PRIMO LEVI
23
tradications, unresolved and gaily accepted. Panurge , charlatan,
pirate ,
clerc,
by turns hoaxer and hoaxed, full of courage, "except
when in danger," famished, penniless and dissolute, who appears on
the scene begging for bread in all living and dead languages ,
Panurge is us , man . He is not exemplary, he is not "perfection," but
he is humanity, alive because it seeks , sins , enjoys and knows.
How is this intemperate, pagan, terrestrial doctrine reconciled
with the evangelical message, never denied nor forgotten by
Rabelais's shepherd of souls? It is not reconciled at all : this too is in–
trinsic to the human condition of being suspended between the mire
and the heavens, between nothing and the infinite . Rabelais's very
life, as far as one knows , is a tangle of contradictions , a maelstrom of
activities apparently incompatible with each other and with the im–
age ofthe author as it is traditionally reconstructed from his writings.
A Franciscan monk, then (at the age of forty) a student of
medicine and physician at the Lyons Hospital, publisher of scientific
books and popular almanacs, scholar of jurisprudence, Greek,
Arabic, and Hebrew, indefatigable traveler, astrologist, botanist,
archaeologist , the friend of Erasmus , the precursor of Vesalius in the
study of anatomy on the human corpse : one of the least inhibited of
authors , he is at the same time the curate of Meudon . Throughout
his life he enjoyed the reputation of a pious and irreproachable man ;
yet he leaves behind him (deliberately, one would say) the portrait of
a sensual man, if not a satyr. We are far from, we are at the an–
tipodes of the stoic wisdom of the golden mean . The Rabelesian
teaching is extremist, it is the virtue of excess : not only are Gar–
gantua and Pantagruel giants but the book itself is a giant, both as
regards size and scope ; gigantic and fabulous are the exploits , the
revelries, the diatribes , the manhandling of mythology and history,
the lists of words.
Gigantic above every other thing is Rabelais's and his crea–
tures' capacity for joy. This boundless and luxuriating epic of sat–
isfied flesh unexpectedly reaches heaven by a different route: be–
cause the man who feels joy is like the man who feels love , he is
good , he is grateful to his Creator for having created him , and
therefore he will be saved . For the rest , the carnality described by
the extremely erudite Rabelais is so naive and natural as to disarm
every intelligent censor: it is healthy and innocent and as irresistible
as are the forces of nature.
Why is Rabelais close to us? He certainly does not resemble us ,
