Gargantua and Pantagruel Reading Order

Gargantua (1534) by François Rabelais is the second of the five Rabelaisian novels in publication order (though the first in the story's chronological order) and the fullest statement of Rabelaisian humanism — the comic encyclopedic vision of Renaissance learning, appetite, and freedom that made Rabelais the most untranslatable and most exhilarating writer in the French tradition. Gargantua tells the story of the giant Gargantua from miraculous birth through humanist education (the satirical contrast between the old Scholastic education and the new humanist curriculum is the thematic center) to war with his neighbor Picrochole and the founding of the Abbey of Thélème — the utopian anti-monastery whose only rule is 'Fais ce que voudras' (Do what you will). The Rabelaisian style is the first great French prose style: torrents of synonyms, lists of hundreds of items, puns, neologisms, parody of every register (legal, medical, scholarly, biblical, obscene), and an energy of linguistic invention that has no parallel in French literature. The novels were condemned by the Sorbonne and placed on the Index of Forbidden Books — Rabelais was protected partly by his patrons and partly by the difficulty of distinguishing his comic grotesque from satirical earnestness. Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World (1965) is the major modern reading, arguing that Rabelais's carnival grotesque represents a popular folk culture in conflict with official clerical culture.