Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (review)

This welcome addition to Rabelaisiana offers us, for the first time since 1959, the 120 illustrations of the Songes drolatiques, in a facsimile of the original 1565 edition and accompanied by a historical analysis (Jeanneret) plus an artistic contextualisation (Elsig). Confirming J. Porcher's theory whereby the artist is identifiable as the Parisian embroiderer and engraver François Desprez, Jeanneret concludes that the pictures are intended as models for grotesque designs in a number of media, and so extend a tradition which, via the Fontainebleau school, Bruegel and Bosch, reaches back to Gothic ornamental styles of architecture and illumination. Without denying the illustrations' polemical import (both Desprez and his publisher Breton were Protestants), Jeanneret refuses (laudably) to see that as the key to their meaning. The Renaissance cult of monstrosity involves far more than a set of weapons with which to empower partisan satire: as the very concept of dignitas hominis was being affirmed, so designs of this sort were undermining it; as nature's richness was ever more fully appreciated, so, in a pre-scientific age, multifarious reflections of this variety emerged in culture, allowing numerous forms and levels of interpretation; at a time of profound civil disharmony the monster became a sign of the power which evil was gaining within France, but simultaneously it was a stimulus to mirth, as laughter at horror allowed one to relativize that evil and purge the fear it provoked. This latter, evidently Rabelaisian, trend is discernible, albeit not universally, within the book itself, where one's eye may move from a somewhat threatening and horrific design on the left-hand page, to a less dreadful, even gracious bizarrerie on the right. Regrettably, and to the editors' apparent annoyance (to which an Erratum note seems to testify), that pattern is vitiated by a minor compositional inaccuracy whereby the left-hand and right-hand pictures are throughout reversed; however a text which challenges the very notions of order and consistency has an inalienable right to its own caprices. Elsig's postface deepens Jeanneret's artistic analysis without ever challenging it. As the drôleries here presented aim to distract rather than edify the observer, so the marginalia of thirteenth- and fourteenth- century manuscripts tend to defy rather than explain the narrative they accompany. That design tradition, which in the 1400s had lost some of its verve, was significantly revived by (again) Bosch, whose pictures, particularly of hell, centralized the marginal monsters and increased their heterogeneity. The resultant aesthetics of agglomeration, fed by a contemporary interest in curiosa, miracles and riddles, plus the grotesque tradition which, strictly speaking, is quite distinct from that of the drôleries, created a trend which climaxed in the period of the Songes drolatiques' publication. Again, although the political context of Reformation and Counter-Reformation should not be ignored, neither should it be over-emphasized. The collection's deliberately anticlassical, vulgar, even blasphemous elements have deeper roots and wider meanings than a mere response to contemporary affairs. Consequently, while it provides the expert with important material for analysis, the non-specialist will always find pleasure in browsing through it.