The pregnant Madame Grandgousier ate too much tripe, and they had to give her a purgative; it was so strong that the placenta let go, the fetus Gargantua slipped into a vein, traveled up her system, and came out of his mania's ear. From the very first lines, Rabelais's book shows its hand: the story being told here is not serious: that is, there are no statements of truths here (scientific or mythic); no promise to describe things as they are in reality.

Rabelais's time was fortunate: the novel as butterfly is taking flight, carrying the shreds of the chrysalis on its back. With his giant form, Pantagruel still belongs to the past of fantastic tales, while Panurge comes from the yet unknown future of the novel. The extraordinary moment of the birth of a new art gives Rabelais's book an astounding richness; it has everything: the plausible and the implausible, allegory, satire, giants and ordinary men, anecdotes, meditations, voyages real and fantastic, scholarly disputes, digressions of pure verbal virtuosity. Today's novelist, with his legacy from the nineteenth century, feels an envious nostalgia for the superbly heterogeneous universe of those earliest novelists and for the delightful liberty with which they dwelt in it.

Just as Rabelais starts his book by dropping Gargantua onto the world's stage from his mama's ear, so in The Satanic Verses, after a midair plane explosion, do Salman Rushdie's two heroes fall through the air chattering, singing, and carrying on in comic and improbable fashion.