“All for the Sake of the Belly”: Aggressive Images of Eating in Gargantua and Pantagruel

초록

Mikhail Bakhtin’s groundbreaking study of François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel has opened a new critical possibility of reading the story as a mytho-socialogical text in which man’s anxiety about his existential vulnerability to external forces finds a liberating moment of self-empowerment through the metaphor of eating. However, Bakhtin’s reading largely ignores the political symbolism embedded in the apparently simple act of eating of which essence is the primal human desire for power. Eating is basically a barbarous act of violence, containment, and destruction, an emblematic manifestation of power in its purpose and consequence. In Rabelais’s mock-heroic chronicle, the recurrent images of eating, despite their benign facade of hilarity, mask contrapuntal manifestations of power politics such as incarceration, cannibalism, kingship, and even colonialism. This ideological association is made possible by the presence of those gigantic prodigies of insatiable appetite and tremendous digestive power. Political leadership, when imagined through giantism, is both disturbing and fearsome, partly because of the age-old conception of the giant as devourer and partly because of the intrinsically aggressive nature of power. To examine the diverse images of eating in Gargantua and Pantagruel is to break through the turbid textual surface and map out the subterranean terrain of the dire nature of power.

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