The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
François Rabelais · five books · Lyon and Paris, 1532 to 1564, the last after the author’s death · scored on Rabelais’s French, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and M. A. Screech’s translation (2006) for sense
Mode
Mock chronicle of giants turned philosophical quest; humanist encyclopedia, satire and carnival in one prose
Mythos
The giant body as the world’s body; carnival at war with Lent; the trickster; the voyage to an oracle and its one word
Phase
Two giant chronicles of birth, education and war, told son first; then one question carried through three books, from the consultations to the oracle of the Bottle
Presentation
Fiction; five books with prologues, published 1532 to 1564, the first under an anagram and the last after the author’s death
Register
Every register of sixteenth-century French, from the Latinate and the scholastic to the market, the drinking house and the Limousin student’s gibberish
Scale
Two giants, their companions, and the whole of the learning, faith and appetite of an age
Governing Proposition
A chapbook of giants becomes, over five books and thirty years, an encyclopedia of the body and of humanist learning: the son’s birth, education and war told first, then the father’s, then a single question, whether Panurge should marry, carried through every authority the age could summon and across the sea to an oracle that answers in one word. The wager of the work is that laughter is proper to man, and that a book which holds everything, from a feast of tripe to the death of Pan, under one gaiety of mind can show learning, war and self-love for what they are.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1532 a chapbook was selling at the Lyon fairs, Les grandes et inestimables Cronicques of the giant Gargantua. The same year Claude Nourry of Lyon printed Pantagruel, the chronicle of the giant’s son, under the name Alcofrybas Nasier, an anagram of François Rabelais. The father’s book, Gargantua, followed from François Juste at Lyon; whether in 1534 or 1535 is disputed. The Tiers Livre appeared at Paris in 1546, under Rabelais’s own name and with a royal privilege, and the Quart Livre in part in 1548 and whole in 1552. Rabelais died in 1553. The Fifth Book came after him, its first sixteen chapters as L’Isle Sonante in 1562, and whole in 1564.
The shape is two chronicles and a quest. The giant chronicles, birth, education and war, were written in reverse order of the story, the son’s first and the father’s after. Then the three later books carry one question, whether Panurge should marry, through the consultations and across the sea to the oracle of the Bottle. Who wrote the Fifth Book is unsettled: most scholars hold that it was made from Rabelais’s drafts and finished by another hand, and some parts, the Ringing Island above all, are more plainly his than others. Completion by another hand in the course of the work’s life is part of the work, and the desk scores the five books as one, the Fifth with them; without it the quest would have no oracle and the question no answer.
The prologue to Gargantua addresses drinkers, and offers them Socrates as a Silenus box, and then a bone: break it, and suck “la substantificque mouelle”
“the substantific marrow”. Then it turns on those who find allegory everywhere, and laughs at them too. The reader is invited to look for meaning and warned against finding too much, and the work keeps those double terms to the end. A verse to the reader stands before it with the rule of the whole: laughter is “le propre de l’homme”
“proper to man”.
Movement II
The son’s book was written first, and the order matters: the chronicle of Pantagruel set the plan that the father’s book would retell. Its comedy takes in the learned world entire. A student from the Limousin speaks a Latinised French no one can follow; the library of Saint-Victor is given as a catalogue that mocks the learning it lists. The giant’s size is never fixed, and the book uses that freedom for its widest joke. The narrator walks into Pantagruel’s mouth and finds a country there, with a man planting cabbages who has never heard of the world outside (Pantagruel 32). The world is inside the giant, and does not know it.
Between the jokes stands the letter. Gargantua writes to his son of the darkness of the Goths and the light of a learning restored, the humanist programme set out in a father’s voice at a plain height. It closes on a warning in one line: “science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’ame”
“knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul” (Pantagruel 8). The comedy around the letter does not mock it. The book has found its theme, and the father’s book will act it out.
Gargantua begins at the beginning of the body. The feast of tripe, a cosmogony of appetite, brings on the birth, and the child comes out of his mother’s ear crying “A boire! A boire!”
“A drink! A drink!” His boyhood is given as a list of games that runs on long past its point. Then his education, first under scholastic tutors who make him a fool, then under Ponocrates, who makes him a man: the same giant, taught under a different conscience. The two educations are the disclosure of the letter turned into practice, and they are the hinge of the first books.
Movement III
The education is for a war. Picrochole makes war, and his counsellors conquer the world in a sitting before a shot is fired. Against him stands the just kingship of Grandgousier. The disclosure can be stated: the war of conquest is a fantasy of the armchair, and the book tells it as farce without making it harmless.
Friar John defends the abbey close against the invaders. The scene is among the most perfectly made in Rabelais, a comic timing that holds over pages, and it sets the monastery up to be turned inside out.
Near its close the father’s book builds Thélème, the archetypal counter-monastery, with one rule: “Fay ce que vouldras”
“Do what you will” (Gargantua 57). Whether it is the humanist ideal or a joke on ideals the work does not settle, and five centuries have not settled it for the work. After it the work stops being a chronicle.
Movement IV
Panurge, the trickster with a coward’s body and a sophist’s tongue, carries the Tiers Livre. It opens with his praise of debts, eloquent in the cause of borrowing, and then poses one question: should Panurge marry, and if he does, will he be cuckolded? The rest of the book is the answer that does not come.
He asks everyone. A theologian, a physician, Rondibilis, a sceptic, Trouillogan, a poet, a sibyl and a fool; and the judge Bridoye, it emerges, decides suits by dice. Each authority speaks, and Panurge turns every answer to his wish. The litanies on Panurge and Triboulet run on at length, and the subtractive test finds them long. But the shape is the knowledge: a man who has already chosen will consult every authority in the world and hear only himself. That is the work’s deepest disclosure, self-love shown as a structure.
No consultation settles the question, and so the book turns into a voyage. Pantagruel and his companions set out by sea for the oracle of the Bottle. A comic chronicle has become a philosophical quest, and the quest has the oldest form there is.
Movement V
The Quart Livre is the voyage. Its prologue names the law of the whole: Pantagruelism, “certaine gayeté d’esprit conficte en mespris des choses fortuites”
“a certain gaiety of mind, preserved in contempt of things fortuitous”. At sea the merchant Dindenault’s sheep follow their leader into the water, one after another, the sheep of Panurge. A storm breaks, with Panurge’s terror and Friar John’s labour, dreadful and funny at once. Island follows island, each one folly of the age: Quaresmeprenant, Lent anatomised, at war with the Andouilles of carnival.
Two passages rise above the comedy. Pantagruel hears the tale of a voice that cried that great Pan was dead, reads Pan as Christ, and weeps. And over the northern sea frozen words thaw in the air, the one moment of pure wonder in the work. The satire hardens as the islands go by, and in the Fifth Book it turns bitter: the Ringing Island, and the Furred Cats, where contempt displaces gaiety.
Then the oracle. The quest set out in the Tiers Livre reaches the Bottle, and the Bottle answers in one word: “Trinch”, drink. Whether that answers Panurge is still argued. It is where the body began, in the tripe and the cry for a drink at birth, and it closes the voyage on the same appetite. The work ends where its law says it should, in a gaiety that holds learning, war, faith and fear in one laughter, and leaves the question open.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is the axis’s question, and this work fails it more often than any book at its height. Much is required: the giant’s education, turned from the scholastic tutors to Ponocrates, which is the hinge of the first books; the Picrocholine war, which the education is for; Panurge’s question, which binds three books. But copia is the method, and copia adds. The list of Gargantua’s games, the catalogue of the library of Saint-Victor, the litanies on Panurge and Triboulet, and island after island in the Quart Livre could be halved without the loss of a fact the work needs, and some could go whole. The plenitude is part of what the book means, and holds the axis above 7.0; what holds it at the foot of the twelve is that excess, with the slacker grain of the Fifth Book.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The disclosures can be stated, and they hold. Learning is a ruin or a freedom according to the conscience that carries it: Gargantua’s letter to his son ends on it, “science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’ame”
“knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul” (Pantagruel 8), and the two educations of Gargantua show it as practice. The war of conquest is a fantasy of the armchair: Picrochole’s counsellors conquer the world in a sitting before a shot is fired. Deepest, in the Tiers Livre: a man who has already chosen will consult every authority and hear only himself. That is self-love disclosed as a structure, not named as a vice. Held off the top because the Christian humanism at the centre is often asserted in counsel rather than discovered.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The elevation is frequent and mostly comic: the grandeur of size and plenty. The narrator walks into Pantagruel’s mouth and finds a country, with a man planting cabbages who has never heard of the world outside (Pantagruel 32). Gargantua’s letter reaches the plain height of a learning restored after the darkness of the Goths. The rarer heights are of another kind: in the Quart Livre Pantagruel hears of the voice that cried that great Pan was dead, reads Pan as Christ, and weeps; and frozen words thaw in the air over the northern sea, the work’s one moment of pure wonder. The storm is dreadful and funny at once. Held at 8.5 because the register rarely leaves laughter for long, and the long counsel chapters are flat.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The giant body is the world’s body: Gargantua is born from his mother’s ear crying “A boire! A boire!”
“A drink! A drink!”, Pantagruel’s mouth holds a country, and a feast of tripe is a cosmogony of appetite. The last three books take the oldest form, a voyage to an oracle, and its answer is one word, “Trinch”: drink. Carnival is set against Lent as two powers at war, Quaresmeprenant anatomised against the Andouilles. Thélème is the archetypal counter-monastery. Panurge is the trickster made whole, a coward’s body with a sophist’s tongue, and still particular: in debt, afraid of cuckoldry, eloquent in praise of borrowing. Held a step down because some of the myth is pastiche of a chapbook, wielded rather than built.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is a popular chapbook, Les grandes et inestimables Cronicques of the giant Gargantua, sold at the Lyon fairs in 1532, with the chivalric romance and the scholastic commentary behind it. The turn: a book of giants made the vehicle of the whole humanist programme, Greek, law, medicine, theology and the reform of education, in a prose that mixes every register of French from the Latinate to the market; and from the Tiers Livre on, a comic chronicle turned into a philosophical quest that does not conclude. The stake could be mortal: the condemnations of the Paris Faculty of Theology, Calvin’s hostility, and in 1546 the burning of Étienne Dolet, who had printed Rabelais. The first books appeared under an anagram. Held below the top only because the first book’s turn was taken a step at a time.
Score: 9.3 / 10
In much of the work the form is the knowledge. The list is the instrument of a humanist plenitude: the world is more various than any system, and the catalogue says so by not stopping. The Tiers Livre is the best case: a man consults one authority after another and hears none, and no other shape could know that. The mock chronicle turns a giant’s genealogy and education into a parody that is also a programme; the voyage makes each island one folly of the age; the Fifth Book closes the quest the form demanded. Held down because the shape was found over thirty years rather than given: Gargantua retells Pantagruel’s plan, the giants’ size changes with the needs of the scene, and several island chapters are containers that any frame could hold.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: nearly five centuries of re-examination, and the readings still contest one another. Lucien Febvre’s study of Rabelais’s religion (1942), against the older view of him as a freethinker; Auerbach’s chapter on the world in Pantagruel’s mouth in Mimesis (1946); Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965), which built a theory of carnival and the grotesque body on it; M. A. Screech’s readings of its evangelical humanism; Kundera’s claim of it as a founder of the novel. Its questions stay open: whether Thélème is ideal or joke, whether one word answers Panurge, whether the laughter is Christian, pagan or both. The prologue to Gargantua bids the reader break the bone for “la substantificque mouelle”
“the substantific marrow”, then mocks those who find allegory everywhere.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is French literature from the 1530s to the 1560s, the decades of Marot, Marguerite de Navarre, Calvin’s French Institution and the Pléiade. The force: the founding monument of French prose fiction, a reorganisation of what prose in a vernacular could hold, from the obscene to the theological, which made the comic encyclopedic book a possibility that had not existed before it. Held a step below the top because the redirection was at first a line of followers more than a reshaping of the main road, and the main road of the European novel ran through Cervantes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a line of learned comic prose runs from it through Urquhart’s English, Burton, Swift and Sterne to Joyce, Céline and Queneau; Balzac imitated it; Bakhtin made it the ground of a theory of literature and culture; and the language took “gargantuan”, “pantagruelian” and the sheep of Panurge from it.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Survival over close to five centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the work survives whole as published, with one question, whether the last book’s text is certainly the author’s, which is a question of what survives and a small one. Presence: continuous in France, read, edited and taught since the sixteenth century; translated into English from 1653 and repeatedly since, by Urquhart and Motteux, Le Clercq, Cohen, Frame, Screech and Raffel. Charged: its presence beyond French is narrower than that of the widest survivors, since Cervantes is read where Rabelais is cited; the difficulty of its French has made it a scholar’s book for many readers; and much of its satire is fixed to its moment, the Sorbonne, the decretals and the quarrels of the Gallican church, the surface the axis penalises.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged on Rabelais’s French, as far as a reading from knowledge can carry it; what lies beyond that is neither credited nor charged. The command of the sentence is among the greatest in any vernacular: coined words by the hundred; every register from the Limousin student’s Latinised gibberish to the drinkers’ talk; parody of law, scholastic disputation, medicine and the chronicle; a comic timing that holds over pages. Some scenes are perfect: the drinkers’ conversation, Friar John defending the abbey close, Dindenault’s sheep following their leader into the sea. Charged: a construction that is episodic and uneven, a giants’ scale that shifts with convenience, long lists that tire even an admiring reader, and the thinner prose of the Fifth Book.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the tripe and the birth from the ear, and the death of Pan read as Christ’s. One law governs both, and the work names it in the prologue to the Quart Livre: Pantagruelism, “certaine gayeté d’esprit conficte en mespris des choses fortuites”
“a certain gaiety of mind, preserved in contempt of things fortuitous”. Body and soul are both honoured, and laughter is “le propre de l’homme”
“proper to man”. The range is the widest of its century, and the law holds across most of it. Charged: the giants are sometimes giants and sometimes men at a table; the satire hardens in the Quart Livre and turns bitter in the Fifth Book’s Furred Cats, where contempt displaces gaiety; and the books were not written to one plan.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Held, and through one figure: the body, the work’s way of holding everything. Birth, food, drink, excretion, sex, sickness and death. Education and the whole of humanist learning. War and the state, in Picrochole and in Grandgousier’s just kingship. The church and the monastery, and their counter-image at Thélème. Law, in Bridoye judging suits by dice. Medicine, in Rondibilis. Marriage, in Panurge’s question. Commerce, in the praise of debts. Philosophy, in Trouillogan’s scepticism. The sea and nature, in the storm and the northern waters; the sacred, in Pan; and language itself as an order. Held below the top because consciousness is thin: Panurge has a self and a fear, but no mind is entered from within, and history is present as allusion rather than as a force on lives.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.4, then The Swerve, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.3. The founding monument of French prose fiction, whose line runs through Swift and Sterne to Joyce; a chapbook of giants made the vehicle of the humanist programme at a mortal stake; nearly five centuries of readings that still contest one another; and a survival continuous in France since the sixteenth century.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.4: copia is the method, and the lists of games and books, the litanies of the Tiers Livre and the islands of the Quart Livre could be halved without the loss of a fact the work needs, with the slacker grain of the Fifth Book charged beside them. Next above it, The Inner Law at 8.4, where giants shift their size with the scene, the satire hardens and turns bitter, and the books were not written to one plan; then The Sublime at 8.5, a register that rarely leaves laughter for long.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.4, The Swerve at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5, with The Inner Law at 8.4 the next lowest; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.2. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.9, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the five books of François Rabelais as one work: Pantagruel (Lyon, Claude Nourry, 1532, under the anagram Alcofrybas Nasier); Gargantua (Lyon, François Juste, 1534 or 1535, the date disputed); the Tiers Livre (Paris, 1546, under Rabelais’s name and with a royal privilege); the Quart Livre (in part 1548, whole 1552); and the Cinquiesme Livre, published after Rabelais’s death in 1553, its first sixteen chapters as L’Isle Sonante in 1562 and whole in 1564. The authorship of the Fifth Book is contested; it is scored as part of the work, since completion by another hand in the course of a work’s life belongs to the work, and its weaker grain is charged on The Inevitable, The Made and The Inner Law. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is scored on Rabelais’s French. M. A. Screech’s Penguin translation (2006), the closest English and annotated from a lifetime’s work on the text, was used for sense; the English of Urquhart and Motteux (1653 to 1694) is a second creation and is neither credited nor charged to Rabelais. French is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own plain English beneath; no published translation is quoted. The French sentence across the whole length is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. The condemnation of the books by the Paris Faculty of Theology is documented and no detail of it is given. Facts that could not be verified, among them the chapter counts of the standard editions, the length of the whole and the author’s movements after the Tiers Livre, are not given. Citations are by book and chapter only where the chapter is certain.