I’ve never read anything by Francois Rabelais, but after reading the stories in The Rabelaisian I think I can tell you a couple of things about Rabelais’ writing. He used the word “whoreson” a lot. He liked long lists of adjectives (“inartistic, common, squalid, vulgar, silly, inappropriate, fecal, irregular, childish, inferior, inelegant”). And he liked to start off sentences of dialogue with the word, “Oh,” as in, “Oh, Sanchica,” or “Oh, Alonso.” Here’s a sentence from the story, “Emily,” by E. A. Sampson: “Oh, Daddy, oh, Daddy, oh, Daddy, oh, Daddy.” Here’s another one: “Oh, Daddy, oh, oh, Daddy, Daddy.” There’s a story about a deformed midget who falls in love with a woman, buys her a monkey, and then, when the woman dumps him, steals the monkey back, swallows it whole, shits it back out (still alive) and then dies. There’s one of those stories where a guy disappears into a woman’s cunt. There’s one where a midget marries a fat woman and they live happily together until the fat woman eats the midget one night at dinner. In the forward that starts off this, the first issue of “The Rabelaisian,” the reader is told, “The stories that follow…are clear examples of bad literature,” but that, “…this is a magazine of real fiction…Our stories are real.” If a bunch of stories about men and monkeys disappearing into various female orifices, all written in a stilted sort of mock-16th century style, constitute what is real, then The Rabelaisian is as real as it gets.
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