Ship of Fools

It is not an easy task to understand the nature of carnival as it is shown by the many failures of the last century after Mikhail Bakhtin’s work became generally known. My book is an attempt to define carnival in relation to another entity that is always and necessarily associated with the carnival, still, easier to identify. The “Clown or Fool par excellence” embodies the carnival’s topsy-turvy attitude and transgresses all borders of reason and social order. Moreover, her repeated jumps to recover bear ritual laughter mocking the figure of Death. This is how the phenomenology of the clown par excellence and the carnival are ontologically related to each other. But, parallel to the strange fate of the clown “on stage” the carnival can become problematic as well. This is clearly visible in the Early Modern theatre of Shakespeare. The resentful exit of Malvolio leaves us confused in Twelfth Night. When the Fool disappears, others have to take on in the stormy night of King Lear. While the gravedigger and his friend, in Hamlet, are mockingly clowning, the grounds spits back a skull that already whispers: “God is dead.” This is how in Shakespeare’s plays the “decarnivalization of the world” is present on the Early Modern stage. I discuss and develop the concept of decarnivalization in order to reinterpret Shakespeare’s dramatic art.

This article explores the entanglement of the discourse of foolishness and the medial conditions of print in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494). To enable the reader to recognize his/her foolishness reflected in the “mirror” of the printed page, Brant would have to shepherd the reader into the book, constructing the very reader that his printed text would, he hoped, transform. This article triangulates the discourse of foolishness, the reader, and the medium of print in order to describe certain pragmatic, structural, and thematic dimensions that have historically troubled scholars. Exploring the typographical form brings us one step closer to this goal, yet print alone does not provide an unequivocal key to understanding the relationship between discourse, mediality, and reception. The article therefore situates the print medium within the early modern convergence culture that the work itself thematizes. It first examines contemporary mirror technology in order to describe Brant’s transformation of the mirror metaphor and how exactly The Ship of Fools “mirrors.” It then considers linear perspective as a model for how the work functions to engage the reader, repositioning him/her in the new media and moral landscape of the early modern period.

When one thinks of the archetypical hero versus villain in the world of comics, Batman and The Joker often come to mind. They connect to the concept of the eternal battle between oppositions. Choosing a side, however, is relative. Heroes can look like villains through the eyes of a hero’s villain. It is an argument that The Joker uses to challenge Batman, in Arkham Asylum. He is tricked into accepting The Joker’s invitation to the Feast of Fools, which was a theatrical event that dates as far back as the Middle Ages. Its contents usually revolved around social and moral criticisms of their time. The fact that an accusation full of reason comes from the mouth of a madman, is an attempt to obscure its contents through comical absurdity. According to Foucault, by the end of the Middle Ages, European literature had stigmatized the madman as a satirical figure by attributing to him the lack of reason to the rest of his repertoire, which consisted of poverty, crime, and ugliness. By reducing the rejects of society to the point of comical absurdity, it often helped reinforce the position of reason, but sometimes it backfires. The absurd claim of the insane is actually a useful tool in philosophical logic. A reductio ad absurdum is a process of refutation on grounds that an absurdity will follow the entailment if we were to accept a certain claim. Morrison claims that Batman would only be mentally unstable if he did not wear a costume and channeled his pain through violence, but so does The Joker, and he is labeled insane. The whole structure rests on the hidden premise that the rich are superior to the poor, who are monsterized like the fool is ridiculed. Nietzsche himself thought that if a person was ugly, they were automatically also criminals. What a reader is subjected to, in the Batverse, is a class warfare between the rich and the poor, authority and the whistleblower, or the wolves and the sheep. There is a tacit agreement at play, and it is The Joker who engages the reader to question that agreement.

An overview of three curatorial carnival projects* against the background of a meta-historical so-called carnivalscape -- or the evolution of carnival from modern times to contemporary practices of carnival performance and carnivalesque protest.
*(Gwangju Biennale, 2008; Cape Town Biennial, 2009; and Göteborg Biennial, 2013)

The trope of boat figures centrally in Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s travelling public artwork, Rubber duck (2007-2016); in the media images of migrant refugees arriving at European destinations by boat since 2015; and in British artist Paul McCarthy’s Ship Adrift, Ship of Fools (2010). Functioning as a hybrid vessel containing conceptions of global and nomadic transitivity, the image of boat forms the coalescing crux of the discourse in this article.  The boat is interpreted as figuratively representing vessel transporting the nomadic individual as an autobiographical subject positioned in liminal and polycultural circumstances. Following Russell West-Pavlov, it is argued that autobiographical discourse continues to manifest as one of the most potent forms of ideology and that subjective nomadic ideology is utopianistically coloured. In the course of the argumentation, notions of polyculturalism; rhizomatic identity: the Foucauldian notion of a Ship of Fools; minor; minority; difference; and Otherness are explored as core aspects of the constructions around autobiographical trajectory in the nomadic context.

В данной статье рассматривается лингвовизуальное явление средневековой Германии конца XV начала XVI вв. «Корабль Дураков» на основе применения филолого-исторического и иконографического метода. Определяются приемы и способы донесения авторской мысли в деле изобличения общественных пороков, которые введены в сатирическое произведение «Корабль Дураков» Себастьяном Брантом и дополнены визуальной ксилографической традицией Альбрехта Дюрера.
Произведение в основе своей тенденциозно, представляет собой своеобразный критический отклик на злобу дня. Писатель видел своей целью создание нравоучительного «зерцала» в духе времени, что зачастую приобретает гневный социально-заостренный характер.
Авторские мотивы, с включением античной и библейской реминисценций, становятся одной из мер воздействия, направленной к высшим образован- ным категориям населения. Дюреровские изображения, способствовавшие распространению идей среди необразованной части населения, наглядно воспроизводят задумку автора, уточняя сатирическую идею произведения, визуализируют пословицы, заключенные в ксилографической традиции, способствуют конкретизации контекста глав и представленной в них морали.

Within this article the linguo-visual phenomenon of medieval Germany late XV, early XVI century “The Ship of Fools” is considered based on appliance of philological-historical and iconographic method. Techniques of getting author’s message across in terms of conviction of social vices, that had been brought in in the satire “The Ship of Fools” by Sebastian Brant and completed by visual xylographic tradition of Albrecht Dürer are specified.
The writing basically tendentiously represents a unique critical response for burning issue. The writer turned his focus towards creation of moral “mirror” right on, that by and large gains rageful socially-pointed nature.
Author’s causes, using antique and Biblical reminiscence, are becoming one of the retaliation, headed to the highest educated population category. Dürer’s de- scriptions, that were ministerial to ideas spread among uneducated population group, vividly represent author’s idea, specify the satiric idea of the writing, visualize proverbialisms (sayings), enclosed in xylographic tradition, ministerial to defining chapters context and a moral represented in it.

In diesem Artikel betrachtet der Autor das linguovisuelle Phänomen «Das Narrenschiff» mit Hilfe historisch-filologischen Mittel, sowie der iko- nografischen Methoden. Es wurden die Techniken und Kunstgriffe von Brant bei der Beibringung seiner Gedanken und Ideen in der Entlarvung der öffentlichen Laster festgestellt, die im satirischen Werk von Sebastian Brant dargestellt sind und die durch die visuelle zur Konkretisierung der Autorenideen Holzschnitttradition ergänzt sind.