Fragments from Gargantua and Pantagruel

The satire by François Rabelais obviously influenced Jonathan Swift and other satirists.

Jacob Folkema, “Panurge inspecteert het gezicht van de Engelsman Avonturen van Gargantua and Pantagruel.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

I normally like to write blog posts like this about entire texts, but that is virtually impossible with some texts that really require months if not years to read and analyze. One day, I may finish the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, but it’s a daunting undertaking. At least story collections, which were popular in the middle ages and early Renaissance, are easily digestible in smaller chunks. I may begin a series on The Canterbury Tales later this year, for example, and dividing that text into its constituent tales makes sense.

The stories of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Franҫois Rabelais span five individual volumes, and it would be an epic undertaking to try to read it all. I haven’t read most of it, and I don’t want to pretend that I have mastered it. I recently taught about twenty pages, amounting to the total number of pages presented in The Norton Anthology of World Literature, and I like to publish whatever I end up writing when I prepare to teach a class, so that’s what this is. It’s not intended to be comprehensive.

The lives of the giant, Gargantua, and his son Pantagruel, are the main focus of the text. The mode is satire, which holds the faults and flaws of humanity…