THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH
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nous."
The most astonishing and most ridiculous thing about this
Gorgiasian world is precisely that it is not entirely different from ours
but on the contrary resembles it in the minutest detail-superior to
ours in that it knows of our world whereas we know nothing of it,
but otherwise exactly like it. Thus Rabelais gives himself the oppor–
tunity to exchange the roles- that is, to have the cabbage-planting
peasant appear as a native European who receives the stranger from
the other world with European naivete; above all, he affords himself
the possibility of developing a realistic scene of everyday life-thus
introducing a third theme which is entirely incompatible with the two
others (the grotesque farcicality of the giants, and the discovery of a
new world) and which stands in deliberately absurd contrast to them;
so that the whole machinery of huge dimensions and of the daring
voyage of discovery seems to have been set in motion only to bring
us a peasant of Touraine engaged in planting cabbages.
Just as the locales and the themes change, so the styles change
too; the predominant style is that which corresponds to the grotesque
central theme-the grotesque-comic and popular style, and that in its
most energetic form, in which the most forceful expressions appear.
Beside it, and mingled with it, there is matter-of-fact narrative,
philosophical ideas flash out, and amid all the grotesque machinery
rises the terrible picture of mortals suffering from the plague, in which
the dead are taken from the houses by cartloads. This sort of mixture
of styles was not invented by Rabelais; he of course adapted it to his
temperament and his purpose, but, paradoxically,
it
stems from Late
Medieval preaching, in which the Christian tradition exaggerated the
mixture of styles to the utmost: these sermons are at the same time
popular in the crudest way, realistic in an animalistic way, and
learned and educational in their figurative Biblical interpretation.
From the spirit of Late Medieval preaching, and above all from the at–
mosphere which surrounded the popular (in both the good and bad
sense) mendicant orders, the Humanists took this mixture of styles,
especially for their anti-ecclesiastical, polemical, and satirical writings;
from the same spring, Rabelais, who had been a Franciscan in his
youth, drew it "more pure" than anyone else; he had studied that
form of life and form of expression at the source and had made it
his own in his peculiar way; he can no longer do without it; much as
he hated the mendicant orders, their flavorful and earthy style,
