Figures de l’histoire et du temps dans l’œuvre de Rabelais (review)

This wide-ranging study analyses the functioning and presentation in Rabelais’s fiction of different sorts of time. Part I examines narrative time. After considering problems of genre and narratorial inconsistency, Emmanuelle Lacore-Martin probes the play with temporal markers in Pantagruel and Gargantua, then the contrasting but problematic linearities of the following three books. In Part 2, she investigates Rabelais’s relationship to the forms and methods of contemporary historiography. As well as underlining Rabelais’s mockery of a number of historians or historiographical practices, she indicates possible commonalities between Rabelais’s reflections on history and fiction and those of his patron, Guillaume Du Bellay. Part 3 explores what the author terms ‘fragments d’une poétique de l’histoire’, understood as instances where Rabelais might be said to point towards what a revised practice of history could look like (p. 151). Here she makes a case for the importance of memory, especially collective memory, in Rabelais’s fiction, and focuses on place and memorials, the latter notably through a reading of the trophies episode in Pantagruel. The final part of Figures de l’histoire examines human time, cosmic time, and calendric time (which Lacore-Martin, following Ricœur, posits as a third temporal dimension, situated between the human and cosmic ones). Lacore-Martin assesses the varying ways in which Rabelais’s characters appear to experience time, in particular an uneasy relationship to time on the part of Panurge, whose past is uncertain, who is afraid of death, and who is unable to move forward into the future. She also discusses the significance to various characters of the Fall and the Apocalypse, and highlights apprehensions of eternity, both those of the ‘beuveurs éternels’ amid the ‘propos des bienyvres’ and also those glimpsed by the dying Raminagrobis and seigneur de Langey. The variety of contexts within which Lacore-Martin places Rabelais is impressive, although, perhaps inevitably, she engages with some in more depth than with others (for example, her consideration of apocalyptic themes and especially the ‘fanfreluches antidotées’ might have been enriched by bringing to bear work by André Tournon, David Quint, Dennis Costa, and, most recently, Thierry Victoria). While at some junctures ideas about time are abstracted somewhat from their roles within the fiction, Lacore-Martin is careful to return to those fictional contexts. Moreover, she provides sustained close readings of a good number of episodes. The analysis does not, for this reader at least, convince in every detail, for example in its suggestions of far-reaching religious questioning, which sits uneasily with Rabelais’s evangelism. Lacore-Martin reads the episode of Gargantua’s birth together with the Pantagruel prologue’s comparison of the Bible to a fiction said to be only a little more ‘digne de foy’ than the Grandes et Inestimables Chronicques; arguing that readers are invited to interrogate the Bible just like any other text, she maintains that they should therefore be more troubled than Screech was by Rabelais’s implicit challenge to them to justify why they believe in some strange nativities and not others (pp. 139–43). Such doubts aside, this is a rich and interesting book.