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PARTISAN REVIEW
theme of the discovery of a new world, with all the astonishment, the
widening horizons and alteration of the world picture, which follows
upon such a discovery. This is one of the great motifs of the Renais–
sance and of the two following centuries, one of the themes which
served as levers toward political, religious, economic, and philosophical
revolution.
It
constantly reappears- whether writers place an action
in
that still new and half-unknown world, because there they can con–
struct a purer and more primitive milieu than the European, which
provides them with an effective and at the same time a piquantly sur–
reptitious method of criticizing things at home; or whether they in–
troduce an inhabitant of those strange lands into the European world
and let their criticism of the established order
in
Europe arise out of
his naive astonishment and his general reaction to what he sees; in
either case the theme has a revolutionary force which shakes the es–
tablished order, sets it in a broader context, and thus makes it a
relative thing. In our passage, Rabelais only lets the theme begin to
sound, he does not develop it; Alcofrybas' astonishment at sight of the
first inhabitant of the mouth belongs in this category of experiences,
and above all the reflection that he makes at the end of his journey–
Then it became clear to me how right people are when they say: One
half the world does not know how the other half lives. Rabelais im–
mediately buries the theme under grotesque jokes, so that in the
episode as a whole it is not dominant. But we must not forget that
Rabelais first calls the country of his giants Utopia, by a name which
he borrowed from Thomas More's book, which had appeared six–
teen years earlier, and that More- to whom, of
all
his contempor–
aries, Rabelais perhaps owed the most-was one of the first to use the
theme of a distant country in the way described above, as an example
for reform. It is not only the name: the country of Gargantua and
Pantagruel, with its political, religious, and educational forms, not
only is called, it
is
Utopia; a distant, still hardly discovered land,
lying, like More's Utopia, somewhere
in
the East, although to be sure
it sometimes seems that it can be found in the heart of France. We
will
return to this.
So
much for the second of the themes contained
in
our passage;
it cannot develop freely there, partly because the grotesque joking of
the first theme perpetually thwarts it, partly because it is immediately
intercepted and paralyzed by the third: the theme
"tout comme chez
