The scene is unreal, impossible; does it, at least, have a moral? Is Rabelais denouncing the stinginess of the merchants, whose punishment should please us? Or does he mean to make us indignant at Panurge's cruelty? Or, as a good anticlerical, is he mocking the stupidity of the religious cliches Panurge recites? Guess! Every answer is a booby trap.

Says Octavio Paz: "There is no humor in Homer or Virgil; Ariosto seems to foreshadow it, but not until Cervantes does humor take shape… Humor," he goes on, "is the great invention of the modern spirit." A fundamental idea: humor is not an age-old human practice; it is an invention bound up with the birth of the novel. Thus humor is not laughter, not mockery, not satire, but a particular species of the comic, which, Paz says (and this is the key to understanding humor's essence), "renders ambiguous everything it touches." People who cannot take pleasure from the spectacle of Panurge letting the sheep merchants drown while he sings them the praises of the hereafter will never understand a thing about the art of the novel.

The Realm Where Moral Judgment Is Suspended

If I were asked the most common cause of misunderstanding between my readers and me, I would not hesitate: humor. I had only recently come to France, and I was anything but blase. When a famous professor of medicine asked to meet me because he admired The Farewell Party, I was most flattered. According to him, my novel was prophetic; in my character Skreta, a doctor who treats apparently sterile women at a spa by injecting them secretly with his own sperm from a special syringe, I have hit on the great issue of the future. The professor invites me to a conference on artificial insemination.