Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>François Rabelais is one of the greatest figures of world literature. What do his sixteenth-century fictions communicate about the power relations that shape what social groups do (or refrain from doing) to each other—killing, wounding, dismembering, having sex with, feeding, depriving of food, protecting, healing, commanding, obeying, ruling, serving, honouring, swallowing, humiliating, scaring, and so on? More generally: how does a literary writer communicate to readers (whether about relations between social groups or anything else), even to readers who are separated from the writer by vast swaths of time and place? Part I provides a reading of the social order across all five books of the Rabelaisian fictional chronicles. They communicate a profound preoccupation both with the need for a rank-based, hierarchical, social order and yet also with the comic and disquieting vulnerabilities or impossibilities of that social order—or rather of social orders in the plural, since the narrative lurches from warring kingdoms to strangely organized island societies. Part II changes gear: it analyses readings of the social order in Rabelais’s fiction that have been offered over the past millennium and that often introduce rather different terms (such as ‘class’ or ‘revolution’). The readers include Aldous Huxley, Gustave Flaubert, Primo Levi, and many more. Have their remarkably varied and often conflicting readings been produced by certain core communicative processes? And did those processes also produce, with different results, the reading offered in Part I? A cognitive approach helps answer these questions, both for Rabelais, and for literature more generally.</jats:p>