[This is a review of three interrelated books: Moby Dick, Gargantua and Patragruel, and Baktin’s study, Rabelais and His World. Same review posted in all three places.]



In others, the nose grew so much that it looked like the spout of a retort, striped all over and starred with little pustules, pullulating, purpled, pimpled, enameled, studded, and embroidered gules, as you have seen in the cases of Canon Bellybag and of Clubfoot, the Angers physician…



Others grew in the length of their bodies, fro

[This is a review of three interrelated books: Moby Dick, Gargantua and Patragruel, and Baktin’s study, Rabelais and His World. Same review posted in all three places.]



In others, the nose grew so much that it looked like the spout of a retort, striped all over and starred with little pustules, pullulating, purpled, pimpled, enameled, studded, and embroidered gules, as you have seen in the cases of Canon Bellybag and of Clubfoot, the Angers physician…



Others grew in the length of their bodies, from whom came the giants, and from them Pantagruel. [a Biblical series of begats] …



Since I was not alive in that age I will cite the cite the authority of the Massoretes, good ballocky fellows and fine Hebraic bagpipers, who affirm that in fact Hurtali was not in Noah’s Ark. Indeed, he could not get in, for he was too big. But he sat astride of it, with one foot on each side, as small children do on hobby-horses, or as the great Bull of Berne, who was killed at Marignan, riding astride on a great stone-hurling canon, which is undoubtedly a beast, of a fine, jolly pace. [Gargantua and Pantagruel]



When, good heavens! What a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares… Ishmael, on first beholding Queequeg.



Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults…and then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice.… [ Moby Dick]



Renaissance grotesque imagery, directly related to folk carnival culture, as we find it in Rableais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, influenced the entire realistic literature of the following centuries. Realism of grand style, in Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, and Dickens, for instance, was always linked directly or indirectly with the Renaissance tradition. Breaking away from this tradition diminished the scope of realism and transformed it into naturalist empiricism. Bakhtin Rabelais and His World



Millions of words have been written about these books, so this will be a review limited to a serendipitous reading.



My reading plan for 2015 includes both Moby Dick (read decades ago) and Gargantua and Pantagruel. I started MD (immediately bowled over by Melville) and a few days later G&P. As noted in my updates, suddenly I found myself reading, on the same day, a chapter in MD on the color white (ghostly, forboding, fear-inducing), and a chapter in G&P on the colors white and blue (white: joy, solace, and gladness). What had happened between 1530 and 1852? Had Melville read Rabelais?



It turns out that not only had Melville read Rabelais, but he had read him only a year or two previously in a great binge of classics, and his novel Mardi immediately preceding MD was criticized as too dependent on Rabelais. So I read on, looking for influences and adding the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World to my co-reading adventure. Bakhtin comments extensively on how the Romantics lost the joyful, regenerative aspect of the grotesque that abounds in Rabelais, a concept that strongly colored the way I read the rest of the novels. I have read additional bits of biography and other criticism as I went along, but mostly this review is an unmediated reaction to these three books.



While Bakhtin doesn’t mention Melville, MD might be a case study in the turn from the original Carnival to the negation of the elements of Carnival that are critical to the Renaissance buoyancy and positive life in Rabelais. On land, Ishmael and Queequeg revel in oyster stew and their physicality; they proceed by happenstance and whim. On the Pequod life is ruled by bells and rank, and absolute hierarchy reigns: Starbuck is repeatedly rebuked for respectfully, even piously, suggesting the monomaniacal chase is ill-chosen. This is the complete reverse of the Feast of Fools atmosphere of Carnival, where the lowly can say anything to the powerful, and a commoner is elected King or Pope for a day.



A selection of observations (note: many spoilers below):



First of all, of course, one confronts the revolving omnibus approach to the novel. These two gargantuan works encompass everything: satire, broad humor, slapstick, tragedy, scientific treatises, battles, quests, erudition, philosophical reflections, psychology, political and religious satire and commentary, exploration, the ocean, the bonds formed by men fighting the elements and the enemy, food, and so much more. Melville clearly learned the power of this, and must have studied Rabelais’s method carefully. And yet his novel is more tightly linear in plot, by design as well as due to his writing it as one coherent work, while Rabelais published G&P over twenty years (1532-1552).



Then there is the observant narrator. In MD he dominates the first sentence: ‘Call me Ishmael." In G&P, in contrast, I think I was a quarter of the way through before the ‘I’ first appeared. ‘I’? Who is this? The reader never finds out, and only encounters ‘I’ a few more times. How is ‘I’ that different from Ishmael, who after selecting the Pequod, never enters the action again? An issue that would take much thought.



The grandiose ruler who destroys his kingdom: Ahab and Picrochole.



Discourses on rope: the harpoon line and hemp.



Science. Melville was writing in the midst of a scientific world; philology and geology had led to questions about the Bible, and evolution was I think fairly commonly discussed, even if Darwin’s theory of natural selection was a few years in the future. Unknown lands were being explored. (Although Ishmael still insists the whale is a fish.) The industrial revolution meant the mechanics of everything were of interest, and the mechanics of whaling populate every page. Similarly, Rabelais’s medicine permeates G&P, with equal importance: the body is ever-present. He has a long explanation of the circulation of the blood. In battles, no one is ever just run through with a lance: the path through every organ and tendon is detailed. The guts and genitals of the Carnival are evolving into a Renaissance awareness of anatomy and science.



The practical joke. Panurge’s and Villon’s violent practical jokes that have serious physical consequences for their victims, contrasted with Stubb’s practical joke on the French captain (‘rescuing’ him from the noxious fumes of the whale filled with ambergris), with its serious financial consequences. Attention has turned from the body to profit.



The repeated advice from outsiders to cease and desist. In G&P, much of Book Three is devoted to soliciting both friendly and ‘professional’ (fortune-tellers and seers) advice for Panurge: should he marry? No, they all agree he will be a cuckold in short order, beaten and robbed. Similarly, Ahab is advised by Starbuck, the English Captain and the other Nantucket captain who has lost his son to give up this irrational and doomed chase. But neither Ahab nor Panurge can be reached—they are consumed by their passions. But then, neither do Ishmael and Queequeg heed Elijah when he warns them about Ahab. So their last land-based encounter with Elijah could be looked at as a turning point between whim and unswerving mission. In any case, both Panurge and Ahab end up pursuing their passionate quest in a ship, and barely survivin a tremendous storm.



One of the most complex comparisons between the two novels involves Panurge and Pip. This is because Pip is so dependent on the intervening Shakespeare’s fools, but I think the link to the terrified Panurge (as the storm at sea rages) is still there in Pip.



Religion: Rabelais was a monk, although perhaps a reluctant one. He also trained as a physician, and, unusual for his time, knew Greek. Bakhtin backs the critic Lucien Febvre’s stance that Rabelais could not have been a rationalist atheist, as claimed by Abel Lefranc, because his culture did not enable him to have such a thought. Hard to say. G&P certainly overflows with rapacious and salacious priests, harsh satire on sellers of indulgences and well-fed monks, etc. Rival orders parade through one story after another. And yet, one doesn’t feel totally engaged in real theological issues. Very different from MD, where not only the differences between Quaker and Congregationalist, but between south seas wooden idols and Fedallah’s Zorastrianism matter. [However, my copy of G&P had very few footnotes, so I may have missed 90% of Rabelais’s comments on religion. That inability to understand much of Rabelais without help because of so many intervening centuries was frustrating. I have ordered Screech’s translation of G&P, which apparently has much more complete notes.]



One of the most interesting religious questions is about vengeance. Ahab goes to his death defying the Biblical ‘Vengeance is mine’ saith the Lord. There is plenty of vengeance in the Carnival life of G&P, including the utterly unjustified shaming of the Lady of Paris by Panurge, and the physical destruction of the monk who will not loan clerical garb to Villon for a Carnival play. This is contrasted by the complete forgiveness exhibited by Gargantua in the non-Carnival ‘plot’ to those who have attacked his country, caused war with its accompanying destruction and death. He is magnanimous in victory.



One has to read Melville on ‘vengeance is mine’ in its time: against the looming Civil War. As I noted in my progress notes, he also wrote on property rights (Fast Whales and Loose Whales) shortly after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.



There is so much more to say. These are books I will think about and come back to, I know.



A word on editions: I listened to Anthony Heald read Moby Dick; he was fabulous. The scientific sections were full of expression, let alone the ‘story’ chapters. Hard copy: I have not yet explored the material, but I think the critical apparatus in the Norton edition of Moby Dick will be very useful, even if the Rockwell Kent illustrations in the Modern Library edition are lovely. Rabelais: as mentioned above, I felt as though I was missing a lot in the Penguin edition of G&P (Cohen translation) so have ordered the Screech translation, which is supposed to have more help. And to be a good, alternative translation. And on Bakhtin: yes, he is repetitive, but worth it; much to think about there.

