Volume 13, Number 6 · October 9, 1969
The Last Laugh
By Frances A. Yates
Rabelais and His World
by Mikhail Bakhtin, translated by Helene Iswolsky
M.I.T., 484 pp., $15.00
Of all writers of the first rank, Rabelais is perhaps the least read. The reasons for this are obvious. First of all the language, the torrent of words poured forth to suggest the talk, movements, ideas of the characters in his amazing novel—a language untranslatable and often unintelligible even to French Renaissance experts. Submerged in this garrulity, the reader first gains the impression of being introduced to a master of burlesque, to a gallery of intensely comic figures whose adventures are above all intended to excite laughter. 'Pleasant' and 'facetious' were adjectives commonly applied to the adventures of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel and their friends, as recounted by François Rabelais; and pleasantry and facetiousness implied in the French sixteenth century a strong admixture of the grossness of the farce tradition.
Review, 3866 words
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