He has been an active member of the writing community in the North East for many years, editing the literary magazine
Panurge and helping many other writers and organisations, such as Seven Stories.
There is not a better example of an archetypical trompeur than Pantagruel's companion
Panurge. From the moment he arrives in chapter nine of Pantagruel, he is immediately associated with Pathelin, the supreme trickster of the genre.
(12) For a literary precursor, see Chapter 19 of Pantagruel, in which
Panurge disputes farcically with Thaumaste: Tanurge soubdain leva en fair la main dextre' (Francois Rabelais, (E'uvres completes, annot.
Specifically, wars and feuds (including academic quarrels) demonstrate that humans cannot live together in mutual tolerance, and that the philautia of the books' comic fool,
Panurge, breeds intolerance to the extent that innocent victims, such as a dying poet, find themselves branded as heretics.
The latter's theory of a fashionable concentric structure is diametrically opposed to Zhiri's detection of a progressive linear structure, although the identification of Pantagruel, rather than
Panurge, as the book's motivator and mediator is interestingly close to Duval's reading of the giant's function, but in the Quart Livre.
In a section on the question of
Panurge's decision whether or not to marry in the Tiers Livre, Gray insists on Rabelais's ludic rather than political designs, in contrast to the works of Jeanne Flore and Marguerite de Navarre, who use the same material for different ends.
Michelle Simondon, 'Le grec de
Panurge', shows that Pantagruel, Chapter 9, reflects the spoken Greek of contemporary hellenists.
In a brilliant bravura passage that could have been stolen from Joyce's Ulysses,
Panurge replies first in German, then in Gibberish, Italian, Scots, Basque, Lanternlandish, Dutch, Spanish ("I am tired of talking so much"), Danish, Ancient Greek, Utopian, Latin, and finally, of course, in his native tongue, the French of Touraine.