Panurge comme lard en pois: paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le ‘Tiers Livre’ by Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou (review)

The title of Panurge comme lard en pois evokes both the scandal of eating meat during Lent and a simile indicative of appropriateness that Rabelais borrows from Maistre Pierre Pathelin. In keeping with the polyvalence of her title, Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou seeks to elucidate the rhetorical and theological stakes of the Tiers Livre through sustained analysis of the intertwined concepts of paradoxe, scandale, and propriété. Paradoxe denotes Panurge’s paradoxical behaviours and the continual confrontation of doxa in arguments for and against marriage; scandale should be understood primarily in the theological sense of ‘stumbling-block’ or ‘impediment to faith’, as Panurge is himself both scandalous and easily scandalized; and propriété signifies, in Pouey-Mounou’s analysis, that which is proper to the individual as well as the opportune time (kairos). As such, Pouey-Mounou sees Panurge’s perplexity over whether to marry, after Pantagruel absolves him of his debts, as a loss of and search for propriété, and ultimately as a reflection on man’s effort to come to terms with prevenient, unmerited grace. The book is divided into three parts: the first explains how the three concepts manifest themselves in Panurge’s dress and behaviour, and it situates Panurge’s relationship with Pantagruel in the context of Reformation thought on scandal, in which Christian liberty is at odds with the Pauline injunction to show charity towards the infirm; the second shows how the discursive par-ticularities of characters in the Tiers Livre (play with adverbs, the blason des fols and blasons des couillons, the use of adages and other rhetorical topoi) constitute an interrogation of propriété in the rhetorical sense of aptum or in the sense of finding one’s place in the world; the third part interprets Panurge’s consultations of Trouillagan, Hippothadée, Rondibilis, Bridoye, and Triboullet, as well as the final decision to set sail in search of the Dive bouteille, as the culmination of kairos. While this conceptual framework is intricate and often difficult to follow, it facilitates a discussion of the responsibility of the individual believer without having recourse to such an anachronistic concept as individuality. Moreover, when combined with solid erudition (especially as pertaining to theology) and acute lexical sensitivity, it allows Pouey-Mounou to modify the canonical view of Panurge as blinded by self-love (philautia) and unreceptive to grace because of his pharisaical superstition. Rather, she sees Pantagruel as evidence of Rabelais’s adherence to Erasmus’s preference for charity over the scandalous exercise of Christian liberty, and Panurge as torn between the prescriptions of the law and the liberation of faith, a position typical of many evangelicals or potential evangelicals in the first half of the sixteenth century: the end result is a more conciliatory Rabelais than the one to which we have grown accustomed, and it is a refreshing and thought-provoking result indeed. In sum, Panurge comme lard en pois is of most immediate interest to seiziémistes and specifically scholars of Rabelais, but those with a broader interest in theology and literature could also learn much from its exemplary treatment of scandal.