Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance

CCCXXIV

Edwin M. Duval

The Design of Rabelais’s "Quart Livre de Pantagruel"

LIBRAIRIE DROZ S.A.

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GENÈVE

1998

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Copyright (1998) by Librairie Droz S.A., 11, rue Massot, Genève.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

11

A Note on Texts and Abbreviations

13

Chapter 1 Quest for the Holy Word

15

Chapter 2 A House of Dead Stones : The Prologue of 1552

49

Chapter 3 Conflict and Anticaritas

65

Chapter 4 Pantagruel Among the Foxes and Dogs

81

Chapter 5 The New Beginning : Caritas versus the

Lex Talionis

109

Chapter 6 The Sign at the Center and the Quest without End

125

References

143

Index

151

Épigraphe

Mandatum hoc, quod ego praecipio tibi hodie, non supra te est, neque procul positum, nec in caelo situm ut possis dicere : « Quis nostrum valet ad caelum ascendere, ut deferat illud ad nos, et audiamus atque opere compleamus ? » Neque trans mare positum : ut causeris, et dicas : « Quis ex nobis poterit transfretare mare, et illud ad nos usque deferre : ut possimus audire et facere quod praeceptum est ? » Sed iuxta te est sermo valde, in ore tuo, et in corde tuo, ut facias ilium.

Deuteronomy 30.11-14

D'une chascune chose le commencement est la moytié du tout.

Gargantua

La fin correspondera au commencement : et sera le totaige en alaigresse et santé perfaict.

Pantagruel

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is the third and final volume of a series of books devoted to the design of Rabelais's Pantagrueline epics. It completes the project begun in

The Design of Rabelais's Pantagruel

(New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 1991) and continued in

The Design of Rabelais's Tiers Livre de Pantagruel

(Geneva : Droz, 1997). Its subject is Rabelais's last complete work, the last of the three epics of which Pantagruel is the hero. As in the two preceding books my purpose here has been to discover the coherence of both form and meaning in a work usually assumed to be fragmentary, disjointed, open-ended, and thus inconsistent, ambiguous, and perhaps even uninterpretable. Contrary to first appearances the

Quart Livre

is, like the

Pantagruel

and the

Tiers Livre

, a profoundly coherent and unified work in which form and meaning are mutually dependent, mutually illuminating, and mutually validating. Each episode has its place and function within in a single overarching design that not only confers meaning on all the episodes of the book but guides us in their interpretation. If we read these various episodes as more or less autonomous « texts » or as more or less interchangeable pieces in a « Menippean satire », then they will necessarily appear random, contradictory, and even indecipherable. But if we read them in their relation to one another and to the larger concerted

work

to which they belong, as integral parts of an organic whole, then they will reveal a coherent pattern, a meaning, and an intention-that is, a « design » in the fullest sense of the word as I use it here.

Although this volume is the final one of the series and the last to appear, it was in fact the first of the three to be written. I began working on it in 1980, wrote a complete draft during the academic year 1983-84, and finished the manuscript during the summer of 1985. For the next eleven years the finished manuscript lay in a drawer, awaiting the completion and publication of the two companion volumes that were to precede it. During those eleven years a great deal of critical and scholarly work was published on Rabelais and on the

Quart Livre

in particular, including important books by Guy Demerson (1986 and 1991), Jerome Schwartz (1990), Diane Desrosiers- Bonin (1992), Michel Jeanneret (1994), and André Tournon (1995) ; the

acta

of several international conferences and many important collections of essays devoted to Rabelais ; authoritative new editions of the

Œuvres completes

by Mireille Huchon (1994) and of the

Quart Livre

by Gerard Defaux (1994) ; and two major books devoted entirely to the

Quart Livre

 : Paul Smith's

Voyage et écnture

(1987) and Samuel Kinser's

Rabelais's Carnival

(1990). Although none of this work either anticipates or invalidates my own, it has obviously contributed important new insights into the

Quart Livre

, many of which are directly related to my thesis, my arguments, and my conclusions. I have therefore reworked my original manuscript, revising many passages and adding several others to take into account the relevant scholarship published by other

scholars over the last eleven years. At the same time I have incorporated into the original manuscript a few new discoveries of my own and revised several passages to assure a greater continuity between this volume and its now-completed companions. In all other respects this book remains faithful to its original conception and form. It is essentially the book that I finished in 1985.

This book could not possibly have been written without a generous Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, which allowed me to work uninterrupted in Santa Barbara and Paris in 1983-84, and a University of California Regents'Humanities Fellowship, which supported my research in the summer of 1983. The larger project of which this book is a part has received support from many other sources as well. I am pleased to have this occasion to thank not only the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Regents of the University of California, but also the Corporation of Yale University, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the generous support that has allowed this book and its two companions to come into existence.

Yale University

October 21, 1996

A NOTE ON TEXTS AND ABBREVIATIONS

The text of Rabelais used in this book is that of the

Œuvres completes

impeccably edited by Mireille Huchon and published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1994. Quotations from Rabelais's works will be identified by title, chapter, and page number in this edition (see list of abbreviations below). I have also consulted editions of the

Œuvres completes

edited by Pierre Jourda (Paris : Garnier, 1962) and Guy Demerson (Paris : Seuil, 1973), critical editions of the

Quart Livre

edited by Robert Marichal (Geneva : Droz, 1947), Abel Lefranc and his team (Geneva : Droz, 1955), and Gerard Defaux (Paris : Livre de Poche, 1994), and a photocopy of the original edition of the complete

Quart Livre

(Paris : Fezandat, 1552) held at the Bibliothèque Nationale (Rés Y

2

2164), kindly given to me by Gerard Defaux.

For the sake of convenience I quote Greek and Latin classics (unless otherwise indicated) from the editions of the Loeb Classical Library, checking these wherever appropriate against sixteenth-century editions available to Rabelais and his readers. Similarly for convenience I quote Erasmus's works in the accessible modern facsimile of the eighteenth-century Clericus edition of the

Opera omnia

(which was in turn based on the Basel edition of 1544), checking it also wherever appropriate against original sixteenth-century editions or against the new standard but still incomplete edition of the

Opera omnia

published in Amsterdam by the North-Holland Publishing Company. The text of the Bible quoted here is that of the Revised Standard Version except in cases where the Vulgate offers a different reading that is important for a proper understanding of Rabelais's work. In all such cases I have modified the RSV by substituting an English equivalent of the Vulgate reading in brackets. All translations from Greek, Latin, and French in this book are my own.

Principal abbreviations used in these pages are the following :

AP

Horace,

Ars poetica

BHR

Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

CL

Le Cinquiesme Livre

ER

Etudes Rabelaisiennes

G

Gargantua

ΗΝ

Pliny,

Historia naturalis

Opera

Erasmus,

Opera Omnia

, ed. J. Clericus

Met

Ovid,

Metamorphoses

Ρ

Pantagruel

PL

Patrologia Latina

, ed. Migne

QL

Le Quart Livre

RSV

Bible, Revised Standard Version

STFM

Société des Textes Français Modernes

THR

Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance

TL

Le Tiers Livre

TLF

Textes Littéraires Français

CHAPTER 1 QUEST FOR THE HOLY WORD

The

Quart Livre des faicts et dicts Heroiques du bon Pantagruel

is in some respects the least difficult of all Rabelais's books. Thanks to the currency of prototypes like the

Odyssey

, the

Argonautica

, the first six books of

the Aeneid

, and Lucian's

True Story

, the structuring device of the epic sea-voyage is as familiar to us today as it was to Rabelais's first readers. And thanks to Rabelais's eighteenth-century epigones, especially Voltaire and Swift, the description of strange lands as a vehicle for social and political satire is equally familiar. Although the sequence of episodes in the

Quart Livre

may appear haphazard at first glance, and although the precise object of satire in some of those episodes may elude us, the overall design of Rabelais's satirical odyssey seems immediately intelligible in a way that neither the messianic, typological design of the

Pantagruel

nor the Socratic, telocentric design of the

Tiers Livre

could possibly be.

Nor is there the slightest uncertainty as to the book's direction and finality. From the very first pages of the

Quart Livre

the narrator states and restates that the telos of this epic voyage is « l'oracle de la dive Bouteille Bacbuc » (

QL

1 : 537 and 539). Even the title of the opening chapter looks ahead to its preordained conclusion : « Comment Pantagruel monta sus mer, pour visiter l'Oracle de la dive bacbuc » (

QL

1 : 537). And the flagship of Pantagruel's fleet, described in the first pages of the book, arbors an ensign representing a « grande et ample bouteille » as a clear indication of its final destination, while other ships of the fleet arbor emblems of bottles, cups, and wine barrels, confirming that the Pantagruelians « alloient pour avoir le mot de la Bouteille » (

QL

1 : 538). Despite the maze of apparently unrelated satirical episodes narrated in the pages that follow we are never allowed to forget the single end toward which the voyage, and the epic, are directed. Just as Odysseus's voyage tends inexorably through its many episodes and peripeteia toward Ithaca and the tranquillity of home, just as Jason's voyage tends toward Colchis and the Golden Fleece, just as Aeneas's voyage tends toward Rome and ultimate Empire, and just as Dante's voyage tends toward Paradise and an unmediated vision of God, so the voyage of the Pantagruelians progresses single-mindedly and in a straight line (« suyvans ce canonique destour par mesme parallele ») toward « Catay en Indie superieure » and the « oracle de la dive Bacbuc » (

QL

1 :539).

The principal difficulty of the

Quart Livre

arises not from an inscrutable form or a lack of direction but from the conspicuous absence of the telos toward which it so insistently points. Not only does the book end before its protagonists have reached their final destination, leaving them as far from their goal as from home, but its final pages are radically anticlimactic, inconclusive, and open-ended. The epic appears simply to

stop

during a lull in the narration when Pantagruel has just declined to visit two islands in succession, the Pantagruelians have relieved the tedium of a dead calm by dining, and the befouled Panurge asserts with characteristic truculence that his own excrement is actually Irish saffron. In place of the Dive Bouteille and a definitive « mot », the

Quart Livre

leads to feces and yet another avalanche of mendacious « mots » uttered by the self-deceiving Panurge :

« Ha, ha, ha ? Houay ? Que Diable est cecy ? Appeliez vous cecy foyre, bren, crottes, merde, fiant, dejection, matiere fecale, excrement, repaire, laisse, esmeut, fumée, estront, scybale, ou spyrathe ? C'est (croy je) sapphran d'Hibernie. Ho, ho, hie. C'est sapphran d'Hibernie. Sela, Beuvons. »

[

QL

67 : 701]

Given the radical inconclusiveness of this conclusion it is no wonder that some editor felt compelled to put together a posthumous sequel to the

Quart Livre

under the telling title :

Cinquiesme et Dernier [!] Livre des faicts et dicts Heroïques du bon Pantagruel ... Auquel est contenu la visitation de l'Oracle de la Dive Bacbuc, et le mot de la Bouteille pour lequel avoir, est entrepris tout ce long voyage

. The

Quart Livre

seems to cry out for a sequel. So great is its frustrated teleological momentum that we modern readers, like Rabelais's sixteenth-century continuators, naturally assume the book is incomplete, and that if Rabelais himself did not write the sequel known as the

Cinquiesme Livre

he must certainly have intended to do so, and undoubtedly

would

have done so if only he had lived long enough.

And yet the

Quart Livre

is the only one of Rabelais's four entirely authentic books that does

not

promise (or presuppose, as in the case of the

Gargantua)

a sequel. There is nothing in the entire narrative-nor even in the Prologue, whose references to contemporary events reveal that it was composed immediately prior to publication in January 1552-to indicate that a sequel is forthcoming or even projected. Nor does the book itself show any external signs of incompletion. Unlike the partial edition of 1548, which the printer obviously interrupted in midchapter and mid-sentence at the end of an in-16 quire with the telling words « qui a, plus n'en dict » (

QL

25 :597 and pp. 1534-35, variant e and note 6 ; punctuation mine), the definitive

Quart Livre

of 1552 ends with a complete chapter, a complete sentence, and the conventional formula by which sixteenth-century printers indicated that the work announced on the title page has been brought to completion and that this is the final page of the finished book : « Fin du quatrieme livre des faicts et dicts Heroïcques du noble Pantagruel » (

QL

67 : 701). Despite its radical open-endedness, the

Quart Livre

is presented to us as a complete and finished book that requires no supplement and will not be continued in a sequel. We must take the

Quart Livre

as it is offered, therefore, considering it exactly as we have considered the two preceding Pantagrueline epics, not as a fragment or as part of a larger whole, but as a complete, autonomous, and coherent work with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Why, then, would an epic quest in the Homeric mold propel us so forcefully toward an ultimate goal only to withhold-deliberately, it would seem-the telos it so insistently promises ? This is the first and most fundamental question raised by the overall design of the

Quart Livre

.

A partial answer to this question lies in the preceding epic as we now understand it. We must not forget that the « mot » to Panurge's quest in the

Tiers Livre

was not to be found at the end of an epic voyage or at the conclusion of a

Quart Livre

, a

Quint Livre

, or even a

Sixte Livre des faicts et diets Heroïques du bon Pantagruel

, but rather in Panurge himself, and at the very center of the

Tiers Livre

. The reader who has understood the design of the

Tiers Livre

approaches the

Quart

knowing from the outset that Panurge's quest is no more than a wild goose chase and the « Dive Bouteille » nothing but a self-deluding mirage-a figure of speech that Panurge has pretended to understand literally in a desperate attempt to continue his headlong centrifugal error, even after he has exhausted all the sources of knowledge and foreknowledge proposed and sanctioned by Pantagruel. If the

Quart Livre

ends without reaching its telos, it is not because the book is incomplete but because its telos lies elsewhere. The voyage of the Pantagruelians can only take Panurge farther and farther from the only authentic « mot » of his quest. In this sense the ending of the

Quart Livre

corresponds perfectly to the ending of the

Tiers

, confirming the illusory, delusory nature of Panurge's fictional telos with an equivalent face-saving lie. Panurge's « Dive Bouteille » is indeed nothing more than the « sapphran d'Hibernie » we find in its place (

QL

67 :701).

But this is only a partial solution to the problem, for the focus of the narrative has shifted entirely in the

Quart Livre

. Panurge is no longer the center of attention or even the principal character in this new epic. His perplexity and his obsession with cuckoldry have all but disappeared and the mundane personal question to which he so obstinately sought an answer in the preceding epic is entirely eclipsed by political and religious satire. The theme that holds the various episodes together is no longer

oeconomica

-that is, marriage and finances in the chastellenie de Salmiguondin- But

politica

and the state of the world at large in 1552. Indeed the reader soon forgets that it was Panurge who proposed this epic quest in the first place and was to have been its sole beneficiary (TL 47 :494-95). Beginning with the title of the very first chapter the

Quart Livre

consistently identifies Pantagruel, not Panurge, as the hero of the epic and even as the leader of the quest : « Comment

Pantagruel

monta sus mer, pour visiter l'Oracle de la dive bacbuc » (

QL

1 : 537, emphasis mine).

Consistent with this obvious shift of focus is a somewhat less obvious shift in the nature and value of the elusive telos of the quest. The

Quart Livre

no longer represents the Dive Bouteille in burlesque fashion as the comical last resort of a desperate φιλαυτóς as the

Tiers

did, but as something more dignified, more general and vague, and the source of a much higher order of truth for which Pantagruel, not Panurge, would appear to be the most appropriate and worthy quester. The first and perhaps clearest sign of this transvalorization may be seen in the singing of a psalm before setting sail in the opening chapter of the book. It has often been said that the choice of this particular psalm (113 [114]) indicates a dangerously reformist intention or, more plausibly, an evangelical allegory of liberation from the « Egypt » of Catholic orthodoxy. But this is surely to attach too narrow a meaning to one of the most widely-used and versatile lines of the entire Psaltery. The psalm « In exitu Israel de Aegypto » was a favorite object of four-fold allegorical exegesis long before the advent of evangelism or the Reformation. Dante, for example, chose it to illustrate the four senses of Scripture in his famous letter to Can Grande (

Epistolae

13). And the Exodus theme to which the psalm alludes remained throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance the most obvious and available type of the pilgrim's progress, however it might be construed-historically, Christologically, morally, metaphysically, personally, polemically, or any other way. The theme suggested by the psalm at the beginning of the

Quart Livre

is therefore not primarily the specific one of the persecutions and liberation of either Reformers or Evangelicals, but the general one of an unspecified allegorical Exodus. Its effect is to transform the oracle of the Dive Bouteille into an ultimate goal, an ideal and divinely sanctioned telos, a kind of Promised Land flowing with milk and honey whose precise nature and identity remains vague but which is rich in allegorical possibilities.

As if to consecrate this transvalorization, Rabelais endowed the original telos of his book with a new name. The burlesque « mot de la Bouteille » envisioned in the

Tiers Livre

of 1546 and taken up again in the fragmentary sequel of 1548, is rebaptized in the complete epic of 1552 as « l'oracle de la dive

Bacbuc » (QL

1 :537 and 539, 25 :598, emphasis mine). This foreign-sounding, presumably incomprehensible Hebrew word, though actually signifying nothing more arcane than « bottle », transforms the « bouteille » to which Panurge originally understood Triboullet to refer him (

TL

47 :494) into something as foreign and exotic, something as mysterious, hieratic, and numinous as the chalice of the Holy Grail, and consequently transforms Panurge's vain search for an answer to his own banal question into a quest for something far more universal and consequential. Like the

Odyssey

(as it was almost universally interpreted in the sixteenth century), like Exodus, like the

Queste del Saint Graal

, like the

Divine Comedy

, Rabelais's epic is presented from the first chapter as an allegorical quest for some absolute, definitive fulfillment or even revelation. Its projected end is a final and definitive telos-a Promised Land and prelapsarian perfection, Revelation of an absolute, transcendent, immutable Truth.

Now if we take these initial indications seriously and begin to interpret the

Quart Livre

in the light of the telos that endows it with a form and a direction, then we are in for a surprise. The various islands visited over the course of this epic quest do not function as obstacles to be overcome in a progressive ascesis, or as the successive stages of an initiation as one might expect, but rather as failed

tele

of the very kind promised from the beginning of the

Quart Livre

. While each island may satirize some specific institution, class, custom, or idea of mid-sixteenth-century Europe, the mechanism of the satire consists in nearly every case in presenting the island as a utopia, a paradise, an ideal, an absolute value, or the source of some transcendent truth, and then revealing a very different reality behind that utopian façade. In other words, each island is deliberately presented as an ultimate epic telos very much like the « dive Bouteille Bacbuc » itself, only to be exposed in the following pages as an illusory utopia, a false paradise, a non-telos, or even an antitelos.

This was not obviously the case in the fragmentary edition of 1548, which included only the islands of Ennasin (chapter 4), Cheli (chapter 5), Procuration (chapter 6), and Thohu et Bohu (chapter 7). The first of these does appear at first glance to contain a kind of Utopian, golden age community in which the inhabitants are « tous parens et alliez ensemble », « tous parens et d'une famille », « tous parens et alliez l'un de l'autre », etc. (

QL

9 :556-57 and passim), but are shown on closer inspection to be « mal plaisans Allianciers » (

QL

10 : 560) whose incivility and extraordinary degrees of kinship nearly drive even the serene Pantagruel to distraction (« le bon Pantagruel ... cuyda perdre contenence », (

QL

9 :559). The second island, Cheli, is similarly presented as a paradisiac « isle grande, fertile, riche, et populeuse » (

QL

10 :560) whose exquisite « courtoisie » suggests an ideal chivalric court and whose king and kitchen recall the popular Utopia of the

pays de Cocagne

, but whose courtly and culinary aspects seem so antithetical as to cancel each other out. But the natives of the next two islands, the Chiquanous and Bringuenarilles, seem to be unrelated to this theme. In fact, no clear pattern of any kind emerges from the original sequence of four islands (Ennasin, Cheli, Chiquanous, Bringuenarilles) framed by two macaronic encounters at sea, both inspired by Folengo's

Baldus

(ship of merchants, ship of monks). The 1548

Quart Livre

seems to be governed by no particular design at all.

But the complete

Quart Livre

of 1552 is a work of a very different kind. To the original sequence it adds ten new islands and three new adventures at sea, arranged in the following manner :

1548 | 1552
1. Medamothi
Merchants en route from Lanternois : | Merchants en route from Lanternois :
Panurge and Dindenault | Panurge and Dindenault
1. Ennasin | 2. Ennasin
2. Cheli | 3. Cheli
3. Procuration | 4. Procuration
4. Thohu et Bohu | 5. Thohu et Bohu
Monks en route to Council of Chesil : | Monks en route to Council of Chesil :
Tempest | Tempest
6. Macraeons
7. Tapinois
Physetere
8. Farouche
9. Ruach
10. Papefigues
11. Papimanes
Parolles gelées
12. Gaster
13. Chaneph
Dead Calm : Resolution of doubts
14. Ganabin

The new episodes in this definitive sequence are far more substantial, more allusive, and more complex than those of the original fragment. More important, virtually every one conforms to the same conspicuous pattern of the Utopia unmasked or debunked. Keeping in mind this clear distinction between the rather inconsequential, desultory episodes of the original fragment and the more substantial, consistent episodes of the definitive work, we must consider the latter more carefully, not as isolated and unrelated moments in a formless Menippean satire, but as the constituent parts of a new and coherent epic design.

*
* *

The first new episode, inserted into the original series in such a way as to inaugurate the entire voyage with a new port of call, introduces in explicit terms the theme of the false utopia. Everything on Medamothi is presented as something to be

seen

, as a strange and marvelous sight from classical antiquity. The island itself is modeled on one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, Pharos. With its « grand nombre [de] Phares et haultes tours marbrines » (

QL

2 :540) it in fact outshines Pharos, whose great renown rested on only one such « lantern and high marble tower ». And a « phare » is of course designed for the sole purpose of being

seen

 : « comme nous voyons les Phares et haultes tours sus les havres de mer estre erigées, pour de loing estre

veue

la lanterne » (

TL

7 :373, emphasis mine). The port of this magnificent island is filled with « marchandises exotiques et peregrines » brought from all over Africa and Asia (

QL

2 :540), all things to be seen and marvelled at-paintings, tapestries, and strange animals which Pantagruel contemplates, and some of which he buys to send back to his royal father as strange and marvelous « nouveaultez » (

QL

4 :547) and things never before seen. The ruler of the island is himself a « lover of sights, light, or appearances » (« Philophanes »), his brother a « lover of spectacles, pleasant or wondrous sights » (« Philotheamon »). In short, Medamothi is a classicizing sightseer's paradise ideally suited to Pantagruel s curiosity as an « amateur de peregrinité et desyrant tous jours

veoir

, et tous jours apprendre » (

TL

47 :494-95, emphasis mine) and to the Pantagruelians'« studieux desir de

veoir

, apprendre, congnoistre » (

QL

25 :598, emphasis mine).

But beneath these wonderful sights there lies the hint that appearances may be deceiving, and that what is

seen

may not be what

is

. The various paintings bought by Pantagruel's companions first appear to be perfect, ideal representations of the unrepresentable. But the reality behind these ideal, classicizing representations is either something mundane and banal (« visaige d'un appellant », « varlet qui cherche maistre »), or the false reality of Hellenistic legend (Philomela, Echo), or the nonreality of ancient philosophical speculation (Ideas, atoms) (

QL

2 :540-41). As for the exotic animals bought by Pantagruel-three unicorns and a « tarande »-these too are fictions and idealizations of classical antiquity, which prove to be disappointingly ordinary on closer inspection. According to ancient descriptions (« nos escrivains antiques ») unicorns are supposed to be terrifying composite beasts with the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, and the tail of a wild boar. Instead they turn out to be rather dull and ordinary creatures that are « plus domesticques et apprivoisées, que ne seroient petitz chattons » and full of « mignotize », and that eat the same fare that common horses do (

QL

4 :546-47). The

tarande

is a similarly disappointing animal whose spectacular false appearances mask a real dullness : it appears to be scarlet, gray, or white, according to its proximity to those colors, but its own natural hue is nothing more exotic than that of the asses of Meun (

QL

2 :542). Paintings and animals alike thus contribute to the idea that the marvelous sights of classical antiquity are either deceptive appearances or mere fictions, and that in any case all appearances can deceive. The exotic can be a mask for the mundane, and the ideal a mask for nothing at all.

The name of the island confirms the suggestion that this paradise for classicizing « amateurs de peregrinité » is a false paradise and a non-telos. « Medamothi » is an authentic Greek adverb-μηδαμόθι-which is roughly synonymous with Thomas More's forged toponym « Utopia » (οὐ + τόπος) and clearly intended to recall it. But whereas More's Utopian island has a real nominal existence as a place with a proper name, Rabelais's exists only adverbially. Instead of a « Non-Place » it is simply « Nowhere ». The ideals it represents in its paintings, in its fauna, and in itself, are literally « nowhere » to be found. A more sinister indication of the falseness of this Utopia is contained in the first phrase of its description : it is « belle à l'oeil et plaisante » (

QL

2 :540). This is the same phrase used in Genesis to describe the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil : « pulchrum oculis aspectuque delectabile » (Gen 3.6). That fruit of course turned out to be considerably less desirable than its superficial appearance led Adam and Eve to believe. While Medamothi may look like a paradise, its appearance is described in such a way as to recall the misleading appearances that led to the Fall and expulsion from the original earthly paradise itself.

« Medamothi », the island governed by an absent and unseen « Philophanes », thus stands at the beginning of the complete

Quart Livre

as an emblem of speciousness and a signal that Ideals are only ideas, that « Utopias » are really « nowhere ». At best they are deceptive appearances-façades for the mundane or representations of that which has never been seen and can never exist. At worst they may constitute the kind of illusion that led to exile from Paradise in the first place. In the world of the

Quart Livre

earthly paradise is just an ancient illusion. Here there will be no place for a Utopia.

The next island to appear for the first time in 1552 is the sixth in the definitive sequence, the island of the Macraeons. This island is indeed a « Paradis grec », as Robert Marichal has called it (see note 12). It is explicitly presented as one of the Isles of the Blest, the

Insulae Fortunatae

, or

Insulae Divites

, celebrated by Hesiod (

Works and Days

, 167-73) and Horace (

Epodes

16.41-66) among others, where pagan heroes and demigods are said to enjoy an eternity of pleasant repose in a kind of Elysean Fields for supermen. The Macrobe, who speaks Greek (« languaige Ionicque »,

QL

25 :598), describes the island in strict conformity with this tradition as one of the « Sporades de L'ocean » and the « habitation des Daemons et Heroes » (

QL

26 :599). As such this might well be the final resting place to which a gigantic hero like Pantagruel would eventually come, the ultimate telos of the perfect prince's « faicts et dicts Heroïques ». However this might be, the Insulae Fortunatae are consecrated by classical tradition as precisely the kind of Utopian promised land toward which a voyage like that of the

Quart Livre

should be directed. Here the untilled earth spontaneously yields a perpetual abundance of wheat, wine, and fruit ; honey flows from trees ; goats and sheep freely offer their milk ; a perennial spring prevails ; the Golden Age has never been tarnished by Iron Age visitors like Jason and Ulysses (Horace,

Epodes)

. These islands are the true classical counterpart of the popular

pays de Cocagne

evoked in the episode of Cheli.

But Rabelais's Isle of the Blest is not at all what the tradition has led us to expect. As their name sugests, the « isles des Macraeons » are islands of old age and decrepitude : « Macraeon en Grec signifie

vieillart

, home qui a des ans beaucoup », as Panurge rightly remarks (

QL

25 :598, emphasis mine). The « maistre eschevin » of the place is similarly called a

« vieil

Macrobe » (

QL

25 :597 and passim, emphasis mine), and μακραίων itself means longlived (

« longaevus »

, according to Jacques Toussain's Greek-Latin Lexicon). And indeed the only sights to be seen on the deserted and dying island are old ruins, vestiges of the past glories of great nonChristian civilizations of the world-Egyptian, Greek, Islamic, Moorish, Slavic : « vieulx temples ruinez, plusieurs obelisces, Pyramides, monumens, et sepulchres antiques, avecques inscriptions et epitaphes divers. Les uns en letres Hieroglyphicques, les aultres en languaige Ionicque, les aultres en langue Arabicque, Agarene, Sclavonicque, et aultres » (

QL

25 :598). What was « jadis » a rich and thriving land is now desolate, and « par laps de temps et sus la declination du monde, paouvre et deserte » (

QL

26 :599). Furthermore, the « Daemons et Heroes » who inhabit the thick forest of the island are not immortal souls which have been transported here after a heroic life on earth to live forever in the enjoyment of youthful pleasures. On the contrary, they are mortal inhabitants who have grown extremely old (« les quelz sont devenuz vieulx »,

QL

26 :599) and who are gradually dying off, one by one, to disappear from the island forever. It is in fact to the death and disappearance of one such aged hero that the Macrobe attributes the violent storm from which the Pantagruelians have just escaped :

« Car eulx vivens tout bien abonde en ce lieu et aultres isles voisines : et en mer est bonache et serenité continuelle. Au

trespas

d'un chascun d'iceulx ordinairement oyons nous par la forest grandes et pitoyables lamentations, et voyons en terre pestes, vimeres et afflictions, en l'air troublemens et tenebres : en mer tempeste et fortunal. »

[

QL

26 :599, emphasis mine]

The long conversation and the moving story of the death of Pan that follow this account must not obscure the crucial fact that this is in fact a false, or rather an inverted Isle of the Blest-not a Golden Age paradise to which immortal heroes come to live forever, but a dwindling community of pagan geriatrics whose old and feeble inhabitants must all eventually die and leave, with no hope of immortality either in this world or in the next.

In the same way that the island of Medamothi subverts the idea of a classical Utopia, then, the island of the Macraeons subverts the pagan myth of paradise. And as in the case of Medamothi, the name of the island neatly confirms the subversive intention of the episode : the « isles des Macraeons » is an obvious satiric deformation of the Greek phrase for the

Insulae Fortunatae

themselves : the μακάρων νῆσοι. With a simple metathesis that changes the genitive plural of « μάκαρ »-μακάρων-into the nominative singular « μακραίων », Rabelais transforms the blessed immortal « Heroes ... et Semidieux » of classical antiquity (

QL

27 :603) into an ever diminishing population of ancient and mortal survivors of a bygone age. What might have been the paradisiac epic telos of a classicizing epic voyage is merely the ruined remains of a dead and dying civilization.

With...