Clowns, Dead Dogs and the Universe
If we’d been alive in Syria, sometime in the 6th century, we might have witnessed a peculiar sight. A man dressed in rags, who has recently been living in the desert, is dragging the body of a dead dog through the streets and into the church! What’s going on? That was just the beginning of the strange and unsettling tricks that Abba Simeon used to lure people to God. Saint Simeon, as he later became, is the first recorded Holy Fool of the western world, and – not surprisingly – the patron of clowns to this day. There was a purpose to Simeon’s mad behavior; such foolish-seeming antics drew people’s attention, defused their scepticism and allowed the gospel message to permeate their hearts and minds.
Simeon is the first of what became a long line of Holy Fools in history and literature, characters so simple and silly that we perceive an innocence about them, perhaps even the aura of holiness. (The root form of the adjective “silly” is the Old English “saelig,” soulful, or blessed. By Shakespeare’s time the word’s meaning had slipped to “weak” or “simple.” ) The true role of the Holy Fool, or the Sacred Clowns of Hopi tradition, is to get past our defenses through laughter, allowing us to perceive the world around us and our place in it in a different way, at the very least to break our deadly cynicism that prevents us from seeing what’s staring us in the face. Throughout the ancient European world, the clown in attendance at the royal court was often the only one allowed to criticize their majesties and get away with it, such criticism, of course, to be veiled in foolish-seeming speech and antics. In due time we have Gimpel the Fool, Mullah Nasruddin, Don Quixote and Parsifal, and later: Marshall Dillon’s deputy, Festus Haggen, and Forrest Gump.
We shouldn’t be surprised to find that some science fiction authors have found the Fool to be a useful addition to the stock of characters on the frontiers of space. (The most obvious stock character is the Naive Observer, the person along on the adventure who is mostly clueless, thus allowing the rest of the characters to explain things to him. This nicely avoids the problem of characters having to say to each other, “As you know, Fred ...” in order to get vital information to the reader.) But sometimes, the plot provides the central characters, the starship captains and the chief scientists, with a problem that evades their ability to figure out. Perhaps they’re trying too hard, or maybe they’re not good at thinking outside the box. The author could just step in, of course, and hand the protagonist a clue: “Look, men! I just found the Rosetta Stone that explains everything!” But where’s the fun in that? Besides, it’s not believable and denies the reader the pleasure of figuring things out along with the characters. Here’s where the Holy Fool is useful.
This character is more than just the Outsider figure Heinlein utilized to advantage, for the Outsider lacks influence not smarts. Allowed to tinker with the problem, the Outsider comes up with a solution that leaves others wondering why they didn’t think of that. And the Fool isn’t the same as the dummy who messes things up and complicates the plot, sometimes for malevolent reasons – thus becoming the antagonist. The significant thing about the Holy Fool is his or her purity of motive and innocence of action; the Fool stands outside of conventional thinking and has no hidden personal agenda. He or she asks questions the others consider beside the point, off-topic, valueless, easily dismissed as not fitting what we might call “received wisdom” or at times: science. The Fool’s behavior, dragging that dead dog across the planet, alternately puzzles and irritates the rest of the characters, often unsettling them when they’re trying hardest to figure things out. And that’s the whole point. Whether the Fool is a holy idiot or crazy as a fox like Simeon or the Hopi Clowns, his or her job is to break through the stereotypical thinking the others are indulging in.
Or that the reader is caught up in. For sometimes the main characters of the story just won’t get it, but the reader is left wondering if the Fool wasn’t right after all. Another, more cynical way of saying this is to suggest that the author is having her cake and eating it too, scrupulously following scientific reason on the one hand, and cracking open the story for doubt, cynicism, mysticism and all manner of strangeness to creep in on the other. One of the most memorable Holy Fools in SF is Brother Francis Gerard in Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz . The category has to include Davy in Edgar Pangborn’s novel of the same name, and to a certain extent, Valentine Michael Smith from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
Often the writer doesn’t know beforehand that’s what the Fool is going to do – often doesn’t even know ahead of time the character is a fool. Characters have a way of birthing themselves in a writer’s head and running away with the best planned plots. Sorel Varney was only meant to be a retarded “handyjack,” along on the mission to take care of chores while the others explored the planet, when I started to write “Stranger Than Imagination Can,”. By the end of the story I was convinced that as a result of his innocence and his immature magical thinking he instinctively understood more about the aliens who once inhabited the planet than any of the smarter characters. Naturally, he couldn’t explain any of it, but I hope the reader will think about the possibilities he’s raised.
As J.B.S.Haldane famously said, “The universe is queerer than we can imagine.” I suspect that the more we learn about the universe and our place in it, the more we’ll realize there are any number of things we can’t understand. Maybe it takes a Holy Fool to make sure we remember that.
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds. To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.
1. yolanda Adler on 05th April 2009 at 4:11 pm
This is my third try. I get a message that I have not matched the words below, but I believe I did. In any case my comments are about the fact that fools often were painted by the royal painters and often appear smarter than their masters. Excellent Paper! Yolanda