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  • Making Metaphor Happen:Space, Time and Trickster Sign
  • Steven Hawley (bio)

In trickster's case, how did mental fakery come to replace incarnate fakery?

It is one thing for trypanosomes to change their skins; another for Raven to become a leaf floating in spring water; another still for storytellers to have imagined Raven in the first place, or for one of us to reimagine him. Before picking these strands apart, however, we should remember that the mythology itself asks us to confuse them. Coyote stories point to coyotes teaching about the mind, the stories themselves look to predator-prey relationships for the birth of cunning. These myths suggest that blending natural history and mental phenomena is not an unthinkable conflation, but on the contrary, an accurate description of the way things are. To learn about intelligence from Coyote the meat thief is to know that we are embodied thinkers. If the brain has cunning, it has it as a consequence of appetite; the blood that lights the mind gets its sugars from the gut.

Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art.

Comic shit is a smooth sign and shit floats in trickster narratives.

Gerald Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse"

Native American Trickster Stories have come to possess a remarkable, irresistible draw for contemporary literary scholars, artists, and anthropologists. Scholars tend to couch their interest in the vernacular of the cultural critic or social scientist, but the attraction also lies partly in the opportunity to discuss trickster's absurdist antics, which broach subjects rarely touched upon in Western literature. Trickster's appetites—sexual, gastrointestinal, and otherwise, tend to defy comprehension through the lens of any particular Western mode of critical thought. The trickster is creator and culture hero to be sure, yet [End Page 95] his simultaneous existence as dupe, hideous pervert, and clown seem to draw more attention. Coprophilic, phallic, and even transgendered adventure permeate much of Native American trickster lore. In Paul Radin's The Trickster, an ethnographic study of Winnebago myth, parts of Wakdjukanga's penis are hacked off, which become edible plants where they hit the ground. In the same myth cycle, the trickster disguises himself as a woman, fashioning portions of the female anatomy out of leftover elk parts.

While trickster's sexual antics have been widely examined and interpreted, trickster crap seems to baffle social scientists and literature critics alike. In his essay "Trickster Discourse," Anishinaabe (Chippewa) writer Gerald Vizenor notes with derision some anthropological theories that attempt to explain trickster's coprophilia, from Freudian anal-stage speculations to the guess that "primitive" peoples evacuated their bowels in the great out-of-doors, where they could get closer to their stool and examine it under the full light of day (197–99). The number of coprophilic episodes in North American trickster lore might indicate the presence of something more than a joke—but then again it might not. Crap can be called upon in a pinch by the Nez Perce Coyote, for example, as a comic sounding board for ideas. It is always the turd that gives him the right advice, which Coyote affirms by saying, "That is what I thought already, and by the way, you might hop back inside, for you have already delayed me" (Phinney 69).

Modern readers can only speculate on the original intention behind such episodes. The tribal punch line to many trickster jokes remains, as it should be, encoded in the native tongue. An analysis of shit probably cannot be accurately construed from text alone. Until recently, and still for most creatures, scat is an outdoor phenomenon. As the father of a one-year-old, and as a hunter, hiker and embodied thinker, my own encounters with excreta on a daily basis seem to rival in number those with text, though the task of processing the latter fills more hours. While the opportunities for speculation in the field on this matter seem endless, they are rarely taken; at the risk of negating my own work here, perhaps this is for the best. In the absence of such reckoning, trickster's scat remains a joke, but also a sign, in both the bear-shit-on-the-trail and semiotic...

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