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

beholder’s imagination. Unlike the scholarly gaze of the art historian whose interests are primarily attached to technique,materials,and subject matter—all for the purposes of describing and explaining the work of art—that of the subjectivist art critic sees the work of art as a point of departure for his own private creation; art (viewing) becomes a collaboration producing another work of art, be it a story, poem or even a self-engineered exhibit or event. For Lyotard, Diderot’s famous “Promenade Vernet” (Salon de 1767—the philosopher’s imaginative stroll through the sites visited in the paintings) expertly exemplifies this strange collaboration which Pierce also identifies as art’s ‘immateriality’; the physical canvas disappears into the beholder’s newly imagined ‘scape.’ In Baudelaire, this experience is taken to another level resulting not only in a prose poem but also in transforming the aesthetic experience of the flâneur into that of creator of (verbal) cityscapes. For Breton, the surrealist gaze is that “receptiveness or openness to the marvelous” (149): apprehending what lies beyond mere representation. Landscape paintings in particular serve as rich highways “to journey beyond the limits of mere representation into a world of dream and imagination inside its frame” (157). The subjective gaze of the author/critic reveals the essential immateriality of art, leading to an increasingly decentered attitude toward the work itself or what Lyotard identifies as the postmodern turn, whereby the work and its viewer no longer stand in fixed positions and roles. His 1995 exhibition, “a backdrop, a landscape in and through which the visitor charts his or her own course” (222), interrogates what constitutes our relationship to objects of art, beginning with the exhibit conceived as a work of art created by and for the participating viewer who walks through it, choosing his or her own way, constituting its meaning and framework according to which objects become part of this subjective journey.Lyotard’s exhibition becomes then the endpoint for what Diderot had begun, and Baudelaire and Breton continued and refined: the disintegration of the physical or material reality of a work of art by the insertion of the subjective gaze that transforms it into something entirely new and immaterial. Pierce’s analysis draws from the best existing scholarship on the French tradition of art criticism with an extensive, highly useful bibliography. University of Kansas Diane Fourny Pouey-Mounou, Anne-Pascale. Panurge comme lard en pois: paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le Tiers Livre.Genève: Droz,2013.ISBN 978-2-600-01608-7. Pp.586. 68 CHF. On croyait avoir tout dit sur le Tiers Livre des faictz et dictz heroïques du noble Pantagruel (1546).Après les nombreuses études récentes consacrées au personnage de Panurge, que restait-il à écrire sur ce parasite intempérant, bon “topicqueur” mais pour de mauvaises causes? Pouey-Mounou, dont on connaît les nombreux travaux de 222 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 223 seiziémiste, en particulier sur l’imaginaire cosmologique de Ronsard, nous invite à repenser la nature et la fonction de ce provocateur notoirement immoral dans l’économie de l’ouvrage de Rabelais, à partir des notions de propriété, de paradoxe et de scandale, telles que les comprenaient, Érasme en tête, les humanistes de l’époque. Certes, ce n’est pas la première fois qu’on analyse les acrobaties verbales d’un parleur séduisant qui pèche et prêche par “philautie” et échappe aux critères légitimes de la convenance; mais Pouey-Mounou n’avance sa thèse qu’en examinant avec précision les adverbes en -ment, qui jalonnent la sémantique du texte et révèlent une grille de lecture beaucoup plus complexe. Le titre de cette étude applique à Panurge une expression employée par Perrin-Dandin dans la Farce de Maistre Pathelin: “comme lard en pois”. Image culinaire qui signifie, comme le juge l’explique (“Je me trouve à propous”), son intervention au bon moment et comme il le faut. Une telle définition peut surprendre quand on l’applique à Panurge, personnage immature, continuellement perplexe et incapable de mesure. La figure du sage médiateur, de l’“apoincteur” qui sait mesurer...