¹ This expression occurs in the first sentence of the Quart livre of 1552, in the Letter to Odet de Chastillon. Textual references are drawn from Rabelais: Œuvres complètes, ed. Pierre Jourda, 2 vols. (Paris: Gamier, 1962). Hereafter the four books are cited as follows: P (Pantagruel), G (Gargantua), TL (Tiers livre), and QL (Quart livre).

² From “Archeology,” in Thank You, Fog (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 23.

³ The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970) is the title that Michel Foucault chose for the English translation of Les Mots et les choses. Although I shall have frequent occasion to refer to his theses, I share the conviction of Jean Paris that the breakdown of universal analogies that Foucault studies occurred in the sixteenth, rather than the seventeenth, century: “Cet essai se propose de montrer, au contraire, …que la Renaissance procède d'une solitude profonde du langage, d'une découverte de son arbitraire …que la coupure epistémologique la plus décisive ne s‘établit nullement …à l‘époque du classicisme, mais un bon siècle auparavant” (Hamlet et Panurge, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 34).

⁴ The Council of Trent sat first in December of 1545 and again in 1551. At the beginning of the tempest scene (Ch. xviii), the voyagers encounter nine boatloads of monks on their way to the Council, which Rabelais calls “de Chesil,” a Hebrew word for “madmen.” They intend “grabeler les articles de la foy contre les nouveaulx hoereticques.” Grabeler, according to Randle Cotgrave, means “to garbell spices, etc. (and hence) also, to examine precisely….” A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611; rpt. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1950).

⁵ See Jean Plattard, François Rabelais (Paris: Boivin, 1932), pp. 277-79, 285-86.

⁶ Rabelais and Calvin had been evangelists together, and in De Scandalis (1550) Calvin reproached Rabelais for falling into disbelief and materialism after having “tasted” the Scriptures (Plattard, p. 301). André Tiraqueau's sins toward his old friend were, quite literally, sins of omission. In the 1545 edition of De Legibus Connubialibus, he eliminated both the praise of Rabelais and the pièces liminaires by Pierre l'Amy and Rabelais that he had included in the 1524 edition. Also, in De Nobilitate of 1549, he did not mention Rabelais when listing illustrious doctors (Plattard, pp. 286-87).

⁷ Rabelais's exile in Metz ended in 1548, when he accompanied Jean Du Bellay to Rome (Plattard, pp. 261-66).

⁸ Rabelais evokes the possibility of his own execution in the Letter to Odet de Chastillon. If he were in reality guilty of heresy as accused, “par moymesmes, à l'exemple du Phoenix, seroit le bois sec amassé et le feu allumé, pour en icelluy me brusler.” Etienne Dolet's fate must have been a terrifying example. For the significance of the Phoenix myth to Rabelais's imagination, see p. 474.

⁹ Francis died in 1547, Marguerite in 1549, and D'Estissac and Guillaume Du Bellay both died in 1543, the latter in January and the former in May. Clément Marot died in Turin in 1544, and Dolet was executed in 1546.

¹⁰ Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 40.

¹¹ The phrase, of course, was spoken by Stephen Daedalus: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of the race.” James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1956), p. 253. It was also Stephen who designated history as a “nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” in the “Nestor” episode of Ulysses (New York: Random, 1961), p. 34.

¹² Lukács, p. 56. His thesis is that the epic embodies the vision of an integrated society, a society in which the individual's relationships with nature, the cosmos, society, and self are settled and unproblematic. As that integrated order breaks down, the novel replaces the epic. The novel derives from an agonizing dialectic between the aspirations of the inner self and a hostile, antithetical outer reality.

¹³ Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 61-62.

¹⁴ “Thus the fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivised as the psychology of the novel's heroes: they are seekers. The simple fact of seeking implies that neither the goals nor the way leading to them can be directly given or else that, if they are given …, this ‘givenness’ may be crime or madness …” (Lukács, pp. 60-61).

¹⁵ La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), pp. 26-47.

¹⁶ The modern word is salmigondis. Cotgrave defines salmigondin as “a hachee; or meat made ordinarily of cold flesh, cut in little peeces and stewed or boyled in a chafingdish….” Salmigondin, we remember, is the province that Pantagruel gives Alcofribas when he returns from his voyage into the mouth (P, Ch. xxxii). This same province is designated as the domain of Panurge in the Tiers livre.

¹⁷ The Dindenault episode is a retelling of an incident in Baldus. As Greene indicates, Rabelais had shown himself to be under Folengo's influence since the Pantagruel, and the presence of this mock epic in the Quart livre is deep and generalized. See Rabelais: A Study in Comic Courage (Englewood Cliff's: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 83. Lucian's influence is likewise pervasive, but we may single out the reference to the country of the “Lanterns” as a precise allusion to the True History.

¹⁸ Panurge, disciple de Pantagruel avec les prouesses du merveilleux Bringuenarilles, an anonymous work first published in 1538, was obviously inspired by Rabelais's own books, particularly by the sea voyage promised in the last chapter of the Pantagruel. This book's popularity is demonstrated by the three editions (at least) published between 1538 and 1548. The Disciple was also called Les Navigualions de Panurge and is included, under this title, in Etienne Dolet's unauthorized edition of Rabelais's first two books (1542). In addition to Bringuenarilles, Rabelais took the Isle de Ruach, the idea of the Farouches and of the Andouilles, and many other details from the Naviguations. For a study of this book and its influence on. the Quart livre, see Jean Plattard's excellent introduction to the partial edition of 1548 (Paris: Champion, 1910), esp. pp. 35-38.

¹⁹ For a survey of the mariner's accounts that Rabelais might have read, including those of Jacques Cartier, see Arthur Tilley, “Rabelais and Geographical Discovery,” Modern Language Review, 2 (1907), 316-26; and 3 (1908), 209-17. Examples of the confusion between reality and fantasy in these accounts are given in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), pp. 83-84, and in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). Of particular interest are Bakhtin's discussions of the “Indian Wonders” (pp. 344-47) and of the real geographical voyages (pp. 396-400). He suggests, for example, that Cartier's itinerary merged in the minds of his readers with the legendary route to hell and paradise.

²⁰ Le Songe de Pantagruel, a long narrative poem by François Habert published in 1542, is generally considered to have provided Rabelais with the orientation of the Tiers livre and, indeed, with many of its main motifs—for example, Pantagruel's dream of a banquet for wise men, whom he asks to reveal the truth he is trying to discover, and Gargantua's return from the dead to advise his son to marry. See Abel LeFranc, “Etude sur le Tiers livre,” in Rabelais (Paris: Michel, 1953), pp. 299-307. However, the dream framework is more pertinent to the Quart livre, as we shall see.

²¹ The Hypnerotomachia is brought to bear on the discussion of hieroglyphs in both Gargantua, Ch. ix, and in the Briefve Declaration of the Quart livre, as an entry for Ch. xxv. Additionally, as LeFranc suggests (p. 308), the oracle episode in the Cinquiesme livre (Chs. xxxiii-xlvii) is manifestly inspired by Colonna's book.

²² Rabelais made three trips to Rome with Jean Du Bellay—in 1534, in 1535-36, and in 1548-50, the period during which he was writing the second Quart livre. Rabelais also spent 1540-43 in Turin with Guillaume Du Bellay and was present, as he tells us (QL, Ch. xxvii), at the statesman's death there.

²³ In an outstanding article, D. G. Jones studies Old Testament myths in Canadian literature. He implies, it would seem, that writers turn instinctively to these stories to express the loss of both personal and national identity. See “The Sleeping Giant or the Uncreated Conscience of the Race,” Canadian Literature, 26 (Fall 1965), 3-21.

²⁴ So reads, of course, the famous title of Erich Auerbach's essay on Rabelais in Mimesis (Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1957), pp. 229-49.

²⁵ —Jesus, dis je, il y a icy un nouveau monde?

—Certes, (dist-il), il n'est mie nouveau; mais l'on dist bien que, hors d'icy y a une terre neufve où ilz ont soleil et lune, et tout plein de belles besoignes; mais cestuy cy est plus ancien.

²⁶ This citation is found in Mallarmé's marginal addition to his essay on Hamlet in “Crayonné au théâtre.” See Œuvres complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé, ed. H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubrey (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 1557. This essay is cited by Mr. Best in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses (p. 187): “Mallarmé, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He says: ‘il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même,’ don't you know, reading the book of himself.”

²⁷ Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Thibaudet et M. Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 648.

²⁸ The Face Is Familiar (Boston: Little, 1940), p. 327.

²⁹ Although, to my recollection, James Joyce does not use the egg imagery, a similarly “maternal” view of the act of creation—creation as autogenesis—underlies the discussion of Hamlet in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses:

…from his mother (Socrates learned) how to bring thoughts into the world…. the midwife's lore…. (p. 190)

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image…. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which I shall then be. (p. 194)

—A child, a girl placed in his arms, Marina, (p. 195)

³⁰ This is the title of a chapter in La Terre et les rêveries du repos (Paris: Corti, 1948), pp. 129-82. A similar reading of the story of Jonah is offered by Arthur Koestler; see “The Belly of the Whale,” in The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1969), pp. 358-65.

³¹ See L'Histoire de la folie (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, Coll. 10/18, 1961). The first chapter (pp. 13-53) discusses the Renaissance. See also Koestler, who suggests that this story be viewed as an allegory of a nervous breakdown (p. 361).

³² Bachelard, p. 14. Could it be that every odyssey acts out “le complexe de Jonas”? We know from James Joyce's outlines of Ulysses that he associated each episode with an organ of the body. And Richard Selzer, a writer-physician like Rabelais, offers this reading of Homer:

Not Jason and the Argonauts in their passage between the crushing Symplegades, nor Ulysses …pursued by the ill-tempered malignant Wandering Rocks, surpassed in their voyages the hazards of the urinary flow through the narrows of the prostatic urethra. That these two men spent altogether too much time skimming across the wine-dark sea for the good of their kidneys is quite apparent. Nor is it beyond the scope of reasonable conjecture that the elderly authors of these two epics, Homer and whoever, themselves suffered from urinary obstruction at this vulnerable site, their art then being but a metaphor of their distress. But since when, one might ask, has it been any different? “Kidney Stone,” Esquire, Aug. 1974, p. 101.

³³ “William Shakespeare,” in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Michel, 1937), xli, 39-40.

³⁴ After receiving his baccalauréat from the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier (in just six weeks), Rabelais became, in 1532, the head physician of l'Hostel-Dieu in Lyon, a post he held until 1539. However, this service was interrupted by long periods of private practice. He went to Rome with Jean Du Bellay for the first time in 1534 and served both Jean and his brother Guillaume intermittently for the rest of their lives (see n. 22), an association that alone attests to his eminence (see Plattard, pp. 112-41, 212-39, passim).

Rabelais was equally distinguished as a scholar of ancient Greek medical texts. For his cours de stage at Montpellier in 1531, he explicated Hippocrates' Aphorisms and Galen's Ars Parva (p. 115). In 1532, the year of the Pantagruel, Rabelais published the Aphorisms in Greek with his philological commentary (p. 131). In 1537, when he returned to Montpellier for his license, he explicated the Greek text of Hippocrates' Prognostics (p. 217). This same year he also conducted in Lyon one of the first public anatomizations of a cadaver in France (pp. 215-16). Rabelais was truly medici omnibus numeris absolutissimi (p. 132).

³⁵ Bachelard stresses throughout his essay that Jonah is a myth of death and rebirth (see esp. pp. 155-68).

³⁶ The surgeon-physicians in Pantagruel's belly may further be compared to the mad Democritus, who, in the Hippecratic novel, dismembered birds in order to locate the center of bile, which is also the center of madness and of laughter—that therapeutic laughter which Mikhail Bakhtin explores so brilliantly in Rabelais and His World (see pp. 360-61 for his discussion of the Hippocratic novel).

³⁷ I leave aside the Cinquiesme livre less because I dispute its worth than because this book adds nothing to a discussion of the quest's outcome. The “Beuvons,” that ends the Quart livre is “le mot de la dive Bouteille” no less than Bacbuc's “Trinch,” and we are certain that Rabelais himself wrote “Beuvons.”

³⁸ We recall the second strophe of Clément Marot's translation:

Œuvres de Clément Marot, ed. Georges Guiffrey & Jean Plattard (Paris: Schmeit, 1931[?]), v, 283-84.

³⁹ See, for example, François Rigolot, Les Langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1972), pp. 139-42.

⁴⁰ Pedro Lain-Entralgo, in The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), traces the concept of logotherapy from Homer down to the period from the sixth to the fourth century b.c.—the age of Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the great “doctors” who so deeply influenced Rabelais's thought.