‘À deux doigtz prés de la mort’

This chapter tackles perhaps the most salient near-shipwreck in Renaissance French literature to the modern reader: Rabelais’s storm scene of the Quart Livre, situating it between two of its closest relatives within the broader family of Renaissance shipwreck texts: one of them familiar, the other perhaps less so. First, some important features of one of Rabelais’s major sources (Erasmus’s ‘Naufragium’ dialogue) are set out, both in order to show how the latter responds to the ship of fools tradition, and to establish the ways in which it too establishes conventions for writing about shipwreck. The reading of the famous Rabelaisian storm scene itself is focussed on the figure of Panurge, arguing that it is this character more than any other element that sets Rabelais’s (near-)shipwreck scene apart from its Renaissance relatives. Staying with Panurge, we then turn to what may be thought of as a rewriting or re-imagining of the Quart Livre storm scene: the beaching of the Thalamège in the Cinquiesme Livre. In this third section, the dynamics of co-operation may be seen to inform our understanding of shipwreck survival (whether in the sense of narrowly avoiding it, or of recovering from it) both as it is dramatised directly in Rabelais’s text(s), and as it, in turn, stages the relationship between author, text, and reader.