Genre, in earlier literature, established the context in which the work was to be received. It was what made you feel you were in the presence of a friend, not a stranger, of someone to whom you could respond as a person, not someone whose every word and gesture had to be monitored for fear of misunderstanding. But of course this only works so long as the conventions on which genre relies are generally accepted. Already in the ancient world there is evidence that genre conventions could be misunderstood and thus seen as absurd or misleading or restricting. Plato's overt attacks on Homer and the covert attacks of Euripides on Aeschylus and Sophocles reveal what happens when the traditions and conventions underlying genre are no longer felt to be natural. But the most striking example comes, significandy, not from the Greek world but from the world of the Hebrew Bible. In Ezekiel 33 we find the prophet berating his audience for listening to him as they would to a bard or entertainer and not as to one who is trying to tell them an awful truth. ‘And lo,’ he says, miming their response, ‘thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument: for they hear thy words, but they do them not’ (Ezekiel 33:32). But of course we are to imagine his audience clapping even harder at this, thus leaving the prophet helpless as to how to convince them that what he is saying is not art or entertainment but a true account of what will come to pass.
It is as though the conventions of art, instead of enabling discourse to take place, had come between Ezekiel and his audience. He wants to sweep them away but this turns out not to be possible. Once he starts to talk to his audience the possibility of misunderstanding will always be there and nothing he can say will get rid of the problem. The possibility had always been there (and is probably there in any culture), but it only became manifest in a time of cultural and epistemological confusion and change. We find it in Plato and in Euripides; in the Hebrew prophets and in St Paul; but it only comes to dominate all other issues at the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation and their aftermath.
Two episodes are emblematic.
The first is to be found in a book. When, in Rabelais' Pantagruel, the young giant meets Panurge, who is to become his lifelong friend, a curious scene ensues. Pantagruel asks the bedraggled but handsome youth who has appeared before him who he is and where he comes from. Panurge answers first in German and then, when this draws a blank, in Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Scots, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and a couple of other, unidentified, languages. Pantagruel is totally baffled. Finally he asks Panurge: ‘Say, my friend, can you not speak French?’ ‘But of course, sire,’ answers the other, ‘it is my natural and mother tongue.’ Then, says the giant, tell us your name and where you come from, for, he adds, I have taken such a liking to you that I would make you my companion. At which point Panurge, in perfect French, gives him all the information he has asked for, but suggests that the full story of his adventures had better wait till he has eaten and drunk, for his body is crying out for nutriment. Upon which Pantagruel gives orders that he be brought to his lodgings and royally entertained and thereafter they are inseparable.
The comedy here lies in the fact that Panurge acts and speaks as though he does not know the conventions of social intercourse. There is after all no law which says you have to answer someone in the language in which they address you, even if that language is French and you are in France and yourself happen to be French. It is only, as they say, that it helps.
But if Panurge is a joker he is, like Shakespeare's fools, also making a serious point. After all, anyone can beg — why should we believe him when he says he is hungry and thirsty and needs clothing? By couching his plea in every language but French Panurge not only gets the chance to reiterate his plea until it seems to take on the force less of an argument than of a physical fact, but he also brings out into the open the point that there will always be a gap between what we say and how we feel, that no language on earth can express our bodily needs. And the young king seems to understand, which is why in the end he offers him much more than food and clothing, he offers him friendship.
Panurge's name tells us that he can do all things, that he is a fixer; and his account of his life reveals that he is a vagabond and an adventurer. Where Pantagruel and his court are rooted in a specific place and specific conventions, Panurge is rootless, without history or genealogy, a crosser of boundaries, a man who lives by his wits and his wit. That is also why he fascinates Rabelais. Indeed, we could say that the sudden appearance of Panurge in chapter nine — and the first edition of the book prints two chapter nines, suggesting that Panurge's eruption was indeed sudden and unexpected — coincides with Rabelais' discovery of his vocation.
Consider. Pantagruel was Rabelais' first venture into an as yet unknown field, that of printed prose fiction. When he begins Rabelais has as yet no defined public, such as Dante and Petrarch had, nor does he have a patron to support him and instruct him as to what he requires. It is going to be up to him to decide what to write and to draw out a public from among the readers of both popular romances and highbrow epics. Thus, like Panurge, Rabelais is both free and needy. Before chapter nine he had been content to advance by means of parody of both epic and romance, making us laugh at his implicit message — this is not epic and it is not romance, the days for such things are past — but not really sure of what his own territory or voice should be. After Panurge's arrival everything changes.
I am not a bard, Rabelais is insisting. I am not the spokesman of the community. Words have, in a printed book, no authority whatsoever. But what role does an author have then? The European novel (noveclass="underline" new, as roman: vernacular) develops by making the boundaries evaporate, by asserting, with varying degrees of seriousness and the desire to persuade: this is true because I, Robinson Crusoe, because I, David Copperfield, tell you it is true. But Rabelais takes a different path. He does not wish merely to entertain, like the authors of the old romances and their descendants, and he is too proud of his new-found freedom to wish to spend his time and powers pretending to be bound by the constraints of the memoir, even the invented memoir. On the other hand mere irony, the mere debunking of epic and romance, does not satisfy him any more than it will satisfy Cervantes in the following century. What Panurge helps him to discover, and what Cervantes, Sterne and Beckett will discover in turn, perhaps with a little help from him, is this: that through laughter a certain truth will emerge, behind the playful words a message will be heard: I am hungry; I am needy; I want to speak to you; I want you to listen to me; yet the words I have to use will always be someone else's words, the language will always be foreign to my own specific needs. Precisely because we can never pin the jester down, precisely because he always seems to know himself and us so well, precisely because he makes us laugh, we extend to him our trust. We do not believe he is telling us true things about his life (Panurge's, Rabelais'), but rather that he is telling us something far more important: he is telling us what life is like in a world where all boundaries have become fluid, and he is showing us the falsity and dangers of pretending that this is not the case.