Day 39: Children, Animals, Fools

Another sub-set of my favorite delayed recognition stories include an unrecognized recognizer. As the story gets to the place of conflict or mystery, the main characters who are the adults and smart people get right to work on solving the problem or identifying the answers. They are annoyed by some less important characters who seem to be underfoot, in their way, distracting their focus, and generally being a nuisance. They are seen as too little to understand, or too stupid to be helpful, and not having a perspective that anyone could take seriously.

Yet as the story unfolds, it turns out to be the ridiculed, scorned, pushed aside ones that get to unlock the secret, find the truth, or save the day. So the main characters recognize finally that the person they formerly belittled is worthy of their respect, attention and gratitude. They begin to look at that child, animal or fool with new admiration and recognize that their own assumptions about the pre-requisite qualities of a valuable detective or visionary or leader were off-base.

My first example is from that Shakespeare play which I have mentioned several times already, Much Ado About Nothing. The main hero of the whole story is a minor character whose only lines are full of mis-used words, mispronounciations and general sloppiness of dialogue. He is a person whom people don't have time to listen to, and if they do, it is with impatience, or to make fun of his gaffes. He is Constable Dogberry, and while the main characters are going about all their dramatic love affairs, and weddings, and rejections at the altar, and challenges to duels, and pretended deaths, he is quietly attending to his post as rural Constable, and available to solve the very mystery that is throwing all the main characters into a tizzy. He and his assistants apprehend the man who pretended to be Hero's secret lover in the bedroom window, and they conduct their questioning session with utmost seriousness, even while we all laugh at their inability to use any courtroom procedure terms correctly.

Finally one of the important household members impatiently takes a minute to listen to what Dogberry has discovered, and the whole household finally recognizes that this silly constable who they mocked and barely tolerated as a neighbor all their lives is the neighbor who has saved the day, uncovered the mystery, and resolved the household's most serious catastrophe.

Michael Keaton plays Constable Dogberry in the film I have mentioned before, and he does a good job of illustrating how any of us would easily fail to recognize the value of such a constable. Grubby looks, bad breath, inability to speak a sentence that makes sense, a lack of social dignity. He is the comic relief, but he is also the one who keeps this comedy from ending as a tragedy. Laugh at him, laugh with him, he can handle it, but do not forget that in some stories the fools recognize what the wise have overlooked.