Naïve Parody in Rabelais

Abstract

‘Naïve parody in Rabelais’ examines the humour arising from the incongruous behaviour of figures unequipped to deal with life as lived by fully conscious mature adults. Animals, children, drunks, uninitiates and fanatics all exemplify it, provided the audience response remains sympathetic. Naïve parody coexists but is distinct from other modes of Rabelaisian humour including a satire deriving generally from humanist polemics against the scholastic consensus. Satire is definably a punitive mode, while parody is celebratory, depending substantially on carnivalesque inversions which disrupt normal living. To enjoy naïve parody one has to suspend serious values, in Rabelais’s case humanist scholarship, evangelical Christianity and responsible self-esteem. Meanwhile if one chooses to condemn his characters, one is shifting them into the mode of value-based satire and reducing the richness of a comic text. Rabelais’s text is orientated in many ways around satiric campaigns, but its comic potential derives no less richly from the parodic mode that I seek to emphasise here.