ABSTRACT

If, as Lorca suggested, modernist artists would need ‘to journey through the eyes of idiots’ before dealing with the challenges to personal identity brought on by modernity, then the second half of the twentieth century can be seen to have stimulated a more diffuse set of cultural strategies for dealing with idiocy.1 Later writers and filmmakers retained a keen interest in the enigmatic appearance of idiot figures and the kind of sacrificial aesthetic that we have traced through modernist texts, but they tended to use idiocy to deal with a broader range of themes, including social issues related to education, faith, gender and race.