Rabelais’s purpose in Gargantua and Pantagruel was to entertain the cultivated reader at the expense of the follies and exaggerations of his times. If he points lessons, it is because his life has taught him something about the evils of comatose monasticism, the trickery of lawyers, the pigheaded persistence of litigants, and the ignorance of grasping physicians. Rabelais was a friar with unhappy memories of his monastery; his father had wasted his money on lengthy litigation with a neighbor over some trivial water rights; and he himself was earning his living by medicine in an age when the distinction between physician and quack was needle-fine.

Though it is an entertainment, therefore, Gargantua and Pantagruel is also serious. Its principal narrative is devoted to a voyage of discovery that parodies the travelers’ tales current in Rabelais’s day. Rabelais begins lightheartedly; his travelers merely set out to discover whether Panurge will be cuckolded if he marries. A dozen oracles have already hinted at Panurge’s inevitable fate, yet each time he has reasoned their verdict away; and the voyage itself provides a number of amusing incidents. Yet, like Don Quixote’s, it is a fundamentally serious quest directed toward a true goal, the discovery of the secret of life.

Intoxication—with life, with learning, with the use and abuse of words—is the prevailing mood of these novels. Rabelais himself provides the model of the exuberant creator. Gargantua and Pantagruel provides a cunning mosaic of scholarly, literary, and scientific parody. One finds this in its simplest form in the catalog of the library of St. Victor, in the list of preposterous substantives or attributes in which Rabelais delights, and in the inquiry by means of Virgilian lots into the question of Panurge’s eventual cuckoldom.

But at other times the humor is more complicated and works on several levels. Gargantua’s campaign against King Picrochole (book 1), for instance, contains personal, historical, moral, and classical points closely interwoven. The battles are fought in Rabelais’s home country, in which each hamlet is magnified into a fortified city. Moreover, they also refer to the feud between Rabelais the elder and his neighbour. They also comment on recent historical events involving France and the Holy Roman Empire, however, and can even be read as propaganda against war, or at least in favor of the more humane conduct of hostilities. On yet another level, Rabelais’s account of this imaginary warfare can be taken as mockery of the classical historians: Gargantua’s speech to his defeated enemy (book 1, chapter 50) echoes one put into the mouth of the Roman emperor Trajan by Pliny the Younger.

Despite these complex levels of reference, Rabelais was not a self-conscious writer; he made Gargantua and Pantagruel out of the disorderly contents of his mind. As a result it is ill-constructed, and the same thoughts are repeated in Gargantua that he had already set down in Pantagruel; the nature of an ideal education, for example, is examined in both books. Moreover, the main action of the story, which arises from the question of Panurge’s intended marriage, only begins in the third book. The first, Gargantua throws up the enormous contradiction that has made the interpretation of Rabelais’s own intellectual standpoint almost impossible. On the one hand we have the rumbustious festivities that celebrate the giant’s peculiarly miraculous birth and the “Rabelaisian” account of his childish habits; and on the other a plea for an enlightened education. Again, the brutal slaughter of the Picrocholine wars, in which Rabelais obviously delights, is followed by the utopian description of Thélème, the Renaissance ideal of a civilized community. Pantagruel follows the same pattern with variations, introducing Panurge but omitting Frère Jean, and putting Pantagruel in the place of his father, Gargantua. In fact the characters are not strongly individualized. They exist only in what they say, being so many voices through whom the author speaks. Panurge, for instance, has no consistent nature. A resourceful and intelligent poor scholar in Pantagruel, he becomes a credulous buffoon in the third book and an arrant coward in the fourth.

The third and fourth books pursue the story of the inquiry and voyage, and in them Rabelais’s invention is at its height. The first two books contain incidents close in feeling to the medieval fabliaux, but the third and fourth books are rich in a new, learned humor. Rabelais was a writer molded by one tradition, the medieval Roman Catholic, whose sympathies lay to a greater extent with another, the Renaissance or classical. Yet when he writes in praise of the new humanist ideals—in the chapters on education, on the foundation of Thélème, or in praise of drinking from the “sacred bottle” of learning or enlightenment—he easily becomes sententious. His head is for the new learning, while his flesh and heart belong to the old.

It is in his absurd, earthy, and exuberant inventions, which are medieval in spirit even when they mock at medieval acceptances, that Rabelais is a great, entertaining, and worldly wise writer.