VOICY MAISTRE JAN CHOUART QUI DEMANDE LOGIS: CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN RABELAIS’S EROTICISM

Abstract

François Rabelais’s literary work is remarkable for its pervasive use of obscenity, which has provoked both laughter and controversy across centuries. While some, like La Bruyère, dismissed his work as fantastical and morally dubious, others – most notably Mikhail Bakhtin – have interpreted Rabelais’s obscenity as an expression of medieval popular culture and the querelle des femmes, the Renaissance debate on the nature and role of women. According to Bakhtin, Rabelais participates in a distinctly Gallic, carnivalesque tradition characterized by inversion, satire, and grotesque realism. Within this context, women are depicted neither as paragons of virtue nor as embodiments of vice, but as integral participants in a comic, corporeal worldview. Obscenity in Rabelais’s texts is primarily conveyed through a highly inventive erotic lexicon, where sexual organs and acts are described via metaphorical expressions rooted in daily life. An analysis from the standpoint of conceptual metaphor theory reveals that these metaphors structure thought by mapping a concrete source domain (e.g., tools, food, animals) onto an abstract target domain (sexuality). Such mappings enable readers to apprehend erotic experience through familiar cultural and bodily schemas. Among the dominant metaphorical domains in Rabelais’s novel are manual labor, violence, food, entertainment, and the animal world. Sexual activity is often metaphorized as labor or plowing, with genitalia imagined as instruments or machines. Technical jargon, repurposed for erotic description, enhances both comedic and symbolic effects. Violence emerges as another salient source domain: sex is portrayed as combat, with the penis likened to weapons such as swords, daggers, or clubs—imagery that invokes dynamics of dominance and conflict between genders. The domain of food – traditionally associated with pleasure and abundance – serves to conceptualize sexual desire in terms of consumption, appetite, and gluttony. Entertainment metaphors depict sexuality as a form of festive play, drawing on language from dance, music, and games to suggest a light-hearted, liberated vision of eroticism. Similarly, references to the animal world present the sexual act as instinctual or primal: the penis is metaphorized as a dog, horse, or hartbeest, while sexual behavior is described using terms borrowed from zoology. Through this rich metaphorical network, Rabelais constructs a carnivalesque universe centered on the body and its pleasures, in contrast to the ascetic and moralistic discourse of his time. These conceptual metaphors do more than provoke laughter – they structure the epistemological framework of his fiction, exposing the sexual imagination, gender dynamics, and social taboos of early modern Europe. Ultimately, they offer fertile ground for interdisciplinary inquiry at the intersection of literature, cognitive linguistics, and cultural history.