Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms

THREE: MAPPING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MYTHIC TRICKSTERS: A HEURISTIC GUIDE

THREE MAPPING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MYTHIC TRICI(STERS: A HEURISTIC GUIDE William J. Hynes At the start of these essays detailing the complexities of the trickster, the reader may find it helpful to ask the central question: What characterizes a trickster figure as such? Using a diverse selection of trickster myths, this chapter advances six characteristics common to many trickster myths. More characteristics could be chosen, but these six serve as a modest map, heuristic guide, and common language for the more complex individual studies of particular tricksters within specific belief systems that follow. Thus, these initial six characteristics invite and anticipate not only the intricacies of the careers of particular tricksters, but emendations from the reader as well as outmaneuverings by that multicultural and multiform figure, the trickster. The sheer richness of trickster phenomena can easily lead one to conclude that the trickster is indefinable. In fact, to define (de-finis) is to draw borders around phenomena, and tricksters seem amazingly resistant to such capture; they are notorious border breakers. By the same token, scholars who focus primarily upon the distinctiveness of specific tricksters within particular belief systems may underline the impossibility of any definitive cross-context, common content to the term "trickster." However, if we steer a course between full delimitation on the one hand and no common content on the other, a number of shared charac- 34 HYNES teristics appear to cluster together in a pattern that can serve as an index to the presence of the trickster. At least six similarities or shared cnaracteristics can be identified to craft an initial guide or typology. The reader should not be deceived into confusing such an initial guide with a unified definition or theory. At the heart of this cluster of manifest trickster traits is (1) the fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous personality of the trickster. Flowing from this are such other features as (2) deceiver/trick-player, (3) shapeshifter , (4) situation-invertor, (5) messenger/imitator of the gods, and (6) sacred/lewd bricoleur. Not every trickster necessarily has all of these characteristics. Still, more times than not, a specific trickster will exhibit many of these similarities. Several scholars, including Laura Makarius, have suggested that one could use such shared characteristics as a matrix by which to survey all known examples of tricksters and to judge their degree of "tricksterness." This niight be a very useful way of testing the degree of commonality of such characteristics, but one should be cautious about the imposition of communality from without. 1. Ambiguous and Anomalous. Because the trickster appears as fundamentally ambiguous, anomalous, and polyvalent, this figure might well be the living embodiment of Nicholas of Cusa's fifteenth-century philosophical principle of the"coincidence of opposites." In striking parallel, our contemporary Claude Levi-Strauss views the trickster as the epitome of binary oppositions, a necessary anomaly incorporating every set of extremes (Levi-Strauss 1963: 224-26). His cosmic interplay engages unceasing sets of counterpoised sectors, such as sacred and profane, life and death, culture and nature, order and chaos, fertility and impotence, and so on. Still, none of these ~renas fully captures or defi~es the trickster: he is not fully delimited by one side or the other of a binary distinction, nor by both sides at once, nor by a series of oppositions. Anomalous, a-nomos, without normativity, the trickster appears on the edge or just beyond existing borders, classifications, and categories. In several of the accounts referred to in this volume, the trickster is cast as an "out" person, and his activities are often outlawish, outlandish, outrageous, out-of-bounds, and out-of-order. No borders are sacrosanct , be they religious, cultural, linguistic, epistemological, or metaphysical . Breaking down division lines, the trickster characteristically moves swiftly and impulsively back and forth across all borders with virtual impunity. Visitor everywhere, especially to those places that are MAPPING MYTHIC TRICKSTERS 3S off limits, the trickster seems to dwell in no single place but to be in continual transit through all realms marginal and liminal. With regard to the more general phenomenon, we are fortunate to have Colin Wilson's seminal study of the alienation associated with being a creative outsider to society, The Outsider (1956). Robert Pelton has observed that the trickster "pulverizes the univocal" and symbolizes the multivalence of life (Pelton 1980: 224). Embodying this multivocality, the trickster himself eludes univocality by escaping from any restrictive definition: the trickster...