A Wise Fool’s Anecdotal Cycle in Malta: A Reappraisal
A Wise Fool’s Anecdotal Cycle in Malta: A Reappraisal

Summary/Abstract: The predominant anti-hero in Maltese folk narrative is Ġaħan(/'djahan/). He is the wise fool, popular with one and all in contemporary Malta. However, in the first half of the twentieth century there was a historical undercurrent which, through children’s literature, has manipulated and bowdlerised the discursive richness of Maltese folk culture to the extent of framing Ġaħan as a “light-headed” fool, at times defining his anecdotes, brimming with sagacity, slyness, guile, cheats and deceits, as “stupidities”. It is the aim of this article to show how through his research and publications the author has challenged this pseudo-scientific assertion which has been crystallised in the native language of the Maltese archipelago. Humour is not only a device to uphold interest in the tale. Above all it facilitates the comprehension of the progression of events, thus heightening effectiveness and efficiency of the narration. Although artificially indulging in anti-social behaviour, the Maltese wise fool semantically also takes the role of a social critic in his farce as well as that of an interceder for the injured and the insulted. He is a poetic vehicle to express folk wisdom, often putting the fool’s cap on himself. His tales are a kind of “ritual of rebellion” which represents an institutionalized way of expressing antagonism towards authority. His anecdotes, better known in Maltese as praspar (/p'ra:spar/), constitute the temporary subversion of a conscious, symbolic order in the interests of a pleasure-oriented subconscious. Ġaħan’s duty is to change chaos to its inverse, cosmos, social disorder to order, the indistinct to the distinct, disequilibrium to equilibrium, to create life and the symbolic universe of our life.

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