When readers think of giants in literature, they think of Rabelais and Swift; when they think of Rabelais and Swift, they think of giants […].
Serious literature is often unfavourable to giants; witness the Cyclops in The Odyssey, Goliath of Gath, the Morholt in Tristan and Yseult, the stupid monsters in Dante’s Inferno and the Loup Garou in Pantagruel. In popular literature, they are either monstrous ogres, as Jacques and the Beanstalk or the Little Thumb, or rather playful supermen, as in the Rabelaisian chronicles.
– Marianne Closson, Les Géants entre mythe et littérature, 2007
Published at the end of 1534 or the beginning of 1535 by the Lyon printer François Juste, Gargantua was inspired both by Pantagruel (1532) and the Grandes et inestimables Cronicques du grant et enorme geant Gargantua (1532), an anonymous opuscule. This peddling booklet recounts the creation by Merlin, on the highest mountain in the East, of Grant Gosier, his wife Galemelle and the great mare, followed by the birth of Gargantua, his childhood and his departure, at the age of seven, for the King Arthur’s court. The Arthurian setting disappears in favour of the topography of Chinon, giving Rabelais’s cow country a fictional existence.
The area around Chinon and La Devinière became a hotbed of extraordinary events.
For his Gargantua, Rabelais followed the narrative of the novel of chivalry, in a picturesque and parodic vein : the birth and education of the giant, the prowess through war, the rewards and heroic elevation.
Laughter is at the heart of pantagruelism, the joyful doctrine taught by the Rabelaisian novels. Offered as a remedy to his readers, it stands in opposition agelastes (those deprived of laughter), canibals, misantropes and othercockroaches.
Invited to do as the dog philosopher, the reader is invited to break the bone to suck out the marrow. Since clothes don’t make the man, the reader must seek a greater meaning to the subject without losing sight of its joyfulness.
Alcofribas Nasier – an anagram of François Rabelais and also the narrator – takes the reader to defend the possibility of an eleven-month pregnancy, describing the differents parts of his livery (his outfit), give his opinion on the meaning of the colours chosen blue and white, and list seventy proverbs about the attitude of the young giant.
The duel between scholastic education and humanist education takes centre stage. Then the war breaks out, taking of the novel, from the refusal of Picrochole’s bakers to sell fouaces to the the fight with Grandgousier’s shepherds, not forgetting the battles and feats of arms, culminating in Gargantua’s victory.
