Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais by E. Bruce Hayes

Abstract

more illuminating than littérature-monde en français. David Murphy compares and contrasts the manifesto with other recent French postcolonial manifestoes. The second section provides further contextualization. Forsdick and Lydie Moudileno separately place the manifesto in the context of debates on transnational/ postcolonial issues, French/Francophone studies, and local/global politics. Chris Bongie and Dominic Thomas each move outward from the manifesto to address two other debates that partially overlap with the littérature-monde one, Haitian/ Caribbean politics and French identity politics around writer Marie NDiaye. Thomas Spear argues that littérature-monde is a new concept only in the very small world of top Parisian publishing houses. Jane Hiddleston establishes that the manifesto’s humanistic ethos was articulated earlier and with much more sophistication by Césaire, Fanon, and Said, whom the authors of the manifesto ignore. The third and final section expands the contextualizing goal of the entire volume. Jean-Xavier Ridon links issues raised in the manifesto with earlier debates around exotic and travel literature. Jacqueline Dutton seeks to develop concrete criteria for what kinds of texts would fit the littérature-monde nomenclature through a case study of ‘migrant’ French works taking place in Australia, which she terms French-Australian literature. Jeanne Garane and Laura Reeck separately point out that the manifesto effectively excludes what would seem to be the most obvious example of littérature-monde, that is, banlieue or migrant literature. Michelle Keown demonstrates that the manifesto’s globalized French model is not relevant to Pacific Islander writers, whose Indigenist liberation politics align them more with Anglophone Pacific Islander writers than with French-language proponents of littérature-monde en français. For Keown, littératuremonde is more relevant to white (settler) writers, a point confirmed by Dutton in the Australian context. Both Garane and Keown point to the importance and complexity of the issue of translation in debates on littérature-monde. Michael Syrotinski contrasts the utopian tone of the manifesto with the pessimism of contemporary male African writers. Hiddleston and Syrotinski both favor the embodied texts of the authors they discuss over the idealism of the manifesto and call for ethical and dissident reading practices. Finally, Emily Apter argues in her afterword for the value of attending to untranslatability in literature and philosophy. Contributors to the volume include major voices in the field of Francophone postcolonial studies today, especially those based in North America and the United Kingdom. The book is presented as being the first in a new series, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, whose editorial board includes many of the contributors. This well-conceived volume augurs well for the series. San Diego State University Anne Donadey HAYES, E. BRUCE. Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7546-6518-2. Pp. 188. $99.95. On peut s’étonner qu’il n’y ait jamais encore eu d’enquête approfondie sur la nature et la fonction de la farce dans l’œuvre de Rabelais. Sans doute, au début du vingtième siècle, des érudits comme Gustave Cohen et Emmanuel Philipot s’étaientils penchés sur la présence importante du théâtre comique médiéval chez notre Reviews 571 Chinonais. Mais, encore récemment, Michel Jeanneret attirait notre attention sur cette curieuse carence alors que plusieurs centaines de farces existaient à l’époque. Nous avons maintenant réparé cet oubli grâce à ce nouvel ouvrage qui vient redonner à la farce sa place centrale dans les ‘mythologies pantagruéliques’. Comme l’indique Hayes dans son introduction, le but qu’il se propose n’est pas d’identifier les allusions au corpus farcesque médiéval mais plutôt d’examiner dans quelle mesure Rabelais a pu structurer son œuvre à partir des éléments pertinents qui définissent ce genre traditionnel. Tout en reconnaissant à quel point les travaux de Bakhtine ont transformé les études rabelaisiennes, Hayes prend ses distances par rapport à la théorie du ‘monde à l’envers’ et rejette l’idée de la farce comme ‘soupape de sécurité’ essentielle dans une société fortement hiérarchisée et étroitement soumise à l’autorité du sceptre et...