Pro-logos: excess and the golden mean

By the time Rabelais was ready to compose the Quart Livre, the need to defend his book against the blasphemous attacks of his detractors became increasingly critical. Condemned by the Sorbonne after the appearance of the Tiers Livre in 1546, and subsequently censored by the Sorbonagre de Puy-Herbault in 1549 and Jean Calvin in 1550, Rabelais, victimized by the most extreme mechanisms of psychic and social repression, found it necessary to repress his wildest impulses and obey a law conceived in the name of the other. To be sure, the text is the obedient and servile offspring, the scriptural representation – that glorifies the edicts of paternal law while at the same time unconsciously trangressing it. Although Rabelais proposes moderation – the golden mean – as an ideal, his text puts this notion into question through an ever-surfacing fear of excess and uncontrollable appetite. In other words, moderation is posited as an ideal while in fact the text reveals its antithetical correlates. The rabelaisian novel must therefore be read as an artifact in which the text's unconscious counterplot reveals, through its language, that any knowledge of self or other remains purely elusive. The signs of the text are symptoms, never directly interpretable in themselves, but only in terms of an imaginary “sub-text” which lies within the symbolic order of language.