The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, and Exemplary Anarchism^29ways. This idea was best captured, perhaps, in one of Day’s favou-
rite metaphors, the “loaves and fishes” of scripture: “we must lay
one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible
only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for
an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform
all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and
multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.”^37
The prospects of divine assistance aside, Day understood that
in order for small actions to have this kind of multiplier effect
they had to have propagandistic value, for actions cannot qual-
ify as exemplary unless they command the attention of an au-
dience.^38 This meant that some thought had to be given to the
image that the Worker projected to those outside the movement.
Rather than relying on the simplified, stereotypical imagery of
traditional propaganda, however, the Worker consciously courted
an image that looked, on the surface, counterintuitive and even
contradictory. Workers challenged the idea that cleanliness was
next to godliness through their “often ragtag appearance,”^39 they
fought to eradicate poverty even as they embraced it themselves,
and they preached the need for social action while adopting an
approach that was strangely tolerant of failure. The upshot of the
Worker’s incongruous appearance was that it encouraged specta-
tors to re-evaluate entrenched assumptions about the nature of
holiness and the vocation of the saint. Day often appealed to the
idea of the “holy fool” to capture this relationship between the
quizzical spectator and the spectated.^40 A recurring character type
within the Christian tradition sometimes attributed even to Christ
Himself,^41 the holy fool is an individual whose outward bearing
is contemptuous of social conventions, but whose actions hint at
his underlying saintliness and superiority of character. The holy
fool has sometimes been interpreted as engaging in wilful deceit,
or at the very least in a complex performance meant both to con-
ceal and reveal his true nature.^42 Day clearly liked the implica-
tion that immediate appearances can be deceiving, and that it was
necessary to look for the deeper meaning in seemingly eccentric
and provocative behaviour before passing judgment. There was
no component of deliberate concealment in the Worker’s actions,
however: its departure from accepted notions of propriety was