Rabelais and the Social Order: An Essay in Cognitive Criticism

This book asks two questions.

The first question concerns one of the greatest figures of world literature: François Rabelais. What do his sixteenth-century fictions communicate about the power relations that shape what social groups do (or refrain from doing) to each other--killing, wounding, dismembering, having sex with, feeding, depriving of food, protecting, healing, commanding, obeying, ruling, serving, honouring, swallowing, humiliating, scaring, and so on?

The second question is more general: how does a literary writer communicate to readers (whether about relations between social groups or anything else), even to readers who are separated from the writer by vast swaths of time and place?

By considering afresh the first question, the book contributes to recent cognitively inflected answers to the second.

Part I provides a reading of the social order across all five books of the Rabelaisian fictional chronicles. They communicate a profound preoccupation both with the need for a rank-based, hierarchical, social order and yet also with the comic and disquieting vulnerabilities or impossibilities of that social order-or rather of social orders in the plural, since the narrative lurches from the warring kingdoms of the early books (Pantagruel and Gargantua) to the strangely organized island societies of the fourth and fifth books. In the middle (third) book, an extravagant character (Panurge) plans to insert himself, by becoming a paterfamilias, in the whole system of renewing the social order through legitimate procreation and inheritance.

Part II changes gear: it analyses readings of the social order in Rabelais's fiction that have been offered over the past millennium and that often introduce rather different terms (such as 'class' or 'revolution'). The journey takes in Aldous Huxley, Gustave Flaubert, Ernest Renan, Primo Levi, and many more. Have these remarkably varied and often conflicting readings been produced by certain core communicative processes? And did those processes also produce, with different results, the reading offered in Part I?

A cognitive approach helps readers understand how literature can afford rich and embodied thinking which is, by definition, constant re-thinking--both from one reader to the next, and from one page to the next.