Mimesis (46 page)

However, even Eustache Deschamps (see, for example, numbers 15, 17, 19, 38, or 40 of his
Miroir de Mariage
) never succeeded in evoking a real scene involving husband and wife in that emmeshing dual play of all levels of consciousness, which is what a marriage is. With him the elements of realism remain superficial, something in the style of what the nineteenth century called genre scenes. The motifs contained in the passage quoted above are almost all represented in Deschamps too. With him too the wife wants new clothes, appeals to the fact that others are better dressed although they do not come from families as good as hers. But the whole thing does not take place at night and in bed; it is not connected with the play of sexual relations, the motif of remarriage after the husband’s death, or all the allusions to how the marriage came about and to the property which she brought with her and which so far has yielded hardly any revenue but instead has been the cause of costly litigation. Deschamps enumerates his motifs,
at times vividly, more often all too prolixly. The author of the
Quinze Joyes
knows what marriage is, he knows the bad of it, and the good too, for in the
Quatorziesme Joye
(p. 116) he has the sentence:
car ilz sont deux en une chose, et nature y a ouvré tant par la douceur de sa forse, que si l’un avoit mal, l’autre le sentiroit
. He has the married couple really live together; he combines his motifs in such a way that the
“deux en une chose”
becomes palpable, chiefly, it is true, in its evil implications, as a situation which enables husband and wife to hurt each other deeply, as the eternal struggle of two creatures fettered to each other, as deceit and betrayal in their partnership. This gives his book a tragic character. It is not very lofty tragedy, nor is it unintermittent. The individual problems are too narrow and petty for that; above all, the character of the victim, that is, the husband, is not free enough. He has neither goodness nor dignity, neither humor nor self-control. He is nothing but a harassed paterfamilias, and his love of his wife is entirely egotistical, without any understanding of her individual nature. He thinks of himself simply as her proprietor and feels that his proprietary rights are constantly in danger. If, then, anyone prefers to eschew the word tragic, he must nevertheless acknowledge that the practical vicissitudes of a human being in his everyday existence have here been given a literary expression which did not exist earlier. And there is in fact a convergence of the stylistic levels of the
Réconfort
, which is written in the feudal tradition, and the
Quinze Joyes
, whose motifs are drawn from the farces and from popular clerical moralizing. There comes into being a level of style which considers the everyday scene of current life worthy of detailed and serious portrayal; which at times, reaching upward, attains the realm of tragedy, at times touches the realm of satire and moral didacticism below; which deals much more penetratingly than before with the immediacy of human existence, its physical actualities, its domestic aspects, everyday enjoyments, the decline of life, and its end; and which, in all this, has no fear of harsh effects.

The sensory present which is thus made manifest remains within the class-determined forms of the time yet nonetheless everywhere reveals itself as a general reality which binds all men together through their common creatural conditions of life (
la condition de l’homme
, as it would later be called). From as early as the fourteenth century, we find instances of this more immediate, more sensory, more detailed realism. They are numerous in Eustache Deschamps, and Froissart relates episodes involving questions of life and death with a sensory
circumstantiality which is not so very different from the manner in which La Sale relates the death of the young du Chastel. When the six leading burghers of Calais, clad only in shirt and trousers, a rope around their necks, the key to the city in their hands, kneel before the English king, who wants to have them executed, we hear him gnash his teeth; the queen, who throws herself at his feet begging for grace for the prisoners, is in the last stages of pregnancy, and he, fearing that in her condition she may come to harm if he does not grant her request, does so with the words:
“Ha! dame, j’aimasse trop mieux que vous fussiez autre part que ci!”
(
Chroniques
, 1, 321). Still more marked in their detailed realism are the episodes of book 3 which treat of the death of young Gaston de Foix. Huizinga grants them “an almost tragic power.” The subject is a family tragedy at a princely court in southern France, and it is reported in a series of extremely clear and graphic scenes, all the details of which are delineated. The terrible proceedings between father and son achieve complete directness in these sketches of courtly mores (the two princes gaming and fighting, the prince with his Italian greyhound at table, and so forth). During the fifteenth century realism becomes even more sensory, the colors become even more glaring. Yet the representation always remains within the bounds of medieval class-determination and of Christianity. The utmost perfection of a creatural realism which remains completely within the sensory and, for all its radicalism of emotion and expression, shows no trace of intellectually categorizing power, or even of revolutionary power, shows indeed no will whatever to make this world any different from what it is, is to be found in François Villon.

We are still—as is clearly to be seen precisely in Villon—dealing with the effects of the Christian mixture of styles. Without it, the type of realism we have called creatural would not be conceivable. But by now it has freed itself from serving the concept of a Christian universal order; indeed, it no longer serves any concept of order whatever. It is fully independent; it has become an end in itself. Once before in the course of this study we encountered a married couple: Adam and Eve in the
Mystère d’Adam
. In that instance the direct imitation of contemporary reality served a timeless and universal purpose, that is, the graphic portrayal of the story of salvation, and beyond this it did not go. Now too the link between here and there, between this world and eternal salvation, remains unsevered. “Creaturality” necessarily implies such a relation to the divine order; it is constantly
referred to; furthermore, the fifteenth century is precisely the great epoch of the passion play, is under the influence of a mysticism which revels in creatural-realistic imagery. However, there has been a shift of emphasis, it now falls much more strongly upon life on earth. And this life on earth is contrasted far more strikingly and far more effectively with earthly decay and earthly death than with eternal salvation. Graphic portrayal is now much more immediately in the service of earthly events; it enters into their sensory content, it seeks their sap and their savor, it seeks the joy and torment which flow directly from life on earth itself. This realistic art has conquered an unlimited cycle of themes and much subtler means of expression. But its growth during this period is restricted to the sensory domain. While the old order declines, there is nothing in Franco-Burgundian realism to announce the rise of a new one. This realism is poor in ideas; it lacks constructive principles and even the will to attain them. It drains the reality of that which exists and, in its very existence, falls to decay; it drains it to the dregs, so that the senses, and the emotions aroused by them, get the flavor of immediate life; and, having done that, it seeks nothing further. Indeed, the sensory itself, for all the intensity of the expression, is narrow; its horizon is restricted. Not one of the writers of this cultural sphere surveys and masters the totality of the earthly reality of his time as did Dante or even Boccaccio. Each knows only his own sphere, and it is a narrow sphere even in the case of men who, like Antoine de la Sale, have traveled widely in the course of their lives. Only through a disposition, an active will, to give the world a form does the gift of understanding and rendering the phenomena of life acquire the power to transcend the narrow confines of one’s own life. The death of the du Chastel boy or of Prince Gaston de Foix gives us nothing beyond the very concrete experience of youth, enmeshment, and excruciating death; when it is all over, the reader is left with nothing but a sensory, an almost physical, horror from the experience of life’s transitoriness. Beyond that the writers give us nothing: no judgment which might have weight, no perspective, no conviction, no principles. Indeed, even their psychology, which is often extremely striking in its concern with the immediate and the particular (the conversation between man and wife in the
Quinze Joyes
may be recalled in this connection) is far more creatural than individual.

It is evident that these writers needed the sensory experience which their spheres of life afforded them, but that on the other hand they did not strive to go further because each such sphere provides sufficient
material in the way of creatural contingency. Boccaccio was known in France—especially through the translation by Laurent de Premierfait (1414); and more or less contemporaneously with the
Réconfort
, a collection of stories after the model of the
Decameron
made its appearance in Burgundy, the
Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles
(edition by T. Wright, Paris, 1857-58). But what constitutes the very essence of Boccaccio is not imitated, indeed is apparently not even recognized. The
Cent Nouvelles
is a collection of robust stories which are served up at a gathering of men, and these men, although representing courtly and high feudal society and in part even the princely ruling class, feel perfectly at ease in the atmosphere of the popular farcical style. Nothing is left of Boccaccio’s elegantly humanistic “intermediate style,” of his doctrine of love, his service of women, of the human, critical, and embracing perspective of the
Decameron
, of the multiplicity of its scenes and its reports of life. It goes without saying that the language too, though flavorful and expressive, shows no sign of having been penetrated by humanism and is anything but literary. The prose of Alain Chartier, who had died two decades earlier, is much more refined and rhythmically studied. Among the stories there are not a few which treat motifs also represented in the
Decameron
. The motif of the angel Gabriel occurs (in the fourteenth nouvelle) in the variant of a hermit who, by the aid of a hollow stick which he passes through the wall of her house, conveys to a pious widow the “divine command” to bring him her daughter because from her union with the hermit will be born a child destined to ascend the Papal throne and to reform the Church. Mother and daughter obey the command; the hermit finally lets them wring a reluctant consent from him. But after he enjoys the daughter for a time, she becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a girl! The nouvelle is very crudely composed (the “divine” visitation and command are repeated three times; the girl and her mother go to see the hermit three times); the characterization of mother, daughter, and hermit, compared with that of Frate Alberto and Madonna Lisetta, is purely “creatural,” that is to say, not at all without life, and indeed quite true to life, but without any individualization. As a sensory rendering of a comic incident the whole story is quite effective. There is much popular and colloquial humor in it (
la vieille, de joy emprise, cuidant Dieu tenir par les piez
), but it is incomparably cruder, narrower, and on a lower level of attitude and form than Boccaccio.

The realism of the Franco-Burgundian culture of the fifteenth century
is, then, narrow and medieval. It has no new attitudes which might reshape the world of earthly realities and it is hardly aware that the medieval categories are losing their power. It hardly notices what decisive changes are taking place in the structure of life; and in breadth of vision, refinement of language, and formative power it is far inferior to what the Italian late medieval and early humanist flowering had produced a full century earlier in Dante and Boccaccio. In it, however, a deeper penetration of the sensory and the creatural asserted itself, and this Christian heritage it preserved and passed on to the Renaissance. In Italy, Boccaccio and the early humanists no longer felt this creatural seriousness in the experience of life. In France itself, and north of the Alps in general, every kind of serious realism was in danger of being choked to death by the vines of allegory. But the spontaneous vigor of the sensory was stronger, and thus the creatural realism of the Middle Ages came to be passed on to the sixteenth century. It supplied the Renaissance with a strongly counterbalancing factor against the forces working toward a separation of styles which grew out of the humanists’ emulation of antiquity.

¹
Kreatürliches
. The word, a neologism of the 1920’s, implies the suffering to which man is subject as a mortal creature. (Translator’s note.)

11

THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL’S MOUTH

I
N THE THIRTY-SECOND CHAPTER OF HIS SECOND BOOK
(which, however, was the first written and published) Rabelais tells how Pantagruel’s army, during the campaign against the people of the Almyrodes (the “Salties”), is surprised on the road by a downpour; how Pantagruel orders them to press close together—he can see above the clouds that it is only a brief shower, and meanwhile he will provide them with shelter. Whereupon he puts out his tongue (
seulement à demi
), and covers them as a hen covers her chicks. Only the writer himself (
je, qui vous fais ces tant veritables contes
), who had already taken cover elsewhere, and now emerges from it, finds no room left under the tongue-roof:

Doncques, le mieulx que je peuz, montay par dessus, et cheminay bien deux lieues sus sa langue tant que entray dedans sa bouche. Mais, ô Dieux et Deesses, que veiz je là? Jupiter me confonde de sa fouldre trisulque si j’en mens. Je y cheminoys comme l’on faict en Sophie à Constantinoble, et y veiz de grans rochiers comme les mons des Dannoys, je croys que c’estoient ses dentz, et de grands prez, de grandes forestz, de fortes et grosses villes, non moins grandes que Lyon ou Poictiers. Le premier que y trouvay, ce fut un homme qui plantoit des choulx. Dont tout esbahy luy demanday: “Mon amy, que fais tu icy?—Je plante, distil, des choulx.—Et à quoy ny comment, dis-je?—Ha, Monsieur, dist-il, chascun ne peut avoir les couillons aussi pesant q’un mortier, et ne pouvons estre tous riches. Je gaigne ainsi ma vie, et les porte vendre au marché en la cité qui est icy derriere.—Jesus, dis-je, il y a icy un nouveau monde?—Certes, dist-il, il n’est mie nouveau, mais l’on dist bien que hors d’icy y a une terre neufve où ilz ont et soleil et lune et tout plein de belles besoignes; mais cestuy cy est plus ancien.—Voire mais, dis-je, comment a nom ceste ville où tu portes vendre tes choulx?—Elle a, dist il, nom Aspharage, et sont Christians, gens de bien, et vous feront grande chere.” Bref, je deliberay d’y aller. Or, en mon chemin, je trouvay un compaignon qui tendoit aux pigeons, auquel je demanday:
“Mon amy, d’ont vous viennent ces pigeons icy?—Cyre, dist il, ils viennent de l’aultre monde.” Lors je pensay que, quand Pantagruel basloit, les pigeons à pleines volées entroyent dedans sa gorge, pensans que feust un colombier. Puis entray en la ville, laquelle je trouvay belle, bien forte et en bel air; mais à l’entrée les portiers me demanderent mon bulletin, de quoy je fuz fort esbahy, et leur demanday: “Messieurs, y a il icy dangier de peste?—O, Seigneur, dirent ilz, l’on se meurt icy auprès tant que le charriot court par les rues.—Vray Dieu, dis je, et où?” A quoy me dirent que c’estoit en Laryngues et Pharyngues, qui sont deux grosses villes telles que Rouen et Nantes, riches et bien marchandes, et la cause de la peste a esté pour une puante et infecte exhalation qui est sortie des abysmes des puis n’a gueres, dont ilz sont mors plus de vingt et deux cens soixante mille et seize personnes despuis huict jours. Lors je pensé et calculé, et trouvé que c’estoit une puante halaine qui estoit venue de l’estomach de Pantagruel alors qu’il mangea tant d’aillade, comme nous avons dict dessus. De là partant, passay entre les rochiers, qui estoient ses dentz, et feis tant que je montay sus une, et là trouvay les plus beaux lieux du monde, beaux grands jeux de paulme, belles galeries, belles praries, force vignes et une infinité de cassines à la mode italicque, par les champs pleins de delices, et là demouray bien quatre moys, et ne feis oncques telle chere pour lors. Puis descendis par les dentz du derrière pour venir aux baulièvres; mais en passant je fuz destroussé des brigans par une grande forest que est vers la partie des aureilles. Puis trouvay une petite bourgade à la devallée, j’ay oublié son nom, où je feiz encore meilleure chere que jamais, et gaignay quelque peu d’argent pour vivre. Sçavez-vous comment? A dormir; car l’on loue les gens à journée pour dormir, et gaignent cinq et six solz par jour; mais ceulx qui ronflent bien fort gaignent bien sept solz et demy. Et contois aux senateurs comment on m’avoit destroussé par la valée, lesquelz me dirent que pour tout vray les gens de delà estoient mal vivans et brigans de nature, à quoy je cogneu que, ainsi comme nous avons les contrées de deçà et delà les montz, aussi ont ilz decà et delà les dentz; mais il fait beaucoup meilleur deçà, et y a meilleur air. Là commençay penser qu’il est bien vray ce que l’on dit que la moytié du monde ne sçait comment l’autre vit, veu que nul avoit encores escrit de ce pais là, auquel sont plus de xxv royaulmes habitez, sans les desers le un gros bras de mer, mais j’en ay composé un grand livre
intitulé l’Histoire des Gorgias, car ainsi les ay-je nommez parce qu’ilz demourent en la gorge de mon maistre Pantagruel. Finablement vouluz retourner, et passant par sa barbe, me gettay sus ses epaulles, et de là me devallé en terre et tumbé devant luy. Quand il me apperceut, il me demanda: “D’ont viens tu, Alcofrybas?—Je luy responds: De vostre gorge, Monsieur.—Et depuis quand y es tu, dist il?—Despuis, dis je, que vous alliez contre les Almyrodes.—Il y a, dist il, plus de six moys. Et de quoy vivois tu? Que beuvoys tu?—Je responds: Seigneur, de mesme vous, et des plus frians morceaulx qui passoient par vostre gorge j’en prenois le barraige.—Voire mais, dist il, où chioys tu?—En vostre gorge, Monsieur, dis-je—Ha, ha, tu es gentil compaignon, dist il. Nous avons, avecques l’ayde de Dieu, conquesté tout le pays des Dipsodes; je te donne la chatellenie de Salmigondin.—Grand mercy, dis je, Monsieur. Vous me faictes du bien plus que n’ay deservy envers vous.”