SOURCE: “Change and Exchange,” in Rabelais Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1993, pp. 1-22.

In the excerpt below, Zegura and Tetel discuss the importance of change and economics in Rabelais's life and works, arguing that these two concepts hold the key for comprehending his disjointed writings.

François Rabelais hawked his Third Book (1546) by claiming the text would never run dry. “Our barrel will prove inexhaustible,” he tells us, comparing his book to a bottomless cask of wine that is “lively at the source and of perpetual flow … a veritable cornucopia of merriment and mockery” (TB, Prol., 298-99).¹ That the prognostication holds true today, not just for the Third Book but for the entire Rabelaisian text, is a tribute to the good doctor's special brand of alchemy, which within the crucible of the fiction combines ingredients so diverse that they never stop interacting. To catalog this hodgepodge of ingredients, which we...