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PARTISAN REVIEW
Almost all the elements which are united in Rabelais' style are
known from the later Middle Ages. The coarse jokes, the animalistic
concept of the human body, the lack of modesty and reserve in
sexual matters, the mixture of such realism with a satiric or didactic
content, the immense fund of unwieldy and sometimes abstruse
erudition, the employment of allegorical figures in the later Books–
all these and much else are to be found in the later Middle Ages, and
one might be tempted to think that the only new thing in Rabelais
is the degree to which he exaggerates them and the extraordinary way
in which he mingles them. But this would be to miss the essence of
the matter: the way in which these elements are exaggerated and
intertwined produces an entirely new mixture, and Rabelais' pur–
pose, as is well known, is diametrically opposed to medieval ways of
thinking; and this in tum gives the individual elements a different
meaning. Late medieval works are confined within a definite frame,
socially, geographically, cosmologically, religiously, and ethically:
they present but one aspect of things at a time; where they have to
deal with a multiplicity of things and aspects, they attempt to force
them into the definite frame of a general order. But Rabelais' entire
effort is bent upon playing with things and with the multiplicity of
their possible aspects, upon tempting the reader out of his cus–
tomary and definite way of regarding things by showing him phen–
omena in utter confusion, upon tempting him out into the great ocean
of the world in which he can swim freely, though it be at his own
peril.
In my opinion, many critics miss the essential point when they
make Rabelais' divorce from Christian dogma the decisive factor in
interpreting him. True, he is no longer a believer, in the ecclesiastical
sense; but he is very far from taking a stand upon some definite
form of disbelief, like a rationalist of later times. Nor is it permissible
to draw any too far-reaching conclusions from his satire on Christian
subjects, for the Middle Ages already offer examples of this which
are not essentially different from Rabelais' blasphemous joking. The
revolutionary thing about his way of thinking is not his opposition to
Christianity but the freedom of vision, feeling, and thought which his
perpetual playing with things produces, and which invites the reader
to deal directly with the world and its wealth of phenomena. On one
point, to be sure, Rabelais takes a stand, and it is a stand which is
