Figures de l'histoire et du temps dans l'oeuvre de Rabelais

Through a complex playful handling of storytelling, the Rabelaisian text consistently rejects chrononological linearity as a narrative frame. The burlesque pretence of a pseudo-historical narration allows for a scathing attack on medieval and contemporary historiography. At the same time, the Rabelaisian narrative sketches out the basis of a new historiographical poetics which would take into account both the treasury of ancient exemplary anecdotes and traditions kept alive in the collective memory, and would be able to perpetuate the memory of the tragic events of its time. The Rabelaisian meditation encompasses an existential questioning of time as the very principle of creation and maturation, whereas the human experience of time's vertiginous infinity amounts to a gaping void that nothing can fill out, except for man's detached acceptation of his own mortality.