Le Héros masqué de 'Pantagruel': une nouvelle introduction à l'œuvre de Rabelais (review)

Another in the seemingly interminable cycle of keys to Rabelais, this book aims to prove that the prologue to Pantagruel is a veiled attack on Jean Lemaire de Belges's Illustrations de Gaule, whilst Pantagruel the character is a mask for the figure of Hercule Gaulois, known to sixteenth-century readers through Lucian, Alciato and Tory. The initial evidence resides in a rereading of the Gargantua prologue which leads us to a necessary conclusion ('nous pouvons et devons conclure') that the Grandes Chroniques are not the real text Rabelais has referred to in his previous prologue: references such as 'Sainct Jehan de l'Apocalypse' and 'gaillard Onocrotale' clearly indicated Lemaire. Meanwhile the Pantagruel-Hercule identification is supported by such points as the anagram Panta-ergul: Tout-Hercule. Gilman has the goodness to admit, and not infrequently, how contrived his arguments may appear. The main point of section one is to argue that the Illustrations (clearly symbolized by the grosses mesles of chapter one of Pantagruel) gave a false and even seditious view of French history. Thus it is suggested (p. 84, but without evidence) that François I^er may even have commissioned Rabelais to write Pantagruel, hence perhaps the allegory of Bourbon's desertion read into the phrase 'La Pleiade moyenne [Bourbon's domain lay in central France], laissant ses compaignons, desclina vers l'Equinoctial'. The second part pursues the Hercule Gaulois allegory through a series of detailed readings of the same volume, which indicate, variously, that Rabelais is displaying him as one greater than his Greek cousin. Accordingly, the philosopher's stone to be found during Pantagruel's further adventures is an analogue of the golden apples plucked by Hercules, and the four pillars on which Pantagruel placed the Pierre levée in Poitiers deliberately upstage the (mere two) pillars of Hercules, and so on. When we are also told that Pantagruel must have been born through his mother's throat (how else could he have suffocated her?) we begin perhaps to suspect a leg-pull. While doubting that possibility, I still resent being told what I must now 'de tout évidence' (sic, p. 111) have learned (for instance, 'Nous savons maintenant qui est le héros masqué de Pantagruel': p. 179), even while accepting the notably less challenging point that Rabelais's heroes display features analogous to those exhibited by the giants of antiquity, and the particular quality of persuasive rhetoric as assigned to the gallic Hercules. For me, Gargantua possesses this quality in richer measure than the Pantagruel of the earlier years, whilst it strains a point unnecessarily to argue that 'engin mieulx vault que force' (Pantagruel, ch. 27) is but a new version of 'éloquence vaut mieux que force' (p. 169: cf. eloquentia fortitudine praestantior, the device of the Hercule Gaulois). Scholars must surely accept that the richness, nay 'ambiguité' (sic, p. 6) of Rabelais's erudition, imagination and lexicon will forever admit such ingenious readings as Gilman's. We retain, if not 'absolumment' (sic, p. 120) then certainly jusques au feu exclusive, the right to deny their exclusive validity.