The Body of Language

 

 

Giants—Morgante and Gargantua, Fracasso and Pantagruel—make their appearance in European literature between the end of the fifteenth and middle of the sixteenth centuries. But the excessive size of their bodies goes hand in hand with another, no less impressive profligacy: that of their language. Pantagruel’s speech is as immense as his body, and the macaronic language of Teofilo Folengo’s poem is just as exorbitant. If Rabelais’s neologistic frenzy seems unstoppable (one of the words he thinks up consists of fifty-seven letters) and distorts the whole of the French lexicon, Folengo does much more: he invents not just words but a language, the macaronic (named after ‘a particular kind of plump, coarse, and rustic dumpling made of flour, cheese, and butter’), which utterly transgresses the Dantean distinction between Latin and the vernacular, Latinizing the vernacular and vernacularizing Latin. For both, language is no longer (as a stale though still dominant view would have it) the sign of a mental concept: it is above all a body, which can be seen, felt, and touched, a body like that of the giants, with its own obscene physiology and even more vulgar anatomy: a body in flight to no one knows where, but certainly away from any grammatical identity and any defined lexicon.

The volume includes illustrations taken from the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, a series of 120 woodcuts from 1565 attributed to Rabelais, and from the 1521 edition of Folengo’s Baldo.