RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS (c. 1483–1553)

RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS (c. 1483–1553), French writer. Little is known about Rabelais's early life; even the year of his birth remains uncertain. He was born near Chinon, in the Loire valley, and refers affectionately to the region in his work. As a young man Rabelais joined the Franciscans (c. 1510), studied both theology and law, and frequented or corresponded with leading humanist scholars of the day. By 1521 he had become a priest and acquired the reputation of being both an excellent scholar of Greek and a troublemaker, as his Franciscan superiors confiscated his Greek books. By the early 1530s, having first left the Franciscans for the Benedictines, and then left monastic life entirely to become a secular priest, he was a prominent physician living in Lyon, the cultural (and publishing) capital of France at that time. There he took up a position at a hospital, began a correspondence with Desiderius Erasmus, and published several medical texts.

In the fall of 1532, Rabelais published a very different sort of text: Pantagruel, the first of the comic works to which he owes his fame. The book's considerable commercial success did not keep it (or Rabelais's subsequent works) from being condemned by the Sorbonne, whose faculty of theology acted as the church's office of censorship. Nonetheless, Rabelais's patrons shielded him well enough that he could follow up on Pantagruel's success by publishing Gargantua in late 1534 or early 1535. Gargantua was in its turn both successful and highly controversial; Rabelais chose, in the increasingly dangerous politico-religious climate of the mid-1530s, to publish less and to avoid France as much as possible. He spent a great deal of time in Italy in the late 1530s and early 1540s, often with members of the powerful du Bellay family, who continued to protect him. After twelve years of intermittent exile and silence, Rabelais published, in 1546, the Tiers Livre. Given the controversy it excited, Rabelais judged it prudent once again to leave town, taking refuge this time in Metz. In 1548 he returned to Rome at the request of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, along the way leaving an incomplete draft of the Quart Livre with his publisher in Lyon. The latter printed it immediately, perhaps to the annoyance of Rabelais, who did not produce the final version until January 1552. The Quart Livre was, like Rabelais's previous volumes, promptly attacked by the Sorbonne, but thanks to the author's fame and connections the censors could not prevent publication. Rabelais died in the early 1550s, probably on 9 April 1553. A Cinquième Livre, published several years after Rabelais's death, in 1564, is of dubious, or at best partial, authenticity.

The four authentic books together constitute a comic masterpiece of the first order, unique in Western literature. Pantagruel, in appearance a mass-market book, a parody of popular chivalric romances filled with superhuman heroes, fabulous monsters, and often obscene humor, is in fact an immensely complex work, combining features of popular literature with deep learning, topical satire, and enthusiasm for the ideals of Renaissance humanism. Gargantua, the story of Pantagruel's father, shares features (for example, its narrative trajectory) with its predecessor but is more sophisticated, eschewing at least some of Pantagruel's raw slapstick in favor of elaborate political and religious satire, a clearer commitment to a tolerant Erasmian Christianity, and a not entirely un-ironic reexamination of the humanist project. The Tiers Livre is the least overtly comic of the four books; it is dominated by the contrast between the humanist sage Pantagruel and his irrational, appetite-driven sidekick Panurge (from the Greek, in the sense of 'one willing to do anything'), who consults a series of more-or-less outlandish "experts" in order to find out whether he should marry. This opposition continues into the Quart Livre, in which Pantagruel, Panurge and his companions embark on a sea voyage to visit the oracle of the Dive Bouteille ('holy bottle'). The islands they visit are populated by a range of odd beings ludicrously secure in their own varieties of folly, and the voyage thus represents to the reader the limits of human understanding, and the consequent (and dangerous) absurdity of any claim to definitive interpretation or knowledge, especially in matters of faith.

Rabelais is perhaps the most difficult of French authors. His immense learning, richness of language, and intense engagement with the literary, religious, and political issues of his day produce a density and complexity of allusion and linguistic play that demand great effort from the reader. This was true even for Rabelais's contemporaries, most of whom nonetheless recognized him to be a writer of the first rank, although some were repelled by his uncompromisingly graphic humor. He fell from favor in the seventeenth century, not least because his linguistic exuberance was at odds with the more severe aesthetic of the day. For many in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries he was more talked about than read, a mere name representing at best drunken good humor, at worst coarse literary debauchery. The twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in Rabelais, and, as a result of actually reading what he wrote, a truer appreciation of his immense accomplishment. As the twenty-first century begins, the enthusiasm and controversy excited by Rabelais show no signs of diminishing. In particular, the tensions between the serious and the comic in his work continue to provoke lively critical debate.

RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS (c. 1483–1553)

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