Abstract
François Rabelais and the Renaissance Physiology of Invention explores the medical poetics of inventive, embodied thinking or ingenuity instantiated in episodes from Rabelais’s Gargantua and, mostly, his Quart livre. It unsettles established dichotomies in Rabelaisian scholarship between Rabelais’s ‘lowly’ laugher and ‘high’ erudite message and reassesses the Rabelaisian grotesque by highlighting its debts to grotesque ornament, this marginal yet omnipresent Renaissance visual art. Bodily functions are a trademark of Rabelais’s poetics. Scholarship has read them as signs of carnivalesque inversion and satirical degradation pitting the ‘lowly’ against the ‘high’, the ‘belly’ against the ‘head’. Yet for a physician like Rabelais, the ‘head’ or brain, the chest, belly and nether regions as sites of cognition, breathing, nutrition, and generation are all integrated physiological systems of animation. From this medical perspective, Rabelais’s fictions testify to his reflexive investigation into how culture results from natural, physiological processes. These underpin the animation of human ingenia—wits conditioned by biological natures—made manifest in pedagogical, artistic, mechanical, and spiritual ‘inventions’. While ingenia might be idiosyncratic, their animation is environmentally fuelled and shaped by the food we eat, the air we breathe, the places we inhabit, the company we keep. In this respect Rabelaisian fiction is grotesque in a period sense. With its emphasis on hybrid forms capturing the metamorphoses of animation, grotesque ornament reflexively commented on the embodied, inventive processes grounding Renaissance mimesis. Similarly, Rabelais’s fictions forefront the inventive powers of ingenious animation and articulate reflexive, often ironic alternatives to the (often transcendent) humanist views they alter: a thoroughly embodied anthropology, a naturalist genealogy of cultural production and transmission.
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