‘Motz […] en main’ or words you can hold in your hand: Rabelais in the Printshop (Quart Livre, 55–6)

Abstract

In chapters 55-56 of Rabelais’s Quart Livre, Pantagruel and his companions encounter a soundscape of inexplicable, disembodied voices and noises, which turn out to be sounds that have frozen into visible, tangible, sensory objects. This article uses the episode to think about words as objects in the world, with a physical presence and sensible properties. Considering first the widespread critical suspicion of the frozen words’ materiality through the lens of the fetish, the article then turns to the material culture of textual production and focuses on the sixteenth-century printshop, where words, in the form of metal type, are also things. The article aims to take a new perspective on the materiality of the frozen words; to consider Rabelais’s familiarity with the printing process; and to explore the impact of the technology of movable type on perceptions of meaning and error in Rabelais’s work.