Betwixt and between : the Trickster and multiculturalism

Scholarly writing about the trickster—an unruly, contradictory figure who appears in virtually every human culture—is bound to be paradoxical, an attempt to contain the uncontainable within academic discourse. There is the risk of defining it to death, of missing the point of the shape-shifter by trying to capture it. Fortunately, the essays in Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective do not fall into this trap; in fact, some of the more innovative essays not only provide insight into the three interwoven subjects of the book—multiculturalism, turn-of-the-century fiction, and the trickster—they also articulate the spirit of the trickster in their creativity and ludic sense of possibility. Although the collection suffers from a wobbly definition of “tricksterism” which only exacerbates many of the pitfalls of canonical revision, Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature is nevertheless a valuable contribution to the study of tricksters in American culture.

In her engaging introduction, Elizabeth Ammons places the ten essays that follow in the broader context of scholarly definitions of the turn-of-the-century period of American literature. She asserts, “Like trickster, the purpose of this book is disruption” (vii)—disruption of the literary canon that excludes all but a few writers (Henry James, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Willa Cather). These canonical writers—and the academic conceits of naturalism, realism, and modernism that literary critics use to discuss them—are really part of one “master code” (a term Ammons borrows from Fredric Jameson) that reinforced (and reinforces) a political agenda of “the preservation and maintenance of elite white male power in the United States, which at the turn of the century (as is still true at this turn of the century) had everything to do with empire, dominance of others” (viii). Because scholars have accepted and extended the ideologically laden definitions of realism, naturalism, and modernism, Ammons suggests, they have neglected and excluded Native American, Asian American, Latino/a, and African American traditions, tales, and writers. This insight provides the basis for the “multicultural perspective” of the collection’s subtitle. Similar arguments have been made in recent reconstructions of American literature that seek to go beyond the elite, white, and male biases on which most American literary and cultural criticism has been based.

Ammons argues convincingly that the “master plot” of canonical turn-of-the-century fiction pits the individual against society, with society emerging as the stronger. “A protagonist/antagonist relationship governs the battle between the rebellious, unruly desires of the individual and the coercive, controlling power of the corporate system or state, which is hierarchically organized to force the individual into obedience” (ix). At the end of the master plot, the individual either yields to the superior power of the “state/system/group” or is destroyed while resisting. The trickster, however, articulates another plot, one in which “Individual desire and group authority cohabit within a network or web of relations; the dynamic is one of interaction rather than dominance and submission” (ix). Ammons’s contention that the plots of trickster tales run counter to the master plot is an intriguing corollary to similar discussions of the relationships between dominant and alternative or oppositional cultural patterns; however, the volume runs into problems where it slips away from trickster figures, plots, and tactics to consider “manifestations of trickster energy, and strategies of tricksterism” (ix).

To various degrees, the ten essays that follow explore the issues Ammons summarizes. The essays are not organized into sections but do fall into three distinct categories. Two are about individual works, six concern previously neglected or “lost” writers, and the remaining two deal with theoretical and pedagogical contexts.

The two essays that provide literary critical readings of individual works, Julia B. Farwell’s “Goophering Around: Authority and the Trick of Storytelling in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman” and...