Cloudcuckoolander/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Cloudcuckoolanders in Literature include:

Discworld

  • The Bursar is something of a Cloudcuckoolander. Since the overbearing Mustrum Ridcully took office as Archancellor of Unseen University and the various weird things that happened since then (including the movies-influenced invasion of Things from the Dungeon Dimension in Moving Pictures and the incident with Windle Poons becoming a zombie in Reaper Man), the Bursar's nerves have been worn threadbare, and given him a tendency to do and say odd things under pressure. Thankfully, his skill with numbers remains no matter how detached from reality he gets, and with a steady diet of dried frog pills, he consistently hallucinates that he is sane (just like everyone else...) and is able to function reasonably well. Though he still sometimes thinks he can fly, and him being a wizard, gravity isn't about to say otherwise.

"The Bursar was, as he would probably be the first to admit, not the most mentally stable of people. He would probably be the first to admit that he was a tea-strainer."

  • Discworld magic-users, as a rule, seem to cultivate a touch of Cloudcuckoolander-ness. One of the minor wizard characters at Unseen University has an office where the furnishings are entirely constructed of piled-up books, while a young witch-in-training from the Tiffany Aching series pins her hair back in a bun with a knife and fork. Apparently, too much power tends to drive witches insane (think of Black Aliss.) Perhaps she is trying to channel her madness into a harmless form? That's what the book says "All witches are odd. It's best to get your oddness sorted out early on."
  • Carrot Ironfounderson, with his unshakable conviction that people are good at heart, is frequently thought to be one of these by other characters. They'd be absolutely right about that, if he didn't make it work. From about The Fifth Elephant he stops.
  • Leonard da Quirm, who designs war machines but believes that no ruler in their right mind would have their army use such horrible weapons. The bad news is, Havelock Vetinari is the only ruler in his right mind on the Sto Plains by these standards, realizing that war and empire-building are more trouble than they're worth; the good news is, Vetinari has Leonard safely locked away and working for him.
  • Moist Von Lipwig is prone to employing these, including Stanley the pin collector, who was raised by peas. Not on, by. Also Owlswick Jenkins, an even more off-kilter Genius Ditz forger who makes copies better than the real thing. For that matter, Moist has some moments like this himself, although it's mostly a result of him living on the edge.

Other works

  • One of the most iconic examples is Jenny Wren, from Our Mutual Friend, who is physically handicapped to boot, and lives in a mixed world of harsh reality and poetic fancy ("Who is this in pain? Who is this in pain?").
  • Marianne Engel from The Gargoyle by Andrew Davis.
  • In The Trolls there is a woman nicknamed "Mad Maud" from Aunt Sally's stories who lived in a house filled with stuffed animals she supposedly shot herself and routinely goes cougar hunting in the woods surrounding her house. Said cougars were actually squirrels, and her aim is far from accurate.
  • Eilonwy from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, who speaks in similes and metaphors, walks around barefoot, chatters airily and often argues with Taran, while still being a beautiful and sharp-witted girl who serves as a Love Interest.
  • The title character of Don Quixote; a man who has become so obsessed with Chivalric Romance that he goes batty and becomes a makeshift Knight Errant, taking on a peasant named Sancho as his Sidekick. His adventures famously include jousting windmills because he believes them to be giants in disguise. Published in completion in 1615, the work is widely regarded as a significant achievement in all literature and arguably the greatest work of the Spanish language, making Don Quixote a candidate for a Trope Codifier. More modern interpretations portray him more sympathetically and put more blame on society's rejection of his admirable idealism.
  • Wendy from John C. Wright's War of the Dreaming is similar to Eilonwy--a Genki Girl who believes she forgot how to fly and runs naked in the woods trying to remember, gets sidetracked during a conversation to hunt for elves, and isn't at all surprised when a armored knight-errant climbs through the window in her hospital room.
  • Jeanne from Charles Baxter's Shadow Play. She invents new words like "zarklike", "corilineal" and "nutomberized", talks to herself, believes she's drifting on an ocean liner, speaks in metaphors, sees angels and so on and so forth. At the same time, she's often wise and loving. She actually understands she's crazy, but seems to choose madness over sanity and prefer living in her own universe. As her son Wyatt said about her, "you couldn't be insane by choice, but she was".
  • Harry Potter
  • The Harpell family of wizards in the Drizzt Do'Urden books. List of "experiments" include trying to cross a horse with a frog; accidentally turning themselves into dogs; physically relocating their brains to their buttocks; separating their eyes from the rest of the body and getting stuck that way; believing double initials to be important omens, etc., etc. All the while beaming happily. The really weird part is that their experiments tend to have successful side effects -- the one who turned himself into a dog, once turned back, ended up a werewolf; the one who tried to cross a frog and a horse succeeded (he dubbed the result "Puddlejumper"); and the brain-switching was actually with purpose, as it was done to fight against brain-eating monsters. This may mean the family hinges on being a clan of The Fool.
    • As for Harkle Harpell's eyes being teleported away from his body, he actually had an excuse that time: it happened during the Time of Troubles, during which everybody's magic spells went wrong somehow. Harkle tried to teleport his entire body before he knew the situation, the result being that he was able to see his intended destination (since his disembodied eyes were there) and talk to the people there, but his body remained behind. He was blind to his immediate surrounding until his colleagues were able to help him make the trip overland and reinsert the eyes in their sockets.
  • In Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, the grandmother appears completely crazy and delusional; she takes out the jewelery and says she wants to get married, then appears cradling a lamb as if it is her baby. Yet she occasionally says what all the other characters should be thinking, and is the first to voice her protest against Bernarda's tyranny.
  • In Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, fictional Nobel laureate Felix Hoenikker, "father of the atomic bomb", was so easily distracted that, at one time, he completely abandoned the development of the atomic bomb to study the skeleton of turtles... his wife suggested his desperate colleagues to simply remove anything turtle-related from his laboratory, and he'd forget about his fascination with them completely (they did, he did).
  • Most characters in Alice in Wonderland count, but the Cheshire Cat is arguably the most famous. He's also a recurring character in the Thursday Next series, where he's portrayed as smart enough to manage a library containing every book ever written single-handedly, but still spends most of his time asking bizarre and irrelevant questions.
  • In Patricia C. Wrede's The Seven Towers, the sorceress Amberglas is somewhere between this and Obfuscating Stupidity; her constant rambling digressions seem to be genuine, but she's much sharper (and more powerful) than she gives the impression of being, and frequently she has important things to say if you can sort them out from the nonsense.
  • A popular Older Than Television example that helped define this trope is James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". The titular hero is a mild, unassuming man who's prone to spinning off into elaborate heroic fantasies at the slightest real-life suggestion.
  • Valentine Michael Smith from Stranger in a Strange Land is this trope played seriously, a Fish Out of Water that confuses everyone immensely because he is clearly not stupid, and probably an outright genius.
  • Derk in Dark Lord of Derkholm. The man makes flying pigs and invisible cats.
  • Animorphs: Tobias is one of those up until the end of the first book. After that his mind is much more 'down to Earth', the irony being that a lot of the time his head is up in the clouds, because he's a bird.
  • The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed is nothing but this trope. Understandable because the author is an AI.

Awareness is like consciousness. Soul is like spirit. But soft is not like hard and weak is not like strong. A mechanic can be both soft and hard, a stewardess can be both weak and strong. This is called philosophy or a world-view.

Sacksby: Ah, Scriventhorpe ... you seen Flannery lately?
Ickenham: I'm afraid I haven't.
Sacksby: Ah. And how's he looking?

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare--or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad--who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.

  • An interesting variation occurs in the novel Summer of Eternity. The mother of one of the characters learns that her husband helped commit a murder and has been arrested. She has a complete breakdown, as a result. For the rest of the book, she is in a cheerful mood and is off in her own little world, believing that her husband is off at work rather than at prison. The trope is played straight, but due to the context in which it is played, it comes across as heartbreaking rather than funny.
  • Ebbitt of The Seventh Tower definitely qualifies. He'd be plain old Crazy Awesome... if he didn't keep forgetting key points of his plan.
  • A great deal of the plot of Pippi Longstocking revolves around Pippi living in Cloudcuckooland while the adults and others doesn't
  • Fregly of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. With the things he says to people ("I bet I can fit your whole foot in my mouth!" and "Wanna hear about my hygiene issues?"), the things he does (play in ball pits, show people his secret freckle, chase people with his boogers) and the fact that anything with sugar turns all of these things Up to Eleven, he makes some of the examples of this trope look normal.
  • In Moira J. Moore's Hero series, being a Cloudcuckoolander is the first symptom children show when they will grow up to be weather-workers called Sources (and be required to have a soulmate The Stoic who can translate for them).
  • Ashley in the Nursery Crime novels, and his entire family. Considering they're Rambosian aliens, it's fairly obvious why they don't get many of the minutiae of human interaction.
  • Odiana of the Codex Alera series lives somewhere in the hinterlands between Cloudcuckoolander, The Ophelia, and Ax Crazy. Not entirely unexpected, since she's an incredibly powerful empath with a past that could have driven even a normal person crazy.
  • Dr. Roger Burrows, the wanna-be Adventure Archaeologist of the Tunnels series. He tends to get so caught up in his admiration of ancient artifacts that he neglects trivial matters such as the fact he ran out of food three days ago and is surrounded by large carnivores. He does however have enough of The Fool archetype to survive most dangers by virtue of simply not noticing them.
  • Orr from Catch-22. The whole book takes place in Cloudcuckooland.
  • Deconstructed in Ironman with Hudgie. His inane ramblings are treated as a severe threat to his own well being, and it's heavily implied that he is incapable of rational thought anymore. Oh and the reason he's like this is due to the horrific emotional abuse and flatout torture his psychotic father subjected him to his entire life.
  • In Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series the entire city of Trenton, New Jersey seems to be if not Cloudcuckooland, at least a suburb thereof.
  • Goss from Kraken is an interesting case. He's either this trope or a subversion, depending on your point of view. He does understand what's going on, but has a tendency to speak in such a bizarre vernacular (speaking to people as if they were school friends, or magical princesses, or something equally as strange), frequently chides his silent partner Subby for being a chatterbox, and has a tendency to ignore whatever others say that doesn't fit into his strange little world. Given that he's an Ax Crazy Complete Monster Psycho for Hire, his bizarre way of behaving is even more terrifying.
  • Just because Shin-tsu of The Longing of Shiina Ryo is one of these doesn't mean he's wrong, you know.
  • Hanno from Buddenbrooks. It's not funny.
  • The Ruler of the Universe from The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy. An example of this:

Zarniwoop: And they ask you to make decision for them? About people's lives, about worlds, about economies, about wars, about everything going on out there in the Universe?
The Ruler of the Universe: Out where?
Zarniwoop: Out there!
The Ruler of the Universe: How can you tell there's anything out there? The door's closed.

To the Ruler, everyone else (if they exist) is the Cloud Cuckoo Landers: they persist in believing things that they have no immediate, direct evidence for -- like what's on the other side of that closed door -- and insist that things are as they say they are without even considering the possibility that they could be otherwise. And then they get angry about it.
  • Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables falls victim to this a moderately, especially in the earlier books. She just really loves living her own little fantasy world, a world where everything is really, really romantic. She asks Marilla to call her "Cordelia" rather than Anne upon their first meeting, claiming it sounded better. It's to the point of hilarity, really. She gets herself into all sorts of scrapes as a result of having her head up in the clouds, including sinking her best friend's father's dory while re-enacting Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot". She mellows out with age, but still retains her wild imagination.
  • Robert Marsh from Darkness Visible, who was driven mad by the influence of Unreality. The same fate befalls about a third of London's population before the book is done. Not that being insane stops Robbie from contributing to the plot...
  • Emily Dorothea Seaton, protagonist of a series of mystery novels by Heron Carvic. She's not exactly out of it, but her thought processes are difficult for others to follow. Unlike other amateur sleuths, she has no idea she's involved in mysteries. Oh, and if you mean her harm, stay clear of the brolly....
  • In the In Death series, Dennis Mira, Dr. Mira's husband. Incredibly sweet and empathetic but rather spacey. Eve finds him oddly charming.
  • Tyentyetnikov, Manilov in Dead Souls
  • Oblomov. It's not really funny: Instead of caring for the village he owns, he spends years of dreaming up improvements and does effectively nothing.
  • Gilbert Hays in Of Snail Slime, who spouts Non-Sequiters left and right, and seems to change his personal view of the world at the drop of a hat. Partially because he's a brainless walking human shaped tumor. Somehow.
  • In The Last Unicorn, the butterfly sings songs, recites poetry, quotes a warning from a matchbox at one point, and occasionally says something useful. It's at least implied, if not stated outright, that verbatim parroting what he's heard others say before is actually the only way any butterfly can talk at all. He seems to understand what the unicorn is after well enough, though.
  • Of all people, a young Elizabeth Bathory in Count and Countess.
  • Dark Future: Commander Fonvielle in Comeback Tour, who regards the Josephites who've drained and reactivated the flooded and derelict Cape Canveral, as new NASA staff and Roger Duroc as the new President of the United States, while being otherwise entirely competent and connected to reality. Well, apart from a tendency to drool and eat his beard. He's also a literal Space Cadet.
  • Lord Peter Wimsey's mother, the Dowager Duchess. As well as Lord Peter himself, though it's hard to tell how much of it is Obfuscating Stupidity.
  • Eliza in Someone Else's War. Her chipper nuttiness is a breath of fresh air, considering that the rest of the novel is one relentless punch to the gut after another. The same novel also gives us Abdel, a quirky little weirdo who arbitrarily decides that he is psychic.
  • In Who Cut the Cheese? by Mason Brown, Duck starts acting schizotypal, dressing in a grass skirt and worshipping models of delivery cars.
  • The Englishman Mister "Pief" (Peeve?) from a story by Wilhelm Busch who walks around while always looking through a telescope.
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