All that and more, it seems to me, is already implied in Dürer's two 1514 engravings: St Jerome shows us what has got lost; Melencolia I what we are left with.
Melancholy and despair are not, however, the only responses to this new situation. Or perhaps one should say that not all those who recognised what was at issue came from German-speaking lands. Two who had the encyclopaedic ambitions of a Dante or a Chaucer, but who sensed intuitively that the combined effect of the disappearance of a sacramental universe and the coming of print had changed the rules for ever, found in the new circumstances an unexpected opportunity for comedy. They were a Frenchman, Rabelais, and a Spaniard, Cervantes.
In Chapter 33 of Gargantua (1534) Rabelais presents us with the tyrant Picrochole and his generals, who are planning the destruction of the benevolent giant Gargantua, and the conquest of his territories. Very quickly their thoughts move from these limited objectives to grandiose schemes for the conquest of the whole world:
Shall we see (said Picrochole,) Babylon and Mount Sinai? There is no need (said they) at this time, have we not hurried up and down, travelled and toyled enough, in having transfreted and past over the Hircanian sea, marched alongst the two Armenias and the three Arabias? By my faith (said he) we have played the fooles, and are undone: Ha, poor soules! What's the matter, said they. What shall we have (said he) to drink in these deserts? For Julian Augustus, with his whole Army died there for thirst, as they say. We have already (said they) given order for that. In the Siriack sea you have nine thousand and fourteen great ships laden with the best wines in the world: they arrived at Port-Joppa, there they found two and twenty thousand Camels…
Picrochole is acting as tyrants have always done, assuming that his wish and the facts will coincide and his courtiers hasten to reassure him, as courtiers have always done, that this is so. Rabelais draws our attention to this megalomania and makes comedy out of it by emphasising the mad logic of what is going on: Picrochole, already, in his mind, crossing the deserts of Arabia, suddenly becomes aware of the fact that his army will need water if it is to survive. In the world of the imagination, however, this is no problem: ‘In the Siriack sea’, his courtiers reassure him, ‘you have nine thousand and fourteen great ships laden with the best wines in the world’. In reality, though, Picrochole and his army are routed by Gargantua only a few miles from his palace.
In reality? No. In reality there is no Picrochole and there is no Gargantua, nor is there any palace. In strict reality these are only the words Rabelais has written, now read by us and transformed in our imagination. But by making of Picrochole such a blatant flouter of reality Rabelais nudges us into accepting his reality — as a mad tyrant.
Picrochole may be a figure of the tyrant, but he is also a figure of the artist in his new circumstances, cut off from tradition and without either the Muses or the rules of Christian iconography to guide him as they guided Homer and the medieval artist, and so having to fall back on his imagination. The imagination is quite capable of conjuring up whole worlds, but unfortunately these worlds are made up only of words and images. The writer, alone now in his room, puts these words down on paper and, a little later the reader, alone in his room, with only the printed book in his hands, is given the tools to recreate this world in his imagination. For Rabelais this new freedom of the imagination is not, as it was for Dürer in the Melencolia, a cause of despair; but it is not a reason for rejoicing either, as it was for the Florentine neo-Platonists and has been for the majority of those who have written about art in the West since then. Rather, it is a cause of laughter.
In the larger economy of the book the same principle is at work: instead of trying to persuade us of his omniscience as an author — who would, after all, only be a version of Picrochole — Rabelais puts before us a fictional author who is shown to us in all his fleshly weakness, thereby stressing rather than denying that he, the real author, is a man not essentially different from his readers — not an angel or a prophet or the custodian of tradition like St Jerome. In this way he creates a space for fiction based not on denial or repression but on open acknowledgement of the way things are. Thus in the Prologue to Gargantua he tells us that ‘in the composing of this lordly book, I never lost nor bestowed any more, nor any other time then what was appointed to serve me for taking my bodily reflection, that is, whil'st I was eating and drinking’; and in the last chapter of Pantagruel (1532) he decides abruptly to bring his chronicle to a close because ‘my head aches a little, and I perceive that the Registers of my braine are somewhat jumbled and disordered with this septembral juice’. Of course nothing tells us that this is how the real Rabelais felt, but we sense that he felt more like that than like Picrochole or Dürer's St Jerome: felt, that is, more as we would feel were we to try and write a book without any guide other than our imaginations.
Cervantes too opens his encyclopaedic prose narrative, the first part of which was published in 1607 and the second in 1616, by insisting on the purely arbitrary and private nature of his creation:
Idle reader, without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant and the most discreet, that anyone could imagine. But I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it like begets like. And so what could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else.
Cervantes' reader is idle, desocupado, one who is not occupied, has nothing better to do. Unlike the listener to Homer or the reader of Dante, who listens or reads so as to have reaffirmed the order of things, how things are, this reader is imagined as turning the pages of a printed book in the solitude of his or her own room, simply in order to pass the time. And the author too, though he would like to be the inspired spokesman of the community, recognises that he is only a solitary individual, ‘filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else’, and therefore with no authority for what he says and no access to the truth or to a Muse who would herself have access to it. In such a situation the worst possible thing would be to imagine or pretend that he did; his only hope is to accept that this is the way things are and to make the best of them. In that way, perhaps, he may become the spokesman for a new community of solitary individuals.
Cervantes explains to the reader that he wished to offer him a prologue that would be ‘plain, bare, unadorned by … the endless catalogue of sonnets, epigrams, and laudatory poems that are usually placed at the beginning of books’. Yet even something as simple as this seemed to be beyond him, he confesses, as though once the dead wood of convention had been banished there was actually nothing at all to put in its place:
I picked up my pen many times to write it, and many times I put it down again because I did not know what to write; and once, when I was baffled, with the paper in front of me, my pen behind my ear, my elbow propped on the writing table, and my cheek resting on my hand, pondering what I would say, a friend of mine, who is witty and wise, unexpectedly came in and seeing me so perplexed asked the reason, and I hid nothing from him and said I was thinking about the prologue I had to write for the history of Don Quixote, and the problem was that I did not want to write it yet did not want to bring to light the deeds of so noble a knight without one.