The Resurrection of the Bawdy

Musée Carnavalet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The period of history we call the Reformation is full of its puzzles and contradictions. One of the most intriguing of those puzzles is this: that one of the leading European literary figures of the time, a man whose work inspired Cervantes and Voltaire, is almost entirely unknown today. This man was a devoted Catholic—a monk, in fact—whose writings repeatedly provoked the ire of Catholic leaders at the Sorbonne and the Vatican alike; these very same works, however, also came under attack from Protestants as prominent as John Calvin. During much of his lifetime, European literati disdained Rabelais’ writing, but after his death, his work sparked a revolution in European literature. For a hundred years, everyone was mimicking his incandescent, absurd style. But then, as quickly as it appeared, his work disappeared from popular discourse.

That man is Francois Rabelais, and his most notable work is the sprawling, gross, bewildering, hilarious monstrosity published now as Gargantua and Pantagruel, which practically no one has read. And that is all right—it is an unbelievably ridiculous work, a colossal waste of time. The only thing more shocking than the fact that some people—in fact, much of educated Europe in the 16th century—took the time to read it is that someone took the time to write it in the first place.

Unlike the marvelous main character of Robertson Davies’ Rabelais novel The Rebel Angels, I am not a Rabelais scholar. Nor am I, unlike the unflappable Mikhail Bakhtin (whose Rabelais and His World is far more than a book of criticism), conversant in medieval and Renaissance literature of many languages.

I am, however, something perhaps rarer: a casual, ongoing, amateur reader of Rabelais. I met Rabelais through Davies, and came to love him through Bakhtin, and the fact that these two (very different) 20th-century giants—one a Canadian novelist, one a Soviet-era Russian critic—were moved to devote their genius to Rabelais says something about the strange power of his work.

I have been reading Gargantua and Pantagruel for over a decade and have not yet finished. I understand probably around a quarter of it, and am continually looking up bits of Latin and archaic French to try to understand the wordplay. It’s baffling, yes, but also mesmerizing. I continually find myself returning to the bits I’ve read, like the fantastic war that breaks out over who has the right to drink the wine at a particular French vineyard; or the episode in which the giant Pantagruel sticks out his tongue and covers up an entire army, prompting an account of the inside of the giant’s mouth; or the pages-long description of the child Gargantua’s search for the perfect toilet paper (the downy neck of a live goose, it turns out, is top notch), or even just the first few pages, which describe the intimate details of Gargantua’s father, Grandgousier’s, relations—gustatory, libatious, festive, and of course, marital—with his blushing bosomy bride.

To try to understand the whole of Rabelais or his writing is the work of a lifetime—I am not sure if Rabelais himself would think such a lifetime well spent—but even a passing acquaintance with this odd fellow is certainly worthwhile. There is a mystery here, of the finest vintage; every time I pick up the blue brick called Gargantua and Pantagruel, I find myself asking, in the midst of chuckles, how can something so stupid have turned literature upside down? Why does this book matter at all?

It really is stupid, too. It’s a thousand pages of poop jokes, fart jokes, drunk jokes, blood-and-bruises jokes, sex jokes, burp jokes, spliced together with politics-and-religion jokes and lots of Latin puns that seem erudite today but would have been more accessible to Rabelais’ 16th-century audience. I cannot think of a single sentence in it that could be read aloud at the dinner table. It’s difficult even to find a quotation because the sentences are so long and elaborate. Here’s a brief sampling from the beginning of the adventures of Pantagruel, in which the young hero visits Paris:

Now after he had stayed there a pretty space and studied very well in all the several liberal Arts, he said it was a good towne to live in, but not to die; for that the grave-digging rogues of St. Innocent used in frostie nights to warm their bums with dead mens bones. In his abode there he found the Library of St. Victor, a very stately and magnifick one, especially in some books which were there, of which followeth the Repertory and Catalogue, Et primo,
The for Godsake of salvation.
The Codpiece of the Law.
The Slipshow of the Decretals.
The Clew-bottom of Theologie.
The Churning Ballock of the Valiant…

This list of book titles (Rabelais loves lists) continues for five pages.  

So why did the European literati, after scrupulously avoiding this nonsense, suddenly devour it? Why did 20th-century giants like Davies and Bakhtin devote so much energy to it? And why do I keep going back to it?

To answer that question, we must go down into the warrens and small smelly holes of folk literature far older and less sophisticated than Rabelais, into the knots and knobs of fairy tales and children’s tales and the whole great, rude, clumsy tapestry of literature that lies behind the works we all know—the Chaucers and the Shakespeares—and see what has been hidden there in plain sight, all along. Literature is, essentially, about stupid things, passing things. It is about flesh and blood. It is about an idiotic war, the war between body and spirit, a war that need never have started but whose various casualties make up the pattern of all of our lives. Essentially, literature is about bodies, and bodies are ridiculous, and that (according to Rabelais, I think) is why they matter.

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin calls Rabelais “the most difficult classical author of world literature,” and later asserts that “all the hyperbole of the Rabelaisian world” centers around the body. What comes as a surprise, however, is how neatly Rabelais fits into the pattern of literature that comes before him. Yes, he explodes the pattern, but he explodes it in scale, not in shape. He is essentially doing on a massive scale what folk literature had been doing for centuries on a local scale. Medieval literature—in contrast to medieval philosophical and theological writing—is earthy, dirty, fecund, hilarious. It is, above all, bawdy.

Medieval literature contains many parodies, satires, grotesque folk tales. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue may stand out as one of the dirtiest sections of the Canterbury Tales (not, of course, overtaking the exploits of that other Alisoun in “The Miller’s Tale,” who, begged for a kiss by her lover, thrusts her butt through a window and fools him into kissing it), but in the landscape of medieval literature, it is fairly tame. There is an entire genre of medieval comedy called grammatical or elegiac comedy, in which a learned author wrote a satirical school textbook that used as many sexual or otherwise dirty puns as possible. Literary artists composed parodies of sermons and even of Scripture readings in which they simply strung together all the gruesome, sexual, or earthy passages of Scripture and read them out in sequence. Because of the emphasis on oral and performance art in the Middle Ages, many of these tales have been lost, but occasionally we stumble upon a new example that only underscores the essentially filthy nature of medieval folk literature.

Bakhtin argues that Rabelais is the summit of this medieval literary tradition of the grotesque, in which

the body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, and defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body…

Whatever one thinks of Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais, the reality is that for one century—the century in which Europe was roiled by the Reformation—Rabelais’ work riveted the continent. Then it was gone, and with it there vanished the folk tradition of the grotesque. Folk literature after the Renaissance is still earthy, but it is more archetypally so; by the time the Grimms compile their anthology of fairy tales in 1812, Europe has passed through the Enlightenment and is on the brink of the Romantic age.

Grimms’ tales, though certainly rougher than contemporary children’s tales, do not have the delightful excess that characterizes medieval tales. Grimms’ are darker and carry profound psychological weight. (For a wonderful primer on how to understand these tales as psychological aids for developing souls, see Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment.) “Little Red Riding Hood” is a deadly serious tale of the dangers of budding sexuality; Little Red, allowed to roam around unattended and unequipped to deal with her burgeoning womanhood, finds that her “scarlet cap” attracts attention from a wolf who wants to devour her and learns a grave lesson. Contrast this archetypal moral tale with Alisoun waggling her buttocks out the window (nothing bad happens to Alisoun, by the way), and you begin to get a sense of the difference between pre- and post-Enlightenment folk tales. 

What are we to do with all this? The “moral” is not that everyone should run out and read Rabelais. But there are a few lessons we can draw. The first lesson is this: the body is the perpetual problem of literature, for it is through the body that we sense, perceive, and act. In periods of cultural or social turmoil like the Reformation, when the body politic or the body ecclesiastic is crippled or convulsed, decadent, gross, excessive, flatulent, our literature will reflect this.

But secondly, the existence of Rabelais is a perennial reminder that no period of history is as straightforward as we might like to think (and neither, by extension, is our own); the same Middle Ages that produced the Summa Theologica and the great cathedrals of France also gave Rabelais both the form and the material for his raucous comedies. If the contrast between medieval high culture and medieval folk culture teaches us anything, it is that high culture can thrive in a veritable swamp of gross low culture—and, indeed, may depend upon it. Rabelais shows us that it may be only a few steps from the stupidity of a spiraling poop joke to the stupendous sight of a cathedral spire rising over the fields.

This does not mean, of course, that all low culture is good; it does mean, however, that there must be a reciprocal relationship between our high culture and our low. High culture does not come from nothing. Rather, it alchemizes over time from a vast swamp of low culture in which a community is working out, in some form or another, the problem of the body, of what it means to be a human, to exist as an eternal soul in a flatulent, flabby, fleshy shell, a shell that (somehow) God promises will be with us in Heaven.

So perhaps that is the real revelation and reminder of Rabelais, in whose book the lowest of folk culture becomes high, like a child’s silly song performed by the greatest philharmonic in the world until it is so beautiful that it brings an audience to tears: that in the great redemption God is working out, nothing good—not even the lowest things—will be lost.

[The essay originally appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Joie de Vivre print journal. To order this issue or an annual subscription, click the “Subscribe” tab above.]

J.C. Scharl is an American poet, playwright, and critic, with work in the BBC, The Hopkins Review, The New Ohio Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Lamp, Measure Review, and others. Her verse play, Sonnez Les Matins, is available through Wiseblood Books.