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Three Good Giants

François Rabelais

As I went on, it did not take me long to discover that it was quite possible for my purpose—following, indeed, the path unconsciously taken in my boyhood—to divide Rabelais sharply into incident and philosophy. That this had not been thought of before surprised, but did not daunt me. I said to myself: I shall limit the incident strictly to his three Giants; I shall hold these, from grandfather to grandson, well together; keep all that is sound in them; cut away the impurity which is not so much of as around them; chisel them out as a sculptor might, and leave his philosophy with face to the wall. This done, I turned the scouring hose, full and strong, upon the incidents themselves, clearing out both dialectics and profanity thoroughly. I did not stop until I had left the famous trio, Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel where I had, from the first, hoped to place them,—high and dry above the scum which had so long clogged their rare good-fellowship, and which had made men of judgment blind to the genuine worth that was in them. In this way I believed that I saw the chance to free Rabelais' Giants, so long kept in bonds, from a captivity which has dishonored them. To do this was clearly running against that good old law which has invariably made all Giants—far back from fairy-time—thunder-voiced, great-toothed, rude-handed, hard-hearted, bloody-minded creatures and truculent captors, never, on any account, pitiful captives. But, to such, the Rabelaisian Giants are none of kin. No more are they of blood to that Giant that Jack slew, or that Giant Despair, in whose garden-court Bunyan dreamt that he saw the white bones of slaughtered pilgrims. - Summary by From the preface