concentrating a tremendous magnetic energy upon the 
     enjoyment—almost as if these inanimate elements were 
     responsive to embraces and good to eat!—of the solid 
     substances of wood and stone, making these things 
     actually porous, you might say, to planetary desire. This 
     characteristic was kept in humorous and very positive 
     control; but that when so kept it is one of the chief 
     characteristics of a born architect I used to be always 
     finding out from my own brother, A. R. Powys, and his 
     ways with wood and stone.

     What Powys says here of tactility and affinity for wood 
and stone ties in with much said earlier about the audile-tactile 
features of scholasticism and Gothic architecture. It is in this 
tactile and audile, and ever so unliterary, mode that Rabelais 
gets his naughty, “earthy” effects. Like James Joyce, another