An ode to drunkenness: Rabelais

Any reader can see why Rabelais got in trouble for writing Gargantua and Pantagruel - he'd probably get in trouble today let alone in the 1500s. This novel, if that's what to call it, is as ribald and raunchy and ill-behaved as anything by the Beats or Henry Miller or for that matter Lawrence or Joyce or any of the writers who've faced censorship in the past 100 years (political censorship aside - I'm taking about censorship by the moralists). Everyone knows that Chaucer was incredibly crude and raunchy in many of his "tales," but Chaucer was careful to keep his more outrageous pieces within a context: they're narrated by crude or "low" characters, and they're within a framework of an essentially very conservative and some would say even devout narrative structure. Also, Chaucer was a powerful guy within the highest circle of the government in his era - so first of all he knew exactly how far he could go and second he was a bit protected from censure by virtue of his status. Rabelais was a living target; I see in a note in the old Penguin edition I've reading that he was a trained physician, and that makes a lot of sense, as the book is full of arcana about anatomical functions and body parts - and it's also full of celebrations of drinking and drunkenness, or sex, lots of descriptions of farting and shitting and puking, and for all that it's pretty funny, in its way-over-the-top manner: Gargantua born as a giant, through a reverse process he rises from the womb and comes to life through his mother's ear (!), much description of the process of clothing and housing the baby giant - and all to what end? I'm not sure what Rabelais's purpose is in writing this book - I'm sure it didn't earn him any money - but as the Penguin edition notes it gives us a glimpse of two societies in conflict - the religious order of the Middle Ages in conflict with the humanism of the renaissance. Maybe, though I think that's much more true of Chaucer (and maybe Spenser); I don't see any evidence of the church and class structure of the Middle Ages, at least in first 50 pages or so, unless it's present by its very absence, in this book that sticks a thumb in the eye of all social conventions.