The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The tone varies. It is serious (we have still to catch up with Rabelais's ideas on education), mock-serious, satirical, fantas- tic, always exuberant. However, even at his wildest, Rabelais evidences two well-blended strains: one proceeding from his humanist conviction that ali men desire knowledge and that ali knowledge is a joyous and attainable thing (the book is, among other things, an encyclopedia); the other flowing from his per­sonal conviction that "laughter is the essence of mankind.^,,

Of ali the writers we have met or shall meet he is the one most unreservedly in love with life. Even when attacking the abuses of his day, he does so in high, almost manic spirits. He would not know a neurosis if he saw one, and most of our gloomy modern novйis he would destroy with a guffaw. He is a kind of happy Swift [52], or perhaps a Whitman [85] with an intellect. His characteristic gesture is the embrace. He can love both God and drunkenness. His laughter is so free and healthy that only the prudish will be offended by his vast coarseness, his delight in the eternal comedy of the human body.

Pantagruelism he defines as "a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune.^,> To enjoy him you must be a bit of a Pantagruelist yourself. His is a book you must give, or at least lend, yourself to, not bothering to ponder every morsel of his gargantuan erudition, and perhaps not trying to read more than a dozen pages at a time.

It is said that Rabelais left the following will: "I owe much. I possess nothing. I give the rest to the poor."

One final suggestion: Read any good modern translation— Cohen^ or Putnam^ or Le Clercqs. Avoid the famous Urquhart-Motteux version—a classic, but not Rabelais.

C.F.

36

Attributed to WU CI-TENG-EN

1500-1582 Journey to the West

Journey to the West was for most of the time since its publica- tion attributed to "Anonymous," and only recently have literary scholars shown that its likely author was Wu Ch^ng-en [Wu Cheng'en]. Why would the author of one of the workTs best picaresque novйis hide his identity? The answer to that is found in Wu's own identity, as a proper Confucian gentleman- scholar and a poet of some repute. In the literary world of tra- ditional China, people with a good classical education were expected to devote themselves to respectable literary forms like poetry and essays, and to engage in scholarly study of clas­sical texts; they were most emphatically not supposed to do anything as frivolous as writing fiction. Not, of course, that there was no market for fiction; many of these same sober and conventional scholars would enjoy a good read in the privacy of their own homes. But they would not want it to be known that they actually wrote the stuff. So Wu Ch'eng-en launched his masterpiece into the world quietly.

In any case it might be more accurate to say that Wu assembled his novel as much as he wrote it; the episodic stories that make up Journey to the West had already been part of Chinese popular literature for hundreds of years by the time Wu finished his own treatment of them. They had been com- mon as storytellers tales in marketplaces ali over China, and in the plots of many operas and puppet-plays. The characters of the tales are among the best-known and best-loved in ali of Chinese literature: Stories of the sweet-tempered and rather unworldly pilgrim-priest Hsьan-tsang [Xuanzang]; his doughty traveling-companion Sun Wu-k'ung [Sun Wukong] the Monkey King; and their friends and helpers, the oafish but good-hearted Pigsy and the fish-spirit Sandy, have for cen­turies been as much part of a Chinese childhood as the charac­ters from Mother Goose have been in the West. What Wu Cfreng-en did was to take the diverse and scattered tales about these characters and weave them into a long and carefully structured narrative.

The novePs story is based on a real journey by a real priest, one that for some reason then acted as a magnet for tall tales over the years. The Chinese Buddhist priest Hsьan-tsang (602-664) traveled from China to нndia, with the emperor s blessing, to try to find scriptures that were still unknown to Chinese Buddhism and better editions of familiar ones. The journey was successful, and Hsьan-tsang returned to great acclaim. He undoubtedly contributed to the growth in both sophistication and popularity of Buddhism during the glorious Tang Dynasty (for more on T'ang Buddhism, see also Hui- neng [25]).

But in Journey to the West, Hsьan-tsang^ traveis are not much more than a peg on which to hang story after story of magical powers, fierce monsters, and the triumph of good over evil. (Chinese commentators, though, have traditionally inter- preted the story as an allegory of the difficult journey to Buddhist enlightenment.) The real hero of the tale is Monkey, who is quite certainly a literary cousin of the heroic Hanuman,