'Un bon esmoucheteur par mousches jamais emouche ne sera': Panurge as trickster. (Rabelais)

The riddle of Panurge has occupied the attention of scholars for several generations. Who is this character, what are his parallels in literary history, and what is his role in Rabelais's text? To paraphrase Edwin Duval, Panurge has been associated with Mercury, Ulysses, Tyl Eulenspiegel, the pranksters of folk myth, and the Devil himself.(1) Each of these associations is correct, since Panurge is an intrinsically multiple character, who undergoes radical changes in the various books. I would like to offer my own conception of this intriguing character in relation to the trickster figures of the nouvelle literature, in order to demonstrate that certain aspects of Rabelais's art, which may seem troubling to readers of later periods, are in fact quite normal in the comic literature of his day.

I will start with the image of a body, that is, with a body that is represented in Rabelais's text and subsequently defaced by its language. In this case, the body happens to be female, which is crucial to our thinking on the subject in recent years. Could the body that is set upon by dogs in Pantagruel have been other than female?

... tous les chiens qui estoient en l'eglise accoururent a ceste dame,

pour l'odeur des drogues que il [Panurge] avoit espandu sur elle.

Petitz et grans, gors et menuz, tous y venoyent, tirans le membre

et la sentens et pissans partout sur elle. C'estoyt la plus grande

villanie du monde. (333)