The latest installment of the Etudes Rabelaisiennes presents an updated version of the proceedings of a conference held in 2006. From the outset, Diane Desrosiers sketches the scope of the enterprise by defining five forms of hybridization (material, linguistic, intertextual, generic, and intermedial). Yet probably the most productive distinction is brought into play by Edwin Duval in his opening remarks on the difference between the “composite” (understood as the juxtaposition of heterogenous elements) and the “hybrid” as an attempt to resolve, in a synthesis of opposing forces and forms, the conflicts at work in Rabelais. Most contributors agree that these tensions express (and sometimes even provoked) various enactments of a critical debunking of the discursive practices of his time.
A first section (“Generic Hybridity”) looks at the mechanisms of hybridization at play in Rabelais’s text that, as Eva Kushner shows, have contributed to a history of interpretations that are themselves “hybrid.” Jean-François Vallée highlights the dynamics of dialogue, Claude La Charité and E. Bruce Hayes reconsider early modern comedies and farces, Mawy Bouchard and Bernd Renner revisit the satirical, while Pablo Péméja analyzes the insertion of poetic devices—often in the form of “text-monuments” (Valérie Nicaise-Oudart)—in Rabelais’s prose, which, as Corinne Noirot argues, can be understood as an instrument of defamiliarization and which calls for a reevaluation of the legacy of the Grande Rhétorique (Michael Randall). Dorothy Stegman focuses on lists and Madeleine Jeay offers valuable input on the medieval legacy that informs them. Marie-Claire Thomine-Bichard analyzes the critical function of the harangue and Renée-Claude Breitenstein that of epideictic rhetoric, whereas Denis Bjaï revisits the strategic presence of prayers. While Florian Preisig highlights Rabelais’s interest for the materiality of texts, Jelle Koopmans shows the importance of understanding the hybridity of his work in the context of early modern print culture—a point that Véronique Duché-Gavet and Trung Tran further develop in their contribution on the illustrations of his books. Barbara Bowen’s remarks on the apparently trivial as well as François Paré’s and Philip Ford’s interest for humanist forms of knowledge also echo the need to historicize what we perceive as hybrid. The contributions on the limits of understanding (Jan Miernowski), the reinvention of language in a time of crisis (Samuel Junod), and the early modern deconstruction of the notion of genre (Nadine Kuperty-Tsur) underline the productivity of such an approach.
The second section (“Intertextual and Linguistic Hybridity”) opens with a contribution by François Rigolot on the prologue of the Third Book as a mise en abyme of Rabelaisian hybridization. The emblematic role of the text is further discussed by James Helgeson in his article on Rabelais’s hybrid “I”—a question that John McClelland’s reading of Pantagruel and Gargantua as “autofiction” will also bring into play. The tensions between the natural and the artificial identified by Rigolot will find an echo in the papers on Quaresmeprenant (John Parkin and Florence Dobby-Poirson). Other contributions focusing on the Fourth Book highlight the challenging rhetoric of the text: Ariane Bayle analyzes strategic forms of “rhetorical contamination” of voices, and Marie-Madeleine Fragonard and Caroline Lebrec show how the work stages its fictionality. Several articles then take a closer look at the influence of key authors on Rabelais’s text: Macrobius and a French Ship of Fools (Mireille Huchon), Lucian of Somosata (Andrea Frisch), Poliziano and Nicolas Petit (Arnaud Laimé), Folengo (Pascale Mounier), Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (Roy Rosenstein), The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (Grégoire Holtz), and Erasmus’s Adages (Marie-Dominique Legrand) and Praise of Folly (Philippe Baillargeon). Papers on the history and poetics of “imaginary books” (Walter Stephens); writing nature’s “curiosities” (Ruxandra Volcan); the burlesque reinvention of Rabelais in the work of Dassoucy (Dominique Bertrand); the role of dream fictions (Normand Doiron) in his reception in the Grand Siècle; Rabelaisian fakes in the nineteenth century (François Rouget); Rabelais’s use of “lexical hybridity” (Isabelle Garnier) in the context of religious conflict; his interest in music (Frank Dobbins), even his silences (Claude-Gilbert Dubois); and the crucial episode of the “languages of Panurge” (Paul Smith) complete the book. An “Index Nominum” concludes a volume that will once again relaunch the interpretative fireworks that is the Pantagruelian saga and invite new readings among Rabelais scholars who will constitute the study’s primary readership.
