Learning

I'm teaching Gargantua by Rabelais...again.

This work from the first third of the sixteenth century appears frequently on my syllabus, from Honors 101 to Medieval and Renaissance French Literature to Monsters of French Literature.

It fits in many academic contexts because it talks about so many big ideas: politics, religion, education, love, life, sex, morality, and justice... and it caused great scandal in its day. Actually, among my students, mostly young, polite Southern students, it causes great scandal today, too.

I love it when I can scandalize them...

I mean, it's not like there is anything in the novel that is worse than what they watch every night on television. But it's got a great way of grabbing their attention.

For example, when Gargantua is still young, he explains an experiment of his to his father. The experiment comes down to seeking out the best material in the world for wiping your ass after you shit.

I told you...scandalous.

First, thinking that softer is better, young Gargantua tries different fabrics like cotton, velours, silk...and then he attempts furs from different animals...and then while he's using one behind a bush, a cat walks by, and he thinks, hey, haven't tried a cat yet, so he wipes his ass with the cat. The fur wasn't bad, he says, but the claws were murder.

He finally settles on a winner. After trying all kinds of things, he concludes that a young swan with soft white, downy feathers works best, provided you hold it between your legs, grasping its feet behind you and its head in front of you so that you can work it back and forth between your legs.

At this point, my students are just staring at me, rather aghast at the crude subject that we are discussing in a graduate-level class at the university.

The lesson is not about, as you could have probably guessed, the history of personal hygiene.

It is about the natural curiosity of children, their intellectual potential, and about “taste.”

Most of all, it's about learning.

Rabelais wants to make a point about learning. We can learn anywhere, anytime, and about anything. It's a metaphor about a way to live life. Are you going to decline to think about your everyday situation, even the messy, embarrassing parts, or are you going to live an examined life? Socrates said, after all, that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Of course, I can't let a chance to by without making a connection with politics today. Rick Santorum, Mr. Frothy himself, has been making a lot of noise about why we need to protect our children from college professors, you know, the people who know shit.

Ask yourself this question: who wants me to learn and who wants to keep me in the dark?

You should be on the side of the former and tell the latter to go to hell.