The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (in French, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father (Gargantua) and his son (Pantagruel) and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, satirical vein. There is much crudity and scatological humor as well as a large amount of violence. Long lists of vulgar insults fill several chapters.

Rabelais studied Ancient Greek, and used this as he invented hundreds of new words, some of which became part of the French language. His quibbling and other wordplay fills the book, and is quite free from any prudishness.

Pantagruel

The full modern English title for the work commonly known as Pantagruel is The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua and in French, Les horribles et épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes, fils du Grand Géant Gargantua. The original title of the work was Pantagruel roy des dipsodes restitué à son naturel avec ses faictz et prouesses espoventables).

Although most modern editions of Rabelais's work place Pantagruel as the second volume of a series, it was actually published first, around 1532 under the pen name "Alcofribas Nasier", an anagram of Francois Rabelais. Pantagruel was a sequel to an anonymous book entitled The Great Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua (in French, Les Grandes Chroniques du Grand et Enorme Géant Gargantua).

This early Gargantua text enjoyed great popularity, despite its rather poor construction. Rabelais's giants are not described as being of any fixed height, as in the first two books of Gulliver's Travels, but vary in size from chapter to chapter to enable a series of astonishing images as though these were tall tales. For example, in one chapter Pantagruel is able to fit into a courtroom to argue a case but in another the narrator resides inside Pantagruel's mouth for 6 months and discovers an entire nation living around his teeth.

Gargantua

After the success of Pantagruel, Rabelais revisited and revised his source material. He produced an improved narrative of the life and acts of Pantagruel's father in The Very Horrific Life of Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel (in French, La vie très horrificque du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel), commonly known as Gargantua. This volume included one of the most notable parables in Western Philosophy: that of the Abbey of Thélème, which can either be considered a point-for-point critique of the educational practices of the age, or a call to free schooling, or all sorts of notions on human nature.

The Third Book

Rabelais then returned to the story of Pantagruel himself in the last three books. The Third Book of Pantagruel (in French, Le tiers-livre de Pantagruel. The original title is Le tiers livre des faicts et dicts héroïques du bon Pantagruel[4]) concerns Pantagruel and his friend Panurge, who spend the entire book discussing with many people the question of whether Panurge should marry; the question is unresolved. The book ends with the start of a sea voyage in search of the oracle of the divine bottle to resolve once and for all the question of marriage.

The Fourth Book

The sea voyage continues for the whole of The Fourth Book of Pantagruel (in French, Le quart-livre de Pantagruel. The original title is Le quart livre des faicts et dicts héroïques du bon Pantagruel[5]). Pantagruel encounters many exotic and strange characters and societies during this voyage, such as the Shysteroos, who make their living by charging people to beat them up.

The whole book can be seen as a comical retelling of the Odyssey or — more convincingly — of the story Jason and the Argonauts. In The Fourth Book, which has been described as his most satirical book,[who?] Rabelais criticizes what he perceived as the arrogance and wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, the political figures of the time, popular superstitions and addresses several religious, political, linguistic, and philosophical issues.

The Fifth Book

At the end of The Fifth Book of Pantagruel (in French, Le cinquième-livre de Pantagruel. The original title is Le cinquiesme et dernier livre des faicts et dicts héroïques du bon Pantagruel), which was published posthumously around 1564, the divine bottle is found. Although some parts of book 5 are truly worthy of Rabelais, the last volume's attribution to him is debatable. Book five was not published until nine years after Rabelais's death and includes much material that is clearly borrowed (such as from Lucian's True History and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) or of lesser quality than the previous books.

In the notes to his translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Donald M. Frame proposes that book 5 may have been formed from unfinished material that a publisher later patched together into a book. This interpretation has been mainly proved by Mireille Huchon in "Rabelais Grammairien" , the very first book in Rabelais' exegesis history to provide a rigourous grammatical analysis on this complex matter.

(From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Download Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, Book 1

PDF format, 1.7MB.

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book 1 by Francois Rabelais, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux is a publication of the Pennsylvania State University.
Cover Design: Jim Manis
Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University

Download Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, Book 2

PDF format, 1.74MB.

Download Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, Book 3

PDF format, 2.1MB.

Download Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, Book 4

PDF format, 2.11MB.

Download Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, Book 5

PDF format, 1.01MB.

INTRODUCTION:

HAD RABELAIS NEVER WRITTEN his strange and marvellous romance, no one would ever have imagined the possibility of its production.

It stands outside other things—a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. Throughout the whole there is such a force of life and thought, such a power of good sense, a kind of assurance so authoritative, that he takes rank with the greatest; and his peers are not many.

You may like him or not, may attack him or sing his praises, but you cannot ignore him. He is of those that die hard. Be as fastidious as you will; make up your mind to recognize only those who are, without any manner of doubt, beyond and above all others; however few the names you keep, Rabelais' will always remain.

We may know his work, may know it well, and admire it more every time we read it. After being amused by it, after having enjoyed it, we may return again to study it and to enter more fully into its meaning. Yet there is no possibility of knowing his own life in the same fashion. In spite of all the efforts, often successful, that have been made to throw light on it, to bring forward a fresh document, or some obscure mention in a forgotten book, to add some little fact, to fix a date more precisely, it remains nevertheless full of uncertainty and of gaps. Besides, it has been burdened and sullied by all kinds of wearisome stories and foolish anecdotes, so that really there is more to weed out than to add.

This injustice, at first wilful, had its rise in the sixteenth century, in the furious attacks of a monk of Fontevrault, Gabriel de Puy- Herbault, who seems to have drawn his conclusions concerning the author from the book, and, more especially, in the regrettable satirical epitaph of Ronsard, piqued, it is said, that the Guises had given him only a little pavillon in the Forest of Meudon, whereas the presbytery was close to the chateau. From that time legend has fastened on Rabelais, has completely travestied him, till, bit by bit, it has made of him a buffoon, a veritable clown, a vagrant, a glutton, and a drunkard.

The likeness of his person has undergone a similar metamorphosis. He has been credited with a full moon of a face, the rubicund nose of an incorrigible toper, and thick coarse lips always apart because always laughing. The picture would have surprised his friends no less than himself. There have been portraits painted of Rabelais; I have seen many such. They are all of the seventeenth century, and the greater number are conceived in this jovial and popular style. ...

Comments (0)

Show/Hide comments

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment