22
PARTISAN REVIEW
It isn't that in it the fundamental themes of the human comedy
are dealt with: on the contrary one would look in vain for the great
traditional poetic sources, love, death, religious experience, precar–
ious fate. In Rabelais there is no morose retreat into oneself, rethink–
ing, inner searching: in every word of his there lives a different state
of soul, fanciful, extrovert, substantially that of the innovator, the
inventor (not the Utopian); the inventor of large and small things,
and also that of the"
bosin,"
the extemporaneous "barker" at a country
fair. At any rate this perennial return is not accidental; it is known
that the book had an obscure precursor, which disappeared for cen–
turies without a trace: a country fair almanac,
Chroniques du grand
Giant Gargantua.
But the two giants of his dynasty are not only mountains of
flesh, absurd drinkers and eaters: together, and paradoxically, they
are the legitimate epigones of the giants who declared war on
Jupiter, sprang from Nimrod and Goliath, and are at once enlight–
ened princes and joyous philosophers. In Pantagruel's vast inspira–
tion and vast laughter is enclosed the dream of the century, that of
an industrious and productive humanity which turns its back on the
darkness and resolutely walks towards a future of peaceful pros–
perity, toward the golden age described by the Latins, neither the
past nor distantly future but within reach, provided the powerful of
the earth do not abandon the path of reason and remain strong
against external and internal enemies .
This is not an idyllic hope, it is a robust certainty. It is enough
to want it and the world will be yours: it is enough to have educa–
tion, justice, science, art, the laws, and the example of the ancients .
God exists, but in the heavens: man is free, not predestined, he is
jaber sui,
and must and can dominate the earth, the divine gift.
Therefore the world is beautiful, it is full of joy, not tomorrow but
today: because to each person is available the illustrious joys of vir–
tue and knowledge, and also the bodily joys, they too a divine gift, of
dizzily overflowing tables, "theological" drunks, and indefatigable
sensual pleasures. To love men means to love them as they are, body
and soul,
tripes et boyaux.
Panurge, the only character in the book who has human
dimensions and never trespasses into symbol and allegory, is an ex–
traordinary hero in reverse, a condensation of a restless and curious
humanity in whom much more than in Pantagruel, Rabelais seems
to be sketching himself, his modern man's complexity, his con-
