Rabelais et la question du sens (review)

This volume originated in a symposium held in Cerisy-la-Salle in August 2000. Some of the ideas presented here have since been developed by their authors; yet the book feels fresh because of its reflexive approach. In opening and closing remarks respectively, Jean Céard and Marie-Luce Demonet hint at what specialists of Rabelais can gain by taking a step back to scrutinize their own hermeneutics. In her contribution, Demonet warns, for example, that our infatuation with ‘higher meaning’ should not dispense us from exploring the literal level, of which much remains unknown; similarly, Louis-Georges Tin prefaces his exegesis of the ‘pantagruelion’ by a catalogue of the premises inherent in any interpretation. As a result of this self-awareness, the volume is not plagued by polemics — even as it remains rife with contradictions. Thus Frank Lestringant, drawing on cartographic models, argues that the episode of the ‘physétère’ in the middle of the Quart Livre is devoid of much sense and functions as a decoy; by contrast, Stéphan Geonget’s views on the ‘Y’ figure buttress the case made by Edwin Duval, in 1998, for the beast’s central importance. Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, studying the ‘cornes’ and ‘cornemuse’ motif in the Tiers Livre, values Panurge’s acrobatic denials over Pantagruel’s predictable sermonizing; whereas Gilles Polizzi emphasizes Panurge’s indignity by following an allegory borrowed by Rabelais from Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia to its final degradation at the end of the Quart Livre. According to Barbara C. Bowen, the Tiers Livre’s Judge Bridoye is a farcical fool and as much the target of satire as Gargantua’s Janotus de Bragmardo; but for Emmanuel Naya, Bridoye is a figure of the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgement that Rabelais’s fiction calls for. It does not follow that all approaches are welcome: while Jean-François Maillard, arguing that Rabelais was no kabbalist, dismisses the assumption that his message is encrypted according to the laws of an outside system, contributors also reject the opposite idea — that meaning, as a textual phenomenon, cannot be nailed down. Most of the essays practise a kind of revised textualism: they combine a historical approach, drawing concepts from Renaissance rhetoric and philosophy (see Naya’s encyclopedic use of scepticism, or Claude La Charité’s instructive confronting of Pantagruel’s Thaumaste dispute with contemporary theories on the language of signs), with a tendency to infer meaning from patterns (syntagms, figures, motifs) provided by the text; these patterns, however, lack the architectural rigour championed by Edwin Duval, whose method and results are cautiously challenged by several of the articles. Also exploring this shifting terrain are Jacques Berchtold’s variations on the ‘mouche’ and ‘mousse’ motifs in Panurge’s proposal regarding the walls of Paris; Pierre Johan Laffitte’s assessment of the evolving François Villon persona in the ‘theatre’ of the Quart Livre; Oumelbanine Zhiri’s dialectical analysis of the Tiers Livre’s conflicting narrative temporalities; and Véronique Zaercher-Keck’s tracking, across several books, of the Pantagruelists’ ritualistic declarations of allegiance and preparations for battle. Much of what is shown is thought-provoking, often persuasive; most convincing are Paul J. Smith’s clever identification of the ‘Andouilles’ as the English (this is one case in which a local meaning seems firmly established) and André Tournon’s brilliant use of the myth of Baubô (who consoles Demeter by exposing herself) as ambiguous key to the strange behaviour of the ‘Sibylle de Panzoust’.