Gargantua and Pantagruel Francois Rabelais

Authorship of The Fifth Book

The authenticity of The Fifth Book has been doubted since it first appeared in 1564.[10] (Rabelais died in 1553.)[11] Both during and after Rabelais' life, books that he did not write were published in his name.[11] The Fifth Book of Pantagruel that usually accompanies the other, certainly genuine, books, is not the only Fifth Book of Pantagruel known to have existed.[11] At least one pseudo-Rabelaisian book was merely subsumed by this Fifth Book that accompanies Rabelais' certain books.[11] It includes much "flatly borrowed [...] and dull material".[10]

Some people believe the book was based on some of Rabelais' papers; some believe that it has "nothing to do with Rabelais".[11] M. A. Screech is of this latter opinion, and, introducing his translation, he bemoans that "[s]ome read back into the Four books the often cryptic meanings they find in the Fifth".[12] Donald M. Frame is of the opinion that, when Rabelais died, he "probably left some materials on where to go on from Book 4",[13] and that somebody, "after some adding and padding",[13] assembled the book that he does not find "either clearly or largely authentic".[13] Frame is "taken with"[10] Mireille Huchon's work in "Rabelais Grammairien",[14] which he cites in support of his opinion. J. M. Cohen, in his Introduction to a Penguin Classics edition, indicates that chapters 17–48 were so out-of-character as to be seemingly written by another person, with the Fifth Book "clumsily patched together by an unskilful editor."[15]

Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais

Mikhail Bakhtin's book Rabelais and His World explores Gargantua and Pantagruel and is considered a classic of Renaissance studies.[16] Bakhtin declares that for centuries Rabelais' book had been misunderstood. Throughout Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin attempts two things. First, to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that in the past were either ignored or suppressed. Secondly, to conduct an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language which was not.[17]

Through this analysis, Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts in Rabelais' work: the first is carnivalesque which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism, which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body.[17]

Bakhtin explains that carnival in Rabelais' work and age is associated with the collectivity, for those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd. Rather the people are seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization.[18] According to Bakhtin, "[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age".[19]

At carnival time, the unique sense of time and space causes the individual to feel he is a part of the collectivity, at which point he ceases to be himself. It is at this point that, through costume and mask, an individual exchanges bodies and is renewed. At the same time there arises a heightened awareness of one's sensual, material, bodily unity and community.[18]

Bakhtin says also that in Rabelais the notion of carnival is connected with that of the grotesque. The collectivity partaking in the carnival is aware of its unity in time as well as its historic immortality associated with its continual death and renewal. According to Bakhtin, the body is in need of a type of clock if it is to be aware of its timelessness. The grotesque is the term used by Bakhtin to describe the emphasis of bodily changes through eating, evacuation, and sex: it is used as a measuring device.[20]

Contradiction and conflicting interpretations

The five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel often open with Gargantua, which itself opens with Socrates, in The Symposium, being likened to Sileni. Sileni, as Rabelais informs the reader, were little boxes "painted on the outside with merry frivolous pictures"[21] but used to store items of high value. In Socrates, and particularly in The Symposium, Rabelais found a person who exemplified many paradoxes, and provided a precedent for his "own brand of serious play".[22] In these opening pages of Gargantua, Rabelais exhorts the reader "to disregard the ludicrous surface and seek out the hidden wisdom of his book";[22] but immediately "mocks those who would extract allegorical meanings from the works of Homer and Ovid".[22] As Rudnytsky says, "the problem of conflicting interpretations broached in the Prologue to Gargantua is reenacted by Rabelais in various forms throughout his work".[22] Moreover, as he points out, this "play of double senses"[22] has misled even the most expert of commentators.[22]

Satire

Rabelais has "frequently been named as the world's greatest comic genius";[23] and Gargantua and Pantagruel covers "the entire satirical spectrum".[24] Its "combination of diverse satirical traditions"[24] challenges "the readers' capacity for critical independent thinking";[24] which latter, according to Bernd Renner, is "the main concern".[24] It also promotes "the advancement of humanist learning, the evangelical reform of the Church, [and] the need for humanity and brotherhood in politics",[23] among other things.

According to John Parkin, the "humorous agendas are basically four":[23]

• the "campaigns in which Rabelais engaged, using laughter to enhance his principles";[23]
• he "derides medieval scholarship both in its methods and its representatives";[23]
• he "mocks ritual prayer, the traffic in indulgences, monasticism, pilgrimage, Roman rather than universal Catholicism, and its converse, dogmatic Protestantism";[23]
• and he "lampoons the emperor Charles V, implying that his policies are tyrannical".[23]