poem/prose 26
His memory he had like a Scarf,
His Common Sense, like a buzzing of Bees
His Imagination , like a Chime of a Set of Bells,
His Thoughts, like a flight of Starlings,
His Conscience, like the unnestling of a parcel of young Herons,
His Deliberations, like a Set of Organs,
His Repentance, like the Carriage of a double Canon,
His Undertakings, like the Ballast of a Galleon,
His Understanding, like a torn Breviary,
His Notions, like Snails crawling out of Strawberries,
His Will, like the three Filberts in a Porringer,
His Desire, like six Trusses of Hay,
His Judgment, like a Shoeing-horn,
His Discretion, like the truckle of a Pulley,
His Reason, like a Cricket.
(Francois Rabelais (or Alcofribas Nasier, his anagrammed self) [?1490's - 1553]
was first a monk, then a doctor, but essentially a great story teller; a satirist, a propagandist, a comic prepared to tilt at any and every windmill, secular or ecclesiastical. His immense masterpiece (over 700 pages in English translation) 'Gargantua and Pantagruel' appeared in parts, the first in 1534. His completely uninhibited language and subject matter have unfairly made 'Rabelaisian' a synonym for crudity; whereas his real characteristic was a love affair with words. "Rabelais plays with words", wrote Anatole France, "as children do with pebbles; he piles them up in heaps".
If you have found it impossible to plough through his dense, loaded, text with its obscure references, diversions, stories within stories, it is probably these piles, these lists which you remember. Once Rabelais begins to describe something, it seems he cannot resist stretching the possibilities into fantasy; he becomes drunk with what his imagination offers. It may be a list of fictitious books in some library, the types of fool someone is, the food served and the names of the cooks, but once he gets started he finds irresistible the urge to continue for two or more pages.
As the above modest example shows, there need be no sense! In fact Rabelais seems to revel in a total but colourful lack of it. It is part of a long description of Shrove-tide, the king of Sneaking Island.
A bit like the work of his admirer, James Joyce, his verbal constructions need endless commentaries; they obviously stimulated his first two translators who apparently added much of their own, often brilliant, inventions. The Penguin version by J. M. Cohen tries to stick more closely to the original)