Rabelais and Language

International audienceAs soon as he published his first novel, Pantagruel, Rabelais offered a multiple vision of human language in all its potential: polyglossia, play with diverse tongues (in the episodes of the “Ecolier Limousin” as well as the meeting between Panurge and Pantagruel), including imaginary idioms, sign language and gestures, nonsense (the Kissass and Sniffshit lawsuit), endless lists, the rhetoric of seduction, of war, of letter-writing, of polemics, or of insult. He avoided no register: from the most vulgar to the most learned, from everyday and market place language to the most elaborate formulae, the language of Arts (philosophy, mathematics, letters), and of the professional Faculties (Theology, Medicine, Law). He played with the vocabulary of the sciences, from the most explicit to the utmost obscurity of occultism. Gargantua renewed the masterstroke, while mocking the prophetic style (“Antidoted Frigglefraggles”, enigmas), the scholastic discourse (Janotus’s declamation), petrarchism (scatological poetry composed by the little giant), and the elegant concions (harangues) of war. Wordplay begins with the first title-pages: Alcofribas might be, in Arabic, “the distiller of alcohol”, and soon Rabelais coins the name of a new philosophical sect, Pantagruelism (Gargantua 1535).More than ten years later, Book Three (1546) offers the main theory of language origins --i.e. conventional and social-- with a novel about language, nearly all built on dialogues dealing with the question of marriage, with its episodes that stage a thorough semiotics of interpretation (the Sybil, Trouillogan, Nazdecabre, Triboulet), with puns based on linguistic moods (interrogatory, negative, injunctive, hypothetical), dealing with the treacherous future contingents that flirt with astrology and predestination, and with the modalities of enunciation: alethic, epistemic, deontic.As for Book Four (1552), it explains with the Frozen Words episode the very function of language: the freezing of concepts through voice and written word, and their restitution with the thawing process of utterance and reading. Every island featured in the voyage has its own linguistic function, adapted to its temper, and signaled by its Hebrew or Greek name: jokes and phrases (Ennasins/ Alliances), nothingness (Ruach), excremental alterity (Farouche), hypocrisy (Chaneph), theft (Ganabins), the respective encounter’s purpose thus being defined, in part, by the islands’ names. The novel contains also a parody of naturalistic etymology, in the way of Plato’s Cratylus, reducing this thesis to a childish rebus. The set of chapters published under the title of Book Five (1564) seems to magnify all these linguistic schemes, echoing the Goths, Papegaux, Cagots and Clergaux in the sixteen first chapters of the Île Sonnante (the Ringing Island, 1562), before the characters walk down, in the ultimate chapters, towards the grotesque bacchanal and the breaking out of the panompheus word: Trinch, itself a message uttered in an oracular poem, visually bottled in a calligramme. However, Rabelais discarded this linguistic catabasis, so that the narrative shifts to another and more enigmatic ending, built on oral language properties and multiple meanings: “Sela, Buvons” (“Sela, let’s drink”), the final words of Book Four