“interficiality” is the very key to the Renaissance as to our 
twentieth century.

The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive 
backwash of receding manuscript culture.

*     A most significant feature of Rabelais as a man on the 
frontier between cultures, is the way in which the tactile sense 
in him gets such exaggeration as almost to become isolated. 
This extreme tactility in him advertises his medievalism by 
consciously splattering it against the tidy new visual wall of 
print culture. John Cowper Powys in his Rabelais  puts it this 
way (p. 57):

          One exceptional characteristic of Rabelais was his 
     power, a power possessed also by Walt Whitman, of