Laughter in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel: Utopia as Extra-Textual Place

Abstract

Gargantua and Pantagruel exists at the nexus point of four subtypes of utopia: the medieval utopia of abundance, such as The Land of Cockayne and Chaucer’s Former Age; the Renaissance utopia of the pastoral found in New World chronicles by conquistadors; the Renaissance utopia of escape such as Campanella’s City of the Sun; and the by Columbus of the utopia he found during his voyages to the New World. Because Gargantua and Pantagruel simultaneously occupies multiple utopian spaces without ever being comfortably classified as a single type of utopia, we can look outside the text for utopian satisfaction. In the persona of Master Alcofribas, Rabelais tells the reader that the boundary of his utopia was laughter brought forward by the act of reading his book. In taking Alcofribas’s advice to look outside the text for utopia, we discover that the utopia of Gargantua and Pantagruel is extra-textual, found in the act of reading and in the Bakhtinian grotesque realism of laughter.