Rabelais and lists
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French writer François Rabelais loved lists. Three of the more famous lists are the blason and contreblason du couillon, a long list of asswipe methods and hundreds of epithets for the fool Triboulet.
- "Sometimes what looks like a poem turns out to be a list. It is another mark of Rabelais's technical audacity that he can often use enumeration, the most tedious of rhetorical devices, more expressively than verse. The strange juxtapositions, for example, in the anatomy of the monster Quaresmeprenant (Lent: Quart Livre 30-32) can exert a hideously surreal fascination; the list of children's games (Gargantua 22) so delighted Rabelais's early translators that they scoured the local playgrounds to discover more. We are reminded of Pieter Breughel's Children's Games; Rabelais's lists often function like a painting, in that the closer we look, the more we discover. But they also impress us by their weight, making original use of the new typography to convey the utter idleness of the young Gargantua, or the merciless gluttony of the Gastrolatres (Quart Livre 59-60)"[1].
- "ambiguity is exemplified by the Rabelaisian lists and enumerations, which hover between hollow repetition and fertile creativity. --Madness, Masks, and Laughter
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