Blood and guts: From Rabelais to James Bond

Why so much violence in Rabelais's Gargantua & Pantagruel? I mean it's among the bloodiest books I've ever read - so much slashing and stomping and beheading and slicing open of guts and carcasses - I know medieval warfare was a nasty business, but this is so extreme - and of course that's the point, that's almost the very essence of the adjective Rabelaisian, everything taken to the extreme: It's a novel about a giant (two, actually) with giant appetites and gigantic gestures, so when Gargantua is called into battle to save his father’s kingdom he doesn’t just defeat the evading army but eviscerates them one at a time. OK, I guess violence was pretty hilarious to medieval readers – in the same way that today we still talk about “cartoon” violence, generally not confined to cartoons but the lifeblood of action movies, such as the Batman or the Bond series, and plenty of films with Schwartznegger or by Tarantino – each a stylized violence but in comically exaggerated forms. So there is a line connecting Rabelais to Ian Fleming – and yet – it’s ultimately not so funny in Rabelais, it’s just gruesome. The closest near-contemporary comparison I can think of is Cervantes = I remember being somewhat put off by all the violence and cruelty (some of it not physical cruelty) in Don Quixote (my mother had the same thoughts when she returned to DQ after many years and found it disappointing); I greatly enjoyed re-reading DQ and came to tolerate the violence because it was in service of plot and character; we suffered along with DQ and Sancho Panza, and his sufferings helped us love and understand him – they fueled the sentiment of the modern stage adaptation. Can you imagine, though, a stage adaptation of Gargantua? Maybe there is one – but it seems to me more suited to a great anime cartoon. The violence is superfluous and out of all proportion, however, and may have given 16^th-century readers a frisson – as did every mention of sex and defecation, no doubt – but it makes this novel feel quant and distant today.