Progress Report Number 5
March 13, 1998
Although modern scholarship calls Gargantua and Pantagruel a collection of four books written by Francois Rabelais, the Penguin Classics edition I read, and even the edition published by Encyclopedia Britannica, in their set of Great Books of the Western World, contains five books. The problem with saying Rabelais only wrote four of them is that the first four do not contain the end of the main story—the arrival of Pantagruel and his company at the Shrine of Bacbuc to consult the Holy Bottle on Panurge’s question of whether he shall be cuckolded if he marries.
Whoever wrote the fifth book did give us a very detailed description of this shrine and of the oracle uttered by the Holy Bottle. The style of writing in this book is much like that of the preceding four books. The two episodes from books four and five that stand out most clearly in my memory and admiration are:
The first of these describes the ruin that has come upon the people of Popefig island, formerly known as the Jollyboys, for having displayed a sign of disrespect toward an image of the Pope while visiting Papimania island. The people of Papimania, led by Greatclod, are devout to a fault—namely, confusing the Pope for God, and the Papal Decretals (transcriptions of answers made by the Pope to a few specific questions of belief) for the Holy Bible.
The second of these outstanding naratives is the description of the underground passages and temple of Bacbuc, particularly the vivid descriptions of mosaics of Bacchus’s victory over the Indians, the wonderful lamp which lit the Temple, and the verdict of the Bottle spoken to Panurge.
Book four and five contain many more imaginative and wild descriptions of island inhabitants that are met with on the voyage. A modern reader might well ask whether the author had smoked some of the hemp he described at the end of book three while writing of these adventures. The Penguin book publishers offer an excellent summarization of the worth of this book in saying that "the caricatures and the episodes are piled up, figure by far-fetched figure, situation by extravagant situation, to give us an extraordinary picture of the intellectual and moral life of an era."
Truthfully, I’ll have to say I’m relieved to finish the book. There are so many mythological references, that the ordinary reader can easily become worn down by not knowing of all this arcane knowledge. In addition, the reader frequently has to guess, or wonder at, some of the objects of parody that ought to be evident in the narrative--and may well have been to the people of that time. Because it was somewhat entertaining all the way to the very end, it really was worth the persistence that drove me on to find out the conclusion of the book.
It would be a really awful school assignment to have to read this book in a short period of time. If one reads it at leisure, as I did, it can be a very agreeable companion for an occasional laugh of two. Sooner or later, though, even the leisurely reader would start yearning for something with a little more substance and sobriety. Rabelais would truly curse me for that last sentence. As the Britannica CD 98 Multimedia Edition puts it, "Intoxication--with life, with learning, with the use and abuse of words--is the prevailing mood of the book."
Copyright 1998, Herman Fontenot
Back up to another of the five articles on Gargantua and Pantagruel: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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