Rambling About Rabelais

``Here is a dimension in which thrashing and abuse are not a personal chastisement but are symbolic actions directed at something on a higher level, at the king. This is the popular-festive system of images, which is most clearly expressed in carnival (but, of course, not in carnival alone). In this dimension, as previously pointed out, the kitchen and the battle meet and cross each other in the image of the rent body. At the time of Rabelais these images were still alive and full of meaning in various forms of folk entertainments as well as in literature.`` | Mikhail Bakhtin

---

Rambling About Rabelais


He was breaking down the fourth wall well before they were even finished putting it up...

Arguably nobody else has ever equaled his grandiloquence; past plus present company included.

Polyglot and polymath — what isn't measured by your staff? Aye there is no doubt — we can all ways count on him for a good laugh!

Même si nous te entendu
Le monde n'a t'a jamais compris
(Excusez-moi mais Français c'est ma troisième langue)
Lingua Ovid autem quartus

These carnivalesque tall tales weren`t so much stories about their larger than life characters like Gargantua & Pantagruel—as the pages of these texts themselves were the ever sprawling unfurling and unraveling bodies of said gigantesque literary figures.

Equally the oft bucolic provincialism evinced by the changing accents in which his characters speak among one another offer us a stained glass window`s peek into Enlightenment Era France.

Furthermore, Francois was a pioneer in the field of potty humor. The body itself speaks in burps, farts, squealing innards, and other bodily functions such as excretion of feces or urination. Sexual congress was no less off the reservation in his contextual consideration.

So say a hooray for Rabelais, that prodigious eater of creamy cakes topped with fresh grapes! First Thelemite, he makes no mistakes. Thy abbey remains thirsty until True Will finally wakes and slakes the likes of us sullen under lunar lakes or when the Earth herself suddenly quakes...

Image: Panurge Emerges ^^British Museum

Share |