Francois Rabelais
This guy's an acquired taste -- he is at the same time the most obscure and the most disgusting of all the great authors. But if you give his "Gargantua and Pantagruel" a try, you might like it.
Obscure and Disgusting? Who Is This Guy?
Obscure? Well, in the words of Rabelais scholar M. A. Screech (whose book on Rabelais is mandatory reading), "Scholarly and literary Frenchmen have been known to classify Rabelais as the most difficult author of any period writing in French."
Disgusting? Consider that an entire chapter of "Gargantua" (Chapter Thirteen, if you'd like to run out and read it) consists of the young Gargantua's quest for the perfect object with which to wipe his ass after a bowel movement. After trying almost everything he can fit between his cheeks, he finally settles on --
Well, you'll have to check the bottom of the page for the answer.
Allright -- You've Convinced Me. He's Obscure And Disgusting. So Why Should I Read a Pornographic Book Written By a 16th Century French Monk?
Perhaps because, as one of his best translators has put it, "His work is the deepest, most far-reaching expression that we have of that consuming thirst for the abundant life that was characteristic of the men of the Renaissance."
Or, as Clifton Fadiman put it in his encomium to Rabelais and his masterpiece in "The Lifetime Reading Plan":
"It is a wild, sane, wonderful, exasperating, sometimes tedious extravaganza. Although it is open to a dozen interpretations, one thing at least can be said of it: It is the work of a supreme genius of language whose vitality and power of verbal invention are matched only by Shakespeare and Joyce.... The tone varies. It is serious (we have still to catch up with Rabelais's ideas on education), mock-serious, satirical, fantastic, always exuberant. However, even at his wildest, Rabelais evidences two well-blended strains: one proceeding from his humanist conviction that all men desire knowledge and that all knowledge is a joyous and attainable thing (the book is, among other things, an encyclopedia); the other flowing from his personal conviction that 'laughter is the essence of mankind.'"
Now come on -- aren't you the teeniest bit intrigued at this point?
Helpful Hints for Rabelaisian Newbies
Pick the right translation: this means avoiding Urquhart-Motteux.
Why? Because, in the words of one translator of Rabelais, although the Urquhart-Motteux translation (or Urquhart's part of it, anyway) is "a masterpiece of seventeenth-century English prose... many persons today find the Urquhart version, even with modern editing, extremely difficult when not unintelligible reading... [Urquhart] was unfamiliar with many of the allusions in [Rabelais] which have only been cleared up by late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars ... As a consequence, in order to cover up his ignorance of the real-life context or his uncertainty as to the meaning involved, Urquhart very often improvises, expands, and embroiders upon the text, dumping into it upon occasion all the synonyms for a French word that he has found in his [dictionary]."
In other words, while Urquhart's translation can be said to be a classic in its own right, and has been hugely influential (at least two subsequent translators of Rabelais -- Smith and LeClercq -- have admitted to having Urquhart's version open in front of them while doing their own translations), it is both dated in its diction and too far removed from the original to be acceptable as an accurate translation by modern standards. Fortunately, there are several good modern translations of "Gargantua and Pantagruel" to choose from.
Reading It Out Of Sequence
It also helps if you read the five books of "Gargantua and Pantagruel" in the order in which they were written -- which is not the order in which they are printed.
This means you should read them in this order: Books 2, 1, 3, 4.
Rabelais wrote "Pantagruel" first, then "Gargantua," then the Third and Fourth Books. I think it helps (a little) to read them in that order -- at least the first time.
There is a Book Five, published several years after Rabelais' death. Its status is a little problematic.
What About Book Five?
Scholars disagree on the subject of the fifth, posthumous book of "Gargantua and Pantagruel." Some think it authentic, others consider it to be a makeshift volume cobbled together by unknown editors from incomplete drafts left by Rabelais at his death, with material added that was not written by Rabelais. Some believe the book to be totally spurious. A good and concise discussion of the issue is on pps. 909-10 of Donald M. Frame's translation.
The two best Rabelais scholars of our time split on this issue: M. A. Screech thinks it's totally fake. Donald M. Frame considers it to be, at least partly, authentic.
"Not only is [the Fifth Book's] authenticity still open to question," writes Samuel Putnam," its creative inferiority to the other books is apparent to anyone. It is the Gargantua and the three books of the Pantagruel, published during his lifetime and revised by him, by which Rabelais must be judged."
Some Rabelais Links:
This is a good short account of Rabelais' life and work:
Francois Rabelais
This is a French website about the birthplace of Rabelais:
La maison natale de François Rabelais
This online magazine specializing in "literate smut" gives you just a taste of Rabelais (in translation and the original):
Nerve Magazine - Jack's Naughty Bits
Texts
The Pleiade edition is scholarly but pricey (I think it's something like $150, but don't quote me). For those who read modern French, Guy Demerson's edition (Paris, 1973) prints a modern French translation alongside the original, which can be helpful. Burton Raffel refers to this parallel translation as "loose and sometimes cavalierly inaccurate," but in the same Preface he misspells the name of Jacques LeClercq -- so what does he know?
Translations
The best available translation -- and by far the most expensive version in print -- is by Donald M. Frame. It's from the University of California Press, is only available in hardcover, and costs something like $85.
J. M. Cohen's and Burton Raffel's translations are both readily available in paperback -- Cohen from Penguin, Raffel from Norton. These are the most accessible and inexpensive versions available, and most people who want to read Rabelais will probably read either one or the other of these. Neither of them has many notes to speak of, though, and that's troubling: if any writer ever needed copious annotation, that writer is Francois Rabelais.
The only English versions of Rabelais that give you any kind of adequate annotation are Smith's, Putnam's and Frame's. Jacques LeClercq (whose once-popular translation, in the Modern Library edition, can be found fairly easily in second-hand bookstores) places into the text of his translation explanations that should be put in a footnote -- an understandable flaw, given the difficulty of the text, but one that would not be countenanced nowadays. As Putnam puts it, "That seems hardly fair to the author, since it not only puts into his mouth things that he did not say and possibly never would have said, but also spoils the rhythm of the original."
Avoid the Everyman's Library edition, which reprints the famous Urquhart-Motteux translation, for the reasons given above.
The translation of Rabelais that badly needs to be returned to print in a good edition is Samuel Putnam's. While an abridged version of it has been available (although not currently) as "The Portable Rabelais," his complete translation has been out of print for decades.
Biographies and Critical Studies
A good biography is by Jean Plattard. It is, of course, out of print.
The best critical books on Rabelais are by Donald M. Frame and M. A. Screech. Both are, of course, out of print.
If you know French you might want to find Guy Demerson's study (Paris: Fayard, 1991).
Mikhail Bahktin has written a hugely influential book on Rabelais called "Rabelais and His World," which is in print in paperback.
Two recent critical books on Rabelais (both in print -- for now) are "Rabelais Revisited" by Elizabeth Chesney Zegura and Marcel Tetel, and "Rabelais" by Michael J. Heath (I particularly like the latter -- it's a good, unpretentious introduction to a very difficult author).
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Answer to the question posed above (and don't think I don't realize that you're dying to hear the answer): "I say and maintain [says Gargantua] that there is no ass-wipe like a good downy gosling, provided you hold his head between your legs."
Aren't you glad you know that?
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