SOURCE: “Gargantua,” in The Rabelaisian Mythologies, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, pp. 69-102.

In the excerpt that follows, Gauna explores the classical influences on the prologue and Abbey of Theleme passage in Gargantua.

There is no doubt that Rabelais wished the appellation of mythologies Pantagruelicques to cover his second chronicle as well as the others, despite the absence in it of both Pantagruel and Panurge, for the author refers back to his first book in the first chapter of this one, and was surely as much as the printer responsible for the title page of the second edition (the page is lacking in the only example of the first edition), which describes the Gargantua as a livre plein de pantagruelisme. Nevertheless the second book is in some wise set apart by that absence: the sense of tension between the one and the many, the philosopher and the sophist, the...