Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms

ONE: INTRODUCING THE FASCINATING AND PERPLEXING TRICKSTER FIGURE

ONE INTRODUCING THE FASCINATING AND PERPLEXING TRICI(STER FIGURE William 1. Hynes & William G. Doty well, I tell you dis, ef deze yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun, en giggle, giggle, giggle, I let you know I'd a-done drapt um long ago. -Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus stories, cited by Lawrence C Levine, "'Some Go Up and Some Go Down': The Meaning of the Slave Trickster." Almost all non-literate mythology has a trickster hero ofsome kind. American Indians had the great rabbit and coyote, the ravens, and blue jay. And theresa very special property in the trickster: he always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. He s both a fool and someone ~ho sbeyond the system. And the trickster hero represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn't decided it wants to deal with. The mind structures a lifestyle, and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities. He doesn't respect the values that you've set up for yourself, and smashes them. -Joseph Campbell, in An Open Life Brer Rabbit, cited in our first epigraph, is just one of many intriguing trickster figures. l For centuries, perhaps millennia, and in the widest variety of cultural and religious belief systems, humans have told and retold tales of tricksters, figures who are usually comical, yet serve to 2 HYNES & DOTY highlight important social values. They cause laughter, to be sure, as they profane nearly every central belief, but at the same time they focus attention precisely on the nature of such beliefs. The diversity and complexity of the appearances of the trickster figure raise doubt that it can be encompassed as a single phenomenon. Perhaps just such diversity and complexity help explain why three decades have lapsed since the first comprehensive portrait of the trickster appeared, in Paul Radin's The Trickster (1955).2 The number of studies of individual tricksters has grown, and the range of trickster phenomena is now such that many scholars argue against a generalizing, comparativist view. Others of us have continued to argue that there are sufficient inherent similarities among these diverse figures and their functions to enable us to speak, at least informally, of a generic "trickster figure." In the editors' perspective as well as that of many of the contributors, we seek to build upon Radin in a critical manner. While we acknowledge the inherent difficulties in speaking about such a complex figure, we steer a course between those who see the trickster as so universal a figure that all tricksters speak with essentially the same voice and those who counsel that the tricksters belon-ging to individual societies are so culture-specific that no two of them articulate similar messages. Consequently , in contrast to Radin and his fellow essayists, Carl lung and I(arl I(erenyi (Radin 1955), we do not argue for archetypal roots in a transcendental human psyche, and we are less interested in origins than in cultural manifestations. But in contrast to a number of contemporary social scientists, the essays here generally do represent the belief that important aspects of a "trickster figure" can be identified across several different cultures. The fact that trickster phenomena contain similar features in several societies leads us to examine comparative social functions, psychological mechanisms, literary traces, relationships to religious systems, and ritual transformations. This book presents a variety of tricksters set within their specific sociocultural settings across a wide variety of cultures. Some of the tricksters to be encountered include the African Ananse, Eshu, and Legba; Western tricksters such as Hermes, Saint Peter, and Herschel; Native American figures such as Coyote, Wakdjunkaga, and Manabozo; and such Asian tricksters as Susa-no-o, Sun Wuk'ung, Agu Tampa, and Horangi. Readers will find many examples of trickster episodes in this book, appearing across a wide range of contexts. INTRODUCING THE TRICKSTER FIGURE 3 Published collections of African or Native American tales usually include segments devoted to the trickster, and an inclusive collection of trickster tales ranging worldwide would require several volumes (Apte 1985: ch. 7 provides a convenient summary of trickster tales). The figure is central in many European materials and in the Orient, but because trickster myths are focal in nine of the eleven Native American regions (Bierhorst 1985: 17-18), contemporary American scholarship in particular ignores the figure at the risk of irrelevance. Here is...