of the various objects in
terms of the "lower bodily stratum". (Bakhtin 371-377) Rabelais would here seem to be playing
the Renaissance scientist not through the privileged medium of the eyes or the
understanding, but through the anus, which has its own standards of
classification. Such a "lower bodily stratum" reinterpretation of the
world is of interest to us because it comically suggests the extent to which we
privilege the upper
bodily stratum in our experience of the world, an experience in large part
determined by Enlightenment notions of reason and the place of the individual
subject in society.
These Bakktinian
concepts of regeneration and the lower bodily stratum are presented through a
large amount of supporting scholarly work, and one's reading of the body in
Rabelais can be greatly informed by them.
There are, however, many elements in Rabelais' work that seem to be
subjected to an all too stringently reductive reading. For one, I am not convinced that
Bakhtin's interpretation of insults is exactly on the mark, which is to say
that I have a hard time believing the plethora of insults and even violent
invective in Rabelais is all to be grouped under the heading "Regeneration
Through Recourse to the Lower Bodily Stratum." One senses that Rabelais is not interested in the
"regeneration" of many of those he attacks, not even somehow
subconsciously interested: for example, the Sorbonnists, or the purveyors of
the "old education"--i.e., those who would have liked to see Rabelais
burned at the stake. One suspects
that, did the invective concern even a revolutionary thinker such as Calvin,
Rabelais would still not be interested in "regeneration," but rather
in playing a trick such as the one the writer has Villon and his troop play on
their enemy in the Fourth Book.
One thinks in this
context of the Indian mother goddess Kali. Kali is depicted wearing a necklace of human skulls. She is said to be continually eating
and giving birth to the universe (anus and birth canal are here seemingly
one). Kali's priestly followers
roamed the highways of India committing random and horrible acts of violence to
celebrate what they saw as the most essential characteristic of their goddess:
destruction. Perhaps comparing the
earthly violence of the Kali cult to the earthly violence of the Rabelaisian
carnivalesque is stretching it. I
do it, however, to point to the importance of the violent side of earthly
"regeneration" in at least one culture. It is not here simply a matter of bringing something low in
order to later regenerate it through carnival humor. It is a matter of the uncanny link between that which
destroys and that which brings forth new life. Judging from many of the elements of Rabelaisian language,
one might say that Rabelais was in touch with a similar kind of cosmic violence. But then one might say that all
violence could be seen as cosmic in this sense, which would mean that singling
out Rabelais is meaningless.
There is, as well, a
paradox inherent in Bakhtin's explanation of the origins of the
carnivalesque. On the one hand, he
treats it as an ancient phenomenon, "surviving" well into the
sixteenth century. On the other
hand, he treats it as a necessary "response" to the unflinching
seriousness of official medieval culture: the Renaissance is in fact one of its
great moments. There is of course
no reason that the Renaissance carnivalesque cannot be both of these at once,
but Bakhtin seems to avoid a possible interpretation of official medieval
culture as not merely the negative "cause" of the vehemence of the
carnivalesque, but as rather the expression of an aristocratic class
consciousness engaged in an ideological war against the subversive desires of
the people.
One could perhaps
rewrite the history of the carnivalesque from this different viewpoint. The carnivalesque, growing out of
polytheistic pre-Christian religious festivals, took on in the medieval period
the character of a collective cultural rebellion against the monotheistic,
repressive structures of the Church.
The clergy and nobility struggled to co-opt these collective pagan
festivals by renaming them as saints' feasts. In this view, the struggle went on steadily until the
fifteenth century, when an aristocratic interest in ancient culture, the
breakup of the Roman monopoly on religion, and a vernacularization of writing
allowed the aristocracy to more easily co-opt these inherently polytheistic,
unrepressed popular forces Bakhtin calls the carnivalesque. Renaissance writers (the educated
class) helped in the co-optation of these forces by charging them with high
learning, certainly an aspect that is not part of the truly popular character
of the carnivalesque.
Bakhtin interprets the
"true" carnivalesque as reaffirming the established cultural order,
but one must take into account the fact that all Bakhtin's evidence is written
evidence, i.e. the production of a writing and reading class. But once in writing the "true
carnival body of the people" became mainly a matter of upper-class leisure
and learning. And it was
eventually sapped of its radical features under pressure of a rising
bourgeoisie that ultimately found its authority in Protestantism and then
Enlightenment. As a writer,
Rabelais might thus be not the ideological champion of the people, but rather
the beginning of the end of popular carnival. The popular "body of the people" finds its
expression in the trappings of the high culture of the day. Bakhtin himself
points to the Renaissance as the beginning of the end of the popular
carnivalesque, but does not see it as part of the cause of this end. The Renaissance might really be the
final Naissance of the rational monotheistic order, a Naissance pulled off
through the new ideological power of the vernaculars, and very importantly
through the ideological power conferred by the printing press. Is it perhaps a quick dash from
Rabelais to the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV and the nation states of modern
Europe? And how is that to be read
in relation to the "body of the people"?
A new joke acts
almost like an event of universal interest; it is passed from one person to
another like the news of the latest victory. Even men of eminence who have thought it worth while to tell
the story of their origins, of the cities and countries they have visited, and
of the important people with whom they have associated, are not ashamed in
their autobiographies to report their having heard some excellent joke.
--Freud, from the
Introduction to Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
(15)
To
further open up the dynamics of Rabelaisian writing, Freud's Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious would
seem to be an obvious work to look into.
This opening up would necessarily take the form of an analysis of jokes
in Rabelais, using the joke model proposed by Freud and the critical techniques
implicit in that model. One must
inquire into how the joke in Rabelais unveils, represses, or otherwise relates
to the body as Rabelais experiences, or at least writes it. In doing so one must remember that
humor and the joke are not the same thing, and that Rabelais' work is humorous
narrative, not simply a joke book.
Nonetheless, jokes play an important part in the work, particularly in
those sections where dialogue is prominent. Taking the general Freudian principle
that all psychical activity is the overcoming of resistance to pleasure (the
Pleasure Principle), we may ask, then: What is Rabelaisian pleasure, what are
the resistances to this pleasure, and what is the function of the joke in
Rabelais' psychical textual economy?
Freud divides jokes into
two broad categories: "innocent" jokes and "tendentious"
jokes. Innocent jokes are most
apparently jokes without an underlying hostility. They are jokes that depend upon turns of phrase, logical
inconsistencies, or the subtle construction or unveiling of absurdity for
effect. They often depend upon an
absurd rigorousness in logic, in this way having some similarity to the
classical Greek paradox. Indeed,
the following linquistic paradox of Chrysippus could be seen as an innocent
joke:
If you
say something, that thing goes over your tongue. Therefore, if you say "wagon," a wagon goes over
your tongue.
Freud
quotes one innocent joke that seems to me quintessential in its affect:
"Never
to be born would be the best thing for mortal men," [we read in the
Greek]. "But," adds the
philosophical comment in [the weekly] Fliegende Blatter,
"this happens to scarcely one person in a hundred thousand."
(57)
This is
an innocent joke because the joke evokes laughter at the expense of no one in
particular. A statement of
numerical exactitude--"scarcely one person in a hundred thousand"--is
brought to bear on a statement of the direness of the human condition. The result is a shock of absurdity: the
laughter is at the absurdity of the two kinds of statement being linked. Because of Rabelais' heavy satirical
content, however, one would guess that such innocent jokes don't play as large
a role in his work as tendentious jokes.
I've suggested above that hostility plays a large role indeed in
Rabelais' writing.
There are three persons in the Freudian
model of the tendentious joke: the joker, the receiver, and the third
person. What is the typical scene
of the tendentious joke? Being very
Freudian about it, one might posit the third person as a haughty woman
inherently disposed to resist the sexual advances (real or imagined) of the
joker. The joker, a frustrated
male, unable to break down the resistance put up by this third person, is
sitting with the receiver (either male or female) in a tavern. The joker tells an obscene joke to this
receiver, psychically targeting the third person (the haughty woman sitting at
the end of the table), and, if the joke is successful, the receiver bursts out
laughing.
What has happened
here, according to Freud? The
joker has brought forward pleasure in the receiver in the form of laughter. This laughter signifies a breakdown in
the resistance of the receiver, or is an attack on that resistance. The breakdown of resistance signified
by the laughter of the receiver is felt by the joker as compensation for the
resistance offered by the third person (the woman who is the target of the
joke). At the same time both joke
and laughter are a kind of retaliation against that third person for her
resistance: the joke is usually, consciously or not, at her expense. The third person's genitals are
symbolically exposed by the obscene joke.
The third person's prim behavior is undermined. The joker evokes pleasure
in the receiver at the expense of the third person, and this successfully
evoked pleasure has, for the joker, the pleasure-evoking content of a
successful conquest. The hidden
sexuality of the receiver is brought into the open: it is indicated by the
receiver's laughter, this laughter proving that the receiver understood the
joke.
This is the most
basic model of the tendentious joke, upon which there are many variations, all
of which, however, work through what we may call the actants of the tendentious
joke: joker, receiver, and third person.
Applying this model
to Rabelais' text, we have two levels on which the joke structure can be
seen. In the first level the
actants are thus:
Rabelais (joker)
? (third
person)
reader (receiver)
In the
second, inner-textual level they are thus:
character making a joke (joker)
? (third person)
character receiving the joke (receiver)
Without
going into the complex interrelations of these two levels, I will mainly
concern myself here with the first level.
Who is the third
person or third people at the expense of which the Rabelaisian joke is
written? How does the fact that
the joke is written--that
in this case both the joker and his society are long gone, while
reader/receivers live on--how does this situation complicate interpretation?
We are here already
embarking upon questions that are very difficult to answer and that engage the
critical enterprise in general. I
only raise such questions to give a hint of the power inherent in the Freudian
joke model, a critical power that immediately exposes the weaknesses of
criticism itself. We might return
to more specific questions so as to find a means of continuing with our
consideration of Rabelais' narration of the body. And one question suggests
itself here: Is the throwing down/regenerating movement identified by Bakhtin
in Rabelais' text also the action of the Freudian tendentious joke?
One sees that
according to Freud's understanding the tendentious joke is not at all a
"regeneration" of the third person, but most quintessentially an act
of frustrated hostility toward the third person. Realizing this may further qualify my comments above on what
I felt to be Bakhtin's insufficient explanation of the function of insults in
Rabelais' work. It would seem to
me, however, that much of Rabelais' humor (this is a key term, replacing jokes) is somewhere halfway between the
Freudian tendentious joke and the Bakhtinian carnivalesque regeneration.
How might we get at
the "halfway nature" of Rabelaisian humor? How might we define its characteristics? One way might be to look at the
techniques Rabelais employs to evoke laughter and to consider these techniques
in the light of Freudian joke techniques and Bakhtinian regeneration.
Before considering
Rabelais' techniques, then, it will first be necessary to lay out some of the
techniques the Freudian joker uses to bring forth the burst of laughter from
the receiver. Freud's joke book
immerses itself in a steady telling of jokes in an effort to discover these
techniques. In his efforts to be complete,
Freud analyses and categorizes many kinds of jokes within the two broad
categories. Without embarking on a
rehash of all this Viennese humor and science, I will merely point out
something of interest to the literary critic: Freud discovers that the list of
joke techniques is almost synonymous with the list of the techniques employed in
creative writing. Jokes thus
depend on: punning, rhythm, timing, narrative suspense, surprise, subtle
allusion, striking juxtaposition, metaphorical and sometimes even allegorical
structures--these and other such devices besides. What is of key interest here is that the joke Freud
discusses is generally a tight little narrative structure with a punch line, a
building up of suspense followed by a dissolution of that suspense in
laughter/hostility/pleasure. By
means of such devices, this dissolution either manifests itself in linguistic
or logical absurdity or cuteness (the innocent joke), or in a quick and subtle
recourse to obscene sexual content (the tendentious joke).
Where is laughter
most readily evoked for readers of Rabelais? It is difficult to say. I myself found some of the funniest sections to be the
following: Les propos
des bien yvres [The Banter of the Thoroughly Soused];
the "swab" episode analyzed above; the stories of Gargantua's infant
feeding; Panurge's prank on the haulte dame; certain instances of absurd list
making: the long lists of weapons, insults, games, etc.
What are the
techniques Rabelais employs to bring forth my laughter in these instances?
In the propos
des bien yvres, laughter
is evoked through punning:
--Quelle
difference est entre bouteille et flaccon?
--Grande,
car bouteille est fermee a bouchon, et flaccon a viz.
[--What is
the difference between a bottle and a flagon? --A great difference. For a bottle is stopped with a cork, a
flagon with a cock. (Cohen, 50)]
. . . .
--Or ca, a
boire, a boire ca! Il n'y a poinct
charge. Respice personam; pone pro duos; bus non est
in usu. (G, 73)
[The
pun is untranslatable.]
through
conversion, or switching of content:
--Si le
papier de mes schedules beuvoyt aussi bien que je poys, mes crediteurs auroient
bien leur vin quand on viendroyt a la formule de exhiber.
[--If the
paper of my bonds drank as well as I do, my creditors would have a fine job
when the time came to make out their titles.]
. . . .
--Voulez-vous rien mander a la riviere? Cestuy cy va laver les tripes. (G,
71-73)
[--Won't you
keep anything for the river? That
fellow's going to wash his tripes.
(Cohen, 49, modified)]
and
through the swiftness of the repartee, unhindered by narrative intrusion.
It is thus mostly
innocent joking; or self-deprecatory tendentious joking (the joker is also
third person).
But aside from the
Freudian categorization another element of Les propos des bien yvres that brings forth laughter is the
framing of the whole episode as a warmly communal celebration. This is the famous Rabelaisian
camaraderie, an element found everywhere in Rabelais, and one that may have
been partly responsible for leading Bakhtin to his notion of a body of the
people. It is also this joyously
communal sense that allows us to posit a sort of Rabelaisian laughter both
generally tendentious and generally innocent: it is the joyous laughter of
fellow drinkers, who are truly sodden in their togetherness. Much suggests that the group of
drinkers is made up from different "levels" of society, different
social groups. The communal spirit
is further emphasized by the presence of discourse alone, without the need to
separate individuals by the author's attribution of the statements to this or that particular drinker. The tone is
established in exclamations like the following, which use neither joke
techniques nor even what might be called comic techniques:
--Tire!
--Baille!
--Tourne!
--Brouille!
--Boutte a moy
sans eau; ainsi, mon amy.
--Fouette
moy ce verre gualentement;
--Produiz
moy du clairet, verre pleurant.
--Treves de
soif! (G, 69)
[--Draw!
--Pass
it!
--Fill
'er up!
--A
mixy!
--Give
it to me without water, like that, my friend.
--Toss
me off that glass, neatly!
--Draw
me some claret, brimmful!
--Death to thirst!]
The good humor of the
Propos des bien yvres
seems then to have little to do with Freud's strict categorization of
jokes. Granted that jokes and
humor are not exactly the same thing, still the verbal humor of Rabelais,
containing as it does so much dialogue, should give us more in the way of
something we may identify as recognizable jokes. Do other instances of Rabelais' humor show similar
resistance to Freud's categories?
The swab episode was
discussed in part above. Most of
the techniques used to draw laughter in the swab episode do not at all fit
either Freud's innocent or tendentious joke models. Without reproducing any of the text again, I will use
Bakhtin's analysis and say that the laughter drawn by the young Gargantua's
precocious anal inquiry into the objects of his environment depends primarily
upon three techniques: 1) the young Gargantua's straightfaced recounting of his
experiments--this first aspect becoming humorous only under the pressure of 2)
"civilized" attitudes toward excrement and language, two things which
under normal circumstances are not loudly and uninhibitedly combined (though
here we probably have a case in which many a modern American reader, with his
or her white porcelain toilet bowl and sterilized environment, feels a stronger
sense of taboo than Rabelais' contemporaries felt), and 3) the sheer
polymorphous variety of objects sent down to do the wiping. This third and last technique we might
call encyclopedic substitution: dozens of objects, in fast succession, are used
in place of a more traditional swab.
All three joke techniques (comic naivetŽ; the taboo over lower bodily
functions; substitution) are discussed by Freud, of course, but again this
episode of the swab is not properly seen as a series of jokes, but as something
else--as pantagrueline humor.
There are many aspects
of the infant feeding of Gargantua which could be taken up here, but it is
clear that the important ones are: 1) abundance or size as a cause for
laughter; and 2) the absurdly specific quantification of abundance or size as a
cause for laughter. As for the
second of these techniques, absurdly pedantic quantification, one may look for
understanding to Freud's innocent joke model and to the joke quoted above about
the scarcity of men who are never born ("scarcely one in a hundred
thousand"): a joke which depends on a sensibility similar to that in
Rabelaisian absurd quantifications.
The humor behind these absurd measurements and enumerations can be
explained thus: such precise numbers are humorous because their pedantic,
matter-of-fact precision is juxtaposed with the impossibly large size or
quantity of the thing quantified.
This technique, used very often by Rabelais (to count soldiers, fabric,
casualties, amounts of food or drink consumed, etc.), belongs properly in
Freud's innocent joke category.
Panurge's prank on
the haulte dame
[aristocratic lady] is clearly tendentious in character. That it would more readily draw
laughter from heterosexual male readers than any female readers is obvious, a
fact which emphasizes its tendentious character. (One cannot exactly put it in Freud's tendentious joke category, however, because it is not
really a joke, but a prank.)
The laughter produced
by the long catalogues of weapons, insults, verbs, adjectives, whatnot, cannot
be explained in any way by any of the joke techniques discussed by Freud. Rampant encyclopedism is clearly a
comic technique rather than a joke technique. Does the laughter and pleasure produced by these long lists
(a pleasure evidently to be had in both writing and reading them) have any
similarity to the laughter and pleasure produced by grotesquely oversized
objects? Perhaps there are some
parallel elements here.
Though Rabelais'
encyclopedism doesn't fit the Freudian joke categories, Freud's joke book is
not without comment on this kind of production. Freud would probably call this technique "play,"
and would insist that it is the prototechnique of later joke techniques. This is of particular interest for our
reading of the body as experienced by Rabelais, because Freud associates this
prototechnique with children.
Before
there is such a thing as a joke, there is something that we may describe as
"play" or as "a jest".
Play--let us keep to that
name--appears in children while they are learning to make use of words and to put
thoughts together. This play
probably obeys one of the instincts which compel children to practise their
capacities. In doing so they come
across pleasurable effects, which arise from a repetition of what is similar, a
rediscovery of what is familiar, similarity of sound, etc., and which are to be
explained as unsuspected economies in psychical expenditure. It is not to be wondered at that these
pleasurable effects encourage children in the pursuit of play and cause them to
continue it without regard for the meaning of words or the coherence of
sentences. Play with words and thoughts, motivated by
certain pleasurable effects of economy, would thus be the first stage of jokes.
This play is brought to an end by
the strengthening of a factor that deserves to be described as the critical
faculty or reasonableness. The
play is now rejected as being meaningless or actually absurd; as a result of
criticism it becomes impossible.
(128)
There are a number of
ways in which this "play" category can illuminate Rabelais' listing
"technique." Freud would
seem to be reinforcing what the reader knows intuitively: the
"meaning" to be found in the absurd number of actions performed by
Diogenes on his barrel (T,
67), for example, lies not only in the expression of feverish activity--for if
this were so it wouldn't necessarily have a laughter-provoking effect--but in a
kind of pleasurable wallowing in linguistic repetition: the rhythmic repetition
of striking sounds for its own sake.
This can be applied even more fruitfully to the volley of insults that
begins the Picrocholine War. (G,
217-218) What an interesting twist
to the question of what provoked this browbeating if we were to posit it simply
as a childlike wallowing in language.
But perhaps Freud would
place these passages within his intermediate category, the
"jest". If play is the
childhood of the joke, the jest is its adolescence. Jesting comes into being when a consciousness of criticism,
of the pressures of reasonableness, forces the child to justify his or her
babbling.
And with
this the second preliminary stage of jokes sets in--the jest. It is now a question of prolonging the yield of pleasure
from play, but at the same time of silencing the objection raised by criticism
which would not allow the pleasurable feeling to emerge. There is only one way of reaching this
end: the meaningless combination of words or the absurd putting together of
thoughts must nevertheless have a meaning. (129)
Thus, in the case of
Diogenes's barrel, as pointed out above, the verbs also have the effect of expressing feverish
activity: thus there is some semantic justification for the proliferation of
verbs. In the case of Gargantua's
games, one is making a catalogue, and not only wallowing in sounds for pleasure's
sake. With the comic battery of
cake bakers' insults at the beginning of the Picrocholine War, Rabelais is also satirizing the petty causes for wars
cited in many ancient histories.
In most of these instances, however, there are several terms used which
have almost precisely the same meaning, as there is also repetition of similar
sounds. Rabelais seemingly takes
the opportunities given by the movement of the narrative to engage in what we
could either call "play" or "jest," both of these terms for
Freud describing childlike or youthful behavior.
Thus, of the episodes
and instances cited as the most laughter-provoking for this reader, several of
them depend at least in part on comic techniques which can be explained using
Freud's joke terminology. Others,
the warmly communal laughter, and the laughter and pleasure provoked by
wallowing in language or sounds, cannot be explained by joke techniques. Neither can the communal aspects of
Rabelais be covered by Freud's Jokes: one would have to go elsewhere in Freud's work. The wallowing in language, however, is
covered, though it is discussed as proto-"technique,"
pre-"reasonable," pre-"critical," and inherently childlike. One thus sees Bakhtin's monster rearing
its head anew: the body of the people is a communal notion, and wallowing in
language is, for Freud, childlike behavior. I have above, in the section on Bakhtin's Rabelais,
described Bakhtin's medieval monster as wandering, childlike, and, of course,
communal. Freud's Jokes, however, can be used to expand
Bakhtin's notions in some respects, even as it contradicts them in others.
Through Freud's
"tendentiousness" and "play/jest," we could begin to see
Bakhtin's obsession with regeneration as not quite on the mark. Nowhere in Freud's discussion of
tendentious jokes does he suggest the third person is being somehow regenerated
by the joker. This is not to say,
however, that this Bakhtinian notion is entirely wrong, for such would be
presumptuous given his extensive and convincing scholarly efforts. It is simply that regeneration is not
the only dynamic behind Rabelais' stinging humor and attacks. One sees also, in Rabelaisian play (his
lists), a masturbatory as opposed to a regenerating sexual dynamic, a
"childlike" wallowing in which both writer and reader indulge. Again, this wallowing does not
contradict Bakhtin, but only raises another "economy" in Rabelais'
text. Concerning the communal
aspects of Rabelais' work (manifested, for example, in the lack of attribution
in the propos des bien yvres),
would we be far off track to suggest that Freudian science, with its positing
of an individual subject almost narratively
inscribed in a personal history, is incapable of dealing with the world
according to Rabelais? Freud's
positing of play as a necessarily childlike activity is historically and
geographically specific to post-Enlightenment Europe, where
"reasonableness" and "criticism" are privileged and where
the worlds of adult and child are more clearly separated.
The risk inherent in
the above observations is that they may lead to a sentimentalizing attitude
toward Rabelais and his century.
Freud's theory of play, quoted above, could lead to a perception of the
sixteenth century as a kind of childhood wonderland. Using Freud's own language, one could see the sixteenth
century as situated in that period of childhood innocence before the repressive
dawn of "the critical faculty or reasonableness." The Enlightenment would become the
culprit in such an anthropomorphized simplification of history. Regardless of the attractions of this
kind of vision (I myself would trade 129 Voltaires for one Rabelais), one must
recall history's depiction of the unbearably repressive mentality of official
medieval culture; one must recall the hardships of the vast peasant class; one
must recall that these "children" burned each other at the
stake. In short, the childlike
element in Rabelais' work may have a solid basis in the real life of his
century; even so, it only represents that century in one of its many moods.
The problematic existence side by side of
the rambunctious and the oppressive in Rabelais' century will hopefully be
somewhat illuminated through a consideration of Mary Douglas's views on body
politics and the body politic.
But what has happened to "the body" in
this discussion of Freud? How, in
other words, do Rabelaisian "jokes" relate to his narration of the
body? I hope that my replacement
of "the body" with "pleasure" has not disjointed the
discussion too much. The more
psychical term "pleasure" has allowed us to get at certain of the
dynamics of Rabelaisian humor, and this, in turn, has expanded certain of
Bakhtin's more inherently bodily notions, as it has contradicted others.
Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols, being comparative anthropology, would
have much to offer were one to apply similar methods to Rabelais' case. Douglas inquires into the symbolization
of the body in several very different cultural instances, and into how this
symbolization relates to "larger" cultural structures. I will here attempt to apply Douglas's
central notion to my inquiry into the body in Rabelais. Douglas writes:
I
[maintain] that the human body is always treated as an image of society and
that there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve
at the same time a social dimension.
Interest in its apertures depends on the preoccupation with social exits
and entrances, escape routes and invasions. If there is no concern to preserve social boundaries, I
would not expect to find concern with bodily boundaries. The relation of head to feet, of brain
and sexual organs, of mouth and anus are commonly treated so that they express
the relevant patterns of hierarchy.
Consequently I now advance the hypothesis that bodily control is an
expression of social control--abandonment of bodily control in ritual responds
to the requirements of a social experience which is being expressed. Furthermore, there is little prospect
of successfully imposing bodily control without the corresponding social
forms. And lastly, the same drive
that seeks harmoniously to relate the experience of physical and social, must
affect ideology. Consequently,
when once the correspondence between bodily and social controls is traced, the
basis will be laid for considering co-varying attitudes in political thought
and in theology. (70-71)
This is
Douglas's central notion, a notion which is both new to our century (through
structuralism), but can probably also be found as far back as one cares to
look, though in less formulaic forms.
What do I mean by this? In
Rabelais' case, for example, one may cite Panurge's in-corp-oration of the
universe in his long justification of being in debt. (T, 107-128, chs. 3-4) The difference between Douglas's
discussion of the body and Panurge's is of course that Panurge uses the body as
a heuristic metaphor for the social cohesion to be found in indebtedness,
whereas Douglas uses the body as a site on which to conduct an anthropological
inquiry. Of course their standards
and goals are different (one could say perhaps correctly that Douglas's are more
rigorous), but one should not overlook the fact that to a certain extent they
are both engaging in a sort of intellectualization of the body, one based on
the structure of metaphor and one in both cases undertaken in service to
motives which are not exactly clear (motives are never clear). Douglas's use of the body, in fact,
leads one to question the extent to which she realizes her own implication in
body politicking: her culture has given her the body as a site upon which to scientifically
conduct an exposŽ of the
effects of ideology have on that (abstracted) body. Everywhere, within her sustained academic questioning, one
reads a desire to liberate the body from its shackles through exposing those
shackles. On a more formal level,
however, Natural Symbols is
written within and for the academic community, by the standards of the academic
community, standards which, need we say, are not exactly bodily in nature. (Well now, there is the foot note, the appendix, the heading; and, one might say, there is the thrust of the argument. This thrust, however, is usually not given its proper
bodily title, but remains just a thesis, or a hypothesis.) One might insist that it is only such
academic rigorousness that will allow Douglas to expose the shackles ideology
puts on the body, but this is somewhat beside the point. Natural Symbols is part of the body of Douglas's
scholarly works as a professional anthropologist: given the years of study one
must undergo to become a professional anthropologist, one can assume that that
body named "Mary Douglas" has been devoted to some great extent to
the academic institution. This is
not to be read as a kind of accusation, however: as a charge of academic
hypocrisy. No, one merely points
to it with a feeling for the necessity of being aware of one's own implication
in one's thinking and writing.
Why begin this
way? After all, this is a study of
the body in Rabelais, not a study of Mary Douglas, PhD. I begin because Douglas's notions
themselves imply these questions, because these are some of the most
significant questions that can be raised.
I begin this way because as I write "Reading the Body in
Rabelais," I am necessarily typing with the hands of "my own"
body, and as I read Rabelais' humor through Freud's Jokes, I am reading this humor through a text
produced by Freud's body, a body, moreover, which could discuss dirty jokes in
the name of Science, but which felt it imprudent to quote any particularly
"offensive" dirty jokes.
Implicit in any reading of the body in Rabelais, there is a whole
collection of bodies with their own body politics, a pile of bodies connected
through the black material of text--a material in which the weight of a hand is
not felt; a material that--thanks to the technology of printing--no longer
retains the smudge of anyone's dirty fingers.
Freud's body
Rabelais'
body
The body
that typed this
Your body
Mary
Douglas's body
Bakhtin's
body
The above-quoted text
from Douglas allows us to raise the question of the entrances, exits, and relations
we can discover in the Rabelaisian body as sites upon which Rabelais'
cultural-ideological environment has left its mark. We would necessarily be reading at several steps removed
here: 1) the black ink body that is the Rabelaisian text could be read as
signifying the "entrances" and "escape routes" of 2) the
flesh body of an actual sixteenth century subject which, in turn, could be read
as a text signifying 3) the body that is its sixteenth century cultural
structure, a social body. Rabelais
himself (or perhaps the ink body of his text) is be our prime informant here,
an informant, like all anthropological informants, who presumably tells us more
about his culture than he thinks he is telling us. We, from our privileged position as "critics" or "scientists"
in the liberal university, thus posit Rabelais as a some-body to be
interpreted.
The problem we hoped to take up above was
that raised by Bakhtin of understanding the relationship in the sixteenth
century between official, repressive culture and popular
"carnivalesque" culture.
I am already showing a bias here by loosely calling these two elements
two "cultures". Let me
be more holistic for now and contrast them as reconcilable elements of one
Renaissance French culture. From
this position, the questions raised would be the following: What are the elements of strict
officialdom in Rabelais' work?
What are the elements of loose unofficialdom? How are these elements reconciled? And, most importantly, how are these elements and this reconciliation
mirrored in Rabelais' narrative of the body?
Working from
Douglas's statements quoted above, and from what Bakhtin has told us about the
nature of carnival, it would seem that the carnivalesque in Rabelais' sixteenth
century should be considered in terms of a social structure that needs
"[ritual] abandonment of bodily control" as a response to the
requirements of "a social experience which is being expressed." Is the Rabelaisian carnivalesque to be
seen as "[ritual] abandonment of bodily control"?
Bakhtin would seem to
come close to this view in his assertion that the carnivalesque is a sort of
necessary pressure valve which releases energy pent up under the repressive
weight of official medieval culture.
According to Bakhtin, without the popular carnivalesque, medieval
culture would have somehow exploded.
Douglas makes this
view possible by discussing cultures which are relatively restricted but which
have different "defined sectors of behavior," certain of these
allowing for cultural release:
Formality
signifies social distance, well-defined, public, insulated roles. Informality is appropriate to role
confusion, familiarity, intimacy.
Bodily control will be appropriate where formality is valued, and most
appropriate where the valuing of culture above nature is most emphasised. All this is very obvious. It goes without saying that any
individual moves between areas of social life where formality is required and
others where it is inappropriate.
Great discrepancies can be tolerated in differently defined sectors of
behaviour. And definition may be
in terms of time, place or dramatis personae, as Goffman showed when he
considered what criteria woman use to decide when it is and is not permissible
to walk in the street in slippers and hair nets. (72)
These considerations
are certainly valid when considering the sixteenth century synchronically, as a
temporally closed object of study.
However, when one has gathered one's synchronically specific evidence
(the frozen tableau of Rabelais' social environment), it would be necessary to
use one's discoveries to try to place Rabelais and his time within the greater
context called history. To do this
would require a different approach, one that would not only inquire into the elements
of Rabelais' world as part of a static social structure, but would also inquire
into them as elements expressing economic and ideological clashes which make
this structure inherently unstable.
Such an historical analysis would be concerned with dominant forces and
subjected forces in their continual struggle, rather than with putting things
in terms of a somehow unified bodily whole which works harmoniously. Bakhtin, though he recognized the
policing out of existence of the popular carnivalesque, finally has no
compelling explanations for why it occurred.
Since my
first readings of Rabelais were heavily informed by Bakhtin, so this my first
inquiry into Rabelais' narration of the body has also been in part an inquiry
into Bakhtin's celebrated reading of Rabelais. It would seem that Bakhtin's reading is reductive in many
areas, even given its overall power and resiliency. This reductiveness has been shown up in his interpretation
of insults and in his one-sided reading of Rabelaisian "laying low"
as being always somehow regenerative in nature. Freud's tendentious joke model has lent its support to these
criticisms. Bakhtin's somewhat
obstinately applied notion of regeneration has also led him to make what may
eventually prove to be a flawed historical reading, though I can only speculate
in this area. Bakhtin reads the
peasant festivals as ultimately supportive of the Catholic Church. This reading may be mostly on the mark,
but Bakhtin doesn't seem to show any significant awareness that not a word of
his evidence was written by this popular class.
Bakhtin's notion of a
body of the people, our medieval monster, has led to some fruitful speculation
and questioning concerning the decline of the carnivalesque. Initially I might say that the
invention of the printing press and the vernacularization of literature would
seem to be key forces in this decline of the carnivalesque. For now, however, this is only to say
that if I were further to research this problem that I would look into these
forces as slowly allowing for greater aristocratic (and, later, bourgeois)
ideologization of the world in general.
One of the most
worthwhile discoveries I've made is the discovery of the gap between Freud's
definition of play as pre-critical, pre-reasonable behavior, and the actual
play present in Rabelais, one of the most educated people of his century and an
acknowledged "monument" of the "tradition"--this tradition
necessarily so full of grave and repressed adults. This gap can only point to the repression
characteristic of our own "liberal" century, a repression which
pre-emptively labels pleasurable and "pointless" play as an activity
for children alone. Another issue
worth considering in this context would be what has been called the
"non-existence" of childhood in the medieval period, as compared to
what has been called the "cult" of childhood in the modern
world. I've felt it prudent not to
speculate in these areas here, though.
Finally, Mary Douglas
allowed me to face my limitations head-on, and reminded me in addition of the
heavy and effaced presence of bodies in any academic inquiry into the body in
Rabelais. This may seem a strange
turn for an academic paper to take--but I feel that it is becoming increasingly
important for us not to repress that which we must looks so plainly in the
face: in this case, the unbearable lightness of text in relation to the
grotesque heaviness of the world it is meant to negotiate.
(This
paper was written in the winter of 1988 for Professor Ullrich Langer's seminar
on sixteenth century French literature at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Professor
Langer probably knit his brows at various times while reading it; he
undoubtedly shook his head when he got to the section on Mary Douglas. But in general the paper was accepted.)
Bakhtin, Mikhail.