At the Rabelais Café...

... have a taste of conversation.

The engraving is from the 1870s, by Gustave Doré, illustrating "Gargantua and Pantagruel" — written in the mid-1500s by Rabelais, who is under discussion in this earlier post today. That picture is used — in a recent issue of The Paris Review — to introduce an essay by Robert D. Zaretsky, who "argues that we’ve lost sight of the grotesque—and of the immense floodgates of laughter that it alone can open":

Laughter that upends hierarchies and undoes centuries of moral self-seriousness, leaving no one unscathed as it washes over the masses. Looking at Rabelais... Zaretsky wonders how we lost our way—and why we can no longer mock ourselves along with those in power: “Grotesqueness was not an insult, but instead an insight into the human condition. More than half a millennium later, in a world dominated by indignation and outrage, and largely abandoned by laughter, a dose of the grotesque might help to better digest events, if only by having a good—and right kind of—laugh... For medieval man, laughter was the great leveler. Preceding Martin Luther’s priesthood of all believers was Rabelais’s priesthood of all belly-laughers. Inclusive and communal, laughter left no one untouched; no less universal than faith, it was a bit more subversive...”

So sit down and, with a dose of the grotesque, digest the events of our self-serious time.