Narrenschiff — the Ship of Fools

Narrenschiff — the Ship of Fools

The image originates in medieval allegory, most famously in Sebastian Brant’s 1494 satire Das Narrenschiff, where a vessel full of fools sails toward Narragonia, a fictional paradise of folly. Brant coined Narragonia by blending “Narr” (German for “fool”) with the pseudo-classical suffix “-gonia” suggesting a land or origin.

Each fool represents a human vice - vanity, greed, pride - and the ship, rudderless and captainless, becomes a metaphor for a society adrift, morally unmoored, absurd in its self-regard.

Later, Hieronymus Bosch painted it: leering grotesques, gluttonous revels, a lute-playing nun - the world as madhouse. Foucault seized on it in Madness and Civilization, seeing the ship of fools as a literal and figurative vehicle of exclusion: the mad expelled from the city, yet still haunting its margins.

In modern use, Narrenschiff is a potent metaphor - for a culture that has lost its reason, for political or economic systems spinning into dysfunction, or even for the human condition itself: brilliant, deluded, fragile, floating godless through the void.

And Robert Plant sang about it.

'Ship of Fools', released in 1988 on Robert Plant’s Now and Zen, is a melancholy meditation wrapped in elegiac blues-rock. Unlike Brant’s medieval satire, Plant’s Narrenschiff is romantic and introspective - a metaphor for emotional drift, disillusionment - and love receding on a tide of time. 

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'Ship of Fools' (1988) - by Robert Plant and keyboardist Phil Johnstone

On waves of love, my heart is breaking

And stranger still, my self-control I can't rely on anymore

New tide, surprise, my world is changing

Within this frame an ocean swell behind the smile, I know it well

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Beneath a lover's moon I'm waiting

I am the pilot of the storm, adrift in pleasure I may drown

I built this ship, it is my making

And furthermore, my self-control, I can't rely on anymore

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I know why

I know why

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Crazy on a ship of fools

Crazy on a ship of fools

Turn this boat around, back to my loving ground

Oh no, oh no

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Who claims that no man is an island?

While I land up in jeopardy, more distant from you by degrees

I walk this shore in isolation

And at my feet eternity, draws ever sweeter plans for me

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Cute.

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Transgressive Science-Fiction

"The Garden of Earthly Delights"

I still recall the shell-shocked faces of the BBC Newsnight team at the Cannes Film Festival. Kirsty Wark had been too scared to go while Mark Kermode, who had attended, self-consciously praised and defended Lars von Trier's latest film. It was the transgressive "Antichrist".

In mainstream literature think Bret Easton Ellis; in painting, Hieronymus Bosch; in TV, 'Game of Thrones'.

Transgressive art is characterised by psychological and often physical violence; visceral, graphic and explicit sex; profane language; the unleashing of the id; subversion of our safe little lives.

In science-fiction there are some notable practitioners (most transgressive first):

1. Scott Bakker (Neuropath)
2. William Barton (When We Were Real)
3. Richard Morgan (Takeshi Kovacs novels)
4. Peter Watts (The Rifters Trilogy; Blindsight & Echopraxia)
5. Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos - Simmons just makes the cut)

I'm currently reading 'Neuropath'. It's difficult, though wholly engrossing - if you can stomach psychopathic brain-control torture, edgy relationships, dense discussion of mind, brain and consciousness.

Amazon link

OK, let me do it this way. Look at your most significant other: his or her smile, affectionate glance, amusing quip. Now make the the skull transparent and look again with the eyes of an MRI scanner. For every quirk of personality you love so much, there's that small net of neural tissue lighting up. That's all there is and ever has been. Meaningless.

Oh, and you too.

One of the themes of this novel is how resistant people are to even engaging with this concept. They shy away - too transgressive.