Airship of Fools

[Bled Welder]

Any characters in Pynchon's work that can be said to represent the Madman, the Fool, the Simpleton, Folly?
>From Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization:
"Something new appears on the imaginary landscape of the renaissance; soon it will occupy a privileged place there: the Ship of Fools, a stange "drunken boat" that glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish canals...
"But if the navigation of madmen is linked to the Western mind with so many immemorial motifs, why, so abruptly, in the fifteenth century, is the theme suddenly formulated in literature and iconography?  Why does the figure of the Ship of Fools and its insane crew all at once invade the most familiar landscapes?  Why, from the old union of water and madness, was the ship born one day, and on just that day?...
"Because it is symbolized a great disquiet, suddenly dawning on the horizon of European culture at the end of the Middle Ages.  Madness and the madman become major figures, in their ambiguity: menace and mockery, the dizzying unreason of the world, and the feeble ridicule of men...
First a whole literature of tales and moral fables, in origin, doubtless, quite remote.  But by the end of the Middle Ages, it bulks large: a long series of "follies" which, stigmatizing vices and faults as in the past, no longer attribute them all to pride, to lack of clarity, to neglect of Christian values, but a sort of great unreason for which nothing, in fact, is exactly responsible, but which involves everyone in a kind of secret complicity.  The denunciation of Madness (la folie) becomes the general form of criticism.  In farces and soties, the character of the Madman, the Fool, the Simpleton assumes more and more importance.  He is no longer simply a ridiculous and familiar silhouette in the wings: he stands center stage as the guardian of truth--playing here a role which is the complement and converse of that taken by madness in the tales and the satires.  If folly leads each man into blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of his truth; in a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception; he utters, in his simpleton's language which makes no show of reason, the words of reason that release, in the comic, the comedy: he speaks love to lovers, the truth of of life to the young, the middling reality of the things to the proud, to the insolent, and to the liars...
"In learned literature, too, Madness and Folly was at work, at the very heart of reason and truth.  Etc."
http://www.hermitary.com/thatch/?p=711




 		 	   		  
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