Fool In Modern Literature

Ashley Tobias holds the view that during the postmodern era the status of the clown underwent significant change as the figure shifted from social, artistic and academic marginality to centre stage (37). In discussing the clown, or fool, as an archetype, we will come to deeper understanding of the role of the fool in popular culture, the way in which historical anti-types have become modern and postmodern prototypes, and why the presence of a fool character in modern literature immediately locates in the realm of the tragicomic. Fools and Fool variants (clowns, jesters, madmen, halfwits, whole wits, tricksters, conjurers, butts and buffers, devilish rogues) may be regarded as pivotal to the comprehension of twentieth century tragicomedies because,

Humour by its very nature is ambiguous and, therefore, helps in negotiating extremely sensitive and emotionally charged issues that lie in the ‘zone of in betweenness’ where it is very difficult to conclude whether they are a step towards subverting the old order and a step towards new world or reinforcement of the old order. Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) proposes the idea that the fundamental forms of life and death are usually divided into four main phases, the four seasons of the year being the type for four periods of the day (morning, noon, evening, night), four aspects of the water-cycle (rain, fountains, rivers, sea or snow), four periods of life (youth, maturity, age, death) and the like. He relates comedy with the spring season, full of vitality, life force, joviality, ardour, endurance, exuberance and liveliness. C.L Barber’s reading of Shakespearean comedies is inspired by the folk customs of the renaissance and middle ages. According to Barber, “Saturnalian” comedy is neither satirical nor political, but is devoted to a process that Barber calls release and clarification. Release refers to the loosening of social controls during holidays, and leads Barber, like Freud, to ascribe comic pleasure to the redistribution of mental energy normally devoted to social conformity, so that “he energy normally occupied in maintaining inhibitions is freed for celebration” (7). Clarification is

(131). Bakhtin was a Russian formalist who first began working on a theory of novel after the Russian Revolution. He made a major contribution to comic studies with Rabelais and his World, written sometime in the later 1930s and unpublished in English until 1968. He argues for the existence of bilocation, two synchronous but contradictory world views during the medieval period. Official culture, which he characterizes as ecclesiastical, somber, excluding profanity, and suppressing the body, driven by the bureaucracy of the Church that is contrasted with what he calls the culture of the marketplace, the popular and boisterous voice of the people. Bakhtin