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Renaissance orality and Literary Banquets
JEANNERET, Michel
JEANNERET, Michel. Renaissance orality and Literary Banquets. In: Hollier, D. New History of French Literature . Cambridge Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1989. p. 159-162
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15 34, Fa!! · Renaissance Ora!ity and Literary Banquets
placing the telos from the end tO the center, Rabelais transformed thar relos from the complete revelation and final solution of the r 5 32 Pantagruel into a provisional revelation and a solution of a decidedly less final kind. Gradually and systematically, he subverted the utopian idea of a definitive answer, along with its implications of completion, plenitude, and certainty. The result is an increasing sense of permanent and irremediable incompleteness, which is com- pensared only by sorne ethical principle, revealed at the center. This principle is not an end but a never-exbausred means, and a constant! y renewed beginning.
Ir is a stable principle of action thar allows the hero tO continue to act with assurance, even iq a very un-uropian world characrerized by unending contin- geney and violence. As such ir also serves as a stable principle of interpretation that allows the reader ro continue ro read and to understand with sorne degree of certainty, even in the absence of a final, definitive revelation of meaning.
Seealso 1512, 1534 (Fall), 1534 (17-18 October), 1942.
Bibliography: Mikhail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problem.J of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Gérard Defaux, Pan- tagruel et les sophistes: Contribution à l'histoire de l'humanisme chrétien au XVIe siècle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). Edwin M. Duval, "Panurge, Perplexîty, and the Ironie Design of Rabelais's Tiers Livre," Renaissance Quarter/y, 35 (1982), 381-400. Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press·, 1982). Abel Lefranc, Rabelais:
Etudes sur Gargantua, Pantagruel, le Tiers livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1953). François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans.]. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955).
Rabelais, Oeuvres complèteJ, cd. Pierre Jourda, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1962). François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1972). Michael A. Screcch, Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).
Edwin M. Duval
Q:;0)
1534, Fa!!
Rabelais Publishes Gargantua Anonymously inTime for the Fair in Lyons Thar Follows the Harvest of the Grapes
Renaissance Orality and Literary Banquèts
"As soon as he was born, he cried nor as orher babes use ro do, miez, miez, rniez, but with a high, sturdy and big voice shouted about, Sorne drink, sorne drink, sorne drink, as inviting ail the world to drink with him'" (Gargantua, p. 9). This is the first babble of the baby Gargantua; it has been taken for the voice of the Renaissance itself, thirsting for life and knowledge. We are at the beginning of the novel. The giant cornes into the world during a feast in the country, where meats, wines, and enjoyment are overflowing. The hero's des- tiny and the whole book rhus open on this note of joyous abundance. Rabelais's first novel, Pantagruel (r532), bad also srarred as a srory of a bout of overearing,
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15 34, Pal! · Renaissance Orality and Literary Banquets
during which the bodies of the first men, at the beginnîng of the world, bad swollen up and given birth to the race of giams. The inaugural act, which creates life and appeals to the reader, is, theo, the invitation to share copious nourishment.
Mikhail Bakhtin bas decisive! y established the links between Rabelais's work and the ideology and images of the- carnival. For people whose normal lot was famines and fastings, these overflowing menus symbolized nature's bounty, her fertility, and also the continuation of vital energies in a productive cycle renewed after the dead season. In this perspective, hunger and sexual impulses often go together, and to admit to, to satisfy, enormous appetites is also to daim thar instincts are legitimate and that supposedly shaineful organs are wholesome. When he sits clown at table, man frees himself from moral embar- goes and renews his harmonious relationship with nature and society. By praising good food in his first two novels, Rabelais expresses a naturalistic and vitalistic ideal and recreares rites and myrhs that are deeply rooted in folklore.
Later, ir is true, in the Quart livre (1552; Pourth Book), the feast becomes an orgy, and abundance turns imo excess: the stomach (Messere Gasrer) looks like a monster, and Rabelais makes gluttons (Andouilles, Papimanes, Gastrolâtres) violent and repulsive.
In the prologue to Gargantua, the author,. in the guise of a happy fellow drinker-he daims to have dictated his book while drinking ao'd eating- invires his readers not merely to drink and have fun with him, but also to break open the bone and to suck its "substantifie" marrow. It is as if feasts and liba- tions created a favorable framework for literary communication-a ki nd of lit- erature that in this way emphasizes its solidarity with the basic gestures of everyday life.
Oral reciting, reading aloud, whether during the meal or afterward, was of course an old tradition, in courts as well as in cottages, and one thar Rabelais was probably trying to keep alive despite the recent introduction of printing.
But as a humanist, he also refers to classical examples. He could have claimed the Odyssey as a mode!: Ulysses relis of sorne of his adventures during a feast among the Phaeacians, with the meats roasting and the cups being passed around. But an allusion at the beginning of the same prologue to Plato's Sym- posium points ro the Greek tradition of the philosophical banquet, where a group of friends, inspired by the wine (syn-posion, to drink together), talk freely about a subject thar is both entertaining and serious. The confidence and well-being that prevail among the guests create the conditions for a quest unhampered by systems, a collective experimental search for truth. The com- plememary ideal of the gospels' Last Supper, where the communion of the apostles is consecrated by the sharing of bread and wine, reinforces for the humanises the symbolic value of the banquet. For Plutarch in his Table-Talk (in Moralia) and for Erasmus, an essential mode! for Rabelais, in the severa! ban- quets to be found in his Colloquia (rsrS, 1526; Colloquies), the friendly circle of eaters creates the image of a society giving itself up without restraint to the
~Co quest for wisdom and satisfying simultaneously the appetites of the body and
J 1534, Pal! · Renaissance Orality and Literary Banquets
the curiosity of the mind. The head does the thinking, the conversation stimu- lates reflection and helps ideas circulate, while mourh and stomach take plea- sure in food. In the ideal integration of the banquet, man can sarisfy all his faculties, intellecrual, moral, and sensual. Montaigne (Essais, Ill, r3) agrees with many of his contemporaries when he explains that a good meal, seasoned with good conversation, creares for the individual a special occasion in which he can bring ali his capacities into harmonious play, and th us realize an essential aim of humanistic ethîcs.
Literary banquets in lare antiquity-after those of Plato and Xenophon- changed their character: the works of Plutarch (Table-Talk and The Dinner of the Seven Wise Men), Athenaeus (The Deipnosophists, or Sophists at Dinner), and Macrobius (Saturnalia) have an aim thar is JeSs. philosophical than learned and encyclopedie. They are enormous catalogues designed to conserve knowledge.
The fiction of a meal, with its desultory conversation, allowed these learned writers to accumulate literary memories, practical observations, philological remarks, and so on. The French humanisrs, who strove ro store as vast a number of documents on ancient culture as possible, liked this sort of compilation.
They published and rranslated those of antiquity and, especially in the second half of the r 6th century, produced many miscellanies. Guillaume Bouchet's Les sérées (1584- r598; Evenings) illustrates how the genre bad evolved. The struc- ture of a meal permits the proliferation of anecdotes, bits of erudition, and serious or amusing subjecrs with the intention of collecting multifarious pieces of knowledge. A mere concern for quantity tends to overlay the pleasure in the story and the festive atmosphere that existed in Rabelais. Nevertheless, this reflex of encyclopedie accumulation is profoundly rooted in the mentality of the period. Whether in a symposium form or not, there are many examples of this gluttonous raste for miscellanies in which learning, wisdom, and science are heaped in profusion (see, for example, the works of Pierre Boaistuau, Pierre de La Primaudaye, François Béroalde de Yerville, and Pierre Messie).
The literary deviee of conversation at a banquet shows up two important and dosely related tendencies in r 6th-century lirerature. As we have seen, the spontaneous and composite nature of table talk corresponds to a generalized emphasis on abundance: humanise texts are often prolix, heterogeneous, and apparently disordered; they are not bound by the prin2iples of order, clarity, and sobriety thar ruled in the following century. With this structural freedom cornes a great license in the handling of the language, bestowing on Renaissance works-those of Rabelais and of such ~bort story writers as Margaret of Navarre, Bonaventure Des Périers, Noël du Fail-an extraordinary charm: the syntax and the vocabulary are still elasric, word:; can be invented, and all sorts of special effecrs can be created by style, which the purism of the subsequent classical era forbade. In particular the fiction of a dialogue at table authorizes and encourages linguistic fantasy. When they joke, the guests like to play on words; they use vulgar rerms; they parody noble or learned rurns of phrase; they indulge in medleys of different languages and different genres, as if the prox- imity to food gave the words a flavor and a sonorous substance richer than in
1534, 17-18 October · Evangelism
ordinary use. Béroalde de Verville's Le moyen de parvenir (ca. r6ro; The Way to Succeed), a literary banquet of an extraordinarily free composition and inventive style, proves in virtuose fashion that literature is also a matter of conviviality and thar, when fable sits at table, good words are as palatable as good wine.
Seeal.so 1512, 1532.
Bibliography: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène lswolsky (Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Michel Jeanneret, De.r mets et des mots: Banquets et propo! de table à la Renairsance (Paris: José Corti, 1987).
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux (Chicago: W. Bemon, r952).
Michel Jeanneret
0P':l 1534, 17-18 October
The Posting of Violent Anti-Catholic Placards in France's Main Cities and on the Very Door of Francis I's Room Launches a Period of Systematic Repression
Evangelism
In his letter of 22 December 1521 ro Margaret of Alençon, sister of King Francis I and future queen of Navarre, Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, echoed what Luther and others bad said before, what Clément Marot, Rabe- lais, and Calvin would repeat soon rhereafter: "The warer rhar flows from the abyss of wisdom and of evangelical doctrine is nor being supplied by those who are in charge of ir, bence the sterility and drought of souls, and not because of a lack of water . . . The church is today arid and dry like a torrent during the hlgh beat of summer. Everyone is looking out for his own welfare and advancemenr. No one is concerned about God anymore. We are complerely given to terrestrial matters, when we should be aU spirit. And this is because we lack of rhe warer of wisdom and evangelical doctrine, which does nor flow and is nor supplied as ir should'' (Correspondance, r :85).
The church was indeed ailing. Weak.ened by the sophistry and intelleCrual arrogance of its theologians, the immoral behavior of îts prelates, the perry rivalries among its monastic orders, the ignorance and superstitions of the vast majority of irs members, ir was no longer able ro meer rhe new spirirual needs of Chrisrianiry. Those whose responsibility it was to supply "the water of wisdom and of evangelical doctrine" bad become slaves to their own appetites.
Wholly "terrestrial" and corporeal beings, they resembled in every way rhe oxen of scripture condemned by St. Augustine, or the happy, smug and troubling
"Papimanes" (Pope Lovers) whom Rabelais would soon satirize so brillianrly in his Quart livre (1552; Fourth Book). Forrunarely, the remedy was simple; it was, for Briçonnet, inscribed in the very nature of the sickness itself. To slake the
