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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, this is really built — story is built around a jester. Tell us why. What is the — for those who don’t really know, what is the role of the jester in literature, in, you know, society throughout sort of, you know, history?
DANIEL KEHLMANN, AUTHOR, “TYLL”: Well, the jester is a strange character that shows up in early modernity literature of 16th, 17th century, the jester or the trickster, and he’s a master of escape and he is usually a strange half funny and half dark mean figure who plays pranks but then is also great at escaping and who is also very good at — well, things like conjuring or dancing, or in the case of my jester, Tyll Eulenspiegel, dancing on a tightrope. So, he’s a lot about escaping and surviving in very dark times. And he’s someone I think that might be the most important thing, you never know what he’s going to do. He’s kind of — there’s always some aura of unpredictability around him and anything is possible where the jester is.
AMANPOUR: So, it might sound a little bit like cognitive dissidence then because you talk about, you know, the conjuring, the magic, the jests and jokes, et cetera. And yet, you set this historical novel in one of the darkest periods in European history, the 30-year war in the 1600s. What brought you to put Tyll, this jester, at the heart of this novel?
KEHLMANN: I really wanted to write about this time, this time of darkness and chaos. In a moment in European history when there was a complete meltdown of all political structure, of order, of civilization and I wanted some kind of guiding character who would lead the reader through this chaos that Europe was at this moment. And society was very rigid. People didn’t really move. People didn’t travel. People also didn’t move up or down socially. So, people from different social classes didn’t meet. But the jester can, of course, go anywhere and also would meet all kinds of people. He would also meet kings or peasants or anyone in between, because he would perform in front of them. So, I felt like a jester would be the key to show this time and to show different characters. And then I thought, why not cast Tyll Eulenspiegel, the mythical Northern European jester, himself?
About This Episode EXPAND
Journalist Helen Lewis tells Christiane about her new book on difficult women who changed the world. German author Daniel Kehlmann describes the vision behind his new novel “Tyll.” Yale law professor Daniel Markovits sits down with Hari Sreenivasan to explain why meritocracy is a trap.
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