Rabelais, François

François Rabelais (1494–1553) was a remarkable French satirist who had a variegated career, studying at a Benedictine abbey, joining the Franciscan order, continuing at another Benedictine house and various universities, including Montpellier and Paris, finally becoming a notable physician at Lyon. His two highly successful satirical masterpieces, Pantagruel (1533) and Gargantua (1535), were published under the pseudonym of Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of his own name). They form an entirely original work combining fantasy and satire, folly and wisdom, coarse physicality and abstruse learning, humanistic values and superstition, all generated by an extraordinary imagination and prodigious verbal creation. The works were highly popular with King Francis I, but condemned by the Church for their unorthodox ideas and mockery of religious practices. For instance Gargantua’s father criticizes “idle and lazy monks, [who] doth not labour and work, as doth the peasant and artificer; doth not ward and defend the country, as doth the man of war; cureth not the sick and the diseased, as the physician doth” (Book I, chapter 40). Three other books followed, under his own name.

Rabelais became known and his influence on English literature initiated through the remarkable translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart (Books I and II) and Peter Anthony Motteux (Books III-V) between 1653 and 1694. The epithet Rabelaisian (which the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1857) means essentially “characterised by exuberance of imagination and language, combined with extravagance and coarseness of humour and satire.” Thus the gigantic infant Gargantua shows his prodigious intelligence in a poetic celebration of an unusual topic, his performance on the chamber pot. Obscene or vulgar topics are often presented frankly with encyclopedic learning, language reaching beyond French, and marked by vivid metaphors. Rabelais’s intention, like that of Jonathan Swift in the English tradition, is to bring out the absurdity of certain social taboos and practices, as well as the odd euphemistic language that becomes conventional. Thus Gargantua’s governesses, more concerned with his physical prowess than his mental development “very pleasantly would pass the time in taking you know what between their fingers, and dandling it”:

One of them would call it her littel dille, her staff of love, her quillety, her faucetin, her dandilolly. Another her peen, her jolly kyle, her blaberet, her membretoon, her quickset imp: another again her branch of coral, her female adamant, her placket-racket, her Cyprian sceptre, her jewel for ladies. And some of the other women would give it these names—my bunguetee, my stopple too, my bush-rusher, my gallant wimble, my pretty borer, my coney-burrow ferret, my little piercer, my augretine, my dangling hangers, down right to it, stiff and stout, in and to, my pusher, dresser, pouting stick, my honey pipe, my pretty pillicock, linky pinky, futilletie, my lusty andouille, and crimson chitterling, my littel couille bredouille, my pretty rogue, and so forth. (Book I, chapter xi)

The passage is full of what would now be called “phallic symbols” ( andouille and chitterling being kinds of sausage). Coney is an old euphemism for “cunt,” while pillicock (also used in King Lear III iv 78) is the ancestor of modern slang pillock , meaning “prick” in both senses. Another tour de force from this bizarre encyclopedia of humorous obscenity is found in the tirade when some cake-bakers insult some grape-pickers:

The bun-sellers or cake-makers did injure them most outrageously, calling them prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny loblocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, dollipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninnyhammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy-gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets.

(Book I chapter xxv)

We notice than injure is here used in the old sense of “to insult” and that the invective includes many words which have long passed away. It is curious to reflect on Sir Thomas Urquhart, a widely traveled Scot of noble standing, knighted by King Charles I, scouring the lower registers to render Rabelais’s extraordinary range of vituperation. His translation of the first two books appeared in 1653, ironically the year of Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth. Peter Anthony Motteux, a French refugee, completed the work nearly forty years later. They used the contemporary idiom, which must have had considerable impact at the time, but is obviously dated now. They often had to anglicize words fabricated by Rabelais, but their translation has retained its classic status.