Aneta Płaza

The article discusses the figure of a village fool as an outsider in folk culture and the typology of this kind of creation in the works of Tadeusz Nowak in relation to the contemporary research on otherness. At the core of the exposition, there is the silhouette of an individual marked by disability and alienated from the community, which through an undefined form of essential distinctiveness is something that escapes clear classification and undermines the structures of cultural division between the foreign and the familiar, teetering on the border of these two meanings. Subject of the analysis involves issues that delve into the problem of otherness of a mentally disabled character in the face of the archetypical cultural codes, phenomenological initiations, and ethical systems. The methodological background is based in the concepts drawn from the writings of Bernhard Waldenfels and Zygmunt Bauman, which – although not addressing rural culture – provide directions for reflecting on contemporaneity as well as engaging with the interpretations of the figure of the village fool in folk culture at multiple levels and the transformed realizations of this motif in Nowak’s work.

The author of the article reflects on the issue of it not being cognitively possible to understand an alienated individual. She presents the character of the fable as an emblem of a suffering, dramatically self-aware being. Revealing the secret results in the stigmatisation of the individual with the tragedy of consciousness and suspends him in the unnamed perceptional interworld. The author analyses the philosophical contexts of the text and characterises Leśmian’s ontology. The themes of fables and Biblical rules become a rich and meaningful background to the reflections provided.