Gargantua

Gargantua the giant, the future father of Pantagruel, emerges from his mother's left ear after an eleven-month pregnancy and demands a drink. This scene is presented at the beginning of the second volume of François Rabelais's five-part novel series, which was first published in 1534. In this Czech edition, translated by Patrik Ouředník, we follow the order in which the individual books were written. Compared to Pantagruel, Gargantua is characterised by greater maturity and didacticism. Like Pantagruel, the character of the giant Gargantua is endowed with wit, an obsession with food, and scatological humour. One of the most original works of world literature, in its immense generic diversity, offers the reader reflections on language (a language born not in time but in space), a mockery of the rigid awkwardness of university education, but above all the nonchalance and boorishness with which Rabelais breaks all the rules of the novel and narrative.

“Rabelais lives at a time when life has split into two worlds – the world of classical education and the practical real world. Rabelais the humanist was at home in both, without being able to decide on one of them as the real world, and so he oscillates back and forth, insecure in his sense of life and not knowing which world is new and which old, which is real and which is unreal; and this uncertainty as to where his position in life actually is, this relativity which the experience of education brings with it, created his wonderfully variable stylistic form.” Leo Spitzer