Rabelais's World Upside Down

chapter 2 Rabelais’s World Upside Down

In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin examines how popular laughter overturns official institution in Rabelais’s prose fiction. This fundamental study has initiated a whole critical tradition, and has propagated the view that medieval and Renaissance instances of inversion pertain to Carnival. As a result, carnivalesque, topsy-turvy and inverted are often conflated in critical discourse. While Bakhtin brought into light crucial features of the world upside down throughout Rabelais’s works, notions such as the lower body stratum, the overturning of the social hierarchy or the downward movement are more signif- icant, as Bakhtin’s examples show, in Gargantua and Pantagruel than in the subsequent books. Jeanneret comes to a similar conclusion in his interpreta- tion of the last chapters of the Quart Livre:

Le lecteur moderne réprime mal un regret : guidé par l’admirable livre de Bakhtine, il a appris à aimer, chez Rabelais, la célébration du ‘bas cor- porel’ et le renversement des hiérarchies spiritualistes, dont témoignent amplement Pantagruel et Gargantua. Mais le schème carnavalesque, le recours au comique régénérateur de la veine populaire perdent ici leur pertinence. Imperceptiblement, dès le Tiers Livre, d’autres valeurs, is- sues de la tradition philosophique ou de l’éthique chrétienne, ont pris le relais.1

Rabelais’s use of the topos of the world upside down provides an opportunity to assess the validity of Jeanneret’s observation and expand his conclusions by examining the shifts at play in Rabelais’s works. Scholars have sought to shed light on these shifts by examining the biographical and historical con- text of each book and by identifying the different genres and source materials used by Rabelais.2 The pattern of Rabelais’s works can be described as follows:

1 Michel Jeanneret, Le Défi des signes : Rabelais et la crise de l’interprétation à la Renaissance (Caen: Paradigme, 1994), 128. 2 See Jean Plattard, L’Oeuvre de Rabelais : Sources, invention et composition (Paris: Champion, 1910); Mireille Huchon, ‘Rabelais et les genres d’escrire’, in Claude La Charité, ed., Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art (Lexington: French Forum, 1986), 226–247; Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991); Raymond la Charité, Carol Freccero, Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, ER 34 (Geneva:

Gargantua and Pantagruel are carnivalesque mock-epics using popular sources; the Tiers Livre is a mock-picaresque narratives in which erudite sources are mocked and misused; the Quart Livre and Cinquième Livre are travel narratives with strong polemical undertones. I will approach the shifts in Rabelais’s works from a different perspective: by focusing on his use of the topos of the world upside down in various contexts, I will show that similar images and themes keep being used, albeit to different ends and with different perspectives. While Rabelaisian scholarship has often insisted on the disparity between certain books and passages, this chapter will identify inversion and the topos of the world upside down as important threads from Gargantua to the Cinquième Livre. I will argue that the evolution of inversion and the topos of the world upside down from Pantagruel to the Cinquième Livre are indicative of the literary and social shifts in the period in- sofar as Rabelais refers back to medieval literary traditions and prefigures the polemical use of the topos of the world upside down during the religious wars. First, I will discuss Carnival and the overturning of the social hierarchy by referring to examples from Pantagruel and the Quart Livre so as to illustrate the evolution of Rabelais’s use of carnivalesque motifs. My second focus will be the grotesque body. In order to re-evaluate Bakhtin’s claim that the elements of the grotesque body are ‘predominantly subject to positive exaggeration’3 I will show how Rabelais adapts the theme of the microcosmic body for parodic and polemical purposes in Pantagruel and the Quart Livre respectively. Then, I will shed some light on the polemical use of enigmatic metaphors of the lower body stratum in the Quart Livre and Cinquième Livre. Finally, I will show how the characterisation and function of fools diverge between Pantagruel and the Tiers Livre.

1 Carnivalesque Rituals

1.1 Rabelais and Carnival Carnival consists in a festive, transgressive and periodical occurrence based on social, generational and gender reversal. It manifests through a series of ritualised performances and dramatisations such as the crowning of the king

Droz, 1997); Raymond C. La Charité, ‘Du Pantagruel au Quart livre: Projet narratif et lecteurs’, in Michel Simonin, ed., Rabelais pour le XXIe siècle, ER 33 (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 361–374; Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart livre de Pantagruel, ER 36 (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Bernd Renner, ‘ “Difficile est saturam non scribere” : L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne’, ER 45 (Geneva: Droz, 2007). 3 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 317.