By Dr Satish C Aikant
The fool is a social type found widely in all cultures across the globe. The making of the fools is a continually evolving social process. From individuals they may grow into types and get institutionalized as figures in comedy to regale the world at large. A fool is not only a popular figure but also the privileged one; license being his unique endowment. His pranks and jokes are to his reputation what exploits are to a hero. He is therefore not a ‘nobody.’
‘If you wish to avoid seeing a fool,’ Rabelais suggests, ‘you must first break your looking glass.’ Indeed, we should be grateful for the blessings the fools bring us to enliven our world. They must be credited for making the heavy and weary weight of our existence bearable. One may think they make ‘non-sense’ into a ‘new sense’ and therefore are to be ranked with original thinkers. They expand our frontiers of knowledge in unchartered directions. A fool does not conform to our common standards. He is, by default, a non-conformist. Being consistent is never his strong point. It needn’t be. Didn’t Emerson make the observation that ‘a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?’ The poet Edmund Waller had written a poem in praise of Cromwell, but later on he addressed another poem eulogising King Charles the Second. ‘Master Waller,’ said the King, ‘the verses you wrote on Cromwell are far better than those you have written on me.’ ‘Sir,’ replied Waller to the king, ‘we poets succeed better in fiction than in truth.’
The fool is believed to be a man (or, a woman, since the male species do not have an exclusive copyright on folly) who falls below the average human standard, but whose defects have been transformed into a source of delight, the mainspring of comedy, which has always been one of the great recreations of the civilized world. The word ‘fool’ may have several connotations. From village bumpkins to court jesters, from artificial fools to natural idiots, there exist several gradations of folly and foolery.
Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch humanist, advanced in his book The Praise of Folly the idea that folly expressed truth, criticism of society or moral advice. The subject of the fool’s knowledge is the folly of mankind, and it is the fool’s role to purge spurious wise men of their pomposity and hypocrisy. Erasmus suggests that folly evokes folly in order to raise folly, and hence works on the principles of homeopathic medicine. When it is pointed out that no one has ever built a temple to Folly, she first says ‘I’m rather surprised at the ingratitude,’ and then points out that ‘this entire world is my temple.’
The English have the festival called All Fools’ Day that falls on 1st April. And so have we, near that season, our Holi, which, besides its cultural significance, is an occasion for celebrating folly. It is time of gaiety, fun, and abandon, dance and delight, a huge carnival when social hierarchies are wilfully subverted or broken down and people from all walks and stations in life mingle in a spirit of camaraderie. Fools or clowns are also part of our social and religious tradition frequently playing key roles and shaping a society’s system of beliefs. Laughter, after all, is a social cathartic. Jesters in many tribes delight and criticize the clan’s folk, their chiefs and other honoured figures. The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead witnessed a jester’s dance in Samoa in which the fool’s caper paradoxically honoured the nobility ‘by mocking them’. In rural Garhwal when a wedding party reaches the bride’s house the village women welcome the bridegroom and his family by hurling good humoured abuses at them.
Shakespeare’s plays deploy a range of comic devices, catering to all segments of the audience. The robust clowns and comic characters as wise fools abound in his plays. The Fool in King Lear serves as a touchstone of values in the bleak world of intrigue, where villainy reigns supreme and the Fool is outdone in folly by everyone he encounters. Here is an exchange between King Lear and the Fool:
Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?
Fool: All thy other titles- thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.
So, we are born into a natural state of folly. We do our best to put on appearances, which in course of time may fall off leaving us with nothing but the substratum of our own folly that stubbornly clings to us. Goethe believed that there were certain kinds of people who were dangerous: ‘Fools and intelligent people are equally undamaging. Half-fools and half-sages, these are the most dangerous of all.’ Indeed, a partial fool is like half-baked bread unwholesome for any stomach. ‘Better a witty fool than a foolish wit,’ declares Feste in Shakespeare’s comic play Twelfth Night.
There is a saying that goes: ‘A fool and his money are soon parted.’ So what? Isn’t it wonderful that, bereft of money or material possessions, a fool may turn other-worldly and seek spiritual merit on his way to enlightenment?
Calling a foolish person an ass is being most unfair to the beast. The implicit comparison is odious since an ass with its ungrudging demeanour far excels a man in the virtues of patience and endurance. Plus, the creature is to be envied and not derided. Those who compare a fool to an owl actually elevate the fool to divine status since owl in Hindu mythology is a sacred symbol, being the vehicle of Goddess Lakshmi.
Modern technology, which has a way of enslaving man, has devised a perfect means of mass deception: the television set, often referred to (and aptly so) as the Idiot Box. We might as well call it the Idiot’s Box. Habitual consumers of the Indian TV debates, for example, will know what I mean. In these debates the battle of wits (dimwits?) escalates to cacophony with no one getting any wiser about the issues being debated. The hapless audiences get more confused than edified. One tends to agree with Groucho Marx’s astute remark: ‘I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into another room and read a book.’
Fools may often go through an identity crisis. One of the characters in Chapman’s All Fools observes, ‘Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.’ To dare and remain audacious is the privilege of the fools; just as to dream and drift is the portion of the wise. A fool has resource, initiative and inventiveness. No wonder ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’
Fools may be unjustly reprimanded for doing nothing. They can, however, take heart from Bertrand Russell who maintains in his essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’ that happiness can be derived from leisure. Russell’s argument is that working, and its alleged status as a virtue, are stressed far too much and that with more of leisure at our disposal we can live happier lives because we would be afforded the time to pursue and cultivate our interests and pleasures. Lin Yutang, the Chinese philosopher, insisted that the American virtues of efficiency, punctuality, and goal-setting are actually ‘vices’. ‘From the Chinese point of view,’ declared Lin, ‘the man who is wisely idle is the most cultured man. Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.’
Whether we like it or not fools abound and dominate every sphere of human activity. It is election season in India when one will witness much foolery by our self-serving netas (of all stripes) ‘itching to serve the country.’ Watch them coming with folded hands and beguiling smiles to woo their prospective voters. We have seen how a neta, miffed at being offered dog biscuits, instead of pasta, by a certain leader, switched sides and was rewarded with Chief Ministership of a state. He then went on to become the poster boy of the saffron party in the north-east. The original poster boy of course remains the venerable yogi from Uttarakhand heading the most populous state in the country.
Isn’t it strange that modern society, in general, seems averse to those who would remind us of our folly? Shakespeare, the great humanist, has the last word. Macbeth’s musing on life as ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’ says it all.
(The writer is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, H.N.B. Garhwal University)
