THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH
675
live various half-animal creatures as well as two human beings, father
and son, who had been swallowed twenty-seven years earlier after a
shipwreck; they too plant cabbages and have built a shrine to
Poseidon. Rabelais, in his way, has combined these two prototypes,
taking from the chapbook the giant's mouth, which despite its
im–
mense dimensions, has not entirely lost the characteristics of a mouth,
and placing within it Lucian's picture of a landscape and a society;
indeed, he goes even further than Lucian
(twenty-fi~e
kingdoms with
large cities, whereas in Lucian it is only a matter of some thousand
fabulous beings), though he takes little pains to reconcile the two
themes: the presumable size of a mouth that is densely populated
bears no relation to the speed of the return journey; still less the fact
that, after he gets back, the giant notices him and speaks to him; and
least of all does the information Alcofrybas gives concerning his diet
and defecations during his stay inside the mouth correspond with the
highly developed agricultural and domestic life which he found
there-whether he has simply forgotten it or is deliberately not men–
tioning it. Apparently the conversation with the giant, which closes
the scene, serves no purpose but that of giving a comical characteriza–
tion of the kind-hearted Pantagruel, who shows a lively interest in
the bodily welfare of his friend, particularly in his being supplied
with plenty of good drink, and who good-humoredly rewards his
undaunted admission concerning
his
defecations with the gift of a
chatelleny-although our honest Alcofrybas had, so to speak, found
himself a cushy job for the duration of the war. The way in which
the recipient of the gift expresses his thanks (I have done nothing
to deserve it) is in this case no mere form of speech but accords
perfectly with the circumstances.
Despite his recollections of literary prototypes, Rabelais has gone
entirely his own way in constructing the world inside the giant's
mouth. Alcofrybas finds no fabulous half-animal beings, no little
handful of men painfully adapting themselves to their surroundings,
but a fully developed society and economy, in which everything goes
on just as it does at home in France. At first he is astonished that
human beings live there at all; yet what surprises him most of all
is that things are not somehow strange and different, but just like
things in the world he knows. It begins with
his
very first encounter:
he is not as amazed to find a man here (he has already seen the
