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Review of Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune: Pantagruelism, Politics, and Philosophy

Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune: Pantagruelism, Politics, and Philosophy. Timothy Haglund. London: Lexington Books, 2019.

 

What form of knowledge can a writer, best known for his satirical literature and grotesque humor, impart on the fields of philosophy and politics? To consider this question, we might begin with a pointer from the great poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, who aptly wrote “it is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.” François Rabelais is among that rare group of intellectuals whose knowledge never got ahead of his jocose outlook of the world’s many ills; it is an attitude that developed into its own philosophical “ism,” alluding to a character in Rabelais’ satirical novels. “Pantagruelism” emerged as an approach rooted in “a certain gaiety of mind pickled in the scorn of fortuitous things.” Epicurean perhaps, his consolation from the world is to eat, drink, and be merry. Rabelais revealed as much as an introduction to the prologue of Gargantua and Pantagruel:

Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there’s nothing here that’s outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you’ll find is laughter:
That’s all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I’d rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.

Rabelais’s extravagant series—an allegory on the lives of giants derived from a popular French folklore legend—may be little-known and ignored in much of western literature for its bawdy language. The topics that he discussed in his pentalogy were bold for his time, but his intention was more significant than mere scandal. Apart from his gifted verse for parody and satire, the description of Gargantua and Pantagruel from Everyman’s Library, for example, recognizes that his work had a deeper impact for “the honor it gives to the deformed, the cloacal, and the profane aspects of existence”; these are “at the very heart of Rabelais’s genius,” for they represent his era’s “love of the human body and its exaltation of the human in the face of the divine.”

Introducing Rabelais to the reader unfamiliar with his work is a challenge given the nature of his verse that, at a cursory glance, might appear only entertaining. Rabelais’s prose is now his legacy, where anything Rabelaisian is “marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism” (Merriam-Webster’s definition). This description would most certainly be a compliment to the man who wrote that laughter is a human characteristic. The sincere importance to which he elevated laughter and humor is underlined in The University of Virginia’s library website on Rabelais’s facsimiles, which introduce the thinker’s philosophy the following way, worth quoting in full:

Rabelais’s laughter is both deep and ambiguous, and studies of his books return frequently to the central question of interpretation, but the Rabelaisian text inevitably eludes a single definitive reading. Some scholars see in Rabelais’s works an affirmation of Christian humanist values and a call for religious reform from a fervent partisan of “l’Evangélisme,” a movement seeking to purify the Catholic Church from within and to reestablish the primacy of the Scripture. Others have identified the influences of classical forms of satire in these parodies of contemporary religious, academic, and professional practices, concluding that for Rabelais, the search for truth is essentially a comic quest with no resolution.[1]

Gargantua and Pantagruel’s literary value as an amusing tale is left for our own leisure. Understanding Rabelais’s paradoxical intelllectual importance as a Christian and critic of the Roman Catholic Church, ecclesiastic and anticlerical, physician and humanist, scholar and bon vivant, however, is a harder task; one that requires studying Rabelais’s unique position amidst the religious and political turmoil taking over Europe during the Protestant Reformation, and contextualizing Pantagruelism’s genesis at the height of the Renaissance—when philosophers were trying to rediscover Greco-Roman philosophy—and the nascent stages of the Enlightenment.

In his recent book, Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune: Pantagruelism, Politics, and Philosophy Timothy Haglund reintroduces Rabelais beyond the comic and as a philosopher in his own right. Haglund makes sense of the contradictions of this philosophical comedian and provides insight into Rabelais as an introspective political thinker whose texts are significant sources of Renaissance intellectual history that ought rightly to take their place within a wider genealogy.

In fact, Rabelais wrote in a unique time in history when another famous Renaissance political theorist was gaining popularity. The “contempt for fortune” in the book’s title references Machiavelli’s writings on fortuna, and the opening pages are dedicated to introducing what Haglund calls the “Rabelais-Machiavelli connection” (6) that reveals how Rabelais might have been an indirect commentator of Machiavelli. Haglund argues this point strongly through a combination of contextual historical analysis and literary analysis that places important philosophical and political questions at the center of the work. Rabelais’s travels and studies give reason to believe that was familiar with the works of the famous Italian philosopher, an Haglund tracks the publication history of The Prince in France to demonstrate how it coincided with the year that Rabelais arrived in Lyon. Textually, Haglund compares Machiavelli’s own comedy, Mandragola (1518), and the famous 25th chapter of The Prince, where he discusses the role of fortune, with Gargantua and Pantagruel. Haglund’s literary interpretation and analysis juxtaposes Rabelais’s treatment of fortune with Machiavelli’s, where the former proposes to work with fortune to attain one’s end while the latter wants to control it.

A strength of this book comes from the fact that Haglund introduces his interpretation of Rabelais from the beginning and takes the reader along his argument and reasoning. The book is worth praising for its clarity in outlining the chapter breakdown of the book all while adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines manuscript study, biographic analysis, historical context, and close reading of Rabelais’ stories. Haglund is direct about his to base his argument on textual evidence in Rabelais’s writings. Rabelais’s works, after all, should not be dismissed for their fictional nature. Haglund posits that Gargantua and Pantagruel contain relevant commentary within the area of Renaissance political thought and proposes to organize Rabelais’s books thematically, for he is interested in Rabelais’s treatment of “this curious subject that he refers to as the political state” and how the political state relates to the “religious and private spheres of life” (3).

Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune is a close study of language and meaning. The nuance of interpretation is key to understanding Rabelais as a writer, for that reason Rabelais suggested to his readers to adopt two “modes of reading,” modes that derive from Pantagruelism. The first mode of interpretation is based upon moral benevolence that Haglund calls a hermeneutic assumption of goodwill, while the second is a philosophical benevolence that requires the reader to grasp the meaning of the text as it is presented, assuming coherence from the part of the author. Chapter two is dedicated to exploring these themes within interpretation of various academic angles that have studied Rabelais’s writings including postmodern and feminist readings of the thinker that demonstrate Haglund’s knowledge of existing scholarship. The majority of the book, nonetheless, is a juxtaposition between Rabelais and Machiavelli, between Pantagruelism and Machiavellianism. Haglund successfully argues that Pantagruelism responds to a political question, albeit in a philosophical sense. If Rabelais is responding to Machiavelli, Haglund notes, it is not to slander him but to portray “the Machiavellian mode of thinking about politics and to scrutinize it” (62). Rabelais interprets Machiavelli’s understanding in the most perfect sense, as an act of philosophical benevolence.

Although the central argument in the book relates to Rabelais’s philosophical writings as an alternative to Machiavelli, the book also contains academic value beyond its response to Machiavellian realpolitik. Several of the book’s chapters discuss themes important to the broader field of intellectual history. Haglund recognizes that drawing a comparison between Machiavelli and Rabelais “brings us back to a fork in the road of human history” (8) that divides the pre-modern and the modern. The Enlightenment and its legacy are in the background of much of Haglund’s work on Rabelais and Pantagruelism, placing the thinker and his works within a wider context of history that contrasts the philosophical differences between Renaissance and Enlightenment epistemological dispositions. Haglund, thus, raises intriguing questions pertaining to intellectual history: “If the desire for certainty is a characteristic of the modern age of Enlightenment,” he asks, have we finally overcome that desire and moved into a postmodern period where we are better equipped to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity?” (15). This question even affects our understanding of history itself. Discovering the intellectual place that Rabelais inhabits between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, thus, faces an impediment that prevents us from fully exploring Rabelais’s “higher meaning,” and it is related to “the rudimentary emergence of a brand of historicism contemporary to him” (28).

The argument behind the title of the book takes full shape in chapter three. Haglund explains how understanding the spheres of life that Rabelais’s works discuss—the religious, political, and private—requires viewing his body of work as a whole; that is, broadly. He spans several of Rabelais’s books and discusses their unifying themes, writing, “my goal is to trace the chronological developments of philosophy as presented in Rabelais’s books. My procedure breaks from the dramatic arrangement of the passages I analyze so I can discuss Machiavelli as a critic of antiquity (refracted through Diogenes) and Rabelais as a sympathetic (because Pantagruelic) critic of both Machiavelli and Diogenes.” (39). In his succinct paraphrase of his argument, Haglund demonstrates the clarity of his argument and its implications on politics and philosophy.

Although there is a place for Rabelais and Pantagruelism within political philosophy, it does not make Rabelais a political thinker, per se. For Rabelais, politics is a condition with which the human mind has to work, Haglund writes. “Rabelais seeks an answer to the more pressing question of how intellectual life can flourish given the politicality of human beings” (11). The questions with which political philosophy deals, therefore, require an inversion of thought: We discuss “the appropriate or best regime,” and “the nature of authority and power,” but these, “suppose a certain luxury” (11). The more important question lies behind the fact that “those who pursue the life of the mind face public pressures.” Rabelais’s contribution to political philosophy, then, is how he concerns himself with “the intellectual’s place in the political world” and whether philosophy acts inimically to politics.

To explore this important question demands an analysis of how Rabelais presents Pantagruelism as the alternative to Machiavellianism. Rabelais’s Rabelaisian stories, however, require a literary approach. Haglund understands this requisite, and his strongest analysis is his literary analysis with which he interprets Rabelais. Chapter four provides Haglund’s interpretation of the Tiers Livre, the third book of Pantagruel, including an analysis of its underlying theme, the role of fortune in human life. The rest of the chapters in the book—chapters six, seven, and eight—are dedicated to continued literary analysis of Rabelais’ writings and their contrast with Machiavelli.

Haglund’s book is a worthwhile study of Rabelais that makes unique contributions to existing literature, most notably and eloquently through his literary analysis that allows him to prove, quite convincingly, Rabelais’s connection to Machiavelli. More commendable is the clarity with which Haglund presents his arguments before elaborating on his research, making the book an accessible read for those unfamiliar with Rabelaisian studies. Haglund contextualizes Rabelais and places him and his writings beside other important thinkers and debates of the time. As it pertains to “Pantagruelism, Politics, and Philosophy,” Haglund makes a strong defense of Pantagruelism for politics, as a middle-road philosophy that tackles life’s issues selectively between those unfortuitous events that “can be met with human industry” and those that are fortuitous that “should be accepted philosophically” (9). Haglund summarizes it well when he writes that Pantagruelists “recognize politics as a necessary sphere of life, but one that hardly solves humanity’s problems” (9). His initial point contrasted with a closing sentence of his work, Haglund provides reason to believe that Pantagruelism has a role to play in these moments where politics hardly suffices: “The development of philosophy to the present day does not constitute a natural course, nor does it reflect the forces of history” (153). If Rabelais and Pantagruelism have been ignored, it is not because the course or forces of history willed it so. Haglund closes his book by taking the decision away from deterministic and historicist accounts of philosophical development and putting it into the hands of the individual thinker, as the philosophical road not taken that may yet be considered.

 

Notes

[1] https://explore.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/show/renaissance-in-print/literaryworks/rabelais1

 

An excerpt of the book is available here.

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Nayeli L. Riano is an Associate Editor of VoegelinView and a freelance writer whose work focuses on the intersection of political philosophy and literature. She received her M.A. in Intellectual History at the University of St. Andrews and her B.A. in English at the University of Pennsylvania.

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