SOURCE: “Gargantua and Pantagruel,” in Language and Money in Rabelais, Peter Lang, 1996, pp. 23-57.

In the following excerpt, Lavatori contends that characters in Gargantua and Pantagruel “deliberately infringe upon the principles of good communication and use language and money to influence others in non-communicative ways.”

What strikes a reader most about patterns of communication in Rabelais is their repeated deviance. There is a constant disregard for the limits to which signs function effectively in communication and little evidence of a clear distinction between levels of meaning or significance. The problem of interpretation is thematic throughout the works and memorably coined in the metaphor of the “substantial marrow” of the prologue to Gargantua. There the reader is instructed to pass beyond the superficial meaning of the narrator's discourse, the literal meaning, as a dog would break through the shell of a bone to extract its marrow, a more sublime...