It's pretty gross and funny, and it takes ages to read... so, why haven't more /lit/izens pretended to read it to impress internet strangers?
>>25166313Nobody is impressed that you read fantasy books
>>25166313Diogenes rolled over them with his tub in sixty two verbs and they couldn't stomach it after that.
>>25166368Also they can't read French.
>>25166313It’s actually one of my favourites though I read it in translation. Guess that means I didn’t read it at all eh? Haha
>>25166374What translation did you read?
>>25166313I had a copy of this signed by the author, but I through it away. Must have been worth $7,000,000.00 or something.
>>25166406M. A. Screech I believe.
>>25166408This one?
Aye, many notes, it has
>>25166414Whoops, sorry about that.
>>25166412Forgot to tag you, yeah, this is it. >>25166414The pic came out horizontally, silly me.
>>25166313couldn't say it was my favorite but the list of fake games had my sides in orbit
>>25166313You have to actually be well-read to follow along with the web of intertextuality it builds itself on, a lot of the more specific satire on topics of the time period it was written in will go over anyone's head (the annotations are a must-have) and the part that everyone can understand, i.e. the body humor, is too crass for the faux intellectuals to appreciate, despite Rabelais being a million times smarter and better educated than they are and still finding it humorous.Summa summarum, it just filters people. There's no easy meme talking points to pick that you could then signal to others with that you've "read" it, it can't be summarized or even described in any meaningful way.I think Bakhtin fell so deeply in love with this work for these very reasons. Gargantua & Pantagruel was the Gravity's Rainbow of its time.
>>25166414>>25166419Thanks, I might try this one some day.
>>25166497It's definitely worth the effort. Characters like Panurge and Friar John are acquintances you'll enjoy making :D
>>25166313I read a bit then realized I had no idea what blud was talking about
>>25166442Rabelais’ work is far more erudite and funny than anything Pynchon ever wrote thoughbeit.
>>25166518It’s like a parody of philosophy while also being philosophy itself, as a fiction novel. Written 500 years ago. Truly an anomaly.
>>25166407W-what? Where did you even get a tome from the 16th century?
>>25166519It was a different time.
>>25166313because it is not refined, at least aesthetically.
>>25166313The reading of Rabelais is not easy to everyone, and perhaps to those for whom it is least easy, he would be most medicinal... He is the sanest of all the great writers; perhaps the only sane one. What he has the power of communicating to us is a renewal of that physiological energy, which alone makes it possible to enjoy this monstrous world. Other writers interpret things, or warn us against things. Rabelais takes us by the hand, shows us the cup of life, deep as eternity, and bids us drink and be satisfied.Those who suffer most from Rabelais' manner of treating sex are the incurably vicious. The really evil libidinous people, that is to say the spiteful, the mean, the base and inhuman, fly from his presence, and for the obvious reason that he makes sex-pleasure so generous... so natural, so legitimate, that their dark morbid perverted natures can get no more joy out of it. Their lust, their lechery, is a cold dead Saurian thing, a thing with the gravity of a slow-worm—and when this great laughing and generous sage comes forth into the sunshine with his noble companies of amorous and happy people, these Shadow-lovers, these Lent-lovers, these Fleshly Sentimentalists, writhe in shame, and seek refuge in a deeper darkness. How strained and inhuman, too; and one might add, how mad and irrelevant—that high, cold, disdainful translunar scorn with which the "moral-immoralism" of Nietzsche scourges our poor flesh and blood. One turns with relief to Zarathustra after associating with pious people. But, after Rabelais, even that terrific psychologist seems contorted and thin.It is impossible not to be struck by the difference between the Rabelaisian tone in regard to erotic and excremental matters and the kind of outspokenness of our own day. With Mr. James Joyce, for example, the urge underlying his obscenities is a savage, almost pathological attraction-repulsion; whereas with Rabelais "these primordials" simply fall into their places like splendid sacraments, essential parts of his huge gala song.His broad, free, humorous treatment of "country matters" has done us service. It has cleared the air of much that is hypocritical and unseemly, and has been a justification for many sincere people who have wished to approach such subjects in a natural way. It should be clearly understood that Rabelais never wrote a single page that is pornographic. In fact he is the great purifier. He lets fresh air into the unhealthy closets of human society, and his laughter, like sunshine, causes wormwood and pungent camomile to grow out of the very middens of the world. Concealed drains are dangerous, those open to the air harmless. Rabelais follows the aristocratic tradition of natural refinement.
>>25167723Picturing Rabelais as some kind of guide handing us the cup of life and telling us to drink up is, sure, poetically beautiful, but it ends up doing the author a disservice. Reducing him to a source of raw, physiological energy is, ironically, making him smaller than he is.The grotesque in Rabelais is never random or just feel-good stuff. When Gargantua steals the bells of Notre Dame, or when Epistemon comes back from hell as a meat stew, we're not looking at spontaneous bursts of vitality. These are precise tools of intellectual and political critique. The overflowing, dismembered body, merged with animals and objects, is always in service of an argument: against scholasticism, against religious obscurantism, against educational models that crush human intelligence. Reading him purely as life energy means missing exactly what gives that energy its point.
>>25167811>The overflowing, dismembered body, merged with animals and objects, is always in service of an argument
>>25166370Nor Latin
