 | | And others grew in the nose so much that it resembled the spout of an alembic, and was all multicolored, all spangled with little buboes, proliferating, empurpled, pom-pommed, all enamelled, all buttoned and broidered with gules ...
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Weldon's armory of stylistic devices includes the Rabelaisian catalogue, the comic technique that involves dazing the reader with a seemingly unstoppable list. The list is most often a recitation of objects, or the attributes of objects, in their unignorable physicality, which is itself a reflection of the profusion of Nature. At times the list may be mockingly organized under a teasing scheme of pseudo-coherence, as in a recipe:
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| | "Take 1/2 pt of vinegar," she said, "2 oz Fuller's earth, 1 oz of dried fowl dung, 1/2 oz of soap and the juice of two large onions....". [
The Rules of Life,
p. 40]
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It is an aspect of Rabelaisian humor that such objects in a list need not by any means be attractiveat least according to the official view of the attractive, though they are always sensuous:
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| | Elsa, stopping to do up her zip, stumbles over her own yellow and crimson platform heels and drops her shoulder bag. Its contents roll down the steps: hair rollers, pay slips, brush, old underground tickets, deodorants, contraceptive pills, her change of clothespink satin shirt, yellow cheesecloth blouse, clean red bikini pantsand so on. [
Little Sisters,
p. 7]
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Every item reminds us of the physicality of Elsa, untameable, though she may try to tame her hair with curlers, her power to conceive with pills, her odor with deodorant, and her red crotch with red pants. The list most often implies body contact with inanimate objects, the possibility of carnally caused dirt and disorder. The more a list spreads, the more it spreads the possibility of contamination, the miscellany hinting at a miscegenation, the union of things that ought to be kept separatelike dung and onions, or dung and drapery:
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| | Puis je me torchay aux linceaux, à la couverture, aux rideaulx, d'un coisson, d'un tapiz, d'un verd, d'une mappe, d'une serviette, d'un mouschenez, d'un peignouoir. [
Gargantua,
ch. xiii, p. 78]
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| | Then I wiped myself on cloth hangings, on the coverlet, on the curtains, on a cushion, on a carpet, on a green rug, on a wiper, on a napkin, on a handkerchief, on a dressing-gown.
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The effect of unstoppability, of excess reflecting nature's thoughtless excess, is never more pronounced than in the employment of lists involving food.
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