Masculinity and Metaphors of Reading in the Tiers Livre, 16-18

Masculinity and Metaphors of Reading in the Tiers Livre, 16-18 David LaGuardia IN A COMPELLING ARTICLE, Marcel Tetel has read Chapters 16-18 of the Tiers Livre, which describe the protagonists' visit to the Sibyl of Panzoust , as embodiments of a dialectical procedure that was an integral part both of Renaissance rhetoric in general and of Rabelais's discursive practices in particular. According to Tetel, Pantagruel exemplifies the principles of rhetorica precisa and oeconomia, while Panurge personifies the opposing positions of rhetorica perpetua and copia. Far from giving priority to either of these opposites, Rabelais's work seems to indicate that correct interpretation and understanding require a continual alternation between them. Performing his own allegorical interpretation, Tetel concludes that the "marriage " sought by Panurge throughout the text is in fact a spiritual union with Dame Rhetoric herself.1 Rabelais puts this rhetorical opposition into play by drawing the reader into a classical intertext, Lucian's Master of Rhetoric, in which the contrast between the two styles of discourse—Panurge versus Pantagruel , wine versus oil, or, as Montaigne would have it, "parler prompt contre parler tardif—is brought to the fore in metaphorical terms as the difference between two paths for traversing a landscape, one narrow and beset on all sides by thorns, the other wide, green, and clear (Tetel 129). This idea of discourse as a mode of traveling, or a kind of spatial quest to reach a desired end, is of course entirely appropriate to the Tiers Livre, which is composed essentially of the characters' spatial displacements from one interpretative locus to another. Like the entirety of the work, then, these chapters constitute an allegory of reading that takes on an astounding variety of forms. More importantly , perhaps, they also provide us with a glimpse of Rabelais as reader, who reveals himself to us in other references that are made explicit in the text. Tetel's cogent reading of the rhetorical intertext that underpins these chapters and the whole of Rabelais's work leads the way to an examination of the numerous other texts that are literally cited by Panurge and Epistémon in their diverse interpretations of the Sibyl's pronouncements, which allow us to glance at some of the elements of Rabelais's own reading list. This most learned of writers never stopped digesting classical authors, though he wrote in a style that was derived from the popular comic context in which the ubiquitous figure of the cuckold reached the culmination of its development. It is Vol. XLIII, No. 3 5 L'Esprit Créateur not surprising, then, that the Panurge of the Tiers Livre becomes the ultimate embodiment of both the learned clerk and the buffoonish cuckold. Like this standard character, Rabelais's writing is irreducibly multifarious in nature. Or, to put it more exactly, the Rabelaisian text is concerned with the infinite variations of writing and reading a limited number of plot motifs, just as the cuckold characters are.2 On the basis of these profound similarities, it could be argued that the cuckold is a particularly apt embodiment of Rabelaisian textual practices. The cuckold was perhaps the representative and virtual hero of the phallic cults that were one of the numerous pagan foundations buried beneath the Christian celebrations of carnival and other feasts. This figure was thus a hybrid that combined some of the pagan and even priapic character attributes that remained from pre-Christian celebrations with the traits of the comic figures of the learned facetiae, which served as a bridge between the serious, didactic, and clerical literature embodied in the Disciplina Clericalis and the comic cuckold tales of later tale collections such as the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and the tales of Philippe de Vigneulles. There is perhaps no better emblem of this hybrid nature of the cuckold than the lunettes that Panurge wears on his head throughout the Tiers Livre, since they recall both the phallus that the festival fools traditionally wore on top of their heads, as well as the scopic, intertextual obsessions that belonged to both the comic and the serious clerical traditions.3 Tetel's compelling reading of Panurge as the champion and personification of rhetorica perpetua situates...