Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 399 - Seriously Funny - Rabelais.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. I may have mentioned at some point that I am an admirer of the silent films of Buster Keaton. One reason they are so entertaining is Keaton's famous stone face demeanor, which he learned as a child on the vaudeville stage in a time when people would pay good money to laugh at Keaton's father, apparently beating him in public. Buster learned that the laughs would be louder if he simply didn't react, maintaining a sober facial expression rather than crying and howling. As the saying goes, treat light things seriously and serious things lightly. In 16th century France, the greatest exponent of this technique was François Vabler, author of a tale spread over four parts, plus a probably mostly inauthentic fifth additional part, following the adventures of two giants named Pantagol and Gargantua. Vabler is himself a giant of literature in the French language, who has been called the most difficult classical author of world religion by one of his most famous 20th century interpreters, the Russian scholar Mikhail Bartin. The difficulties are many. Vabler used stunningly varied and creative language, with different registers of speech, slang and technical vocabulary, made-up words and puns that presuppose a readership as a home in both Latin and the French vernacular of the time. When the third major character, Panourege, makes his appearance, he introduces himself in a whole series of languages, or rather, parodic versions of languages, including Greek and English, before revealing that he's actually a native French speaker. The books are also full of pointed topical references and jokes about contemporary events, which will pass you by if you don't follow along using a learned commentary. Vabler's sense of humor also presents some obstacles to the modern reader. We can appreciate the irony of treating war and tyranny as a joke, or staging an apparently serious disquisition about the best way to wipe one's bottom, but it might not actually make us laugh. Speaking of which, there's also the regular, extensive, extravagant vulgarity. Vabler is rarely outright obscene, since he usually speaks about such matters as sex and excretion using metaphors. Codpiece, for instance, is one of his favorite words. The prologue to Pantagruel even advertises another supposed work of his called On the Dignity of Codpieces. But his vivid imagery leaves mercilessly little to the imagination, whether he is proposing the idea of building a fortress out of women's genitals because they are a challenge to conquer and can be had so cheaply, or describing the flood that ensued when the giant gargantua relieved himself in Paris. This is how the city got its name, because he decided to inundate the population with urine just for a laugh, par-ri. Another major preoccupation of Vabler is drinking and drunkenness. Pantagruel's name means always thirsty, and gargantua's first words directly after being born are to call for drink. It is this aspect of the work that Bachten especially had in mind when he described it as difficult. He saw the books as the late flowering of a tradition that has been lost in modern times, a style of folk humor epitomized by the reversals and rule-breaking observed during the time of Carnival. In this spirit, Rablait takes license to laugh at everything and everyone. He plunges his reader into an unapologetically material world where basic bodily functions are exaggerated so as to become grotesque while remaining grounded in recognizable physical reality. As Bachten put it, medieval laughter found its highest expression in Rablait's novel. It became the form of a new free and critical historical consciousness. Even in Rablait's own day, high literature was already departing from such squalid matters, as we can see from the high-minded poetry of his contemporaries in the playette. Yet those poets were still able to appreciate comedy of this sort and even indulge in it themselves. Kwanzal wrote humorous verses as an epitaph for Rablait, which described him spending every day drunk contented like a frog in mud. After death, wine grows from his buried corpse. A bit later, Montaigne classed the books of Rablait as simply amusing. This was not necessarily a criticism, since it was this kind of book Montaigne admitted to liking best. But it was still an underestimation of Rablait, a failure to heed the warning laid down in the prologue of Pantagoule. Alluding to a passage in Plato's Symposium in which Alcibiades speaks of the philosophical riches hidden within Socrates, Rablait tells us to uncover the deeper meaning of the outrageous material that is to follow, like someone breaking a bone to suck out the marrow. That reference to Plato might make you wonder, wait, is this Rablait yet another French humanist obsessed with ancient sources, dismissive of the scholastics, and proud of his attainments in Latin and Greek scholarship? In a word, we. His tale is packed with allusions to Plato and Neoplatonists, like Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, peripatetics like Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias, and even thinkers of the Islamic world, like Avicenna. Many of these allusions are invented jokes. Alexander is cited on the pivotal question of why lions are afraid of roosters. But Rablait does genuinely draw on philosophical and scientific literature, in the latter department showing particular expertise in medicine is when he provides exaggeratedly exact descriptions of horrific battle wounds such as only an anatomist could do. In fact, Rablait was renowned for his expertise in the field of medicine. He studied this subject at Montpellier and was a doctor at the public hospital in Lyon. He then became physician to Jean Dubélé, bishop of Paris, and then his brother, Guillaume. In Guillaume's entourage, Rablait traveled to Italy before coming into the service of a final patron, the Cardinal de Chastillon. Étienne Dolais refers to Rablait giving learned commentary on an anatomical dissection, though it is not clear whether he himself was wielding the knife. Of course, in this period, there was no tension between an interest in medicine and an interest in classical texts. To the contrary, mastery of this discipline presupposed familiarity with authors of antiquity like Galen and Hippocrates. We have copies of their works that were annotated by Rablait personally, and the same goes for books by Plato and Plutarch. Perhaps nothing epitomizes his humanist credentials so well as a copy of Plato's dialogues in Greek on which he wrote, This belongs to Franciscus Rablait, the excellent doctor, and his Christian friends. Speaking of his friends, he dedicated the third book of his novel to Marit de Nérar, and corresponded in Latin with other humanists like Erasmus and Boudet. To Boudet, he expresses the paradigmatic Renaissance conviction that All humanity, or nearly all, is regaining its ancient splendor. The same idea appears in Gargantua, in a letter written from the title character to his son Pantagur. Gargantua deplores the medieval period, when all good literature was destroyed, hails new advances like the printing press, and celebrates the spread of facility in Greek and Latin, as well as Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Pantagur is encouraged to learn these languages and to imitate Plato when writing Greek and Cicero for Latin. Gargantua hopes that Pantagur will become a bottomless pit of knowledge. By contrast, Rablait would clearly like to consign some scholars of his time to a real bottomless pit. His books feature parodies of the Scholastics, like a Parisian scholar who speaks in typically Rabelasian gibberish. In the 17th-century English translation by Thomas Urquhart, often praised for capturing the feel of the French original, this passage reads in part, I demigrate into one of these so well minsters, and there, Irritating myself with fair lustral water, I mumble off little parcels of some misic parkation of our sacrificules, and submurmurating my horary prequels, I elevate and absterge my anime from its nocturnal inclinations. Scholasticism is also sent up by using its technical language in inappropriate contexts, as when the urge to get drunk is explained on the grounds that privatio praesoponit habitum, with the added comment, I am learned, you see. There are also mock scholastic accounts of vulgar phenomenon, like the marvelously fresh and cool nature of women s thighs. A kind of elaborate disputed question on whether it is wise to marry dominates the third book we ll come back to that later. Most entertaining may be the list of fictional books found in the Library of Saint Victor, which goes on for pages and includes such entries as On Bacon and Peas with Commentary, and Apology Against Those Who Alleged that the Pope s Mule Eats Only at Set Times. Pontegrul himself is trained as a scholastic philosopher, and decides to post publicly a list of no fewer than 9,764 propositions for debate. It s an obvious parody of Pico della Mirandola, who in real life proposed to defend a list of 900 theses, which in all honesty is only slightly less ridiculous. Scholastic lawyers likewise come in for rough treatment. In the same chapter as the jive at Pico, we find the complaint that the university jurists are ignorant of classical languages, have studied less philosophy than a mule, and know less about history than a toad has feathers. It's hardly surprising that the theologians of Paris at the Sorbonne put Rablé on their list of dangerous books in 1542-1553. What may be more surprising is that works like these should have come from a man of the church. He was at first a Franciscan fire, then a Benedictine monk. to square with the traditional picture of his writing as irreverent or even atheistic. Fortunately that interpretation was refuted by Lucien Fafre, who in 1942 made a persuasive case that religion was, for Rablé, one of those serious matters that he chose to treat lightly. His books consistently adopt reformist positions, whether by attacking the laziness of monks, recommending private study of the Bible in the original, or warning that human desire leads inevitably to sin, if not guided by grace. On this point, Fafre makes much of a passage where Rablé seems to follow the Lutheran teaching on good works. Help yourself, and God will break your neck. A famous passage in Praintegoule can be read as combining Rablé's humanist and reformist tendencies. It is a description of an abbey called D'elain, and is notable for not being particularly amusing. If read straight and not as parody, it sets out the author's ideas for a utopian community. Utopia was an abiding interest of Rablé, who elsewhere in the books refers to an island called Medamoti, this means nowhere in Greek, recalling the etymology of utopia, and of course reminding the well-informed reader of Thomas More's work of that name. The inscription on the gate of this abbey welcomes those who reflect upon scripture while banning corrupt lawyers, clerks, scribes, as well as the greedy, diseased, and vicious. The inhabitants of the abbey are noble folk of both sexes, who take vows of chastity and poverty yet adopt as their motto, do as you will. By itself, that injunction could suggest moral laxity or even relativism. In context, though, it is a deeply Christian idea, which recalls a famous sentence of Augustine, love and do what you will. What Rablé means is that once we have accepted God's guidance and pledged ourselves to love him and our fellow humans, whatever we do will inevitably be good. This explains why the residents of Thelem, which by the way means will in Greek, in doing whatever they want, all wind up behaving in exactly the same way. Thus far then we've learned that Rablé, despite his distinctive and often scandalous style as a writer, was very much a man of his time. The intellectual currents of humanism and reform run below the chaotic surface of his tales. But did he contribute anything more distinctive that would interest the historian of philosophy as opposed to the literary historian? For a start, we shouldn't be hasty in letting the literature people claim Rablé's language for their own. Even if you can't read him in the original, you can see that he's doing some philosophically very interesting things with French. His wordplay, his lists, his habit of piling up dozens of synonyms in what has been called his penchant for gibberish, all draw our attention to the artificiality of words and the relationships between words, within one language and across languages. Even the author's name is a matter of linguistic trickery. The books were published under the pen name Alco Früblas Nacier, an anagram of François Rablé. From its title page onward, the work demonstrates that language is a creation of humankind, one subject to our whims and our manipulations. As if in confirmation of this, at one point Rablé has Pantagruel explicitly assert a conventionalist theory of language, that is, has him argue that spoken sounds do not have their meanings in themselves, but through arbitrary fiat. This is proven by the fact that lip readers can understand language without even hearing the sounds. An evocative part of the fourth book imagines a place so cold that words freeze into jewel-like colored ice and then become audible when they thaw. To be honest, I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but it is certainly cool, in every sense of the word. Maybe it is intended to point out the disparity between living, spoken language, and recorded language, which Früblé, living before phonographs and podcasts, would have meant the written word. If that's right, then he may be suggesting that writing is inert, in a sense not language at all, until it is used, as by being read aloud so that its meaning is understood. On the other hand, the first sounds to thaw are not words at all, merely noises, but that fits with the way Rablé more generally blurs the line between language and non-language by using nonsense and onomatopoeia. Two more philosophically rewarding passages are found in the third book. Early on in this installment, there is a pair of speeches given by Panourege and Pantagruel, first in favor of and then against the idea of being in debt. As we know, there was a fine tradition of writing in comia for things that are commonly despised, hence that joke about writing in praise of the codpiece. Erasmus' praise of folly would be the most famous humanist example, though a closer comparison to this section in Rablé would be Poggio Bracciolini's dialogue about avarice, which I covered back in episode 354. As with Poggio's rhetorical setpiece in favor of greed, Panourege's defense of debt can be read as parodic, as sincere, or probably better, as both. The initial points made are simply jokes, and pretty good ones at that. Panourege says you should always be in debt to someone so that at least somebody is praying for you not to die. Furthermore, philosophers since antiquity have been wrong to say that nothing comes from nothing. From having nothing, I make creditors. But as his speech goes on, the notion of debt is broadened out to refer to all cases of exchange in the universe. Here it may be relevant that the French dét can mean both debts and necessities. Thus the elements are paying a debt when they transform into one another, and the heavens do the same by performing the motions that they owe. A lengthy part of the speech once again showcases Rablé's medical knowledge, as he describes the exchanges that happen within the human body. Thus typical Renaissance themes of balance and harmony, and the human body is a microcosm, a smaller version of that well-ordered universe, are creatively brought into dialogue with questions of economics. Intriguing though this is, most readers of the third book will come away from it remembering, above all, the central disputation about whether Panourege should get married. This was a standard topic for demonstrating rhetorical brilliance, and it's another echo of Erasmus, who wrote a treatise praising marriage. Remember that this is another theme relevant to the Reformation. Luther waged a battle against the Catholic valorization of chastity. Predictably, Rablé's approach to the topic is more satirical. His character Panourege is attracted by the thought that, if he takes a wife, he will be able to satisfy his sexual desires without sin, but he's beset by the fear that his wife will be unfaithful. He encounters a series of advisors, including a theologian, a lawyer, an occult scientist, and a doctor, who give him wildly varying advice about the only thing these speeches have in common is that they are all useless. Now, there are at least two ways to approach this part of the book, and, as usual with Rablé, they're probably both right. More obviously, he's contributing to the ongoing debate over the merits of women, the so-called caral de femme. Panourege's obsession with adulterous betrayal is fed by worries about the bad character of women, something emphasized by the medical advisor. This doctor says that given the weakness of the female sex, cuckoldry follows marriage like a shadow follows the body. He discourses on an idea found in Plato's Timaeus, that the womb is like an animal in its own right that can move around the female body, causing anatomical mayhem and erratic behavior. But of course, we should not necessarily take the most misogynist speakers as representing Rablé's own view. More likely, he is satirizing the whole debate and making fun of all sides—the women haters, mocked for their crass hostility and pseudoscience, even as the women lovers are accused of wanting an excuse to, well, love women. As one scholar has put it, he is much more an amused spectator than a partisan participant of the battle between the sexes. A second, less obvious approach to the debate about marriage would be to read it as an indirect reflection on another controversial topic, divine predestination. The idea would be that Panurge's fear of having an unfaithful wife stands in for the fear of damnation. While that may not apply to this whole part of the third book, it certainly seems to fit the discussion between Panurge and a theologian character called Hippodate. He offers the advice that if Panurge does marry, then his wife will cheat on him if God wills it, but if not, then not. Panurge objects to this scholastic appeal to conditional arguments. To be sure of his wife's faithfulness, he would have to attend God's privy council. Here then, Rabelais thematizes anxiety about the obscure workings of God's will—a serious matter indeed presented in the comic form of a man who is caught between lust and fear of betrayal. I mentioned in passing earlier that this part of Rabelais's four-part novel was dedicated to none other than Marguerite de Navarre. As far as I know, we have no evidence what she thought of it, but given that her heptameron likewise mixes the profane with the profound, I find it pretty easy to imagine her chuckling along while reading about the adventures of Panzecor and friends. Actually, these two authors have something else in common. They both include characters who are barely disguised versions of contemporaries. In Rabelais, one of the easiest to identify is the occult scientist Herr Tripper, who was obviously a stand-in for Agrippa von Netzesheim. A wicked king named Pirchol probably represents the emperor Charles V, and it's been at least speculated that the theologian Hippo the Thee is meant to be a leading intellectual of the day, Jacques Lefebvre de Taple. He was yet another of these humanists we keep meeting, but an unusual one in that he moved within the world of scholasticism, writing treatises and commentaries on various parts of Aristotelian philosophy. So we'll be meeting him soon as we turn our attention to the University of Paris and see what they were getting up to there apart from condemning books they didn't like. First though, you may have noticed that we're about to reach a significant milestone—episode 400 of this podcast series. That's 500 fewer than the number of propositions defended by Picot, and 9,364 fewer than the number defended by Pantagruel, but still worth celebrating. For which purpose, I'll be joined next time by three other philosophy podcasters to ask and answer such questions as whether it is wise to wed yourself to the project of producing a philosophy podcast. That's next time here on the 400th installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.