Sasha's Reviews > Gargantua and Pantagruel

Rabelais! The foreman of farts! The sheik of shit! The rajah of rectums! Listen, the first joke in the world was a fart joke; Sophocles, Shakespeare, Melville, all liked fart jokes; but no one has ever farted like Rabelais.

Here's the dirty truth: if you're not super into 1100 pages of 16th century fart jokes, you can read the first two books and skip the rest. I KNOW! Only assholes do that! Look, you don't have to take my advice, I don't care, I'm just...do kids still say "keeping it real"? No? No, they never actually said that? Whatever. I fart in your general direction, pedant. You can read the first two books and love Rabelais, or read the whole thing and be annoyed. Your choice.

Book One (in the order they were written) is Pantagruel, and here's what Pantagruelism is, so you know what your pretentious college professor friends are talking about it when they start throwing that word around - p.s. people who use this word are like 30 seconds from hinting that they swing, so just be aware of that - it's "A certain merriness of mind pickled in contempt for things fortuitous." It means talking about heavy things, but not too heavily. There's a lot of drinking involved. (But not drunkenness! You know how Europeans are.) Pantagruelists are educated and intelligent; they're very pleased with themselves for being educated and intelligent; they swish wine around in their glasses before drinking it; they cultivate a certain smug detachment from the world. They're annoying, but not the most annoying; they do have interesting things to say, although they tend to bang on quite a bit.

And there are a lot of them - this is like 80% of college literature professors - so you might as well read this first book to understand them better.

More stuff about Pantagruelists
"They will never take in bad part anything they know to flow from a good, frank and loyal heart."

"There was but one clause in their Rule: Do what thou wilt, because people who are free, well-bred, well taught and conversant with honourable company have by nature an instinct - a goad - which always pricks them towards virtuous acts and withdraws them from vice."

See, they're not bad. Just sorta douchey.

This book also introduces the character Panurge, who is (initially) a terrific scoundrel. He wears a cloak with "over 26 pouches and pokes", containing "verjuice, which he flung into the eyes of the folks he came across; in another, burrs...in yet another, he kept a pile of little cornets full of fleas and lice [which] he threw on to the collars of the most sugary of the young ladies." He's a dastardly prankster. Fun stuff.

Book Two is Gargantua, and this is great too. It features the famous bit where the young Gargantua describes all the different things he's tried wiping his ass with: cats, roses, hats, pigeons, but the best, he says, is a goose. Which is not true, because geese are cruel, but who are you gonna believe, me or a famous writer?

Anyway, Gargantua is driven insane by dumb medieval learnin', which I think we can all identify with; this is similar to what happens to Don Quixote 65 years later. Rote memorization is what turns Gargantua into a blithering idiot. A reeducation in the humanist, Renaissance style - a focus on being well-rounded, understanding texts, and also physical education - saves him.

This book also introduces the fightin', fuckin' cleric Frere Jean, one of Rabelais' better characters: "young, gallant, lively, lusty, adroit...a galloper through of mattins...a polisher-off of virgins: in short, a true monk if ever there was one since the monking world first monked about with monkery."

Book Three is the most philosophical book, otherwise known as the most boring one. Panurge suddenly turns from a scoundrel to a dunce; he spends the whole book whinging about whether he should get married, which Rabelais uses as an excuse to expound on a number of Renaissance debates that you don't care about. "I was greatly vexed there for three reasons. first: because I was vexed. Second: because I was vexed. Third, because I was vexed."

Book Four is pretty okay. It's just like an Odyssey-style journey, so that's fun. But inessential.

There's a lot of controversy over whether Book Five was written by Rabelais at all; my translator, whose name is seriously Screech, is positive it wasn't. That should give you enough of an excuse to skip it; it's fine but you certainly have the idea by now anyway, and it has nothing amazing to add.

Rabelais is pretty cool. There are some good jokes in here. It's also possibly the world's greatest repository of band names, including such hits as:
- Farthing, Farthing Up Your Bum
- Angel Nards
- Fields of Enemas
- Farty Kick-back Bollocks
- Lawless Codpiece

He doesn't love women, when he thinks about them at all. There's this aside: "Madam, mind you don't fall in. there's a great dirty hole right there in front of you!" and this great story from a "parlourmaid of Sparta":
"Have you ever had anything to do with men?"
"No, but men have occasionally had something to do with me."
But "If [Rabelais] dreamt: it was of flying phalluses scrambling up walls." This is a man's world.

Look, Rabelais is right: someday "you shall die, all peacefully pickled in farts." There's time to visit his terrific writing first. But maybe not all of it.