A Taste for the Foreign by Ellen R. Welch

Author:Ellen R. Welch [Welch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2011-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

v

Consuming Curiosities in Extraordinary Voyage Fictions

This book opened with a consideration of “exotic merchandise” in the Medamothi episode of Rabelais’s Le Quart Livre. A second examination of that passage reveals that, even in its print debut, the term exotic had a complicated, critical relationship to the distinction between foreign and domestic. Although the narrator insists on the exotic quality of the imported goods in the marketplace, emphasizing the fact that they are sold by African and Asian merchants, few of the objects Rabelais describes hail from those distant corners of the world. Instead, the reader beholds the spectacle of fantastic, otherworldly creatures, such as unicorns, alongside surprisingly familiar objects, such as canvases representing stories from classical literature. Indeed, the items that Pantagruel and his shipmates choose to purchase are overwhelmingly domestic: paintings and tapestries that copy scenes from European life and mythology.1 Even the alien tarande, whose fur changes color like a chameleon’s skin, possesses a “natural” hue that resembles that of the donkeys of Meung.2 The exoticizing rhetoric of the passage, like the market’s unfamiliar décor, lends an air of excitement to these otherwise homely objects.

The episode ushers in a series of adventures at sea and in strange lands, but it also hearkens back to a recurring theme of discovery, astonishment, and encounter with the other that appears throughout Rabelais’s books. Indeed, Erich Auerbach’s classic reading of Rabelais’s oeuvre identifies discovery as one of three major themes in Gargantua and Pantagruel. The outward movement implicit in the novels’ description of the characters’ Utopian homeland, the presentation of France through Pantagruel’s foreign eyes, and the many encounters with strangers has “a revolutionary force which shakes the established order, sets it in a broader context, and thus makes it a relative thing.”3 Yet this theme, in Auerbach’s view, is countered by a second, “incompatible” theme that he calls “tout comme chez nous.” Strangers ultimately reveal themselves to be much less foreign than they first appear to be; seeming foreigners turn out to be peasants from Touraine.4 In an essay that aims to resolve this contradiction in Auerbach’s reading, Terrence Cave characterizes encounters with the other in Rabelais’s novel as “mirror images, scenes that stage a recognition of the familiar in the alien.”5 Episodes such as Pantagruel’s first meeting with the apparently polyglot Panurge recently returned from Turkey, the dialogue with the Limousine schoolboy, and the narrator’s run-in with a cabbage farmer in Pantagruel’s mouth are dialectical, in Cave’s view, because they simultaneously reveal the strangeness of the self and the familiarity of the foreign.

This vexing double movement between foreign and domestic similarly animates the Medamothi episode. This scene, the characters’ first step into the wide world of the Quart Livre, also represents Pantagruel’s closest encounter with home in the book, as he receives letters from his father and writes back, sending along “belles et rares choses” from the market as souvenirs. Precisely through this “return to the familiar,” however, the Medamothi episode offers several compelling insights on the aesthetic experience of exoticism.

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