Rabelais’ “culture of folk humor” as a Technique of Archaicized Narration
Journal Title: Studia Litterarum - Year 2018, Vol 3, Issue 2
Abstract
The French reception of Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais excludes the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. However, by analyzing Rabelais’s text as a reflection of national culture and ignoring the author’s role in the development and transformation of the novel’s cultural, generic, and linguistics codes, we inevitably distort the text of the novel. This article argues that novel (especially its first two books) is closely connected to the discussions about the status and meaning of vernacular language that were relevant for the time and that generated a wide range of non-humorous works in France of the first half of the 16th century (by Jean Lemaire de Belges, Geoffroy Tory, etc.). The comic in Rabelais’s originates from French variant of humanist ideas. Famous prologs by Alcofribas Nasier represent a merely authorial play with canons and methods of the medieval literature and a parody of the medieval understanding of words and books that had little to do with the spirit of popular carnival. At the same time, the author consistently marks poetic canons of the late Middle Ages as archaic. Such combination of archaism with the intention to write a popular book can be traced in the typographical features of the first parts of the novel that allows us to rethink the term “national culture” in the light of Roger Chartier’s concept of appropriation. This reading demonstrates that Gargantua and Pantagruel is a masterly literary play that rejects not only “official” culture but also the entire Medieval culture with its poetic norms, values and rules for the sake of the incipient ideals of national humanism.
Authors and Affiliations
I. K. Staf
Keywords
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- EP ID EP26223
- DOI 10.22455/2500-4247-2018-3-2-10-25
- Views 313
- Downloads 11
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