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The Travails of Blind Bifford Jelly is a narrative series of 50 etchings, drawings and paintings that document the encounters Blind Biff has in and around the British Isles. Blind Biff is a Blemmyae, a foreigner, a 'third kind'. Rabelais first uses the term Blemmyae in his list of some of the beautiful lies of antiquity, Blemmyae belong to a long tradition of fabulous creatures associated since Greco-Roman times with far off countries, essentially the travelogues of India - the 'Indian Wonders'. These creatures are depicted in medieval illustrations which accompany the Romances of Alexander the Great and Raleigh claimed to have discovered them in South America. The standard Blemmyae had no head, but wore its facial features on its torso, the eyes were on the shoulders and the mouth in the middle of the breast. Biff, however, takes a more refined form, he is a legged head.

Biff's absurd adventures are intended to recall the heroic journeying of Rabelias' Pantagruel, Cervantes' ludicrous Don Quixote and Daumier’s invention that ragged agent provocateur Ratapoil, the great Napoleonic hustler. Biff embodies the ambivalence of Ratapoil, villain and hero. Like the protagonist Punch, the anti-hero, he is a capricious and cowardly clown. Less tyrannical than Jarry's Pere Ubu, rather, Biff echoes Shakespeare's Puck, a sort of 'hobgoblin' a malignant, a marginal character and 'cousin' of the ancient Greek Pan and Satyr.

Biff's adventures imply a moral narrative series, corresponding to Bunyan's 'The Pilgrim's Progress' and Hogarth's 'The Rake's Progress'. The other important antecedents of this narrative are Wilhelm Kaulback's series of engravings of Goethe's allegory, the corrupt and deceitful 'Rein eke Fuchs' and William Caxton's translation of the History of Reynard the Fox. Also the Punch and Judy Show, Miro's Catalan fairground tyrant, El Merma, Picasso's narrative etching, 'The Dream and Lie of Franco', Dario Fo's 'Mistero Buffo', Marcel Marceau's mime character Mr. Bip and Bill Griffith's 'Zippy the Pinhead'.

Biff is a grotesque and his bizarre behaviour is epic and gross, yet there is something fundamentally pedestrian about Biff. He is a buffoon, a fool and is often bamboozled by the common place, as an outsider he has the exaggerated provinciality of a primitive. We are asked to confront contradictions of our world through Biff's innocent and bandaged eyes. (From The Genesis of Blind Biff, JY 1991) 1986 - 1991

For further insight see also, in the "TEXT" section, the articles It’s a Joke by Sandy Moffat and Fool of Second Culture by Jeff Sawtell.