Book Review by Richard Gehr
This article was originally printed in The Village Voice, reprinted by
permission of the author. Richard Gehr writes for The Village Voice,
Guitar Player, and other magazines, on music and culture. He lives in
Brooklyn but grew up on the Oregon Coast.
Trickster Makes This World:
Mischief, Myth, and Art
By Lewis Hyde
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26
It's nearly impossible to consider the Trickster without getting a rush of
pleasure from the unadulterated sense of Possibility he suggests.
Trickster is the cosmic fly in the ointment Embodied as Hermes or Mercury
in Western mythology, as Loki for the Vikings, as Eshu or Legba in West
Africa and Haiti, or as Coyote among the Navajo, Trickster is an intensely
rich and evocative figure noted for his (except in the few matrilineal
cultures where it's "her") formidable appetites and a PREDILECTION for
boundary-crossing. A cultural hero with a thousand faces, Trickster is the
amoral "creative idiot, the wise fool" who shuttles between heaven and
earth conveying sacrifices upward and bringing back DOWN such technologies
as fire, trapping nets, divination. He is the thieving god of
crossroads and travel, of darkness on the edge of town, of blues, voodoo,
and the abstract truth. HE IS EVEN WILE E COYOTE, A CRAFTY LOSER
DOOMED TO BLOW HIMSELF TO BITS IN EVERY ROADRUNNER CARTOON.
Earth may be reborn. Japan's Susa-no-o dirties the palace, thereby
allowing fruit and vegetable seeds to sprout freely. And China's Monkey
King crashes the royal party and steals the peaches of immortality.
A Walk in the Jag Wood
Equally poetic and scholarly. Trickster reads like an epic world dream
that flows seamlessly between the personal (Hyde's own tales of travel and
loss), political, literary, and mythic. The Monkey King's theft of the
peaches of immortality, for example, prefaces a book-ending disquisition
on James Baldwin's prophetic admission that "all Black men have toward all
white men an attitude which is designed, really, either to rob the white
man of the jewel of his naivete, or else to make it cost him dear".
Hyde regards the frequently self-contradicting Trickster mythos as an
ongoing DEBATE CONCERNING what society is willing to integrate (and hence
domesticate), cast away, or simply tolerate. He reads the Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave as the words of a
translator and traitor whose moments of trickster consciousness —
Douglass was at the same time a slave and free, black and white - had a
profound effect ON THE NATION but an ambiguous personal upshot when a
domesticated Douglass eventually transcended such dualities.
Suddenly, I found myself just entering the zoo with
my parents. It was like deja vu. My parents asked me
if I wanted to go to the polar bear exhibit. I said
"No Way!" And ran straight for the jaguar exhibit. I
wanted to look for the jaguar that I saw in my dream.
At the exhibit, a jaguar spoke to me! And said,
"Thank you so much for warning me about Duke Grover."
There was a small sign on the jaguar exhibit that
said:
Free! Jaguar Kittens
Need Good Homes
Please ask the Zoo Keepers
to get them out for you
So we decided to get the kitten that spoke to me. Now
she is my little advisor.
Say "Hi," Laura.
"HI!!"
Lewis Hyde, in this sprawling, OFTEN POETIC follow-up to his highly
regarded The Gift Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, suggests
that a society without Tricksters is a society doomed for the dumpster of
history. Hyde, in Trickster Makes the World, nimbly and often dazzlingly
unravels the psychological hard wiring that makes the Trickster mythos
necessary for cultures to adapt and survive. Not only does Hyde
demonstrate "how social life can depend on treating antisocial characters
as part of the sacred", but he suggests that the Trickster mentality
parallels our incessant yearnings for transcendence.
Although Hyde FLOATS the notion of the confidence man as the closest thing
we have to an American Trickster figure, his heart doesn't seem in it.
He's more interested in how writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong
Kingston, and Richard Rodnguez, artists like Pablo Picasso and Marcel
Duchamp, and the composer John Cage have used Trickster strategies of
revelation, paradox, and chance to dilate the hidden pores in the mundane
and unveil the plenitude that lies beyond it. As intermediary between
mortals and gods, between Here and There, Hyde'S Trickster IS a crafty
"joint worker" equally adept at both destroying and rearticulating. "The
Monkey of the Mind," writes Hyde, "knows that human beings had a hand in
articulating the world they inhabit and so knows that human beings can
remake it when they need to. To wake that Monkey is to wake the
possibility of playing with the joints of creation, the possibility of
art".
4
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Hyde views art as a form of divination. (Hermes's particular method of
divination, cledomancy — divining through accidental but portentous
remarks — clearly anticipates psychoanalysis.) Picasso and Duchamp
transformed chance discoveries into the modernist masterpieces, while Cage
cultivated inattention and, writes Hyde, "cast his lot with perturbation".
Kingston and Rodriguez do much of their work in the INTERSTICES
separating cultural identities, generations, and race. Not necessarily
Tricksters themselves, they use Trickster tropes to exteriorize inner
conflict and shame, destroying the old world in order to ADAPT to the new.
Tricksters like Allen Ginsberg, on the other hand, become prophetic
through sheer shamelessness, transforming his mother's madness and his
father's homophobia into sublime self-exposure.
Strictly speaking, it takes a polytheistic culture to create a Trickster.
Today, however, most of us live in polycultural societies beholden to a
single god or less. So of what use is a quicksilver messenger like the
Greek god Hermes, asks Hyde, in a world where winged travel is the rule
rather than the exception? Which is to ask: Is there any place for the
Trickster in contemporary American life?
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I was always fascinated by the
mischievous stories about Coyote and Crow told by the Coos, Umpqua, and
Siuslaw Indian- though not quite so profoundly as my run-ins with Ken
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, archetype-dissolving goofballs
representing a strange new tribe. Trickster is a hungry and lusty but
incessantly inventive creature who gets down and dirty in order to reveal
the universal. So if Kesey and Neal Cassady’s coast-to-coast dissemination
of LSD, cosmic humor, aleatoric arts, and on/off-the-bus rhetoric don't
sketch the latest culture-hero Tricksterism to a T, I'm a Signifying
Monkey.
Hyde doesn't mention the Merry Pranksters, although they fit neatly at the
end of the Trickster lineage; they were about spectacle, performance, and Pop Art,
while Hyde is more interested in the other sort of high art. The foundation of
Trickster Makes the World is Hyde's translation and interpretation of "The
Homeric Hymn to Hermes." Probably written during the sixth century BC,
the "Hymn to Hermes" opens the doors to a timeless space in which the invention
of sacrifice through deferred appetite neatly abuts both psychoanalysis and artistic
modernism. A CRAPPING, fartingantagonist to Apollo's orthodoxy, Hermes
sweet-talks his way into "glamorous" Olympus by lying shamelessly and
inventing the lyre (with which he appeases and seduces Apollo). Hermes's lies
and sacrifices are floating signifiers that suggest the symbolic invention of language
(while his comely profile and winged feet today encourage contemporary
prevaricators to say it with flowers).
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Perhaps it's Trickster's inherent messiness that makes him most troubling
for cultures such as our own. Tricksters such as Hermes and Susa-no-o are
perfectly comfortable with detritus. But, as Hyde shows through the examples
of Andrew Serrano's Piss Christ, Robert Mapplethorpe's whip handles,
and their attendant controversies, we are a culture deeply divided as to what is
clean and dirty. Mass-media Tricksters from Bugs Bunnyto Bart Simpson have
been sanitized for our protection, while movements from the Situationists to
Punks rise only to be subsumed back into consumerist hegemony. Was it ever thus?
Yes and no. The beauty we make will perish," concludes Hyde, "but not the world from
which we make it, nor the wit to do the making". WHICH I READ AS
SUGGESTING THAT THAT DAMNED WILE E COYOTE MAY HAVE MORE
TO SAY TO US THAN WE GIVE HIM CREDIT FOR
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Other cultures' Tricksters are no less subtly inventive, and HYDE'S BOOK
brims with evocative and multilayered stories of their quirky,
inscrutable, and often Rabelaisian doings. The Navajos' Coyote, for
example, invents the traps in which he subsequently loses himself. Norse
mythology's Loki brings on Ragnarok, the Asgardian apocalypse, so that the
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