2 - Reading the works of Rabelais

Summary

Reading Rabelais is no easy matter. His language constitutes an initial obstacle. Replete with clerical,medical, legal, philosophical, scholastic terms and terminology, various classical, foreign, or invented tongues, provincial dialects and urban slang, poems, anagrams, abbreviations, sounds, names, and quotations, his writing displays one of the most varied and extensive lexical ranges of any world author. Intertextuality is rampant, usually displaced by willful distortion. And more is suggested than said, making every word even more polyvalent. Equally disturbing is his recounting the story of a family of giants in a learned, highly literary language. Ultimate meaning, frequently glimpsed but forever elusive, is another. So much so that there are almost as many readings of his works as readers, a positive sign of their successful resistance to any definitive interpretation and a sure criterion of their literariness. At times a single word presents a problem, at times a sentence or a paragraph; but usually it is the determinative intention of a word, an allusion, a chapter or a book, which remains problematic. The weightiest subjects are presented lightly, and trivial matters with great care. Ever-renewable, Rabelais's text is ever-rereadable, inasmuch as it is grounded on differences, sometimes within proximate interpretations, sometimes with alternative possibilities, sometimes both.