Flirting and Frustration of Gargantua and Pantagruel_ * * * The first of a double-volume exploration of the farcical worlds of Rabelais' great characters Gargantua and Pantagruel. When Rabelais published his two great fantasies, _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ , in 1533 and 1534, he was thirty-seven years old and had reached the peak of his literary powers. The two books established him as one of the most important thinkers of the age, yet the works that immediately followed were never as funny. For the next thirty-five years, Rabelais enjoyed a long and productive writing career, including a hugely successful translation of the entire _New Testament_ from Latin to French. Yet this work was dry in comparison with his previous romps, and his last major publication was a religious treatise called _The Great Book of Honorius_. After his death, _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ went out of print, but Rabelais' vision of enormous, grotesque giants, tiny devils and huge books remained popular with the reading public. As a consequence, _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ entered the language as metaphors. _There's Gargantua at it again_. Now, more than four hundred years later, they have been rediscovered by a new generation of readers for whom Rabelais' works have given a new slant to our understanding of giants, small men, demons and book-reading. As with Shakespeare's works, it is no longer obvious whether this huge re-evaluation is an enhancement or a dilution of Rabelais' original vision. Perhaps it is both, but it is certain that _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ are the most fun they have ever been. As one character comments, 'We have much leisure, much food and many friends. We'll fill up the rest of our days with all kinds of mirth and recreation.' Now that _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ have been discovered, it is clear that they have everything that makes for great storytelling. This book takes an entertaining look at the world of Gargantua and Pantagruel as it once was, at the world of their ancestors and at the world of Rabelais' most recent followers. This _Very Short Introduction_ attempts to reveal something of Rabelais' mind and approach to his writing and to do more than just present his work as a series of anecdotes. It considers the work of Rabelais as part of his era's understanding of the relationship between literature and human nature, looking beyond his work for a glimpse of the social, religious and intellectual challenges that confronted his society. Introduction Rabelais and Gargantua Gargantua is a character from a sixteenth-century fantasy classic. You won't have heard of him. Neither, at first sight, will I, which is not surprising. The point is that his is a long-forgotten story. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, the English writer John Ruskin discovered Gargantua and set him free to haunt a modern world that could appreciate him. Since then, his creator Rabelais has become one of the greatest writers in the history of world literature, yet he remains undervalued – the man at the back of the bus whose name nobody knows. Gargantua the giant is a comic monster in a farce-comedy. He speaks in an overblown literary language, he moves around in a literary universe in a story that is a _comédie larmoyante_ , and he has his friends – his family – in all kinds of comic families, as well as his enemies. More to the point, all this is done to entertain an audience which, given the nature of Rabelais' audience, had great things in mind for him in the profession of writing. The world of Rabelais' characters has never been properly explored. It was in the nineteenth century that Rabelais became known to the reading public. Then, following his rediscovery, his fiction was re-evaluated in terms of a modern humanist sensibility, and for a while his works were considered to be among the more serious products of the human imagination. Yet the truth is that Rabelais' world is the work of a sixteenth-century mind, and it is a very comic world. In the context of writing, then, Rabelais has a lot to teach us, including a lesson about the relationship between fiction and the world we inhabit. It has been said that the world of _Gargantua_ is full of fantastic creatures, but this is not quite accurate. In Rabelais' comedy we know about the existence of giants because they are spoken about and described in contemporary texts, and they become a subject of conversation. There are many ways of writing about giants: from the way they are described in medieval folklore to the way they appear in contemporary reports of sightings and of incidents where they have disturbed the peace of the community. So giants, far from being a distant world to which we rarely have access, are known and discussed and make an everyday appearance in medieval folklore and in contemporary writings about monsters. Even the monsters that can be found in other forms of fiction can, in their own way, be read as being similar to giants: they too, are creatures that take great delight in their own imaginary power. So far from being extraordinary and impossible to imagine in any other form, giants are not only creatures that can enter our literary imaginations because they are talked about, they are very familiar characters: monsters, if you like, but monsters that we can imagine with great pleasure. Giants are not simply things that belong to faraway worlds and can be encountered only in literature. Giants are something that can exist in the world we live in, and something that has an impact on our thinking. Let's consider a very real example: a French town where a medieval church tower fell down in the 1460s and crushed four girls, including two orphans, under its tons of masonry. I would not want to claim that this town, the site of the church at La Chaise-Dieu in the modern department of Indre, is like Gargantua's castle of Pantagruel, or indeed that they have anything at all in common. Yet there is something else that they do share: they both represent a fantasy world that is entirely real to the people who live there and are deeply significant to them. So what we are left with is the realization that, even though giants may be imaginary creatures, they are also concrete and real human experiences that touch the lives of the people who live in them. What we are concerned with here is a very personal way of imagining the relationship between imagination and real life. One of the many reasons that this imaginative world became popular is that it provided the people of sixteenth-century France with their own literary space, but it was also a kind of way of talking about the human condition. We have to be careful when we come to _Gargantua_ because what we are reading is not so much a book about giants as a book about giants as a reflection of what people were thinking about at the time. Although Gargantua is clearly a giant, he is also part of his environment, as we are in ours. He talks about the human condition, but he also thinks about it. Part of the pleasure of writing about giants is that they are something entirely fantastic that still has its roots in human reality. The giants that we read about in medieval legend and in the contemporary accounts of people who have seen monsters also remind us that even in the Renaissance, in the midst of great cultural changes, people were still thinking about monsters. A giant is a story that does not end. In this book, we discover a very real world that exists beyond the borders of what we know, and we also come to understand the place of giants in the human imagination and in society. Giants continue to exist: giants exist within us. We can see from historical records that there was a contemporary audience for the giants that Rabelais talked about, and we can still explore this territory today, as well as reading the many books written about the giants of ancient Greece. We can see, too, that even in our own time and in our own cultural landscapes, giants are with us, not only in stories but in our experience, as a part of the human world. Although it is a fantasy, _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ are not completely imaginary creatures. Although they are creatures of imagination, they have an extraordinary resonance with us because we still talk about them and we still see them. Giants are not only something imaginary that we can imagine as characters in books, they are also creatures that exist in human worlds. Giants touch our experience of life and are part of our history. The giants of Rabelais' creation have also touched our culture and the ways in which people think. The giants have come to live inside us, not as a separate and distinct thing, but as our own imaginative projections into the world around us. The giants of Rabelais' fiction have not only touched the imagination; they have helped shape the culture of which they are a part. Giants are real entities that are very close to our experience, even though they belong to another age and