A review
As far as I can tell, The Guizer is now out of print, but I would recommend all Fools and Beasts to keep an eye out for it in, or request it from, their public library.
Garner's own preface is worth quoting at length:
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The Guizer is a collection of stories about fools. Guizer is the word for an actor in a mumming play, and he represents a character that is both comical and alarming, stupid and cunning, foolish and wise, animal and man, man and divinity. Guizer is the English name for the Fool, but the most complete surviving expressions of him are to be found among people who have not had to invent writing. They remember all they need, which means that their stories tell us the most difficult truths in the simplest language. They show us the Guizer under many names and in many shapes, but everywhere the myth is the same. |
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The Guizer enters the world as a force without direction. He has no knowledge of bad or good. Whatever he does goes wrong, so that his kindness may result in death and his anger can give life. He is is own victim, a creature of 'blysse and blunder', but his combined ignorance, innocence and villainy make the world he entered a place changed for the better, despite his efforts and because of them" |
We wouldn't all necessarily agree with everything Garner says here, but I think his words and the stories in the book have something to say to us, as Fools and Beasts, about who and what we think we are. They're a very varied lot, from cultures all over the world, but they're all about the outsider or misfit who does strange illogical things and gets stranger, even more illogical results, or about practical jokers who either come a cropper or unwittingly teach their victims something useful. I like 'Turncoat', about a joker who walks between two fields wearing a parti-coloured coat, the left side a different colour from the right: the farmers working in the fields start arguing about what colour the coat is and eventually start fighting so violently that they have to be separated by their wives. Then the joker comes walking calmly back the other way...
The interesting thing about the stories from the Fools & Beasts point of view is how often the two are interchangeable - beings like Chulyen the Crow, Hare or Ananse the Spider shift from human to animal and back without seeming to notice the difference, or it may be unclear - or irrelevant - which they are at any one time.
I'm not saying these stories are going to give anybody direct ideas - not too many of us will be hitching a lift on a passing whale, conning it into beaching itself and then eating it - but when you've read a few of them you have a feel for the kind of creature the Fool is. When I started out in Fooling I found this book invaluable for creating a character and now that I've finally got my own copy I'm looking forward to reading it again to refresh my memory and with any luck, my act.
JH
