Welcome Onboard! This is the “Ship of Fools”! — The Changing Image of the “Ship of Fools” in Western Culture
Written by: Wang Jingyu
In the Western imagination, reason has long belonged to terra firma. Island or continent, it repels water with a solid stubbornness: it only concedes its sand. As for unreason, it has been aquatic from the depths of time and that until fairly recently. And more precisely oceanic: infinite space, uncertain… Madness is the flowing liquid exterior of rocky reason. [1]
—— Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984), L’eau et la folie, Médecine et Hygiène, 1963
In Dits et Ecrits vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, p. 268. [This passage is translated by Clare O’Farrell]
Where the ocean represents the uncertain place of imagination and ideas in people’s mind, the boat has often been regarded as the means by which one can successfully cross this body of water to reach the other shore. It seems to be a natural conclusion that the ocean always symbolizes the imagination or projection that comes from the unconscious minds of human beings because the ocean is the place where strangeness and things of the unknown live. Boats become the focal point here since they not only create a kind of ‘temporary’ land that allows human beings to cross over the sea of unlimited depths and allows them to navigate further onto another shore, another land. Boats are the means for exploration of the seas as well as the accompanying imagination that allows the conscious mind to breathe air while connecting with the depths of the unknown in the waters of unconsciousness. The boat, like the one on the river Styx, guides the individual across unknown depths to the uncertain lands on the other side that the waters give rise to and whose new discoveries, or fears, they represent.
One of the most famous boats in Western history of arts has its own name, “Ship of Fools”. This boat has been painted dozens of times and is the subject of many songs. It is so famous that if you search on the internet you could immediately find more than fifty songs in different styles and different languages bearing the same title. The songs come from different bands or singers in a variety of styles. Similar phenomena exists in painting and the most representative piece, “Ship of Fools”, came from the Dutch/Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 – 1516). This piece depicts a vivid scene of a group of fools adrifting in the sea while indulging themselves in pleasure[2]. Apart from music and painting, “Ship of Fools” appears to be more important considering that it has become a well-established genre in literature. It is believed that Bosch’s painting is inspired by the book Ship of Fools (Modern German: Das Narrenschiff) written by a German humanist and satirist Sebastian Brandt (1458 – 1521). The painting is visually connected with the frontispiece of the book. In the preface of the English version of the book it states “If popularity be taken as the measure of success in literary effort, Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools must be considered one of the most successful books recorded in the whole history of literature. ” [3]
Ship of Fools (painted c. 1490–1500) is a painting by Hieronymus Bosch
Frontispiece and inside page of Ship of Fools (Stultifera Navis)
Tracing even further back trying to find the origin of this concept, the framework of Brandt’s book was inspired by the allegory created by Plato in the Republic. In the very original version of the concept, Ship of fools is the metaphor of the operation system with a dysfunctional crew. In Brandt’ satire he has brought the trope into his own era and speaks to contemporary social phenomena. Accompanying the popularity of the book there have been numerous and various treatments on the theme since the time of Plato. The depiction of the ship was visually transformed into a boat carrying the heroes and wealthy people, where the “fools” are ironically replaced with successful people. The inconstant meanings of the “ship” reveal the inclusiveness of the boat in showcasing changing backgrounds and context.
Hieronymus Bosch(Date: c.1465 – c.1516), The Ship of Fools in Flames (c.1516)
Franz Sedlacek (1891–1945), Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) (1926)
Thomas Bühler (1957-), Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) (date not known)
But why fools? We may raise that question when shifting the focus from the boat itself towards the passengers. Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)’s treatise Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961) could provide us more insights on this, not to mention that he has done an archeological study on the tradition of “Ship of Fools” comprehensively. In his discussion the fools and madmen are always used interchangeably to indicate the group of people who are defined as sick and abnormal[4]. They are either physically impaired or mentally broken. According to Foucault, the Ship of Fools, or Narrenschiff, was often manifested in the form of leprosy, an illness that has now all but vanished from the western world following the end of the Middle Ages. The eradication of leprosy may have removed the initial visual references to fools but ample other depictions continued to inform the creativity of artists. Literature therefore serves as a device to project reality. The ship is the vehicle by which fools are metaphorically and visually expelled from the rest of society. The ship carries them to lands unknown across perilous waters. To load a ship with madmen and expel them into the boundless sea is to decline care and eliminate a sickness not by curing it but removing it from sight. The result of being expelled or rejected in every civilized land is that the ship is floating on the ocean aimlessly. Thus, civilization remains coherent and the madmen are removed from the group as a whole.
Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961)
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
“…you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”
Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,1967
Where the idea of madness is lingering over the imagination of the western world, the ship of fools naturally becomes an active imaginative medium. It carries the social phenomenon all along the timeline and projects the changing social landscape under various kinds of power. Foucault further takes a boat as a perfect metaphor for Heterotopia, a new spatial type, in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. The term “Heterotopia”, borrowed from medicine, originally referred to the abnormal displacement of a bodily organ or part from its normal position. Heterotopia is then used to represent the displaced space both in real life where a different order is sustained regarding its surroundings. To expel the heterogeneous people via a boat is to create a heterotopia where the established order breaks down and yields to disorder, unknownness, and uncertainty. This is also part of the reason why the existence of boats is claimed to be so significant to the incubation of imagination.
Yes it is true that modern civilization has invented the prison and the madhouse to manage the “fools”. They are part of the long list Foucault proposed as the example of heterotopia floating in our society and not yet put to sea on a boat [5]. However, these institutions are no more than a boat at anchor. The anchored “Ship of Fools” is coherently imagined by those outside a unified institution but inside the walls, madness keeps deteriorating all that occurs inside the boat. There is not healing going on, merely madness put to sea but then anchored at the port.
How does this “Ship of Fools” relate to our contemporary world? When we face an Anthropocene Age where almost every inch of space is conquered by humans and the world is heavily influenced by human activities, we have created an infinite and vast online and in-person world of our own transformation and making. This world acts as a twisted mirror image of real space, incorporating the imagination that has been expelled from sensible societies everywhere and expelled to the “Ship of Fools”. In the newer online world, human beings utilize electronic methods to build this imaginary boat in a virtual world more rapidly and effectively. Foucault would have had no idea that an online heterotopic space could be created in just one second. Virtual words multiply more quickly than our Antrhopocene three dimensional world has been able to grow. Where once there were a few ships of fools in a year now new ones can be created each second. The challenge posed by so many “Ships of Fools” being created is that the overlapping of such spaces has thus transformed the world itself into a huge Heterotopia where there is no consistent and certain order anymore. And it is no longer the exclusive problem of the Western culture, but has become a common issue facing this entire, newly flattened world. That is to say, the whole world has undergone accelerated deterioration and everyone of us now are the fools on this ship.
The earth itself is now a ship — filled with fools.
Maybe another boat named Noah’s Ark would come to one’s mind when talking about the images of boats within Western culture. Different from the salvation and hope represented by the huge Noah’s Ark, the contemporaneity of the theme “Ship of Fools” more lies in its simultaneous acceptance and rejection by the established order . More than ever this theme addresses more urgently the contemporary concern of human being’s destiny.
1866–1870 engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), entitled “Le Lâcher de la colombe” (“The dove sent forth from the ark”).
Technically and literally speaking, a boat itself is difficult to ferry people across the complex waters of this world, but maybe the enlightenment can.
Reference:
[1] https://michel-foucault.com/2018/07/13/foucault-quote-water-and-madness/
[2] https://eclecticlight.co/2020/01/04/paintings-for-our-time-the-ship-of-fools/
[3] http://www.gutenberg.lib.md.us/2/0/1/7/20179/20179-h/20179-h.htm
[4] http://www.nhu.edu.tw/~sts/class/class_02_4.htm
[5] https://www.heterotopiastudies.com/
[6] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249687001_Unravelling_Foucaults%27_%27Different_Spaces