PARTISAN REVIEW
unmistakable characters, but he is not always inclined to keep them
unmistakable; they begin to change, and suddenly another personage
peers out of them, as the situation or the author's whim demands.
What a change in Pantagruel and Panurge during the course of the
book! And even at a given moment, Rabelais is not much concerned
with the unity of a character, when he mingles complacent cunning,
wit, and humanism, with an elementally pitiless cruelty which is
perpetually flickering in the background.
If
we compare the grotesque
underworld of Book II, chapter 30 (in which he turns his personages'
earthly situations and characters topsy-turvy), with Dante's other–
world, we see how summarily Rabelais deals with human individual–
ity; he delights in tumbling it over. Actually the unity which char–
acterized the Christian idea of the cosmos, together with the Christian
idea of the personal preservation of terrestrial beings before the
divine judgment, led to a very strong concept of the indestructible
permanence of the individual. (It is most strongly evident in Dante,
but can also be seen elsewhere.) And this was first endangered when
Christian unity and Christian immortality no longer dominated the
European concept of the universe.
The description of the underworld referred to above is also in–
spired by a dialogue of Lucian's
(Menippus seu Necyomantia),
but
Rabelais carries the joke much further-indeed, far beyond the limits
of discretion and taste. His humanistic relation to ancient literature
is shown in his remarkable knowledge of the authors who furnish
him with themes, quotations, anecdotes, examples, and comparisons;
in his thought upon political, philosophical, and educational ques–
tions, which, like that of the other humanists, is under the influence of
ancient ideas; and particularly in his view of man, freed as it is from
the Christian and social frame of reference which characterized the
Middle Ages. Yet his indebtedness to Antiquity does not imprison him
within the confines of antique concepts; to him, Antiquity means
liberation and a broadening of horizons, not in any sense a new
limitation or servitude; nothing
is
more foreign to
him
than the
ancient separation of styles, which in Italy even in his own time, and
soon after in France, led to purism and "classicism." In Rabelais
there
is
no aesthetic proportion; everything goes with everything.
Ordinary reality is set within the most improbable fantasy, the coarsest
jokes are filled with erudition, moral and philosophical enlightenment
