THE UNIVERSITY OF MALTA G. F.

ABELA JUNIOR COLLEGE

THE FIRST WISE FOOL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

AND

THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL STORY TELLING FESTIVAL

IN

MALTA

University of Malta
(founded 1592)

THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

ON
THE WISE FOOL
DECEMBER 07-10, 2006
AND
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL STORY TELLING FESTIVAL
IN MALTA
DECEMBER 11-13, 2006
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE ENZYKLOPÄDIE DES MÄRCHENS
AT
THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, GÖTTINGEN,
THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION REPRESENTATION IN MALTA,
THE AUSTRIAN EMBASSY IN MALTA, CASA ROCCA LTD,
THE EMBASSY OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY IN MALTA,
THE ITALIAN EMBASSY
ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI CULTURA IN MALTA
AND
UNIVERSITY OF MALTA JUNIOR COLLEGE
 The Wise Fool: The storyteller’s way
of mastering and educating the interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence

Stelios Pelasgos, Ph.D.

“The folk story is a Wise person

who has reached the end of his road.
The storyteller is the fool
that does his best in order to serve this Wise person.”
Katherine Zarkatei
Dear friends,
I prepared my talk having in mind the challenges a teacher faces in his work. I shall use the word
teacher, referring to all levels of formal and informal education and to every age group. The
Wise Fool is a folk hero, an archetype encountered in every culture, which is very useful to
teachers. The Wise Fool is a great teacher and his lessons have been repeated innumerable times
by mouths speaking different languages. I follow his teachings both as a professional storyteller
and as a teacher- storyteller, yet it has took me years to appreciate the subtlety and the
effectiveness of his “teaching method’’ and to interpret it according to the scientific language of
developmental psychology.
In ancient Greece “paidagogos”, the guardian and teacher of children, was occasionally depicted
with the Wise Fool’s characteristic ugliness and deformity, reminding of “Paposilenos” (the
guardian of child Dionysus) but also of the philosopher Socratesii.
A strange kind of teacher
Unfortunately the Wise Fool is a very elusive character due to his contradictory nature,
gravitating sometimes towards the fool and sometimes towards the wise but always aspiring to
form in our mind a unity, the desired “harmonia oppositorum”, the harmony reached through the
meeting of the opposites. This elusiveness is quite entertaining and salutary for the audience of a
storytelling gathering but poses certain problems to the scholars who would attempt to define
him and his function. Therefore following his teachings we will try to meet him and acquaint
ourselves with his behavior, ‘riding backwards on the donkey” as Nashrettin Hodja, taking the
path that will distance us from him and not the obvious path that approaches him. We will try to
reach the opposite direction and meet his opposite. His direct opposite in the Mediterranean and
European folklore would be the Wise, the absolute teacher and judge, one of the rare figures
accorded the title of “Wise”, the Wise Solomon. Solomon is able to intervene in all human
disputes and deliver a wise judgment accepted by every person concerned without raising any
dispute or rancor. Nobody laughs at Solomon, nobody questions him and his wisdom seems
supernatural. Every word he says is well thought, a wise teaching to comprehend and meditate
upon. He inspires awe, as he is elevated beyond the human limits.
His exact opposite is the Wise Fool, whatever name the local folklore of each people has
attributed to him. He is only human, cannot realize the obvious and is always derided. Yet
everybody adores him, he is approachable, a neighbor or a friend. He deals with small everyday
problems, all kinds of bothersome details and trivia of human life. Nobody would imagine
approaching Wise King Solomon casually; nobody would dare to bother him with our daily fight
with our instincts, our passions, our family and our neighbors. Therefore we need the Wise Fool
daily, much more often than we need the Wise King, the Wise Judge or the Wise Teacher.
A strange way of teaching
The Wise Fool doesn’t teach directly, yet he is a great teacher. He cannot say wise words nor
give wise counsels yet the essence of his stories permeates the folk proverbs and sayings. The
old Pomaks (an ethnic minority in Northern Greece) say "Za kirk déne akú ne spominésh
Nasradíne sha se izlézi pak” (If you do not evoke Nasrettin’s name within forty days, he will rise
again)iii. If we don’t evoke his name, if we do not use his tales in order to solve our daily
problems and disputes, this means that we have learned nothing, we are more foolish than the
fool; this means that we do not trust his foolish wisdom and we are doomed to repeat his
mistakes and suffer the consequences. But he will not let us suffer he will rise again (as a menace
or as a savior?) to make us laugh and be merry.
The Wise Fool is wise therefore he employs the most effective method of teaching: laughter, the
unique human trait that many believe is what differentiates us from the animals. Although this
foolish teacher initiates the learning process from the basest kind of laugh (laugh at the
misfortunes of others), he enters a reflective quality in certain stories thus transmuting it into a
nobler kind of laugh (laugh at our own shortcomings, faults and sins) till it reaches a
transcendental kind of laugh (laugh at our own misfortunes, our Fate, “God’s pleasantries” as the
great storyteller Karen Blixen used to call themiv).
The Wise Fool is humble therefore he employs the humblest way of teaching, suitable even for
animals . He employs the method of trial and error therefore he usually learns after suffering the
consequences of his mistakes. “The things I suffered, became a lesson”v as goes the Greek
proverb still in use. Nashrettin Hodja falls and hurts himself in order to caution us not to saw the
branch we’re standing on. Yet we our continuing to waste Nature’s resources, changing the
planet’s climate and poisoning air, earth and sea.
Aesop examined the limits of Wisdom and Folly in his fables. The best teacher for the wisest
animal, the Trickster par excellence, Ms. Fox, proved to be the Donkey, which died because of
his aspirations to Wisdom. In this Aesop’ s fablevi the Donkey tries to be a fair judge and divides
equally in three parts the game killed by the band that included himself, the Fox and the Lion.
The Lion is displeased with the equal sharing and eats the fair judge, the Donkey. Then the Lion
invites Ms. Fox to make a fairer (!) sharing. Consequently Wise Ms. Fox keeps a very small
amount for herself and offers all the rest to the lion. “-Congratulations Ms Fox, who taught you
to be so fair? the Lion compliments her. “- My teacher was the Donkey, replies Ms Fox.”
Therefore as the fable implies the Wise Judge or Wise Teacher may be useless in real life
situations, when one has to face the animal greed (concealed inside each human heart) or other
destructive and antisocial instincts. The perfect teacher in this fable is the aspiring “Wise” who
suffers because of his idealism and cautions us to take reality into account. Thus the wisest
attitude is the foolish attitude of Ms. Mary, the Fox, when facing the absurdity of brutal force.
Another educational method employed by Wise Fools of all ages is the acceptance of their
ignorance, Socrates way. The Wise Fool asks the persons that consider themselves wise to
enlighten and advise him thus exposing their folly and their ignorance. In two such instances
preserved in Greek oral tradition he is an anonymous father or Nashrettin. He is willing to accept
and follow any kind of advise concerning the appropriate way to travel with his son and a
donkey or concerning the correct way to build an oven for baking bread. Thus after following all
advises given, the father ends up carrying the donkey on his back and Nashrettin building the
oven on a cart in order to be able to turn its opening in any direction the wise passers -by advise
him.
The storyteller and the teacher as Wise Fools
So far we have considered the educational value of the content and the form of Wise Fool
stories. Now we must consider the very act of storytelling as a Wise- Foolish act and the
storyteller presenting himself as the Wise Fool.
Any storyteller (or any teacher for that matter), who faces an audience has to answer the initial
and greatest challenge, how to turn the individuals into a community. Traditionally most
storytellers (apart the professional or the itinerant ones) formed part of a “storytelling
community”vii. Storytelling played a vital functional role in such communities providing
entertainment, education, social unity, spiritual and moral support. Thus it was easier for the
narrator to overcome any barriers that separated him from each member of the audience, any
differences of social and economic status, age, gender and even religion. This is not true about
the modern professional storytellers, the “revivalists”, who usually perform for a disrupt
audience of individuals; people who are not used to attend such intimate art forms as storytelling
and disregard any other function apart the entertaining. They do not know each other and they
may even have a different ethnic and cultural background. Added to these difficulties, the
contemporary storytellers occasionally choose the stories from “exotic” oral traditions. Under
these circumstances the challenge of forming a storytelling community becomes an almost
insurmountable problem.
The Wise Fool stories offer each storyteller a way to bypass or overcome the barriers that
separate and segregate a given audience, and to form a storytelling community. The wise fool
questions and criticizes established ideas and social behaviors. He ignores and scorns social
protocol. He is able to mock the emperor (Timur, Alexander the Great), generals, high priests
and judges. In many stories he follows social or religious rules and observances literally,
foolishly, thus rendering them absurd. These characteristics turn him into a favorite hero of all
oppressed minoritiesviii. A teacher can use these stories to address adolescents who naturally
question the established norms of society, and a storyteller to approach all kinds of oppressed or
marginalized groups.
The figure of the Wise Fool fights division and segregation and encourages the feeling of
belonging to a community, because he confronts the foundation of every segregation, our
(acknowledged, secret or repressed) feeling of individual superiority. He celebrates human folly
and liberates us from the obligation to seem coherent, logical, efficient and strong.
In such instances we can witness the storyteller’s interpersonal intelligence at work. This kind of
intelligence characterizes people who are able to understand the feelings, intentions and moods
of the others by their behavior and alter their own responses accordingly, in order to be able to
influence them. This ability is commonly found in religious or political leaders, healers or
teachers. An appropriate example of the use of this intelligence we find in the case of Helen
Keller’s education by Ann Sullivanix. The traditional and the revivalist storyteller are able to
respond to the expectations of his/her audience by lengthening or shortening a story, altering
certain elements and improvising. The stories form an essential part of each storyteller’s
existence thus they are modified as the storyteller modifies his attitude according to the
peculiarities of his audience. Stories are constantly reshaped, as the storytellers are constantly
reshaped by the response of their audience.
Any successful storyteller’s intellectual profile comprises a heightened intrapersonal
intelligence, also. A person with an acute intrapersonal intelligence can distinguish and
differentiate his feelings. He is also able to express them through a given symbolic code. The life
of Sigmund Froyd offers a vivid example of the use of intrapersonal intelligence x. For Howard
Gardner the interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences do not occur separately and they form a
unionxi.
The combination of the two personal intelligences offers the oral artist the ability to
move his/her audience. He/she is not afraid to offer them an image of complete innocence, a
childlike transparency of feelings and intentions, of inoffensive foolishness. He/she can assure
them that he/she is not a potential menace to their feeling of superiority. The storyteller is so
innocent and unrestraint that he/ she identifies completely with the fictional characters of the
tales. “The heroes of the fairy tales are so alive for them as to express genuine feelings towards
them; as if they were actual beings and not fictional characters and imaginary deeds”xii.
In a typical traditional storytelling performance in a Greek village an old woman
welcomes a collector of folk tales. She is invited to tell some fairy tales and begins spinning her
yarn. Then as her imaginary story reaches a climax she can no longer restrain herself and weeps.
– Why are you weeping? Asks the embarrassed collector. – I’m weeping for the poor lad who is
put to jail although he is innocentxiii.
Is she a fool? She has begun her story stating plainly that it is imaginary and may end it by the
formula ‘I was not there and you shouldn’t believe me’ xiv, yet she allows herself to weep. Is she
disgracing herself in frond of a stranger? How can the village moral code that discourages public
expression of emotions allow this foolishness? This is a liberating foolish attitude. This is a
supreme case of masterly use of the storyteller’s personal intelligences aiming at the integration
of the stranger into the intimate atmosphere of the storytelling community. Of course she is not
pretending. She genuinely identifies with the suffering hero but in the meantime she is intensely
aware of the necessity to address any hindrances that restrain her audience and help them
identify, as thoroughly as herself, with the fictional character. If she is allowed to weep then we
are allowed to shed some tears without disgracing ourselves. She is not a simple Fool. She is a
Wise Fool, because she has encouraged us to shed those long restraint tears.
Such instances are part of an emotional and moral continuing education, an apprenticeship where
the Master is not an inaccessible idealized wise person but a Wise Fool admired for the wise
management of common human folly. In the oral traditions, the master is often considered the
paragon of his/her art, an example that apprentices strive to imitate. The educational process
comprises the stages of active observation, imitation and guided participation in the activitiesxv.
Thus when the Master (storyteller) employs the Wise Fools strategies exposing himself as a
sensitive, vulnerable person that identifies with his fictional character he encourages his
apprentices (or the audience) to imitate him, to accept and take pride into their sensitivity and
their vulnerability. Furthermore he celebrates the ultimate human social virtue, Empathy. Thus
the audience learns to dismiss their egocentric and narcissistic tendencies and care about the
other members of the storytelling community.
Thus the Wise Fool persona acquires an added value. This persona protects the Master/ Teacher
from the “obscene tyrant”xvi, his own ego. Power corrupts as we all can testify and many Wise
Fool stories demonstrate. The storyteller is always a charismatic person and he/she is conscious
of his/her influencing power and his/her function in the community. This power is augmented
when he/she takes over the role of the Master.
The apprentices venerate their Master. He/she has reached the absolute mastery of his/her art or
craft; his/her whole life is dedicated at its perfection. It is very dangerous to try to shake this
veneration but it is far riskier to accept it or, God forbid but megalomaniacs are as a rule
excellent storytellers, to encourage it. At this point, comes the Tradition in the rescue of the
storyteller offering him the Wise Fool persona. Now he/she is free to act as a fool, to encourage
critical thought, to stress the dangers of blind obedience, to uproot the addictive traits of his
apprentices’ s relation to him/her. He can appear incompetent, ignorant, avid e.t.c. , without
disrupting the apprenticeship process, without shaking the apprentices’ s trust in him. Thus the
teacher, the Orthodox Christian monk, the Sufi dervish, the Zen master gives the ultimate lesson
to his apprentices, and the storyteller to his audience. I may be fool, but listen to my stories. The
ego is always a fool, but this foolishness is checked by tradition, by the members of the
community who have preserved the Wise Fool’s tales. I may be a Fool but my stories are Wise.
i
Zarkate Catherine, Conte et Spiritualité [Folk Tales and Spirituality], in Callame- Griaule Genevieve (ed.), Le
renouveau du conte [The revival of Storytelling] , C.N.R.S., 1991, p. 391
ii
Neils Jenifer & Hart Katherine (eds), Coming of age in ancient Greece. Images of childhood from the classical past,
Yale University Press, 2003, p.249
iii
Kokkas Nikolaos, Tradition vs. change in the orality of the Pomaks in Western Thrace- The role of folklore in
determining the Pomak identity, paper presented in the international conference “Minority-building among the Pomaks
in the Greek-Bulgarian region” - Erlangen 15-16 July 2005
iv
Arent Hanna, Men at dark times, Pelican, 1973
v
Μπαμπινιώτης Γεώργιος, Λεξικό της Νέας Ελληνικής Γλώσσας, [Babiniotis G., Dictionary of Modern Greek
Language] Κέντρο Λεξικολογίας, 1998, p.1310
vi
Aesop, Fables, No 209, Tolidi, Athens, 1984
vii
. Linda Degh, Narratives in society: A performer –centered study in narration, Academia Scientiarum
Fennica, 1995, p.34
viii
Storytelling is naturally a double-edged sword. Such symbols occasionally were and are still put in the service of
racist and misogynistic propaganda.
ix
Gardner Howard, Multiple intelligences. The theory in practice, Basic Books, 1993, p.23
x
Gardner Howard, Creating minds: an anatomy of creativity, N.Y. Basic books 1993
xi
Gardner Howard, Intelligence reframed. Multiple intelligences for the 21st century, Basic Books 1999
xii
Οικονομίδης Δημήτριος, Το παραμύθι και ο παραμυθάς εν Ελλάδι, Oikonomidis D., [Storytelling in Greece],
Λαογραφία, τόμος ΛΑ΄ 1976-78
xiii
Κλιαφα Μαρούλα, Οι λαϊκοί παραμυθάδες και η επιβίωση του παραμυθιού ως τις μέρες μας, [Kliafa M.,
Contemporary folk storytellers and folk tales], περιοδικό Διαβάζω, τ.130, 1985
xiv
Ιωαννου Γιώργος (επιμ.), Παραμύθια του λαού μας, [Ioannou G.,Greek Folktales],Ερμής 1987
xv
Rogoff Barbara, Apprenticeship in thinking. Cognitive development in social context, Oxford University Press,
1991
xvi
Tavener John, Preface to his composition “The Hidden Face”, C.D., Harmonia Mundi, 2001