{"id":169262,"date":"2024-11-25T10:00:43","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T15:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169262"},"modified":"2024-11-25T13:49:02","modified_gmt":"2024-11-25T18:49:02","slug":"rabelaisian-enumerations-on-lists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/11\/25\/rabelaisian-enumerations-on-lists\/","title":{"rendered":"Rabelaisian Enumerations: On Lists"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Illustration by Albert Robida, from chapter seven of Pantagruel <\/em>(1886). Courtesy of the Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Few are the authors whose names rise to the status of adjectives: <\/span>Shakespearean<\/span><\/i> profundity, <\/span>Dickensian<\/span><\/i> squalor, <\/span>Kafkaesque<\/span><\/i> bureaucracy. <\/span>Rabelaisian<\/span><\/i>\u2014satirical, excessive, corpulent\u2014joins these ranks. The French author Fran\u00e7ois Rabelais\u2019s first novel, <\/span>Pantagruel<\/span><\/i>, is a heady celebration of abundance in which sexual organs and epic feasts sit alongside scatological humor. Beneath the absurdity, however, is a deep critique of Renaissance learning.<\/span><\/p>\n

The plot is simple: Pantagruel, a giant, grows up, gets an education in Paris, makes many friends, and ends up fighting to defeat the Dipsodes, a rival group of giants who have invaded Utopia. In an early chapter, the eponymous hero heads off to the University of Paris and stumbles upon the Library of Saint-Victor, which he finds \u201cmost magnificent, especially certain books he found in it.\u201d What follows is a long list of rather odd titles, among them:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Bregeuta iuris<\/span><\/i> (The codpiece of the law)
\n<\/span>\u2022 Malogranatum vitiorum <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>The pomegranate of vices)
\n<\/span>\u2022 La couillebarine des preux<\/span><\/i> (The elephant balls of the worthies)
\n<\/span>\u2022 Decretum universitatis Parisiensis super gorgiasitate muliercularum ad placitum (<\/span><\/i>Decree of the University of Paris concerning the gorgiasity of harlots)
\n<\/span>\u2022 La croquignolle des cur\u00e9s <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>The curates\u2019 flick on the nose)
\n<\/span>\u2022 Des poys au lart cum commento <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>On peas with bacon, with commentary)
\n<\/span>\u2022 Le chiabrena des pucelles<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>The shitter-shatter of the maidens)
\n<\/span>\u2022 Le culpel\u00e9<\/span><\/i> des vefves <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>The shaven tail of the widows)
\n<\/span>\u2022 Antipericatametanaparbeugedamphicribrationes merdicantium <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Discussion of messers and vexers: Anti, Peri, Kata, Meta, Ana, Para, Moo, and Amphi)
\n<\/span>\u2022 La patenostre du singe <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>The monkey\u2019s paternoster)
\n<\/span>\u2022 La bedondaine des presidens<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>The potbelly of presiding judges)
\n<\/span>\u2022 Le baisecul de chirurgie <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>The kiss-ass of surgery)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Usually, institutional libraries are governed by highly codified policies. Their catalogues are their raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/span>,<\/span><\/i> elegant data structures that facilitate easy circulation and millennial continuity. Here there is none of that\u2014the titles are solipsistic and self-referential, \u201ccodpieces\u201d without organs, surfaces with no depth, skin with no substance.<\/span><\/p>\n

This salmagundi (today this means \u201ca dish of seasoned meats,\u201d but the word comes from Rabelais\u2019s <\/span>Le<\/span><\/i> tiers livre<\/span><\/i>) gestures at some basic problems of information management: What sort of collection should a library hold? How should books be classified? What is the function of lists?<\/span><\/p>\n

Lists are important because they manage our order of discourse. And because they are the heart of information systems, they teach us how data becomes knowledge. In Rabelais\u2019s time, the old cosmology of medieval knowledge was dismantled piece by piece and reconstructed into the new constellation of the humanist encyclopedia. This state-of-the-art knowledge was then scattered far and wide by printed books. The historian Ann Blair has shown that this proliferation of books gave rise to the anxiety of \u201ctoo much to know.\u201d It was the newly invented printing press that inspired Rabelais to summon forth the incandescent trope of poetic enumeration.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

The Renaissance also gave birth to the <\/span>studiolo<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> the private study or personal library coveted by all well-heeled cultural elites. From Petrarch to Machiavelli, from aristocrats to cardinals, well-read humanists engaged in a gentle sort of competitive rivalry to curate a bespoke room of one\u2019s own. The study was grounded in bibliophilia: a love of books, it was believed, uplifted the soul. Fiction responded by highlighting the negative side of bibliophilia. Some of the great characters in Renaissance literature have their lives upended by books: Don Quixote reads so many chivalric romances that he becomes mad; Prospero in Shakespeare\u2019s <\/span>The Tempest <\/span><\/i>is exiled to an island on account of his readerly obsession; Doctor Faustus spends too much time in his study and sells his soul to the devil. In an era of discoveries and upheavals, these bibliophiles\u2019 readings and identities are so entangled that they lose their grip on reality. Overwhelmed by the confusion of atlases, catalogues, and encyclopedias, they take their world to be their library, and the library to be their world.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pantagruel shares with these book-besotted men an epistomania, an overwhelming appetite for knowing it all. My sense is that Don Quixote, Prospero, and Faustus were invented to show how noble minds can be overthrown by their own libraries. But Pantagruel is quite different from this distinguished company, for Pantagruel enters an <\/span>institutional<\/span><\/i> library\u2014and only briefly at that\u2014and <\/span>exits<\/span> unscathed.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the thirteenth century, the University of Paris emerged as the leading center for scholastic philosophy in Western Christendom, in no small part due to the contribution of the Abbey of Saint-Victor. In 1114, William of Champeaux, after a long and brilliant career at the school of Notre-Dame, settled in an abandoned hermitage outside the city walls and founded a community of canons in honor of Victor, a fourth-century saint. The abbey quickly became distinguished for its erudition.<\/span><\/p>\n

The<\/span><\/i> Book of Orders<\/span><\/i>, written around 1116, gives us a sense of what life was like inside the abbey. The monks lived in an environment in which every micromovement\u2014from waking, sleeping, eating, walking, and standing, to praying\u2014was precisely and strictly regulated. To this regime of absolute control Giorgio Agamben has devoted a slim book: <\/span>The Highest Poverty<\/span><\/i> (2013) reconstructs how the imposition of order undergirds the entire infrastructure of Western monasticism. Agamben calls the monks\u2019 obsessive restrictions on what to do and how to do it a \u201cform-of-life\u201d in which \u201cform\u201d and \u201clife\u201d become inseparable. \u201cWhat is a rule, if it seems to be mixed up with life without remainder?\u201d he asks. \u201cAnd what is a human life, if it can no longer be distinguished from the rule?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the most important regulatory roles in the Victorine community was that of the <\/span>armarius<\/span><\/i>, the librarian. He possessed \u201cin his custody all the books of the church.\u201d He dictated the common readings and chants for all occasions, \u201cwhether at Matins, at Mass, at chapter, at the table, or at collation.\u201d As it happens, posterity has bequeathed to us Saint-Victor\u2019s library catalogue from 1514. The <\/span>armarius<\/span><\/i> at that time, Claude de Grandrue, made a list of the Abbey\u2019s 1,081 manuscripts and did some innovative things: he inscribed an \u201cex libris\u201d at the beginning of each volume, foliated every page, and assigned a pressmark to indicate its location. The books were then arranged in an alphabetical sequence: A\u2013Z, AA\u2013ZZ, AAA\u2013OOO. Here is a sampling:<\/span><\/p>\n

A: The Old and New Testaments, usually with the <\/span>Glossa ordinaria<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

B: The New Testament, biblical concordance, works on the Bible by Pierre le Mangeur, Jean Marchesini, Adam of Saint-Victor, Pierre Riga; Greek and Hebrew Psalters, Greek Gospels<\/span><\/p>\n

C\u2013F: Commentaries on the Scriptures<\/span><\/p>\n

G: The works of Albert the Great<\/span><\/p>\n

H: Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas<\/span><\/p>\n

K\u2013M: Commentaries on the <\/span>Sentences<\/span><\/i> of Peter Lombard and theological questions by Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Giles of Rome, Guillaume d\u2019Auvergne<\/span><\/p>\n

N\u2013Q: Canon Law, <\/span>Gratian\u2019s Decretum<\/span><\/i>, writings by Yves de Chartres, Bernard of Compostella, Baldo Ubaldi; documents on the Great Schism; the councils of Constance and Basel; handbooks on notaries; manuals on epistolary<\/span><\/p>\n

R\u2013S: Civil law, texts and commentaries, barbarian laws, feudal laws, customs of Normandy<\/span><\/p>\n

T: Medicine, texts and commentaries (Galen, Avicenna, Hippocrates, Arnaud de Villeneuve, Guy de Chauliac, et cetera)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But by the time of Rabelais, such knowledge systems must have seemed superannuated, and thus ripe pickings for satire. The author\u2019s entire apparatus aimed to topple such strict hierarchies. His exuberance erupts from these rigid boxes of knowledge; he crafts instead a cunning poetics of infinite enumeration. Who else would come up with <\/span>Three Books on the Mensuration of Army Camps in the Hair<\/span><\/i>; Hotballs<\/em> [<\/span>chaultcouillons<\/span><\/i>], <\/span>On the Guzzling-Bouts of Doctoral Candidates and Doctors<\/span><\/i>: <\/span>eight highly lively books<\/span><\/i>; <\/span>The Fart-Volleys of the Bullists, Copyists, Scriveners, Brief-Writers, Referencaries, and Daters<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> compiled by Regis<\/span><\/i>; or <\/span>Marforio, a Bachelor lying in Rome<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>On Skinning and Smudging Cardinals\u2019 Mules<\/span><\/i>? His salty catalogue mocks the Faculty of Theology and its hairsplitting scholastic ratiocinations, and skewers the vices and laziness of the clergy. Rabelais was the perverse librarian par excellence.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet this list is a parable of not just medieval pedantry but early modern information overload. Across Europe, books about books proliferated: publishers offered seasonal lists; owners catalogued their collections; censors compiled indexes of prohibited books; auction inventories were drawn up for the estates of the deceased.<\/span> But is not a random collection of titles\u2014no matter how clever\u2014too tiresome for the reader? Does not the multitude of names lead to tedium or frustration, and therefore to skimming or skipping?<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Middle Ages, Noah\u2019s ark was the emblem of the total archive. In fact, bibliographers and Noah have many things in common. They must contend with the problem of inclusion, inventory, and survival. Like animals, manuscripts can multiply. In the Bible, Noah\u2019s ark offers safe passage to every creature great and small. But were there some that didn\u2019t make the evacuation? In that sense, Rabelais is Noah 2.0: not only does he include all the books that have ever existed, but he includes even those that do not exist. Like Noah, Rabelais suffers from the pathology of accumulation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Along with the ark, Rabelais uses another figure: the abyss. The word appears twice in other parts of the book: \u201can abyss of science\u201d and \u201cthe true well and abyss of the Encyclopedia.\u201d The logic of enumeration, pushed to its extreme, becomes an algorithm of the absurd. Rabelais points out that there are oddities in the world that cannot fit into any classification scheme, more things in our heaven and earth than are dreamt of in either the medieval pretensions of the summa or the ambitious early modern bibliographic machines. The abundance of the information ark becomes an encyclopedic abyss.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is only from this historical condition of data glut that characters like Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Prospero, and Doctor Faustus could have emerged. Though the topos of <\/span>multitudo librorum\u2014<\/span><\/i>too many books\u2014existed already in antiquity, the proliferation of texts brought on by the printing press was unprecedented. That these characters are all driven to bibliomania suggests their inability to cope with cognitive inundation. They show the tragedy of reading too much, and too wrongly. It is only Pantagruel who exits the library laughing.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/b><\/p>\n

Every cultural action has an equal and opposite reaction. The bibliographers and the censors existed side by side. At the exact same time that bibliophiles were churning out lists telling people what to read, a countervailing force pushed back: bibliophobia. Church authorities were churning out lists of what people should <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> read.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the first counterblasts to the Reformation was the Catholic Church\u2019s creation of the <\/span>Index of Prohibited Books<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>Pantagruel<\/span><\/i> had the honor of making the list. In 1533, less than a year after its publication in Lyon, the book was denounced by the authorities; a revised edition in 1543 expurgated some of its racier bits. In 1551 the Sorbonne published a list of censored books that included editions of <\/span>Pantagruel<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> Gargantua<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>Le<\/span><\/i> tiers livre<\/span><\/i>.<\/span> The Council of Trent placed Rabelais at the head of the \u201cheretics of the first class.\u201d As soon as each of his four books appeared in print, they were condemned by the French authorities.<\/span><\/p>\n

The creator of any list endlessly negotiates the desire to submit and to control, to surrender and to order. The Roman censors\u2019 knowledge was parasitic: they used the very same works that they condemned to compile their own lists. For example, a library in Bologna possesses a copy of Conrad Gesner\u2019s <\/span>Bibliotheca instituta et collecta <\/span><\/i>once owned by zealous Jesuit, Antonio Possevino. It is heavily annotated, and Possevino used Gesner to create his own guide, called the <\/span>Bibliotheca selecta<\/span><\/i>. As the title implies, he selected for the reader texts that are in absolute conformity with church doctrine. What is interesting is that the Jesuit and Gesner both cancel and supplement each other. They both try to direct the reader to what is worthwhile and what is not. The bibliographer creates metaknowledge, whereas the censor suppresses it.<\/span><\/p>\n

So between the Scylla of classification and the Charybdis of suppression, Rabelais avoids a shipwreck by deploying what he knows best\u2014excess. He bypasses this bibliographical conundrum by presenting fake books. How can you be censored if you don\u2019t have any content?<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

In Jorge Luis Borges\u2019s \u201cLibrary of Babel,\u201d readers can find:<\/span><\/p>\n

The detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the <\/span>true<\/span><\/i> catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With Babel, we come full circle back to the ark. Like Rabelais, Borges wants to know and have it all\u2014in fact, the moral of the story is that our dream of the total library is actually our deluded desire to become gods. In the Bible, the ark and the Tower of Babel are survival machines that protect humans from divine calamity. Totality and ruin, humans and God, proliferation and confusion\u2014these are the grand themes of the Bible and the history of imaginary libraries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lists beget lists. But they also cannibalize one other. In fat years, we make lists to keep track of what we have. In thin years, we make lists of what we had or what we want. They give us a measure of comfort and hope. And in good times and bad, we make lists of invented books to remind us of our finitude.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries<\/a>, to be published by Princeton University Press in December.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He is the author of <\/em>A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter and\u00a0<\/em>The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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