6 THE OTHERNESS OF HISTORY IN RABELAIS' CARNIVAL AND JUVENAL'S SATIRE, OR WHY BAKHTIN GOT IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME
[…] an extraordinarily great influence on literary-artistic thinking was exercised by the ritual of crowning/decrowning. This ritual determined a special decrowning type of structure for artistic images and whole works, one in which decrowning was essentially ambivalent and two-leveled. If carnivalistic ambivalence should happen to be extinguished in these images of crowning and decrowning, they degenerated into a purely negative exposé of a moral or socio-political sort, they became single-leveled, lost their artistic character, and were transformed into naked journalism. (PDP, 125–126)
In what can only be termed an ironic decrowning of authoritative discourse,1 the book through which Bakhtin first achieved fame outside Russia, Rabelais and His World, has come into greater and greater disrepute in recent years among seizièmistes as well as partisans of the great Russian theorist himself. In each case, these disputes over the value of Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais have been influenced by other more local concerns within the scholars' respective fields. Thus, in what Carla Freccero has termed the Bakhtin debate among students of the French sixteenth century, the question of the value, or lack thereof, of Rabelais and His World forms only one part of a larger more general debate on the value of theoretical versus historicist methods for interpreting Rabelais' mammoth and unwieldy texts. Not surprisingly, among partisans of a theoretical approach to the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bakhtin is generally more highly esteemed than among those who favor more traditional views (Freccero 1991. ix–x, 46–47 n. 19).2 Likewise, among the professional Bakhtinians, the value of Rabelais and His World and the centrality or marginality of this text with respect to the rest of his canon fluctuate according to the author's stance on the related questions of Bakhtin's position on Marxism (both in its Soviet and less orthodox incarnations) and his authorship of the disputed texts attributed to Medvedev and Voloshinov. Those who see him as implacably hostile to all forms of Marxist and socialist thought generally argue against any substantial authorial role in the disputed texts and against the centrality of the Rabelais text vis-à-vis the rest of the Bakhtinian canon, and vice versa.3 The stakes in this debate, then, are high, and the concerns of the two groups arc not unrelated. The fact that the historical validity of Rabelais and His World has been questioned by seizièmistes is itself cited by the more conservative wings of Bakhtinian scholarship as evidence for their own claims that this work is of less value than his earlier philosophical writings, his more general pronouncements on theory of the novel, and his work on Dostoevsky. To take a position in this dispute, therefore, is to expose oneself to a variety of oppositional currents whose strengths are great and motivations complex.
Nonetheless, in what must be seen as a foolhardy endeavor on the part of one who is neither a seizièmiste nor a professional scholar of Bakhtin. I want to argue in this article for the lasting value and essential correctness of Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais. To do so, I shall follow a two-track line of argumentation. First, I shall argue that the historicist case against Bakhtin is not as strong as its proponents claim, often involving a distortion of Bakhtin's text, a neglect of important sources of evidence, and a focus on certain of Bakhtin's more narrow claims to the exclusion of the big picture. In this section. I shall concentrate on the work of Bakhtin's most forceful and influential critic, Richard Berrong. By clearing Bakhtin of the charges laid against him by his historicist critics. I will have laid the groundwork for the second, positive part of my argument. In that portion of the article. I will argue that the essential contention of Rabelais and His World is that the imagistic system employed by Rabelais, which Bakhtin labels “grotesque realism”, implies a fundamental openness to history and to the Other that separates Rabelais' comedy both from authoritarian structures that seek to present themselves as closed, complete, and extratcmporal. and from any narrow negative satire that strives to annihilate the Other. The fundamental correctness of this reading of Rabelais' place in the “History of Laughter”. I shall contend, can be shown by comparing his work to the satire of Juvenal, who employs many of the same basic elements found in Rabelais' “grotesque realism”, but uses them to achieve effects which are precisely the opposite of the revivifying and relativizing laughter of the marketplace. In Juvenal, both the grotesque and the Other function in an exclusively negative fashion that prevents narrative expansion and historical progress. More specifically, I shall first examine in this section the birth of Gargantua and the “abbaye de Thélème” from Rabelais, and then three scenes drawn from Juvenal's Satires 1, 6, and 9. What will emerge from this reading will be a position akin to that of Hans Robert Jauss, who notes: “Although it may not do full justice to Rabelais' creative individuality, his humanist or Erasmian credo, and the questions about a new practice of life, Bakhtin's interpretation nonetheless provides us with the indispensable key that will help avoid the familiar aporias of philological and positivist research” (1982, 205).4 In short, I shall argue that, even if Bakhtin's historicist critics score some points on matters of detail, his vision remains fundamentally correct, in the same way that, while the historical sins of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy were exposed by Wilamowitz, his vision of a fundamental struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian elements in Athenian tragedy has become a central part of the critical unconscious of most twentieth-century readers (Rehm 1992, 12; Alford 1992, 58–63).
We shall begin, then, with Berrong's Rabelais and Bakhtin. Berrong makes two essential arguments against Bakhtin, both of which will require a set of detailed responses. Number one, he argues that while there were “two ‘cultures’ in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance [the official and the popular] […] their participants were by no means so exclusively segregated as Bakhtin maintained. […] What we term the ‘popular culture’ of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was in fact every man's culture” (1986, 13–14, 19).5 This statement is problematic on several levels. First, Bakhtin never maintains that these cultures were “exclusively segregated”, and he gives a rather detailed explanation for why this is so. Nor does he deny the fundamentally universal nature of the culture that he sees at the root of Rabelais’ “grotesque realism” (RW, 72, 76; PDF, 127, 129–130; Gardiner 1992, 54, 204 n. 4). Second, while faulting Bakhtin elsewhere for segregating official and popular culture, Berrong himself does not deny that references to the “‘lower bodily stratum’ […] did figure far more prominently in popular culture than in its learned cousin”, nor that much of what Bakhtin labels popular culture “was uniquely popular” (1986, 24, 30, 60–61). Thus the picture that Berrong draws of Bakhtin's argument does not do justice to it. Painted with so broad a brush, the subtlety and nuance of Bakhtin's original thesis are lost, making him an easy target.
Typical of this cavalier treatment of Bakhtin's text is Berrong's statement that images of the lower bodily stratum were “by no means rejected by or absent from ‘official culture’ as Bakhtin repeatedly insisted. […] [I]mages of the excremental figured prominently in the discourse of at least one official establishment group […] the Franciscans” (1986, 24). This reading of Bakhtin, however, is simply not correct. Leaving aside the dubious suggestion that the mendicant friars were part of mainstream aristocratic culture in the Renaissance, Bakhtin most certainly did take account of the substantial popular elements in Franciscan discourse:
Many figures described by Burdach as preparing the Renaissance reflected the influence of the culture of folk humor. […] Such were, for instance, Joachim of Floris, and especially Francis of Assisi and the movement he initiated. Francis called himself and his companions “God's jugglers” (ioculatores Domini). Francis' peculiar world outlook, his “spiritual joy” (laetitia spiritualis), his blessing of the material bodily principle, and its typically Franciscan degradation and profanation can be defined, with some exaggeration, as a carnivalized Catholicism. (RW, 57)
Thus Berrong is mistaken when he claims that Bakhtin ignores the fact that certain elements of “establishment culture” employed the discourse of carnival. Indeed, the very example he gives is cited by Bakhtin.
Third, Berrong also admits that though popular culture was open to all, official aristocratic culture remained exclusive. It was defined precisely by its closure to the Other, while Bakhtin's festive laughter was universal in aim and characterized by a profound openness (Berrong 1986, 14; RW, 2, 10, 12, 19, 26). Aristocrats and their learned dependants may have participated in the people's festivities, but not vice versa. Likewise, those same nobles sought to limit the relativizing effects of the world of festive laughter by modifying the nature of its practices and by striving to put legal limits on them (RW, 73, 77; PDP, 129–130; Jeanneret 1993, 204, 206). Both of these strategies are documented by C.S. Barber in his landmark Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1963, 7, 24–31, 37, 49–57). Hence, while there remains debate over whether carnival and the practices associated with it were as inherently subversive of the established order as Bakhtin is often thought to imply (Stallybrass and White 1986, 30; Rebhorn 1993, 242 n. 2; Gardiner 1992, 182),6 or whether carnival served more as a safety valve which allowed the popular classes to blow off steam in a contained and ultimately conservative fashion (Stallybrass and White 1986, 13, 72–73), it is documented that carnival festivity not only expressed desires subversive of late feudalism's vertical hierarchy, but also that these expressions were feared by the ruling classes who sought to regulate them, and that on occasion these desires were translated into violent actions which were more than symbolic (Stallybrass and White 1986, 14–15, 32, 35; Ladurie 1979; Gardiner 1992, 182, 206 n. 13).
Fourth, Berrong argues that Bakhtin portrays Rabelais as presenting the nature of the opposition between official and popular culture as that of class-conscious proletarians revolting against their masters (Berrong 1986, 8–13; Walter 1988, 195 n. 1). In fact this view distorts both historical reality and Bakhtin's portrayal of it. Rather, the conflict between ruler and ruled was immanent in the exclusive nature of official culture itself, its refusal to admit the Other. Bakhtin never sees Rabelais as a political organizer or a propagandist per se for the lower classes, as Berrong suggests. In contrast, Bakhtin stresses repeatedly that Rabelais' comedy is positive and regenerative rather than closed and destructive, and that its popular elements are part of an inherited system of images whose logic eludes any attempt to harness it to the kind of narrow, exclusionary satire that propaganda requires (RW, 28–29, 37–39, 81, 114, 211; Gardiner 1992, 47, 207 n. 20).7
Berrong's second contention is that, contrary to Bakhtin's interpretation, beginning with chapter 13 of Gargantua, there does indeed appear to be a greater schism between popular and official culture than before, but this increased schism is now made manifest through the progressive marginalization of popular culture in the remainder of Rabelais' oeuvre (1986, 77).8 According to his reading, popular culture plays a smaller role in the second half of Gargantua, the Tiers livre, and the Quart livre, and what modest role it does continue to have is only “verbal” and displaced from Gargantua and Pantagruel to Panurge, Friar John, and others. Berrong largely credits this shift to Rabelais' having come under the patronage of Cardinal du Bellay. While he offers no statistical evidence for his claim that popular culture plays a smaller role in the last books, many would concede that the later narratives are not so thoroughly saturated with images of excrement and sexuality as the earlier ones.9 Nonetheless, the role of the grotesque remains substantial, as Berrong himself concedes: “[it can] be said quite categorically that Rabelais never excluded popular language from his narratives” (1986, 70). By the same token, as Bakhtin notes, Book Three contains, among other things, the famous list of 303 epithets for the phallus, and the story of Orion's birth from the urine of the gods, and is largely organized around the theme of Panurge's future cuckoldry (RW, 150–151, 177, 179). Berrong also ignores Bakhtin's claim that the basic recurrent theme of Book Three is the use of games as forms of fortune-telling, a cultural phenomenon which Bakhtin links to the festive life of the marketplace, fairs, and carnival (RW, 231, 242–244).
As for Berrong's argument that when sexuality and excrement are mentioned in Book Three — sometimes with quite detailed descriptions — they are only verbal (1986, 81–83), it will not hold water. Panurge's famous description of how to construct a series of impregnable walls around Paris, using monks' phalluses coupled with female genitalia, is itself only verbal, but it is certainly vivid and very characteristic of grotesque realism. There is, however, an even more fundamental problem. What precisely is meant by the distinction between the merely verbal and the real when speaking of fictional narratives? What is not verbal in these novels? At what level of abstraction is it possible to make this distinction in a meaningful way?10
All the same, Berrong himself concedes that popular culture and its grotesque imagery make a comeback in Book Four, but, he argues, since Pantagruel generally does not participate, the oppositional elements in that culture are blunted, and the narrative in fact is supportive of official culture (1986, 91, 94–96). This is an oversimplification. First, as Jeanneret notes, Book Four is largely organized around alimentary themes. It is here that we find the Sausage War, the story of Messer Gaster (Mr Belly), and the anatomy of King Lent (Jeanneret 1993, 102–103; RW, 155–156, 173–177, 200; FTC, 190). Thus, carnival festivity is not banished from Book Four, but rather forms one of its structural principles. Second, Philippe Walter has shown that Rabelais composed Book Four during his exile in the free city of Metz after the condemnation of Book Three by the Sorbonne (clear evidence that Rabelais' later novels were still considered subversive by the agelasts in power). During this period, he lived in the neigborhood of the chapel of Saint-Genest on the corner of “la rue d'Enfer” and “Jurue” (meaning “street of the Jews” in the dialect of Metz), where every Thursday a special mass was said for jugglers, street musicians, and acrobats, for this was the quarter where Jews, exiles, convicts, mountebanks, and the disreputable were made to live. Rabelais, then, not only included elements of carnival in Book Four, he lived it directly during the book's composition. Walter also argues that throughout his entire corpus Rabelais displays a deep familiarity with the mythology and folklore of the region around Metz, the origins of which stretch to the pre-Christian Gallo-Roman period. Consequently, he contends “Rabelais ne pouvait done que s'y intéresser lorsqu'il séjourna dans la cité et y composa le début de son Quart Livre” [Rabelais could not have been uninterested in [the mythology and folklore of Metz] during the time he stayed in city and wrote the beginning of Book Four] (1988, 189–195). Finally, although il is true that most of the popular clowning in Book Four is performed by Panurge, Friar John, and the characters met in the group's various adventures, this in itself hardly blunts the force of that imagery. For, as was noted above, this imagery is part of a larger inherited system with very deep ancient roots, and its significance eluded the control of even Rabelais himself (Freccero 1991, xi).
This argument on the ancient roots of Rabelais' popular culture is, however, not likely to go unchallenged, and a brief excursus on its legitimacy is in order. Rabelais' relation to folk culture and that culture's ancient roots have been the subject of some dispute in recent years. The most sustained critique is found in Walter Stephens' attack on the work of the early French folklorists and his attempt to link Bakhtin's work with theirs. Stephens is himself a great supporter of Berrong (1989, 27–29). His critique of Bakhtin, however, is of limited value. He focuses primarily on the question of the folkloric origins of the figure of the benevolent giant and deals with only one chapter of Bakhtin's book, “The Grotesque Image of the Body and Its Sources” (1989, 4. 6–8, 11,14, 20–21, 26–28. 38–39). In the process of examining Bakhtin's understanding of the folkloric origins of Rabelais' jolly giants, Stephens ignores much of what constitutes grotesque realism: its relation to the speech genres of the marketplace and the bourgeois (as opposed to courtois) genres of the animal epic, farce, and fabliaux, and to the system of imagery characteristic of folk humor rather than the actual narrative of the actions of the giants themselves (RW, 15, 27, 33, 40–41, 146, 153–154, 176–177, 181, 204–205; FTC, 159; PSG).
At the same time Stephens' claim that the primary evidence for the folkloric basis of Rabelais' humor can only be traced back to oral traditions dating from the nineteenth century is highly suspect. It does not take into account Antonine Maillet's considerable research on the Gargantua legends, which shows their presence in the folklore of Acadia in the seventeenth century. This is a period sufficiently early and a geographical location sufficiently isolated that the chances of widespread contamination by learned humanist culture is small, especially given the fact that the vast majority of the colonists she studies were illiterate (1971, 1, 20–23, 27, and 29). Nor is Stephens able to respond to Walter's work on the giant traditions associated with Saint Gorgon in Metz, which clearly predate Rabelais' novels (1989, 190–191, 198–199). Stephens also fails to analyze Barber's evidence for a parallel festive tradition in England, including giants associated with Lent, festive abuse, and linkage of that abuse with the bodily principle in various carnival practices associated with May celebrations, the Feast of Fools, and Lords of Misrule (Barber 1963, 11, 17, 21–25, 46–47, 71–72; see also Gardiner 1992, 49, 207 n. 17), all of which are also examined by Bakhtin (RW, 5–6, 12–14, 74–75, 79–80, 220; FTC, 184). Moreover, Rabelais himself was explicitly linked with the popular carnival tradition by his contemporaries (RW, 60–61),11 and there is now a considerable bibliography on the ancient sources of this tradition and its relation to both the Roman Saturnalia and the Greek institutions of old comedy and iambic poetry, all of which Stephens ignores (see RW, 6–8, 22, 30–31, 54–55, 121; Barber 1963, 3–4, 7–8, 16, 26–27; Mason 1963, 97–98; Calame 1977, 246; Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983, 15–16; Rösler 1986; Reckford 1987, 466; Walter 1989, 192; Nagy 1990, 397–398; Döpp 1993; Platter 1993; and Miller 1994, 9–37).
Thus, Stephens' critique is nowhere near so devastating as at first it might appear. A more balanced approach can be found in the work of Wayne Rebhorn (1993). While granting that Stephens and Berrong may be correct in contending that Bakhtin oversimplifies the relationship of folk culture “to ‘official’ or literate culture” in the Renaissance, he argues that Bakhtin's description of the opposition between the grotesque and the classical body “is operative in a host of Renaissance texts”, and that this opposition is explicitly portrayed by Castiglione, Thomas Wilson, and others as being homologous with that between courtly, aristocratic culture and peasant, folkloric buffoonery. Thus, it seems, the folkloric basis and the populist thrust of much of what Bakhtin labels grotesque realism is well attested not only for Rabelais but also for the Renaissance itself.
Finally, Berrong inadvertently undercuts his own thesis on the marginalization of popular culture in Books Three and Four, when he first argues for the virtual exclusion of festive culture by noting the increased citation of classical sources in Book Three by both Panurge and Pantagruel, and then proceeds to contend that there is an implicit condemnation of popular festive culture in the depiction of Panurge unrepentantly squandering his fortune on “a thousand little banquets and jolly feasts open to all comers” (1986, 80–81, 83). Panurge is, then, the source of both wanton festivity and the classical citations which supposedly negate it. This contradiction between Panurge's roles as the representative of both popular festivity and humanist culture is one that Berrong seems not to notice. In fact, what we see in the figure of Panurge is not the exclusion of popular culture but its direct merging with classical humanism, since his character participates with equal gusto in both realms, each of which vivifies and relativizes its Other. The essential duality of his character can be seen in his “Praise of Debtors”, where, after having spent his fortune on feasting, he defends the thesis that “[…] nature n'a crée l'homme que pour prester et emprunter” [Nature has created man for no other purpose but to lend and borrow], in the course of which he compares, in detail, the various stages of the process of digestion — from the consumption of food to its transmutation into blood — to a series of debtors and creditors (Rabelais 1964, 48–49; 1981, 300–301). In this speech we see not only the open and unfinished body, which are marks of the popular grotesque (RW, 23–34), but also a clear example of the genre to which Erasmus' Praise of Folly belongs, the mock encomium, “with more than a nod towards Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium” (Screech 1979, 225–226). The humanist and the popular, then, are not mutually annihilated by their copresence in this character, but rather they are productively joined in a single literary and linguistic matrix which transcends one-sided seriousness and pretensions to extra-temporal importance. Panurge is not the simple contrary or negation of Pantagruel. Instead he is his simultaneously necessary and extrinsic supplement — the positive presence of the Other that allows the embodiment of authority to function as something other than a dead, sclerotic weight.12
To understand how these complex sets of social codes, the popular and the humanist, combine to create that peculiarly open work we know as Rabelais' novel, it will be necessary to take a closer look at the text itself. Exemplary in this regard is the birth of Gargantua. First, it is crucial to understand more precisely what is meant by “grotesque realism”. “The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, and abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of the earth and the body in their indissoluble unity” (RW, 19). Degradation in grotesque realism does not represent a simple value judgment, or crude negation. It has always a very direct, concrete meaning, governed by a strict topographical logic, “‘Upward’ and ‘downward’ have here an absolute and strictly topographical meaning. ‘Downward’ is earth, ‘upward’ is heaven. Earth is an element that devours […] (the grave, the womb) and [is] at the same time an element of birth” (RW, 21). Grotesque degradation, as it appears in folk culture, does not represent one individual' desire to humiliate or destroy another. This degradation is the product not of vindictiveness or rage, but of a mixing of social codes and forms of behavior that usually would be kept apart (FTC, 170). It is a form of transgression and a denial of normal limitations in which, as in the Saturnalia (carnival's ancient ancestor), master and man momentarily trade places (RW, 81).
From this perspective, the passage describing Gargantua's birth is particularly interesting. It illustrates simultaneously the positive value of grotesque degradation and the topographical scheme of Rabelais' iconography. The body of Christ and the body of humanist letters are also players in this game, and in the tension between their high seriousness and Rabelais' low humor emerges the topsy-turvy world of carnival.
One can gain a sense of just how complex an ideological structure undergirds this thoroughly scatological passage, wherein Gargantua is born amidst heaps of excrement and tripe, by examining a thesis first propounded by M.A. Screech (1959, 10). He makes the argument that through a series of allusions to Luke 1.37 and Genesis 13.14 Rabelais is polemicizing in this scene against the Sorbonne's contention that faith was the “argumentum non apparentium” (the argument of nonevident truths) — a definition which Erasmus had shown was based on a faulty reading of the vulgate text of Paul's letter to the Hebrews (1959, 11–12).13 This interpretation of the passage is not in itself incongruous with Bakhtin's own:
The entire passage is a brilliant parody of the medieval doctrine of faith, as well as of the methods of defending and teaching it: through quotations from the Scriptures, intimidation, threats and accusations of heresy. The concentrated atmosphere of the merry bodily elements prepares the uncrowning of the doctrine of faith as “the argument of nonevident truths”. (RW, 227)
Thus Bakhtin, like Screech, sees this passage as engaging in a debate over the doctrine of faith as it was interpreted by the Sorbonne in this period. Yet Screech in a later work finds little to approve in Bakhtin's approach to Rabelais. For Screech, it is not the laughter of grotesque realism that is important but Rabelais' evangelical seriousness (1979, 1–14, 479; Stallybrass and White 1986, 7).
Nonetheless, throughout the whole of Screech's exposition, two key points are ignored. First, Gargamelle gives birth only after having eaten “sixteen quarters, two bushels, and six pecks” of poorly washed tripe. “O belle matiere fecale que doivoit boursoufler en elle” [Oh what fine fecal matter to swell up inside her!] (Rabelais 1962, 38; 1981, 48). And second, the miraculous birth itself occurs as a result of a softening of the right intestine and the astringent which was applied as a remedy:
Dont une horde vieigle dc la compaignie. laquelle avoit la reputation d'estre grande medicine […] luy fesit un restrinctif si horrible que tous ses larrys tant feurent oppilez et reserrez que a grande pene, avecques les dentz, vous les eussiez eslargiz, qui est chose bien horrible à penser.[…]
[At this point a dirty old hag of the company who had the reputation of being a good she-doctor […] made her an astringent so horrible that all her sphincter muscles were stopped and constricted. Indeed you could hardly have relaxed them with your teeth which is a most horrible thought. […]] (Rabelais 1962, 48–49; 1981, 52)
The argument about the nature of faith, complete with scriptural quotations, cannot be understood apart from this passage, which features one of the most spectacular examples of grotesque topographical degradation in all five books: the image of a person trying to open someone else's anus with their teeth, while the latter is in the midst of giving birth after a bout of diarrhea brought on by eating an excessive amount of insufficiently cleaned tripe.
Screech, however, is not alone in offering monologic readings of this passage. Berrong, in reference to this very scene, argues that the popular grotesque is all but excluded. He contends that Rabelais “in support of his claims concerning Gargantua's birth […] turns to classical mythology and Pliny (53; G 51–52) […] not to popular culture” (1986, 22). Thus, in order to focus solely on his thesis of a humanist Rabelais who progressively learns to reject popular culture as he comes under the influence of Cardinal du Bellay, Berrong, too, must ignore the scatological context of those classical citations.
The problem with such readings is simple, in each of these cases, Screech and Berrong, two learned and intelligent men, neglect what is arguably the most striking thing about this scene: its saturation with images of feasting, excrement, death, and new life. The womb and the bowels, sexuality and shit, birth and death are here tied up into one “grotesque knot” of carnivalesque vitality. Yet this complex of images is in no way hostile to the claims of classical humanism and evangelical reform. The citations of classical and biblical sources are neither removed nor attacked. Indeed they are welcomed, so long as they do not seek to become exclusive loci of power that would deny what is due the forces of time, which cause one thing to yield to another in an endless cyclical celebration of birth, death, and life anew. In effect, Berrong and Screech also ignore that the meal of tripe takes place on Mardi Gras, the last festive moment before the gloom of Lent, which is itself succeeded by that greatest festival of rebirth, Easter's feast of resurrection, wherein the cycles of the ecclesiastical calendar and those of the returning spring become one (RW, 162–163, 220–222, 226, 247–252; FTC, 171; PDP, 125, 164; Jauss 1982, 207; Jeanneret 1993, 23–25; McKinley 1987, 86). This cyclical movement from corrupt body to immortal soul replicates on the institutionalized metaphysical level the alternation of grotesque realism and theological polemic in the text of Rabelais. As Glidden notes, “For Rabelais, the truth lay neither in idealized images, nor in clerical humor, but in the middle ground in which soul and body mingled” (1991, 59).
What are we to make, however, of the end of Gargantuul Surely, if there were ever a passage that supported Berrong's contention that in the last half of the novel Rabelais moves from an acceptance of the popular grotesque to its virtual exclusion, it would be the “abbaye de Thélème” (Berrong 1986, 38; Stephens 1989, 28). Berrong himself highlights Bakhtin's admission that “Thélème is characteristic neither of Rabelais' philosophy nor of his system of images, nor of his style. […] This is not a popular-festive mood but a court and humanist Utopia […]” (RW, 138; see also 280, 431). He concludes that the “abbaye de Thélème” stands outside Bakhtin's vision of Rabelais' work. There is no place for it in his hermeneutic circle. Nonetheless, the “abbaye de Thélème” will hardly bear the weight Berrong assigns to it: it does not represent a final repudiation of the popular grotesque. The reasons for rejecting such a reading are three.
First, the “abbaye” itself in no way constitutes a narrative telos that would allow this humanist Utopia to stand as the final Rabelaisian word. Dramatically, it takes place not only before Books Three and Four, which it also predates historically (1534 versus 1546 and 1552 respectively), but also before Pantagruel, which Berrong himself acknowledges is chock full of the popular grotesque. Moreover, as we have already shown, Books Three and Four themselves owe a far greater debt to the aesthetics of grotesque realism than Berrong is willing to admit. Thus the “abbaye de Thélème”, from the perspective of Rabelais' grand narrative, hardly represents the achievement of a final triumph of the timeless and the finalized over the open historicity of the bodily grotesque; rather it represents an ideal construct which momentarily rises above the endless fertility of the lower bodily stratum only to be swept forward once again into the endless “feast of time” described in Books Three and Four.
Second, this temporal contextualization of the “abbaye de Thélème” applies not only to the narrative unfolding of the whole series of novels, but also to Gargantua itself. It will be recalled that the novel is bound by two enigmatic poems. The first is said to be very old. According to the narrator, it is found at the end of an ancient book giving the genealogy of the giant Grandgouzier and was discovered in a tomb. The contents of this “coq à l'âne” nonsense poem are all but indecipherable, although they are generally thought to be satiric (Rabelais 1962, 23–30). The novel ends with a similar poetic enigma which, we learn, is found at the base of the abbey (Rabelais 1962, 306–312). On a purely formal level, these two enigmas which frame the novel, one found in an ancient grave, the other at the foundation of the abbey, indicate a cyclical view of time. The novel ends as it began. This circular notion of temporality is, of course, at the heart of grotesque realism's celebration of the endless cycle of birth and death. At the same time, the fact that the first enigma, at the beginning of the novel, is found in a grave and that the second poem is found at the end of the novel, when the construction of the “abbaye de Thélème” is just beginning, reinforces this cyclical vision of time. Here birth and death, beginning and end, are purely relative positions (PDP, 164). Moreover, since Gargantua reads this second poem as an apocalyptic prophecy of an end time in which all those people who have been led back to a belief in the gospel are persecuted, he also sees in this poem a vision of the dangers that threaten the very humanist and evangelical ideals for which the abbey stands. It is therefore hard to envision how the “abbaye” could represent the negation of folk culture's vision of the endless cycle of time. Rather, it seems that “Thélème” is subject to the same forces of destruction and decay — which make possible new life and rebirth — as any other human construct. This not to say that Gargantua's fears are not justified. As Screech points out, in the atmosphere of France's increasing religious tensions during the sixteenth century they are very legitimate, and Rabelais underlines the seriousness of his apprehensions through his systematic use of biblical allusion and quotation in the last stanza of the poem, which was added specifically for the version printed in the novel (1956, 395–399; 1959, 17). But Bakhtin does not deny this. As he notes, in his reading of the poem, “Let us stress in this prophetic picture the complete destruction of the established hierarchy, social, political, and domestic. It is a picture of utter catastrophe threatening the world” (RW, 237). Thus even the “abbaye de Thélème” is mortal and so cannot stand outside time.
All the same, Gargantua's gloomy reading of the second poem is not allowed to be the novel's last word. Friar John immediately challenges this grim interpretation with a more humorous reading based on the poem of Mellin de Saint-Gelais which Rabelais had adapted to his own purposes. For the original “Enigmes en façon de Prophétie” had employed the language of apocalyptic eschatology to describe nothing more than a tennis game (RW, 237; Rabelais 1962, 306; Screech 1956, 392, 399). It was onto this poem that Rabelais had grafted his evangelical fears. The novel, therefore, concludes with Friar Jean's uncrowning of Gargantua's somber interpretation of the poem, noting that the end of the poem shows that the players “apres avoir bien travaillé, ilz s'en vont repaistre; et grand chiere!” [having put in a good day's work, they go for refreshment, and there was great good cheer!] (Rabelais 1962, 314). Gargantua ends, then, not with the humanist Utopia, nor with evangelical gloom, but with a feast (RW, 238). This is not to say that the evangelical and humanist elements, on which Screech and Berrong concentrate, are not there, or are somehow less real than the popular festive world, but as in the case of the birth of Gargantua, the competing realms of learned humanism, devout evangelical religion, and grotesque realism serve to revitalize and relativize one another, allowing no one of them to exercise permanent hegemony over the others.
The essence of the Rabelaisian grotesque, then, as Bakhtin saw it, was a fundamental openness to the Other which allowed for, and even demanded, temporal and historical change. It is this force that powers the narrative from one book to the next, and which will never allow either the high or the low, the official or the popular completely to exclude the Other. Grotesque degradation does not abolish the vertical axis of transcendental values so much as it renews and revitalizes it in order to make horizontal movement possible (RW, 2–3, 9–11, 49, 53, 82, 166, 212–213; FTC, 146–166, 177, 187; Jeanneret 1993, 25–26; Barber 1963, 9).
The truth of this understanding can perhaps best be seen in light of what Bakhtin calls “great time” or “historical poetics” (RQNM, 4; FTC, 84; Morson and Emerson 1990, 428–129). For if we compare the use of the grotesque and of topographical degradation in Rabelais with that of Juvenal, the laughing openness of Rabelais' grotesque realism will become all the clearer in light of Juvenal's historical closure. First, Juvenal's hostility to foreigners, women, and indeed anything which occupies the position of the cultural Other is sufficiently well known as to require no further comment in the context of a brief discussion. Second, Juvenal's very different view of the grotesque, one which is anything but fertile and revivifying, but more precisely sterile, can be easily demonstrated by recalling a scene which, as in the birth of Gargantua, combines images of eating, excrement and sexuality in a context rich in metaphors of the earth and agriculture. I am referring to the passage from Satire 9 in which the bisexual gigolo Naevolus rhetorically asks his master:
an facile et pronum est agere intra viscera penem
legitimum atque illic hesternae occurrere cenae?
seruus erit minus ille miser qui foderit agrum
quam dominum.
[Do you
Suppose it's easy, or fun, this job of cramming
My cock up into your guts till I'm stopped by last night's supper?
The slave who ploughs his master's field has less trouble
Than the one who ploughs him.] (9.42–16)14
Here we have the same essential set of elements as in the birth of Gargantua, but the accent placed on them is completely different.15 Everything leads to nothing here. There is nothing redemptive, or even profitable, since the question occurs in the course of a conversation about Naevolus' difficulty in receiving proper remuneration for his services. Time in this poem is not pregnant with the future but held static in the sterility of the present. Juvenal's satire here is purely negative, without the vivifying force of the festive laughter of the folk.
The real difference between the laughter of Rabelais and the satire of Juvenal can perhaps best be seen in the very different ways in which they treat the topographical logic of grotesque degradation. In Rabelais, as we saw, high and low are brought together on the vertical axis in such a way as to promote horizontal movement through time. This, in turn, is exemplified by the novel's relentless narrative progression. In Juvenal, the conflation of the poles on the vertical axis leads to a mutual annihilation which renders horizontal or historical progression impossible. The first passage we shall examine is Satire 1.147–149:
nil erit ulterius quod nostris moribus addat
posteritas, eadem facient cupientque minores,
omne in praecipiti vitium stetit.
[Posterity can add
No more or worse, to our ways; our grandchildren will act
As we do, and share our desires. Today every vice
has reached its ruinous zenith.]
The thesis of this passage is one of paralysis and double negation: “We have reached the high point which is also our low point. The future holds no turning back. Everything will always be the same.” The very rhetorical structure of the passage imitates its semantic content. The enjambement of the first and second lines gives the impression of vice literally spilling over from one line into the next. “The limit has been reached and surpassed; the young will do and desire the same.” Normal vertical relations of value have become so conflated as to be almost flat. The “minores” [the “lesser ones” or the “younger ones”] are to be no “less” than their “betters”, the “maiores”, who are also their “elders”. The phrase “facient eadem” [they will do the same thing] likewise recalls the beginning of the poem where Juvenal had warned “expectes eadem a summo minimoque poeta” [you can expect the same thing from the greatest and the least poet] (1. 14). In short, one of the founding paradoxes of this poem is Juvenal's thesis that “everything has become the same, only worse”.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of the topographical logic of degradation, it is the final line that demands the closest attention. Ferguson explains:
omne in praecipiti vitium stetit: a vivid visual picture of a gang of vices standing on a high peak with a steep drop in front of them, but what does J[uvenal] mean to convey by it? (a) We should not lose altogether the idea that vice has ‘peaked’; it is implicit in the picture that future generations cannot go higher. […] (b) But in praecipiti stresses the point that it has nowhere to go but down. This in turn links two ideas: (i) that vice leads to disaster […] (ii) that it is there for the satirist to push it over the precipice. The picture is not quite a single one. (1979, 122 n. 149)
Ferguson's point that the picture is not single is well-made. “In reaching the highest we have topped the lowest. There is no place to go but down.” Yet this is not the sole reversal. For, if the satirist does push vice over the precipice, do we then reach the moral high ground by crashing to bottom, or just the abyss? We have in this passage not the degradation and renewal of hierarchies, as might be found in Rabelais, but their annihilation. Standards of measure and comparison are turned against one another.16 Logical development is impossible; the only avenue open for expansion is the accumulation of examples, which is typical of Juvenal's style.17 Narrative progression here is denied.
An analogous vignette to the one just investigated can be seen in lines 349–351 of Satire 6:
iamque eadem summis pariter minimisque libido,
nee melior silicem pedibus quae conterit atrum
quam quae longorum vehitur cervice Syrorum.
[High and low alike, all women nowadays
Share the same lusts. The peasant trudging barefoot
Over black cobbles is no whit superior to
The lady who rides on the necks of tall Syrian porters.] (emphases added)
The first line restates our thesis with epigrammatic concision. The opposition of summus to minimus establishes a set of topographical relations which is then negated by both eadem and pariter. The class significance of this visual hierarchy is underlined by the fact that the one woman is walking while the other is being carried by her Syrian slaves.
To appreciate the irony of the passage, it must be remembered that Roman ethical and class values were both organized along the same vertical axis. Thus words expressing character judgements, such as “honor” or “goodness”, carried strong political and class connotations (Nicolet 1966, 721; Foucault 1986, 42). It was a world in which a low or immoral aristocrat was a theoretical, though certainly not an empirical, non sequitur. Thus, the equestrian and senatorial classes were termed the “honestiores”, or the more noble members of society, while the rest of the population were referred to as the “humiliores”, or those closer to the earth (humus). By the same token the normative term boni [the good men] stood as metonymy for the equestrian and senatorial orders (Syme 1960, 14). As Marilyn Skinner has observed:
In the competitive Roman status system, acquiring wealth — preferably, if not exclusively, by socially approved means — was the precondition for elite mobility. Rank and its concomitant privileges were explicitly defined by the amount of one's fortune. Financial resources also served as a stable foundation of moral authority: like the newly rich freedman, the financially strapped gentleman was thought to violate both class protocols and norms of right conduct. (1989, 12)
Roman ideology and Roman values were, in fact, from the beginning predicated on a rigidly class-structured society. It would be expected, then, that the wealthy woman would be the better born, and thus the moral superior of the lower-class woman.18 But in Juvenal's topsy-turvy world the presumption of superiority is shifted to the lower orders, but only after having been negated in a second reversal (“non melior”). Thus, once again the presumed hierarchy is annihilated, and the expected standards of comparison rendered inoperable.
Juvenal's method, here, is clear, and it is one he uses frequently.19 The double reversal is achieved by the reduction of a term, or a hierarchical structure, which has both a normative and a purely logical or descriptive meaning, to its descriptive pole alone.20 Yet for the irony of this process to be perceived, the reader must feel the absence of the corollary meaning, even as s/he is made also to question whether this reduction of the normative to the material and descriptive was not immanent in the term all along. As W.S. Anderson has noted, this “paradoxical use of traditionally moral terms symbolizes the extent of Rome's degeneracy and justifies the satirist's uncompromising condemnation” (1951, 37).21
In many ways, Juvenal's satire is typical of an imperial culture which cannot envision any future beyond itself.22 As Bakhtin wrote of Apuleius, who was part of the generation succeeding Juvenal, “The everyday world itself is static in Apuleius, it has no ‘becoming’: this is precisely why there is no single everyday time” (FTC, 128–129). The same is even more emphatically true of Juvenal himself. His satires consist of groups of vignettes which possess a thematic resemblance but no narrative development; nor could they. For the structure of those vignettes, the internal logic of their imagery, is such as to produce a set of self-canceling contradictions which allows no possibility for envisioning either their future resolution or their dialectical synthesis. High and low are brought together not so as to revivify that which is most authentic and open to time in each of them, as we saw in the birth of Gargantua, but so as to leave no spot from which one can imagine the new and the different. Juvenal's satirical world presents a form of ideological closure which consistently borders on the paranoid and the agoraphobic. In this respect, although its images often consist of elements which are very similar to Rabelais', from the perspective of the “history of laughter” Juvenal's satires represent the polar opposite of Rabelais' carnival.
To sum up, then, we have demonstrated three things. First, the stakes in rethinking Rabelais and His World are very high, because the status of this book is at the center of theoretical and political debates currently raging among students of the French sixteenth century and scholars of Bakhtin himself. Moreover, the influence of this book on literary studies across the board has been so substantial and profound that ultimately the fate of a large portion of the literary scholarship of the past decade hangs in the balance. If the theoretical model on which that scholarship was based can be shown to be without substantial merit, then the value of that scholarship itself would be dubious in turn. Second, using the example of Richard Berrong, and to a lesser extent Walter Stephens and M. A. Screech, we have shown that the historicist case against Bakhtin is not nearly so good as it is often said to be. Bakhtin never claimed that carnival folk culture and humanist aristocratic culture were mutually exclusive in the Renaissance. At the same time, we have seen that this folk culture is part of an ancient and complex system of images whose basic paradigms correspond to what Bakhtin call “grotesque realism”. Morover, while Books Three and Four may represent a moderation in Rabelais' use of the scatological folk humor of the grotesque, it is hardly absent. Consequently, the reports of Bakhtin's death in Rabelais studies have been greatly exaggerated. Third, while we may wish to concede to the historicists certain points of detail that Bakhtin got wrong, certain areas which received insufficient emphasis, and a certain lack of positivist precision, our reading of the birth of Gargantua and the “abbaye de Theleme” in relation to the three passages from Juvenal's satires demonstrates the essential correctness of Bakhtin's understanding of Rabelais' use of “grotesque realism”. The openness to history manifested in Rabelais' carnival grotesque is diametrically opposed to the historical and narrative closure of Juvenal's classical satire. In this light, while Rabelais and His World can and must be open to criticism of all stripes, it remains, in Hans Robert Jauss' words, an “indispensable key” to understanding the world of Rabelais' novels (1982, 205; see also McKinley 1987, 88).
NOTES
1. On authoritative discourse, see DN, 342–345; PSG, 88–89; and Morson and Emerson 1990, 218–223.
2. For a good example of the way the Bakhtin debate divides along roughly the same lines as the literary theory versus traditional historicism debate, see Berrong's hostile comments directed against “various theories and theoreticians fashionable among ‘New Critics’”, in his book-length polemic against Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais, Rabelais and Bakhtin (1986, 149 n. 6). For an analogous division between historicist and linguistically-oriented critics, see McKinley 1987, 83–84.
3. Thus Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, who consider the Rabelais book uncharacteristic of Bakhtin's oeuvre, see him as consistently hostile to Marxism and discount the possibility that he wrote or helped author the works attributed to Medvedev and Voloshinov, whom they view as Marxist: 1990, 3–4. 11, 77, 92–96, 102, 104, 106–119, 124–125, 161–162. 433–452. 479 nn. 6–7. See also Morson 1991, 1072, and Emerson's discussion of contemporary Russian attempts to discount the importance of carnival (1993. 123–133) and her review of Gardiner 1992 (1994). For opposing views, which generally concur in attributing greater importance to the Rabelais book, granting some measure of authorship to Bakhtin in the disputed texts, and not seeing him as hostile to Marxism in general (although no one claims he was sympathetic to its Soviet parody), see Gardiner 1992, 2–6, 9–22, 107, 138, 197 nn. 3–4 and 8, 215–216 n. 11; Holquist 1990, 8, 34–35, 157–158; Frow 1986, 64–68, 97–99, 133–139, 158–159; Todorov 1984, 11; and Stallybrass and White, who record Tony Bennett's claim that “Bakhtin's study of Rabelais should hold an exemplary place in materialist cultural criticism” (1986, 7). It is particularly interesting in this light to note that one of Bakhtin's most hostile critics among the seizièmistes, Richard Berrong, sees Rabelais and His World as an essentially Marxist work (1986, 11–12). For a good example of how politics powers much of the contemporary debate surrounding Bakhtin, see the exchange of letters between Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd on the one hand and Gary Saul Morson on the other in PMLA (1994, 116–117, 117–118). For a general discussion of the multiple readings of Bakhtin currently in circulation, see Miller and Platter 1993, 117–120.
4. See also Bakhtin's indictment of a purely positivist approach: RW, 130–131.
5. For a supporting view see Stephens 1989, 27–28 and McKinley 1987, 85.
6. See, however, Bakhtin's observation on the limits of folk culture's opposition to ecclesiastical and aristocratic authority (RW, 95, cited in Gardiner 1992, 232 n. 3).
7. This is a point which seems to elude Charles Byrd in his otherwise excellent article on Freudian influence on Bakhtin's theory of laughter (1987).
8. But see Glidden's argument, that Panurge's obseene suggestion for building a wall around Paris using interlocking sets of female genitalia and monks' phalluses serves as “a foreshadowing of the monstrous bodies and body parts to come in the Quart Livre” (1991, 41); cf. McKinley: “There is a change in tone in Gargantua, and it may indeed support Berrong's thesis, but the popular elements that remain cannot be discounted” (1987, 86).
9. Thus Berrong (1986, 21, 33, 56 and 84–85) cites one of Bakhtin's supporters. Michael Beaujour. as arguing “the Third and Fourth Books seem to return to the humanist fold”. Likewise Jeanneret. who labels Bakhtin the foremost authority on images of food, feasting, and bodies in Rabelais, sees the regenerative powers of the stomach as more limited after the first two books, though hardly absent (1993, 23 and 106).
10. For a useful critique of the rhetoric of realism, see Kennedy 1993. 46–63. (1 owe this citation to Charles Platter.)
11. For more corroborative evidence of the popular and folkloric origins of Rabelais” humor and style, see Huizinga 1924, 60–61, 137, 143–144, 152–153, 193, 232, 280–281; Jauss 1982, 206–207; Stallybrass and White 1986, 57; Freccero 1991, 42: and Jeanneret 1993, 205.
12. See RW, 11–12. 21, 24, 30, 66, 71–72, 110, 138, 176: FTC, 176: PDP, 160; Huizinga 1923, 141, 160–161: Maillet 1971, 19–20: Jauss 1982, 205–206: McKinley 1987, 86: Freccero 1991, 10, 31; Gardiner 1992, 56; Jeanneret 1993, 7, 105–106, 222–223, 239, 272; and on the “supplement”, see Derrida 1976, 144–145.
13. Screech's case is strengthened by the fact that the following variant appeared in the first two editions of Gargantua, immediately after the passage reading “Je me doubte que ne croyez asseueremenl ceste estrange nativite. […] De ma parte, je ne trouve rien escript.” It was suppressed in later editions by order of the censors at the Sorbonne: “Ne diet pas Solomon Provcrbiorum 14: «Innocens credit omni verbo etc.», et Sainct Paul, prime Corinthio. 13: «Charitas omnia credit». Pourquoy ne le croyries vous? Pour ce (dictes vous) qu' il n'y a nulle apparence. Je vous dictz que pour ceste seule cause vous le debvez croyre en foy parfaicte. Car les Sorbonistes disent que foy est argument des choses de nulle apparence […]” [Does not Solomon say in Proverbs 14 “The innocent person believes every word”, and Saint Paul at Corinthians 1.13 “Charity believes everything”. Why would you not believe it? Because, you say, this thing cannot be seen. I say to you that for this reason alone you ought to believe it in perfect faith. For the Sorbonne says that faith is the argument of things unseen. […] (Rabelais 1962, 31–32 n. 4, my translation). Confirmation of Screech's thesis can be found on the level of theme and image as well as direct statement. For in having Gargantua born from Gargamelle's left ear, Rabelais is parodying the tradition which said that Christ was conceived through Mary's car upon her having heard the word of God (Screech 1959, 15). For a more condensed rendering of Screech's argument see his Rabelais (1979, 134–137).
14. This and all subsequent translations are taken from Green 1974.
15. On the importance of “accent” in Bakhtin, see inter alia, DN, 276–277, 282, 288–294.
16. Compare Satires 3.6–9, and 1.22–23.
17. "By varying his exempla and their imagery he seems to build up an indictment, an indictment which in fact depends upon affective juxtaposition of highly theatrical episodes exploiting a rhetorical antithesis and a strikingly paradoxical image. We may well conclude that such imagery blocks off reasoning or logical development of an argument, and constitutes a necessary element in Juvenal&s satiric poetry, where if one thing is emphasized it is that unreason dominates the world” (Anderson 1960, 260).
18. Horace himself queries this collapsing of class, monetary, and ethical values in his Satire 1.6, where he plays upon the multiple meanings of nobilis, honestus and ingenuus (Rudd 1966, 202–224). The lip-service given to the old Roman value of paupertas was belied by the relatively high monetary qualifications for entering either the senatorial or equestrian classes. A poor man, almost by definition, could not be honestior. Ovid has Janus in the first book of the Fasti make the point bluntly: “in pretio pretium nunc est; dat census honoresj census amicitias; pauper ubique iacet” [now the prize is for a price; wealth provides all honorl wealth provides all friends; the poor man lies in the street (my translation)]. As Catharine Edwards summarizes, in her excellent review of the subject, “in Roman texts social status is a moral issue” (1993, 180–186).
19. Compare 1.48. See also Lafleur 1974 and 1975, especially 55, and Syme 1960, 12, 157.
20. Anderson puts it this way: “[…] the thematic self-contradiction suggests to the satirist a technique of exposition by which he progressively strips away the potential connotations of a concept and ultimately leaves it with a single glaring significance, that by its enormity, justifies his indignation” (1951, 88).
21.Anderson lists the following examples from Satire 1: merentur (37), optima (38), lautum atque beatum (67), melior Lucusta (71). One could also add infamia (48). For inversions of the traditional themes of pietas and the sportula see Winkler's analysis of Satire 9 (1985, 112–114); on the complexities of the use of moral terms in Latin poetry see Miller 1994, 128–140.
22.By Juvenal's time, the return of the Golden Age, announced in Vergil's Fourth Eclogue and presaged in the Aeneid, had been officially accomplished, and the political problems which led to these poetic speculations had been “ex hypothesi […] solved” (Williams 1982, 22; see also Wilkinson 1974, 175). Roman ideology had entered a period of stasis and self-replication. Though the fabric of Roman society was changing, there existed no accepted paradigms to articulate that change. The standard models could only reveal their inadequacies, they could not project new solutions: it was not in their nature. Instead, ancient modes of thought were radically conservative, and adverse to all innovation or change. In structural terms, these traditional modes of thought can all be said to suffer from “historical inversion”. As Bakhtin observes, “The essence of this inversion is found in the fact that mythological […] thinking locates such categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection […] and the like in the past. To put it in somewhat simplified terms, we might say that a thing that could and in fact must only be realized exclusively in the future is here portrayed as something out of the past. […] The present and even more the past are enriched at the expense of the future” (FTC, 147). See also Wilkinson: “What did the Romano-Greeks of this period lack that modern societies have, blessed as they were with freedom from strife? Primarily the idea of progress in this world. Many of the ancients had a conception of human progress up to their own time. […] But there was no general idea of future progress as the gradual achievement by human endeavor of various social and technological aims. The whole age was backward looking” (1974, 168).
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