Forget the Nobel Prize in literature. The highest literary honor, accorded to a nobler elite, comes when an author's name enters the language as a laudatory adjective. Who would not wish to write a work, or even a single sentence, judged by others to be Shakespearean, Aeschylean, Faulknerian, Dantesque, Miltonian, Proustian, or dubbed with some other similarly high-flown modifier? Such terms are employed, sparingly and judiciously, to describe a grandeur of expression, a heightened sensitivity toward language, a lofty paradigm of signification.
The term 'Rabelaisian'—derived from François Rabelais, the most celebrated French author of sixteenth century —is sometimes used in this manner as well, referring to an earthy naturalism in storytelling and uninhibited approach to literary expression. Yet the word often describes more than a style of writing, and is frequently employed to describe an attitude toward life and a mode of conduct. A handy reference work tells me that Rabelaisian can mean "bawdy, broad, coarse, earthy, extravagant, exuberant, gross, lusty, raunchy." This one literary figure, in other words, has become a stand-in for the seven deadly sins and host of less deadly vices. Even by our contemporary standards of extravagant authorial debasement, that represents a considerable—and perhaps unsurpassable—achievement.
And Rabelais managed to achieve this despite a CV that included stints with the Franciscans and the Benedictines. Talk about covering all the bases. Yet the excesses of Rabelais's biography are more than matched by those of his writing, and I’m hardly surprised that his characters have also contributed adjectives to our language— gargantuan (from Gargantua) and pantagruelian (from Pantagruel). Both of these words are, like 'Rabelasian', typically applied to things larger-than-life, enormous, voracious. In short, whenever someone pushes to the limits and beyond—in literature as in life— Rabelais is the benchmark, the measuring rod for that which defies measurement.
Almost everything about Gargantua and Pantagruel testifies to its excess. The plot is so convoluted as to defy synopsis. By comparison, Cervantes seems austere and punctilious. Rabelais's book is both long and long- winded, and it crosses conventional boundaries of style and subject, taking on aspects of fantasy, social commentary, travel literature, parody, allegory, adventure story, narratives of battles and chivalry, songs, bawdy jokes, poetry, tall tales, wordplay and most other types of vernacular writing of its author’s day. By the same token, no work of its time is more outrageous or transgressive, and it is a wonder that Rabelais managed to find a publisher and avoid suppression …or worse. Recall that, just a few months before the publication of the first volume of Gargantua and Pantagruel , Jean de Cahors was charged with heresy for demeaning the clergy and was burnt at the stake. Rabelais repeatedly takes on the clergy, and every other interest group of his day, during the course of his work, and never minces his words. Fortunately he had friends in high places, notably King Francis I, who gave Rabelais legal protection, at least until the monarch's death in 1547.
The story revolves around the exploits of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, both giants of prodigious feats and considerable appetites. To make Gargantua’s breeches required eleven hundred and six yards of linen, his codpiece resembled a flying buttress, and his purse was made of an elephant's testicle. His son Pantagruel was equally supersized—as a child he drank the milk of four thousand six hundred cows at each meal, and his mouth was so large that entire cities were built on his teeth, complete with "tennis courts, handsome galleries, beautiful meadows, and many vineyards." Rabelais adds: "And these delightful fields were dotted with more Italian-style summerhouses than I could count."
Although the term "magical realism" didn't exist back in the Renaissance, Rabelais must be considered one of the key precursors of the modern exponents of that style. A key subplot involves Pantagruel's attempt to foretell the future, and determine whether his companion Panurge should get married. This pretext gives Rabelais the opportunity to explore the full range of fortune- telling and prognosticating methods, including reading cards, rolling dice, studying the entrails of animals, selecting random passages in Virgil's Aeneid , seeking the counsel of a fool, a wise man, a sibyl, and finally a large bottle (a fitting symbol to cap a drink-filled narrative) that spouts off Delphic utterances instead of liquor.
The incidents presented here are often ludicrous, but Rabelais also injects a considerable amount of social commentary into his storytelling. In this regard, too, he anticipates the Márquez , Grass , Rushdie , Allende and the other leading magical realists of our time, who have found that fantasy is not incompatible with a critique of ruling powers and historical events. For Rabelais, the leading targets are corrupts monks, dishonest lawyers, power-hungry nobles, religious hypocrites, pompous academics, and most of the other elite groups of his time. No one is exempt from criticism and ridicule in these pages, and a certain grotesque realism is ever present as a foundation for the preposterous exaggerations of the ever-changing plot.
Although Rabelais constantly seeks out targets for his savage wit, don’t jump to the conclusion that his worldview is essentially caustic and negating. Far from it. Few literary works of any era are more boisterous or less gloomy. Much of Gargantua and Pantagruel is devoted to eating and drinking and other sorts of revelry. I'm not sure I believe Rabelais's claim that he wrote this work while feasting and boozing, but he certainly does justice to those pursuits, and almost every adventure, large or small, that takes place in this book is capped by the protagonists celebrating with several rounds of drinks.
Yet even a party can grow tedious if it goes on too long, and Rabelais pushes everything too far in this work. Some of his lists—of insults, of mythical books, of dishes served at a meal, etc.—go on for pages and pages, and most of the stories in this gargantuan book would benefit from some pruning and excision. There's just too much here, and Rabelais is not the man to set proper limits, whether at the dinner table or the writing desk. Indeed, if literature could give you a hangover, this would be the book to do it.
The end result is a peculiar flip-flop: the extravagant work that its author thought would entertain, amuse and shock only achieves those ends in small doses for readers today. Yet other aspects of this work now stand out, qualities that its initial audience no doubt paid less attention to, but which are especially appealing to modern readers—not just the elements of magical realism and social critique mentioned above, but a host of other radical techniques that nowadays would be described as modern or postmodern. Of all the works of the Renaissance, Gargantua and Pantagruel is the one closest in spirit to James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and a host of other leading spirits of our times. In fact, there might even be something about modern life that makes us all a bit Rabelaisian, whether we care to admit it or not. Certainly in a literary environment that continues to prize transgression as well as expression, audacity as much as veracity, this boundary-busting book will not just survive, but continue to find new admirers, emulators and even a few suitably Rabelaisian drinking buddies.