Father figures: genealogy and narrative structure in Rabelais (review)

146 Reviews I am not sure that Hint is entirely convincing in this her final portrayal of Columbus. Faced with an historical character as diverse, devious and distant as the Great Admiral, some historical reticence is probably called for. But this is a fine account by one of the most subtle and knowledgeable scholars of medieval intellectual culture, of the cultural world of the last medieval man. Hilary M . Carey Department of History University of Newcastle Freccero, Carla, Father figures: genealogy and narrative structure in Rabelais, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xvi, 213; R.R.P. US$27.95 plus 1 0 % overseas. Given Rabelais's interest in all things medical, there is perhaps some justification for employing psychoanalytic tools in a contemporary evaluation of his work. In Father figures, the spotlight is turned, not on Rabelais himself, but on the text, since Carla Freccero holds firmly to the view that the real Rabelais remains forever behind, or before, the books he authored. And, since these books, by their very textuality, refuse to privilege any one ideological or methodological approach, tbe critic is free to pick and choose on the basis of 'a question of interests', or of what Freccero calls 'personal resonance' (pp. x, xi). She chooses therefore to approach Rabelais's work through the study of genealogy, defined not in conventional but in psychoanalytic terms. The theme of filiation is explored on three levels: the relationship between father (Gargantua) and son OPantagruel), between the book (Pantagruel) and its 'sequel' (Gargantud), and between the author and thetexthe has fathered (specifically, the Tiers livre and its progeny). By a wonderful irony of history Pantagruel, the book of the son, appeared in 1532, thus predating Gargantua, the book of the father, by two years. Freccero's discussion of Pantagruel insists on the work's debt to the parent text, the Chronicques gargantuines, but also on its ambition to usurp and overthrow the authority of the parent culture. Since, however, such an ambition generates, in Freccero's Freudian parlance, a 'burden of guilt', genealogical themes in the book undergo a compulsive repetition: they are 'thematically... overdetermined' (p. 12). Thematically, Pantagruel's role both as his father's legitimate son and also as his compliant echo is announced by Gargantua's famous letter of Chapter 8. Pantagruel's potential for oedipal rebellion against the paternal law is nevertheless not realized; instead it is transferred to the adventurer Panurge, a substitute hero embodying the will to subversion and defilement which in Pantagruel is merely latent. By contrast and as benefits the book of the father, the genesis of Gargantua is presented as an act or archaeological reconstruction, not as the product of Reviews 147 biological generation. Gargantua thus becomes 'orginary' for Rabelais's entire corpus. Chapters 8 and 9 of the book, in highlighting the disparity between words and sense, involve the notion offiliationinsofar as what is at stake here is the father's ability to impose his meaning on the sign. More importantly, the Th61eme episode on which the book ends appears at first glance as the triumph of the paternal will, the creation of an imperialist Utopia. Yet on closer inspection Freccero finds Th61eme a kind of retrospective origin by which GaigantxxalGargantua compensates for his/its belated 'birth' in the Rabelaisian corpus. Thdleme is, in Denida's phrase, a 'supplement', designed to make good the defect of the whole. But as supplement it calls forth a countervailing supplement the celebrated Enigme, and thus is revealed to be a failure, the impossible telos of the genealogical quest. The remaining books (from the Tiers livre to the apocryphal Cinquieme livre) are surveyed briefly as a type of the romance quest narrative, centring thematically on Panurge's problematic search for a mate and paternity, and structurally on the multiplication of episodes destined never to arrive at a revelation which might constitute a satisfactory closure. Here again, Freccero detects a displacement of filial succession from Pantagruel to Panurge and, as in the case of Thdleme, a failure to impose a 'unified code of meaning', whose secrettiesforever hidden in the 'dive Bouteille' (p. 188). Father figures interprets in often ingenious ways the varied...