Carnival was introduced to Louisiana in 1699 by the French explorer Pierre LeMoyne d’Iberville. More than 200 years before d’Iberville made his camp at Pointe du Mardi Gras, François Rabelais was born in the Loire valley town of Chinon. He became a Franciscan monk in 1520, and also earned a degree in medicine. Such accomplishments notwithstanding, Rabelais is best known for authoring the comic classic Gargantua and Pantagruel. Originally published in several volumes, the novel relates the history of a gigantic monarch and his son. At one point, young Pantagruel undertakes a voyage of discovery. He and his companions reluctantly find themselves caught up in an epic struggle involving the Andouilles, a tribe of humanoid pork products.
The Andouilles (which can be translated as “Chitterlings”) are in league with the Game Puddings, the Stout Dumplings, and the Mounted Sausages. Together, the allies wage an existential war against the tyrannical King Lent: “The standard bearer of the Ichthyophagi, the dictator of Mustardland, a whipper of small children and a burner of ashes”.
Mistaking them for agents of the oppressor, the Andouilles take up arms against Pantagruel’s party. A brief skirmish ensues, but a wider slaughter is prevented by the sudden appearance of an immense flying hog, with a flamingo’s wings and the webbed feet of a goose. This is none other than the embodiment of Shrove Tuesday, “the tutelary deity in times of war, and the first founder and member of the whole Chitterling race”.
The passage provides a brilliant display of mock heroic style, a literary echo of Bruegel’s painting The Battle of Carnival and Lent. Yet Rabelais’ entire masterpiece has rightly been called carnivalesque. The title characters loom enormously over the story, like floats in a delirious parade. Martial exploits are interspersed with absurd arguments, raunchy humor and scatological asides. Paeans to wine and gluttony abound as Rabelais both parodies and celebrates the wisdom of the ancients, all the while poking fun at the scholarly fads of his own day.
Like Cervantes and Shakespeare, Rabelais was a writer of the Renaissance, but his work can be seen as an extension of the medieval worldview. In many ways, France remained an essentially feudal society long after modern, centralized nation-states emerged in other parts of Europe. The ancien regime was finally, famously abolished in 1789. 128 years later, revolutionary violence would convulse a much larger country.
There is a suitable irony that the most comprehensive study of Gargantua and Pantagruel comes to us from the pen of a Soviet philosopher. Mikhail Bakhtin was born in 1895; the start of his career coincided with the Russian revolution. As the son of bank manager, his background was decidedly bourgeois. In contrast to other intellectuals of his generation, he avoided the harshest persecutions of Stalin’s rule. But following an arrest in 1928, he and wife spent six years of forced exile in Kazakhstan.
After the end of World War II, his dissertation on “grotesque realism” in Rabelais’ work was presented to the Gorky Institute. The research won many admirers, but ultimately the Higher Attestation Commission – a Communist party organ – denied his bid for a doctorate. Rabelais and His World would not be published until 1965, under the relatively moderate leadership of Leonid Brezhnev.
The style and structure of Gargantua and Pantagruel tends to strike modern readers as erratic, even psychotic. Yet Bakhtin argues that Rabelais’ prose would have been far less baffling when it first appeared in print. He contends that the work embodies a folk culture “consecrated by the tradition of popular-festive forms”. Beyond Carnival itself, trade fairs and celebrations like The Feast of The Ass were marked by a “freedom of laughter” that contrasted with the sober dictates of Church and State. In Bakhtin’s telling, vernacular ritual, inherited from antiquity, fueled the Renaissance spirit every bit as much as the more celebrated innovations of sculptors, architects, and painters.
The author’s passion for his subject is undeniable. His knowledge is exhaustive and detailed, even when his analytic tone verges on the exhausting. Of course, academic writing tends to be dense even under ideal circumstances. This is exacerbated whenever open debate is subjected to the hostile scrutiny of politicians. Sadly, this truth is as evident in contemporary Manhattan as it was in central Moscow a century ago.
Examining debauchery through the lens of dialectical materialism, Bakhtin nevertheless conveys the sheer joy of The Tradition:
“Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part.”
Most of this issue was written (in a slightly different form) about 5 years ago, and I just started re-reading GARGANTUA & PANTAGRUEL last week.
I forgot how absolutely raunchy it is! Neither THE DECAMERON or THE CANTERBURY TALES can even approach Rabelais' level of old-school filth😂
Thanks as ever. One of these days I’ll get around to reading Rabelais!