Bücher von Alice Fiola Berry

Published in two parts in 1548 and 1552, Le Quart Livre is Rabelais's last book of certain authenticity and his most difficult and mysterious work. In it, Pantagruel and Panurge undertake a sea voyage and a quest for "the word of the Divine Bottle," but the islands they visit along the way are inhabited by strange beings whose nature and physiognomy defy natural categories. Expressing the elderly writer's despair at the failure of all his dreams as a young humanist, the voyage traces the last phase of the heroic quest, the cycle of old age and death. It is a descent into the underworld, but one that is undertaken hopefully, for the Quart Livre continues the search for a wife and for paternity begun in the Tiers Livre. Ultimately, all of these strivings may be associated with the writer-physician who faces misfortunes in order to cure them. In the end, the Quart Livre affirms the healing power of wine, laughter, and words.

Alice Fiola Berry's study on the fundamental importance of language itself in the four books of Rabelais leads the reader down the path trod by Panurge and Pantagruel. Berry demonstrates how language and logos are the source of comedy, the focus of attention, and indeed the closest elements to the main character of the texts. Nowhere is this import more clear than in the dominant theme of Rabelais's volumes: the quest for truth. There, in the core of these texts, Berry teases out the ways that the legitimacy of language is most seriously questioned, and the limits of its power drawn.