oceanwave
10-08-2007, 09:18 PM
Yeah its a good point, I dont know too much about it but remember reading a book called "Crazy Wisdom" which talked about the different archetypes, and I remember the fool being one of them.
I wholehearted feel that sometimes in a crazy world, the fool is the wisest of them all... ;)
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FOOL IN MODERN HEROIC FANTASY
In Aspects of the Fantastic: Selected Essays of the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film.
Ed. William Coyle. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986. 123-30.
The modern mentality has all but destroyed the fool in literature. Staggered by the stress on reason and science, he fell victim to the collective empiricism of Neoclassicism, Realism, Naturalism, Existentialism, and Skepticism. As a figure who denies order, mocking the society that ironically he needs to survive, the fool’s power to melt the "solidity of the world"1 became, finally, too much of an embarrassment. The fool has been transformed into a superficial scapegoat whose comic efforts are reduced simply to chaos rather than enlightenment as Harlan Ellison’s "‘Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman" (Galaxy, December 1965) illustrates by its pathetic marriage and Robert E. Vardeman and Victor Milan’s The Sundered Realm (Playboy Press, 1980) demonstrates by its maimed, castrated Prince who retains only the fool’s license to speak freely in the presence of his demagogue sister. As Carl Jung points out in Psychological Types, the modern intellect recognizes everything but itself as fantasy, and being a closed system, the intellect represents fantasy activity as much as possible.2 Therefore, the fool must die.
Ambiguously, as the artistic and philosophic legacies of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Sartre, and others gave birth to a singular stress on actuality and immediacy that emasculated the fool, the fall of the nobility and its own special order destroyed the social environment that the fool needed as the frame for wisdom and mockery. The fool dies with the king, and Shakespeare’s parallel of the hanging of the fool with unlawful abdication in King Lear is a harbinger of the fool’s later crucifixion on the crosses of the rise of the middle class and the fall of cosmic order. Enid Welsford, in her classic study, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, accurately summarizes the fatal descent of the fool:
The King, the Priest and the Fool all belong to the same regime, all belong essentially to a society shaped by belief in Divine order, human inadequacy, efficacious ritual; and there is no real place for any of them in a world increasingly dominated by the notions of the puritan, the scientist, and the captain of industry; for strange as it may seem the fool in cap and bells can only flourish among people who have sacraments, who value symbols as well as tools, and cannot forever survive the decay of faith in divinely imposed authority, the rejection of all taboo and mysterious inspiration (193).
However, to believe that the fool is a victim of the modern era, one that Erich Neumann condemned so fully for its appalling inability to deal with the human soul,3 is to fail to recognize the fool’s characteristic plasticity. Smacked over and over again, he will spring back up like a Joe Palooka doll--eternal in his capacity for regeneration. To discover him, the search must be conducted among the rigidly structured social orders in which his vision and folly originally flourished. Joseph Heller, in his mock epic Catch-22 (Simon and Schuster, 1961), uses the military and the absurdity of seemingly unending bombing mission after bombing mission as just such an environment. When Orr finally reaches Sweden on his rubber raft, the reader shares the celebration of the fool as outsider who still manages to triumph despite repressive and ordered systems. In an instant, Orr is transformed from "a permanent scapegoat whose official duty is to jeer continually at his superiors in order to bear their ill luck" (Welsford 74) to the fool who is licensed to summon the "magical force of continuing life"4 and violate order with impunity. The success of Heller’s Orr as a figure who exhilarates centers of life and, thus, causes joyous laughter5 is also present in the immense popularity of Richard Hooker’s M.A.S.H. (Morrow, 1968), Robert Altman’s film version (1970), and its television continuation.
While the bathetic characterizations of Woody Allen are indications of just how much of an exception Catch-22 and M.A.S.H. are, the fool has been alive and well in examples of heroic or sword-&-sorcery fantasy for some time now. He is still uncommon, for heroic fantasy’s roots in saga, epic, and romance give it a predominantly solemn tone--inhospitable to the fool. Were it not for the Hobbits, for example, a study of humor in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would be the shortest article ever written, a characteristic that made the series so delightfully vulnerable to Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney’s parody, Bored of the Rings (New American Library, 1969). In the same vein, John Jakes mocked Robert E. Howard’s Conan and aptly named Solomon Kane along with other, equally grim examples of sword & sorcery, in Mention My Name in Atlantis . . . (DAW, 1972). None-the-less, heroic fantasy does have the necessary orderly world view and royalty to be fertile ground for the fool despite its exaggeratedly sanctimonious vice and virtue.
In fact, fantasy, in general, is usually more rigorous in its ethical constructs than the actual world, and while it is most often socially and morally non-didactic, heroic fantasy is predominantly preoccupied with psychomachia. This stress on the polarities of good and evil also explains why the fool doesn’t occur more frequently despite the suitability of the environment. The fool is most frequently an enemy of the didactic,6 an amoral, Janus-like7 figure who lives in ambiguity, not the clear win-or-lose conflict of the psychomachia. Thus, Samwise, Tolkien’s fool in the Lord of the Rings, becomes a functional agent only in the final struggle at the Crack of Doom between Gollum and the evilly-possessed Frodo. Here Samwise serves in the fool’s role of a counterweight to whatever principle is in control.8 Many heroic fantasies seek to make or re-establish boundaries, and the fool is a boundary breaker,9 as Enid Welsford points out:
Under the dissolvent influence of his personality the iron network of physical, social and moral law, which enmeshes us from cradle to grave, seems–for a moment–negligible as a web of gossamer (317).
The fool and his folly, an agent for the freeing of the imagination (Welsford 221), is a true alien in a heroic fantasy that has ethical an pompous extremes that are selfprotective and intolerant. Examples of this are the two main characters in Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight (1957; rpt. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), a fantasy set during the wars of Charlemagne. Agilulf, a paladin, is only an empty, immaculate suit of white armor. He exists only by his will power and constant belief in himself and Charlemagne’s holy cause. He never sleeps, and while fools are supposed to expose pretenders,10 Agilulf’s twenty-four-hour puritanism and meticulous attention to proper procedures are constant plagues upon his less glorified and mundane comrades. He loses his self-sustained life when his perverse comrades pressure him to discover whether or not the damsel he rescued in his youth, a feat upon which Agilulf bases his entire reputation and honor, was a virgin. When it appears that she was not (via a convoluted deus ex machina reminiscent of eighteenth-century domestic drama), Agilulf literally falls apart. He is a victim of his own inability to understand the follies of the world, his comrades and himself. He cannot avail himself of the fool’s ability to protect himself from the environment11 nor can he be a touchstone to test the true quality of men and manners (Welsford 249). Interestingly, a multi-named idiot, a natural fool and Agilulf’s page, does survive. He is the opposite of the paladin and is totally unaware of his own existence (28), thus, his many names: one is as good as any other. Among his many spontaneous performances that delight everyone are his near drownings when he forgets if he is to eat his soup or if it is to eat him and when he forgets if he’s to be in the ocean or the ocean in him. He can, however, be a bit pesty when he thinks he’s a fish and gets tangled in the villagers’ nets. He is a "prisoner of the world’s stuff," the narrator tells. Because he is, he is allowed to survive. Agilulf has none of the "world’s stuff"; thus, he perishes. Both are too extreme to be true fools. Somewhere between them is the true conscious fool who can break sown the distinction between folly and wisdom (Welsford 27) and be a slave to neither.
Another figure in modern heroic fantasy who also cannot distinguish among the ambiguities of the world, although with less painful results than in Agilulf’s case, is Zdim in L. Sprague de Camp’s The Fallible Fiend (Signet/New American Library, 1973). In this burlesque tale, Zdim is a demon drafted in his native realm to serve a mortal wizard in exchange for much-needed iron. Zdim’s difficulty is that he takes literally everything he is told. Like Butch in Robert Bloch’s "A Good Knight’s Work" (Unknown Worlds, October 1941), who must cope with a visit from a medieval knight, who doesn’t have even the remotest understanding of the twentieth century, or Jim Eckert in Gordon R. Dickson’s The Dragon and the George (Ballantine, 1976), whose mind is placed in the body of a very large dragon in an alternate world, Zdim is hilariously confused. When asked to shake, he gyrates his hips; told to devour the first person who enters the wizard’s workshop, he consumes the apprentice. After he and the master decide to go on a vegetarian diet, he is incapable of devouring a true thief. Obviously, Zdim is caught in the world’s paradoxes and ambiguities. The professional fool, being aware of his role, uses these to his own gain, ignoring the created laws of logic, to satisfy his own needs and exercise his special insights. However, Zdim, a demon of no small intelligence, does learn the ropes and manages to manipulate various leaders and chieftains to save his adopted city. In fact, he gets so good at it that, after he returns to his own plane, he requests another "sabbatical" on Earth.
As mentioned earlier, the fool is invariably an alien or outlaw within the social order, but as with any figure that lives by his wits, he is dependent on the same order for his existence (Welsford 55). He is, in part, a parasite. Yet, he is a powerful leech who lives through exploitation. His power is his ability to live via ambiguity, which is a natural characteristic of the cosmos, while the more normal characters around him keep expecting order, honesty, and justice. Thus, he is ennobled during holiday, as the incarnate Lord of Misrule, when everyone yields to natural instincts and moves to the rhythm of life.12 In a rare example of the combination of social satire and fantasy, Charles G. Finney creates just such a figure in The Magician Out of Manchuria (Pyramid, 1968; rpt. Garland, 1981). Set in China amid the socialist "Great Leap Forward," it focuses on the magical and scandalous activities of a thief, magician, and general rapscallion. Finney’s character is a picaresque figure who prefers wine to gold and who must shed his skin at the most inopportune moments due to a python in his family tree. He, his apprentice, and his ass join with a very ugly queen; she has been the victim of an attempted assassination, and the magician has transformed her into the Queen of Lust with a magic balm. The magician’s strenuous, amorous interludes with the Queen, after he has shed the obese skin he wears at the beginning of the novel and has become strikingly handsome, illustrate another traditional characteristic of the fool--his exaggerated sexuality.13 More importantly, The Magician Out of Manchuria demonstrates the fool’s role as compensator as he balances the predominant ruling order. He plays what John Danby identifies as the game of "handy dandy." 14 In this case, his whimsy, exploitation, and cunning are the comic alternative to the rote conformity of the "Great Leap Forward." As always, he mocks the artificial class distinctions that societies create form only superficial characteristics and then fervently believe in as facts. While Enid Welsford identifies the priests and their no-nonsense religions as the fool’s greatest enemies (180), Finney’s rogue attracts more modern and more expansive threats. The social satire of the novel demonstrates how secularism, socialism, and nominalism have reduced the continual rebirth of imagination and the liberating mind-play of festivity to socially integrated and inferior portions of the supposedly "superior" utilitarian world.15 Art is subordinated to "real" waking experience,16 and the rhythm of spontaneous life, which the true fool so thoroughly embodies, is lost.
This role as compensator is probably the fool’s most valuable characteristic in modern heroic fantasy. Like Finney’s magician, Heller’s Orr, and Walter Wangerin’s Mundo Cani in the early parts of The Book of the Dun Cow (1978; late in the novel, he becomes a sacrificial hero), this is Samwise’s role in the Lord of the Rings as he attempts to place his diminutive self across the fulcrum from the deep solemnity of the trilogy’s virtuous and fell forces. De Camp’s Zdim, like Bink in Piers Anthony’s Xanth series (1977-1982), also serves this purpose as he turns potentially horrific events into laughter. As Puck does in Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, the successful fool often has to stand against the potentially destructive and maiming forces of the world of experience. Sustaining vision and imagination, the fool continually tries to recreate the world17 by averting potential horror with kinetic folly. In this, he is in opposition to the hero who is trying to conquer the world, and typically, it is the hero, rather than the fool, who is featured in sword-&-sorcery fantasy, much in the manner of Northrop Frye’s theory of romance. This is why Calvino’s Agilulf fails: he hasn’t the balancing power of the fool nor the social acceptance of the hero.
Another figure who stands against the frequently dreary and dangerous atmosphere of heroic fantasy and is a transformer of the mundane is Black, the sidekick in Roger Zelazny’s series of short stories and one novel (The Changing Land, 1981), featuring Dilvish the Damned or the Deliverer (depending on who’s speaking at the moment). Dilvish has been cursed by the Dark One, and for two-hundred years, his body stood as a statue while his soul suffered in Hell, his punishment for saving a sacrificial virgin.18 Clearly, Dilvish is not given to frivolity by disposition. However, Black, his burnished iron and magical warhorse, is given to speaking sardonically and even sarcastically at times. Unburdened by the morbid irony of Cugel the Clever in Jack Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) and no prancing jester in cap and bells, Black is a prime illustration of Robert Hillis Goldsmith’s observation, in Wise Fools in Shakespeare, that the wise fool is often more ironic and less direct in his folly than the buffoon, 19 and Black is characterized by his understated wisdom. He demonstrates this frequently by his droll insights and knowledge of impending danger. For example, in "Tower of Ice," he mutters about how someone of his dignity has to pull a sled out of a ditch and explains that one day civilization will have an entire system of physics to explain what he is doing.20 Like Elric’s eternal sidekick in Michael Moorcock’s sword-& sorcery series, Black’s character is determined by his Bogartesque tone, which is well illustrated by the following interchange as he carries Dilvish through a dementedly sorcerous gauntlet:
Lowering his head, Black plunged down the hillside into the fog, his eyes glowing like coals. The ground was shaking steadily now, and in the portions of which he had view, Dilvish could see cracks appearing, widening. Wisps of mingle with the fog. The winds rose again about them, though not as strongly as before.
Leaping among large, cube-shaped green rocks in a very unhorselike fashion, Black bore steadily to the right as the ground leveled and the fog abated in patches. The sound of a terrific explosion reached them and splatters of hot mud rained nearby, though only a few fell upon them.
"In the future, " Dilvish remarked, "I would prefer not cutting things quite that closely."
"Sorry," Black replied, "I was caught up in the beauty of the moment."21
Zelazny’s Black brings up an important point about the fool in sword-&-sorcery fantasy, which is that he is often disguised and not as obvious as he is when he wears the conspicuous motley. This should be no immediate surprise since the wise fool frequently adopts disguises in literature.22 In fantasy, however, there is a more critical issue here because the literature’s totality is already a statement of the reversal of normal expectations, a suspension of the rules of everyday in which the fictive experience itself assumes the traditional role of the fool in the reader’s mundane world. Thus, in their roles of balancers, fantasy’s fools are sometimes reminders of the pragmatic world the reader has left to enter the misrule of the fantasy realm.
Nowhere in modern fantasy is the use of the fool as a referent to the reader’s cosmology better demonstrated than by Schmendrick the Magician in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (Viking, 1968; rpt. Gregg, 1978). Schmendrick is one of the Last Unicorn’s companions as she journeys to free her ensorcered kin from the spells of King Haggard, a twisted creature who hungers for beauty but has the crippling knowledge that nothing is worth loving since it will only die in his hands.23 One of Schmendrick’s important roles in the novel is maintaining a fatalistic optimism after he has inadvertently turned the Unicorn into a maid to save her from Haggard’s awesomely fell Red Bull and, as a result, introduced her to the horrors and pains of morality. This is just another of his misfired spells, a condition he has come to expect since he has no faith in his ability to expertly do any real magic. He has said to the Unicorn, "Take me with your for laughs, for luck, for the unknown" (The Many Worlds . . . 58). His attitude reflects the realistic view of the reader’s world that magic is really useless and only a sham, for he "can’t turn cream into butter" (53). Schmendrick considers himself only a storyteller, a traveling prestidigitator, and a fool; not even the Unicorn’s magic can turn him into a true magician (59). Thus, he serves as his own foil when magical power does triumphantly take possession of him, and his humorous misadventures stand between the reader and the potential tragedy of the wondrous Unicorn dying as a human and never saving her kin.
Interestingly, the one immediately recognizable fooling heroic fantasy appears in The Last Unicorn only briefly and is a slightly mad butterfly (The Many Worlds . . . 32-34). This delightfully blithe figure identifies himself as a roving gambler and brings laughter to the Unicorn for the first time in her arduous quest. He misdirects, rhymes, riddles, puns, and sings–all motion, whim and impulse–before his madness suddenly vanishes for a moment, and he warns the Unicorn of the dread forces that await. However, in true fool fashion, he quickly recants his wisdom and lapses into balancing folly. And, as he filters briefly through Beagle’s wondrous novel, one is immediately provided with the vision of the perfect fool as he must have capered across the Elizabethan stage some five-hundred years before.
Thus, the fool is alive and well in some modern heroic fantasy. In these works, his perennial power to melt the solidity of the world (Welsford 221) is augmented by his ability to maintain the dual realistic and fantastic perspective of the fantasy reader. He prevents the often violent and dangerous heroic world from tumbling into horror and fear, and his balancing act maintains wonder and intuitive wisdom, The fool prevents the yielding of the world to humanity’s continual attempts to impose an artificial order that is at best boring and at worst creatively stultifying. As Don Antonio points out to Samson Carrasco, in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, human beings need the fool:
"O sir! . . . may God forgive you for the wrong you have done in robbing the world of the most diverting madman who was ever seen. Is it not plain, sir, that his cure can never benefit mankind half as much as the pleasure he affords by his eccentricities? But I feel sure, sir bachelor, that all your art will not cure such deep-rooted madness, and were it not uncharitable, I would express the hope that he may never recover, for by his cure we should lose not only the knight’s good company, but also the drollery of his squire Sancho Panza, which is enough to transform melancholy itself into mirth.
http://wpl.lib.in.us/roger/FOOL.html
i should have really put the above in this thread "I Am A Fool"
(http://davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5382)