SOURCE: Siegel, Paul N. “Gimpel and the Archetype of the Wise Fool.” In The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer, edited by Marcia Allentuck, pp. 159-73. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.
[In the following essay, Siegel examines the ways in which Singer utilizes the archetypal figure of the wise fool in “Gimpel the Fool,” and calls the story “a masterpiece of irony.”]
“Gimpel the Fool,” perhaps the most widely acclaimed work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, has its roots deep in the soil of Yiddish literature. It is concerned with two of what Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg tell us, in their Treasury of Yiddish Stories, are “the great themes of Yiddish literature,” “the virtue of powerlessness” and “the sanctity of the insulted and the injured,” and has as its anti-hero the “wise or sainted fool” who is an “extreme variation” of “the central figure of Yiddish literature,” “dos kleine menschele, the little man.” The wise or sainted fool is, however, not merely a recurring character in Yiddish fiction; he is a centuries-old archetypal figure of western literature. The manner in which Singer handles this archetypal figure, making use of the ideas associated with it, but in his own distinctive way, makes “Gimpel the Fool” the masterpiece of irony that it is.
The idiot was regarded in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance as being under the special protection of God. He was also often regarded as an “innocent” or a “natural,” a child of nature who lived without thought of the past or the future and was consequently happier than the supposedly wise man. The court jester was either a feeble-minded person or a lunatic who evoked amusement by his inaneness or his antics. He might also be someone who pretended to be a fool and used his assumed folly as a license for his wit.
Shakespeare's Feste and Touchstone are jesters of the second kind, “fools” who, as Viola says of Feste (Twelfth Night, III, i, 61), are “wise enough to play the fool.” Feste demonstrates the foolishness of Olivia in her exaggerated mourning for her brother, and Touchstone satirizes the foolish artificialities of the court. Each finds the world to be made up of fools, of whom it might be said (in the words of Touchstone (As You Like It, V, i, 30-31), “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
Lear's fool is mentally unbalanced but shrewdly perceptive, crack-brained but sharp-witted. He knows the ways of the world and exposes the folly of Lear in seeking to give up power but to retain the pomp of power. Paradoxically, however, while mocking Kent for foolishly following someone who has given up his power, he himself remains faithful to Lear. In doing so, he is following a higher wisdom than worldly wisdom. This is the wisdom of St. Paul, who warned that those whom the world regarded as wise must become fools in the eyes of the world if they were to become genuinely wise. They must become as the little children of whom Christ spoke. The “innocent” or “natural” fool might act on such wisdom without thought or utter Christlike truths without realizing their significance.
The heyday of the wise fool was in Renaissance literature. However, the idea was continued in different forms in Coleridge's crazed mariner, the “gray-beard loon” who has learned the secret of the love of living things; in Melville's young black boy Pip, who on being alone, like the ancient mariner, in the vast immensity of the ocean, has been rendered idiotic but has seen in its “wondrous depths” the “hoarded heaps” of “the miser-merman, Wisdom”; in Dostoevsky's saintly Prince Myshkin, reviled as an “idiot,” who experiences a vision of light at the beginning of his epileptic fits.
Gimpel differs from the other representatives of the archetype, the Yiddish ones as well as the others, in that he is the expression of his creator's own idiosyncratic mixture of faith and skepticism. It is this mixture which, as we shall see in analyzing the story, is the source of its pervasive irony. Singer stated in a Commentary interview on November, 1963 that it would be foolish to believe the purveyors of fantasies about psychic phenomena—just as it was foolish of Gimpel to believe the fantastic lies he was told—yet the universe is mysterious, and there is something of truth after all in these fantasies, at least a revelation concerning the depths of the human psyche from which these fantasies emerged and perhaps something more as well. The need to continue to search for the truth, the realization that this search cannot result in the attainment of the truth, the need to choose belief, the realization that, intellectually speaking, such a choice cannot be defended against the unbeliever—all of this lies behind “Gimpel the Fool.”
In many ways the work dealing with the idea of the wise fool that is closest in spirit to “Gimpel the Fool” is Erasmus's The Praise of Folly. Although Erasmus accepted Christianity as divinely revealed, he was capable of writing, “I like assertions so little that I would easily take sides with the skeptics wherever it is allowed by the inviolable authority of Holy Scripture and the decrees of the Church.” Socrates, the man who was so wise because he knew how little he knew, he regarded as a saint equal to St. Paul. He attended the same school of the Brethren of the Common Life and imbibed there the same philosophy of a simple Christianity devoid of scholastic subtleties as did Nicholas of Cusa, who in his Of Learned Ignorance maintained that all human knowledge is only speculation and that wisdom consists of the recognition of man's ignorance and the apprehension of God through intuition. The expression of a fusion of skepticism and faith resembling that which underlies “Gimpel the Fool.” Erasmus's The Praise of Folly is pervaded by a similar complex ironic ambiguity. It will be interesting and illuminating, as we proceed in our discussion of Singer's story, to observe the similarities between these two works.
Gimpel is the butt of his village because of his credulity. But is he the fool that the village takes him to be? Telling his story himself, he affirms his own folly in his very first words: “I am Gimpel the fool.” In the very next breath, however, he takes it back: “I don't think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that's what folks call me.” As he relates the story of his life, this denial of his foolishness seems to be the pitiful defense of his intellect by an evidently weak-witted person who at times tacitly admits that he is a fool, but a steadily deepening ambiguity plays about his narrative. This ambiguity, present from the beginning, is indicated in the title and the opening sentence of the Yiddish, where the epithet used is “chochem” or “sage,” which often has the ironic meaning of “fool,” the meaning in which the villagers and Gimpel's wife use it.
Singer's device of having Gimpel act as the narrator is similar to Erasmus's device of having the allegorical figure of Folly deliver a mock encomium of folly. Are we to take what she has to say seriously? Her oration is in the form of a mock encomium, that is, it is an ironic praising of folly which, it would seem, should be read as the opposite, as a censuring of folly. But then, it is delivered by Folly herself. If Folly censures folly, then it would seem as if Wisdom should praise it. But if Wisdom praises folly and Folly censures it, how are we to know which is Wisdom and which is Folly? We are lost in a labyrinth of irony similar to that which we shall find in “Gimpel the Fool.”
Gimpel, looking back upon his childhood, seeks to justify the way in which he would allow himself to be taken in. He once played hookey because he had been told that the rabbi's wife had been brought to childbed. But how was he to know that he was being lied to: he hadn't paid any attention to whether her belly was big or not. So too, when he took a detour because he heard a dog barking, how was he to know that it was a mischievous rogue imitating a dog? These excuses of Gimpel sound plausible enough, the first as well as the second. After all, we don't expect a child to note the advance of pregnancy. Each birth is unexpected and comes as a kind of miracle that may happen to any woman.
But as Gimpel continues to explain that he was not really a fool, we see that he was indeed stupidly credulous, accepting the most fantastic stories which all the villagers conspired together to make him believe. Working as an apprentice in the bakery after he left school, he was subjected to a never ending flow of accounts of alleged wonders, each more silly than the other. Whereas before it was the rabbi's wife who was said to have given birth, now the rabbi was said to have given birth to a calf in the seventh month. But, as outrageously ridiculous as the stories are, there is still some uncertainty about how utterly a fool Gimpel is. He had to believe, he tells us, or else people got angry, exclaiming, “You want to call everyone a liar?” His belief, then, was in part the wise acquiescence of the butt who must play his role, knowing that otherwise he will never be free of his wiseacre tormentors.
Yet it was not merely a pretended belief. For always there would come the thought: maybe it is, after all, true? When he was told that the Messiah had come and that his parents had risen from the grave, he knew very well, he informs us, that nothing of the sort had occurred, but nevertheless he went out. “Maybe something had happened. What did I stand to lose by looking?” The jeering he got on that occasion made him resolve to believe nothing more, but he could not stick to this resolution, his poor wits being no match for those of the villagers, who confused him with their argumentation.
Moreover, he came to believe not merely because he was talked into it but also because he wanted to believe. When he was derisively matched with the village prostitute, he knew very well what she was, that her limp was not, as alleged, a coy affectation and that her supposed little brother was actually her bastard child. But, after having been pushed into marriage with her by the entire village, he grew to love her and the uncertain belief in her virtue to which he had been persuaded became a determinedly held belief against all the evidence.
At this point in his narrative Gimpel, the husband of the sharp-tongued Elka, becomes both a henpecked husband and a cuckold, the two figures who have been objects of mirth through the centuries and have often as here been combined in the same person. With comic repetition each time the truth is revealed to him he is talked out of it or talks himself out of it. Elka bears a child seventeen weeks after the wedding, but after a period of pain he allows himself, having grown to love the child, to believe that it is his. She bears another child after a separation of more than nine months. The village laughs, but Gimpel accepts it as his. He finds Elka in bed with another man, but after a period of painful separation persuades himself to accept her story that it was an illusion. On returning home unexpectedly after the separation, he finds her in bed with his apprentice, but again he permits himself to be persuaded that what he saw was an illusion, this time allowing himself to be overwhelmed by her torrent of abuse and giving up all doubt the following morning when the apprentice replies to his questioning with amazed denials.
His credulity has no limits. Repetition seems to make it easier for him to believe rather than the reverse. We should laugh at this spectacle of the fool continuing in his folly, but we do not, for we have come to wonder if Gimpel, undoubted fool that he has proven himself to be, is not in reality superior to his...