46. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel, two giants, father and son, were created by the French doctor and monk François Rabelais in the mid-sixteenth century. Rabelais is careful to give exact etymologies for their respective names. The origin of ‘Gargantua’ is as follows:

While that good man Grandgousier [Gargantua’s father] was drinking and joking with the others he heard the horrible cry made by his son as he entered the world, bawling out for ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’ Whereupon he said, ‘Que grand tu as.’ — What a big one you’ve got! — (the gullet being understood); and when they heard this the company said that the child ought properly to be called Gargantua — after the example of the ancient Hebrew custom — since that had been the first word pronounced by his father at his birth. The father graciously agreed to their suggestion; it was most pleasing to the mother as well; and to quiet the child they gave him enough drink to break his larynx.

‘Pantagruel’ is explained thus:

And because Pantagruel was born on that very day, his father gave him the name he did: for Panta in Greek is equivalent to all, and Gruel, in the Hagarene language, is as much as to say thirsty; by this meaning to infer that at the hour of the child’s nativity the world was all thirsty, and also seeing, in a spirit of prophecy, that one day his son would be ruler over the thirsty, as was demonstrated to him at that very hour by another sign even more convincing. For when the child’s mother Badebec was being delivered of him and the midwives were waiting to receive him, there came first out of her womb sixty-eight muleteers, each pulling by the collar a mule heavily laden with salt; after which came out nine dromedaries loaded with hams and smoked ox-tongues, seven camels loaded with salted eels; and then twenty-four cartloads of leeks, garlics, and onions: all of which greatly alarmed the said midwives.

Both of these thirst-orientated explanations are side-swipes at the truth. The name ‘Gargantua’ existed before Rabelais, in a popular book about a giant of that name published anonymously in the early 1500s, the Great Chronicles of Gargantua. The ‘garg’ of ‘Gargantua’ does indeed have to do with the gullet, or throat: in the Provençal dialect, throat is gargamallo and in Languedocien it is gargamela. Gargantua’s mother is called Gargamelle, and his father, Grandgousier, takes his name from gosier, the French for ‘throat’. Gargantua’s family therefore derive their appellations, both in Rabelais’s comic philology and in actuality, from the throat and from thirst. Pantagruel is the same. His name, Rabelais assures us, means ‘all-thirsty’. But the ludicrous appeal to an origin in the ’Hagarene’ language covers up the fact that his real source, again, is in popular literature and folklore. In Rabelais’ time ‘Penthagruel’ was a dwarf-devil who preyed on drunkards, throwing salt in their mouths while they were asleep so that they woke thirsty, hung-over and dying for a glass of wine. Pantagruel is born during a drought and is preceded from the womb by a wagon-train of thirst-inducing victuals. His mother, the poor giantess Badebec, is ‘suffocated’ by the effort of giving birth and expires.

So the unavoidable theme of the giants’ names is drink, drinking, thirst, thirstiness, and the quenching of it with floods of life-giving wine. Wine bubbles everywhere throughout Rabelais’ work, an invigorating prelude, accompaniment and postscript to any and every activity. So much is consumed that when the giants relieve themselves, the streams of urine work water-wheels and wash away villages. Wine is literature, symbolic of the intoxication of learning; wine is companionship, necessary for the intercourse of man and man; wine is heretical salvation. The obsession with drinking culminates in a voyage to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle, the last chapter of the five books, where Panurge (Pantagruel’s sidekick) wishes to get an answer to the question of whether or not he should get married. The Oracle’s answer is one word — ‘Trink!’ The solution even to the basic problem of man and woman is liquid in nature.

Perhaps in the light of this we should re-define ‘Rabelaisian’. Most of us think of it as denoting bawdiness or coarseness. The bawdy and scatological — two styles which are barely distinguishable from one another in Rabelais, the act of love being comically treated as a lusty evacuation — are present in great quantity throughout the 800 pages of Gargantua and Pantagruel. But they come a poor second and third to Rabelais’ main preoccupation. Delight in bibulosity is the chief Rabelaisian characteristic, and it’s right there in the title.

Consulted:
Rabelais, François: Gargantua and Pantagruel (translation and introduction by JM Cohen, 1955)
Screech, MA: Rabelais (1979)

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