The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Flagler Beach Traffic Alert: Crews from Construct Co Inc. will be working on SRA1A for the next 2-3 weeks, installing pilings for Dune Walkovers at the following locations:

1316 South Oceanshore Boulevard

South 14th Street

South 15th Street

South 17th Street

Notably: It was on this day in 1546, after 11 years of silence, that Rabelais published his sequel–the third book, or tiers livre–to Pantagruel and Gargantua, those books of hilarity that laugh in the face of life but that so few us, myself not included, can understand anymore without too many footnotes to spoil the fun. (Example: Gargantua is really French King Francois 1er, Pantagruel is Henry II, etc.), though how could one resist the chapter literally called “ass-wipes,” a satire of education systems, with so many applications to our own Flagler County School Board. Still, I’ve picked him up several times, usually to no avail. It’s like reading Chaucer: it’s too difficult getting there, the inside jokes are everywhere, even though the farting, too, is everywhere: Rabelais loved to shock. A bit too much,  in Voltaire’s view: Voltaire was fastidious in those ways, though he abandoned his reserve late in life and himself related with obvious delight the story of how Rabelais had gone to Rome with the Cardinal du Belley, how the cardinal had kissed the pope’s right foot then his mouth, and how Rabelais said he in turn wanted to kiss the pope’s ass, but that the pope would have to wash it first. Voltaire adds the superfluous disclaimer that the story was probably the work of cabaret tales. Why quote it then? Because it’s perfectly Rabelaisian, and Voltaire couldn’t resist a churchy ass-whopping. Maybe this is where an English translation helps. It breaks the cardinal rule of never reading something in translation when. you can read it in the original. But when the original French needs translation to modern French, might as well go for the full English. There’s a curious little passage in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when, early in the book, as Pierre Aronax and Captain Nemo are tentatively trying to get to know each other in that Stockholm Syndrome in the making, Nemo shows off his erudition, as Verne loved to do, referring to Rabelais’ French as “that language still in use in certain Canadian provinces.” (“Cette vieille langue de Rabelais qui est encore en usage dans quelque provinces canadiennes.”) Was it? I recall the French of Northern Maine, traveling near Madawaska in the winter of 1999, but I was told back then that it was a derivative of Creole, from Louisiana, not Rabelais. These days we hear of Rabelais third hand. He is the thematic center of Looking for Alaska, John Green’s coming-of-age book I was happy to discover last year when it was among those on the ban list in Flagler schools. The protagonist sets off from his parents’ Florida home to boarding school in Alabama, looking for “the great perhaps,” one of Rabelais’ famous lines and in Alaska a double-entendre, since Alaska, the protagonist Pudge’s best friend, is killed in a car accident. Emerson in his earliest journal, from 1820, when he was 17, tells us that “The Supreme Pontiff sent a confessor to Rabelais on his deathbed charging him to receive absolution. Rabelais dismissed the messenger & bid him tell the Pontiff He was now to visit the great Perhaps.” He has not turned up in Canada. But leave it–yet again–to Voltaire to outdo Rabelais, La Fontaine and Augustine together: “I don’t know why they made so much fun of La Fontaine,” Voltaire wrote a correspondent, not far from his deathbed, on Sept. 24, 1773 (he would die in may 1778), “when he asked who was wittier, Saint Augustine or Rabelais.” The double-entendres are everywhere: Voltaire was not a fan of Augustine, that Calvin-before-Calvin cornerstone of Catholic totalitarianism. But for all his deference to the great perhaps, Rabelais went right to the point with perhaps’s earthly powers: Panurge, one of the main characters in the two big books, tells of how he wiped his ass with one of the pope’s encyclicals (or decretals) and ended up with  hemorrhoids half a foot long.

—P.T.

 

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Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there’s nothing here that’s outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you’ll find is laughter:
That’s all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I’d rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.”

–From Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel.

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