Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms

THIRTEEN: INCONCLUSIVE CONCLUSIONS: TRICKSTERS, METAPLAYERS AND REVEALERS

THIRTEEN INCONCLUSIVE CONCLUSIONS: TRICI(STERS-METAPLAYERS AND REVEALERS William J. Hynes Something about the antics of the trickster causes this figure to be enjoyed worldwide. The heartiest laughter within belief systems seems to be reserved for those mythic and ritual occasions when tricksters profane the most sacred beliefs and practices-be they occasioned by Hermes in Greece, Maui in Hawaii, Loki in Scandinavia, or Agu Tomba in Tibet. Systems normally busy generating firm adherence to their constitutive values are discovered to be simultaneously and contradictorily maintaining a raft of tricksters who perpetually counter, upend, and loosen adherence to these same values. The preceding chapters witness the variety, frequency, and pervasiveness of tricksters. What significance may be attributed to the trickster phenomenon, sighted in such various contexts? Many of the authors of the preceding chapters have proposed insights into this question . Although the phenomena of tricksters are so rich as to put us on guard against definitive conclusions, this last chapter offers a range of interpretative theses ranging from the most apparent to the less obvious. In conformity with trickster logic, they can be considered to be inclusive of one another or not. 1. 1tickster myths are deeply satisfying entertainment. These myths are entertaining at a variety of levels, both to those who tell them within their respective belief systems and to those who study them formally METAPLAYERS AND REVEALERS 203 from without. That it is necessary to begin here with such an apparently obvious observation again reveals the attempts in this book to offset a dominant Western cultural bias. Is there a bifurcation between matters serious and matters humorous? Between matters educational and matters entertaining? Contributors here have argued otherwise. Most of our authors would support the insight of the Catholic novelist, Flannery O'Connor that "the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy" (O'Connor 1980: 167). Confronted with the inherent humor, dramatic timing, and narrative tension of the trickster myths, more than one scholar has remarked, perhaps a trifle sheepishly, that a central personal if somewhat unconscious motivation in studying the structure of these myths is the entertainment they provide. Witness Katharine Luomala of the Bishop's Muse~m in Hawaii: "Their basic human appeal, independent of cultural differences, is their initial attractive quality and their most enduring, for I find that rereading them and once more enjoying their humor soon dissipates any weariness from my endless dissection and attempts at synthesizing information about them and about the cultures in which they are popular" (Luomala 1966: 157). Within Western cultures during the last century, a clear delight in and fascination with the trickster and tricksterish characteristics have gone a great distance toward establishing the trickster narrative as a literary genre. One volume of studies, The Fool and the 'l1'ickster (Williams 1979), cites tricksters across a range of Northern European mythology, medieval European fools, Dr. Faustus, and Shakespeare. Confidence men have been the central characters of Herman Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1875) and Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix I(rull: Confidence Man (1954). Susan Kuhlmann's [(nave, Fool, and Genius (1973) concentrates on the literary uses of the confidence man in nineteenth-century American fiction. Within the more specific American literary scene, Gary Snyder has exhibited an intense fascination with the modalities of the Coyote tricksters in his poetry and fiction (1977). Playwright Murray Medick has recently completed a cycle of seven plays based upon the trickster myth cycle (see Kroll 1985; cf. Gelber 1981 on the work of playwright Sam Shephard). Gerald Vizenor's Earthdivers: 'l1'ibal Narratives on Mixed Descent (1981) is one of the most successful sets of short accounts of contemporary trickster figures. Vizenor prefaces his book with a version of the 204 HYNES "whites have headaches, skins have anthropologists" saying: "The creation myth that anthropologists never seem to tell is the one where naanabozho, the cultural trickster, made the first anthropologist from fecal matter. Once made, more were cloned in graduate schools from the first fecal creation" (xv). The stories in Earthdivers parody a wide range of academic sanctities, particularly those about how to treat "minority cultures" (trickster themes reappear in Vizenor 1987 and 1988). Although there are various real-life, twentieth-century tricksters, more often than not the tenor of their character tends not to be as rich, multivocal, or polychromic as that of mythic tricksters. Hugh TrevorRoper wrote one study of a...