Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel by Richard M. Berrong (review)

78Rocky Mountain Review the collective and produce the charismatic community of the emancipated people. It is significant that both Biberkopf in Berlin Alexanderplatz and Graf's characters fail as individuals. Berman suggests that the use of dialect and inclusion of the proletarian city in leftist modernism represents a radical social change comparable to the integration of the bourgeois family into the tragedies of the eighteenth century. While the emphasis of fascist and epic leftist modernism is on the establishment of charismatic communities, Thomas Mann is concerned with a new social individuality as well as a renewed collective, with the contradictions within the individual representing the social totality. Berman concludes that the political power of literature is insufficient to transform society alone. The modernist project has been unable to achieve its goal, but it has articulated the critique of conditions that have to be overcome; this constitutes the continued relevance of this literature. This is an absorbing book and valuable for graduate students and instructors of German literature and cultural studies. The study includes an index and notes with extensive documentation; all quotations from texts are in English. HANNA SCHUSTER FIELDS University of Texas at Austin RICHARD M. BERRONG. Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 156 p. Richard Berrong's well documented monograph, Rabelais and Bakhtin, will not go unnoticed by sixteenth-century literature scholars. Its provocative title seems indeed to promise fresh insights on the Russian critic's Rabelais and His World, a well known work which has, since its publication in the late 1960s, often been a subject of controversy. And, this promise is fulfilled. Basing his contentions upon the findings of distinguished historians and scholars of popular culture such as Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Burke, and Robert Muchambled, Berrong demonstrates the historical weaknesses of Bakhtin's analysis and, therefore, his erroneous reading of Rabelais' fictional narratives . Bakhtin argues that the essential significance of Rabelais' works is to be found in the author's use of popular culture. He explains that, by exploiting the images and language of the marketplace, Rabelais intended to show official culture from the outside and by so doing, he hoped to escape from and combat the oppressive establishment and its institutions. Berrong refutes this thesis by showing how Bakhtin fails to recognize the bi-culturalism of the learned, the powerful, and the elite at the beginning of the sixteenth century and then, the essential shift which occurred when they distanced themselves from the popular culture in which they participated earlier. In a carefully reasoned study of Rabelais' narratives, Berrong proceeds to demonstrate the fallacies of Bakhtin's argument. He first indicates a marked shift between the use of popular culture in Pantagruel and in the later Gargantua. Contrary to Bakhtin's assertion, he maintains that popular culture is not the dominant voice in Pantagruel but rather on an almost equal footing with learned culture. In Gargantua, especially after chapter 14, he notices a systematic and radical exclusion of popular culture. Focusing on the Book Reviews79 "popular elements" that Bakhtin had previously distinguished, Berrong provides convincing examples to trace this progressive exclusion; for instance, he points out in Gargantua significant differences in the views on the acceptability of dirt and excrement, on leisure and laziness, on social structure and hierarchy , in the use of banquet imagery, and in the treatment of disease and sex. In this light, Theleme is no longer unfitting with Rabelais' imagery and style but appears to be "a very logical conclusion to the systematic exclusion of popular culture that goes on before and during Gargantua" (38). To strengthen his argument, Berrong examines Rabelais' rapidly changing attitude toward popular culture in the light of contemporary historical and cultural changes: the strong influence of the Catholic church which disapproved of the licentiousness and pagan beliefs perpetuated by popular culture , the increasing desire to purify the mores on the part of the humanists, and the growing threat of social upheaval from the lower class after 1500. However, he concludes that Rabelais' sudden change toward popular culture may be better explained by the crucial changes which occurred in the author's life, such as his sudden entrance...