Trickster Makes This World

How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture.

Lewis Hyde

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781847677013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Trickster disrupted the world around him, and in doing so he reshaped it. Playful, mischievous, subversive, amoral, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but they are also indispensable heroes of culture.

Trickster Makes This World revisits the stories of Coyote, Eshu and Hermes and holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston and others. Authoritative in its scholarship, supple and dynamic in its style, Trickster Makes This World encourages you to think and see afresh.

PART ONE

TRAP OF NATURE

1

SLIPPING THE TRAP OF APPETITE

The whitebait
Open their black eyes
in the net of the Law.
—Basho

THE BAIT THIEF

The trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his tracks and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs. Trickster starts out hungry, but before long he is master of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of art. Aristotle wrote that Homer first “taught the rest of us the art of framing lies the right way.” Homer makes lies seem so real that they enter the world and walk among us. Odysseus walks among us to this day, and he would seem to be Homer’s own self-portrait, for Odysseus, too, is a master of the art of lying, an art he got from his grandfather, Autolycus, who got it in turn from his father, Hermes. And Hermes, in an old story we shall soon consider, invented lying when he was a hungry child with a hankering for meat.

But I’m making a straight line out of a narrative that twists and turns, and I’m getting ahead of myself. We must begin at the beginning, with trickster learning how to keep his stomach full.

Trickster stories, even when they clearly have much more complicated cultural meanings, preserve a set of images from the days when what mattered above all else was hunting. At one point in the old Norse tales, the mischief-maker Loki has made the other gods so angry that he has to flee and go into hiding. In the mountains, he builds himself a house with doors on all sides so he can watch the four horizons. To amuse himself by day, he changes into a salmon, swimming the mountain streams, leaping the waterfalls. Sitting by the fire one morning, trying to imagine how the others might possibly capture him, he takes linen string and twists it into a mesh in the way that fishnets have been made ever since. Just at that moment, the others approach. Loki throws the net into the fire, changes into a salmon, and swims away. But the gods find the ashes of his net and from their pattern deduce the shape of the device they need to make. In this way, Loki is finally captured.

It makes a nice emblem of trickster’s ambiguous talents, Loki imagining that first fishnet and then getting caught in it. Moreover, the device in question is a central trickster invention. In Native American creation stories, when Coyote teaches humans how to catch salmon, he makes the first fish weir out of logs and branches. On the North Pacific coast, the trickster Raven made the first fishhook; he taught the spider how to make her web and human beings how to make nets. The history of trickery in Greece goes back to similar origins. “Trick” is dólos in Homeric Greek, and the oldest known use of the term refers to a quite specific trick: baiting a hook to catch a fish.

East and west, north and south, this is the oldest trick in the book. No trickster has ever been credited with inventing a potato peeler, a gas meter, a catechism, or a tuning fork, but trickster invents the fish trap.

Coyote was going along by a big river when he got very hungry. He built a trap of poplar poles and willow branches and set it in the water. “Salmon!” he called out. “Come into this trap.” Soon a big salmon came along and swam into the chute of the trap and then flopped himself out on the bank where Coyote clubbed him to death. “I will find a nice place in the shade and broil this up,” thought Coyote.

Trickster commonly relies on his prey to help him spring the traps he makes. In this fragment of a Nez Perce story from northeastern Idaho, Coyote’s salmon weir takes advantage of forces the salmon themselves provide. Salmon in a river are swimming upstream to spawn; sexual appetite or instinct gives them a particular trajectory and Coyote works with it. Even with a baited hook, the victim’s hunger is the moving part. The worm just sits there; the fish catches himself. Likewise, in a Crow story from the Western Plains, Coyote traps two buffalo by stampeding them into the sun so they cannot see where they are going, then leading them over a cliff. The fleetness of large herbivores is part of their natural defense against predators; Coyote (or the Native Americans who slaughtered buffalo in this way) takes advantage of that instinctual defense by directing the beasts into the sun and toward a cliff, so that fleetness itself backfires. In the invention of traps, trickster is a technician of appetite and a technician of instinct.

And yet, as the Loki story indicates, trickster can also get snared in his own devices. Trickster is at once culture hero and fool, clever predator and stupid prey. Hungry, trickster sometimes devises stratagems to catch his meal; hungry, he sometimes loses his wits altogether. An Apache story from Texas, in which Rabbit has played a series of tricks on Coyote, ends as follows:

Rabbit came to a field of watermelons. In the middle of the field there was a stick figure made of gum. Rabbit hit it with his foot and got stuck. He got his other foot stuck, then one hand and then his other hand and finally his head. This is how Coyote found him.

“What are you doing like this?” asked Coyote.

“The farmer who owns this melon patch was mad because I would not eat melons with him. He stuck me on here and said that in a while he would make me eat chicken with him. I told him I wouldn’t do it.”

“You are foolish. I will take your place.”

Coyote pulled Rabbit free and stuck himself up in the gum trap. When the farmer who owned the melons came out and saw Coyote he shot him full of holes.

Coyote doesn’t just get stuck in gum traps, either; in other stories, a range of animals—usually sly cousins such as Fox or Rabbit or Spider—make a fool of him and steal his meat.

So trickster is cunning about traps but not so cunning as to avoid them himself. To my mind, then, the myth contains a story about the incremental creation of an intelligence about hunting. Coyote can imagine the fish trap precisely because he’s been a fish himself, as it were. Nothing counters cunning but more cunning. Coyote’s wits are sharp precisely because he has met other wits, just as the country bumpkin may eventually become a cosmopolitan if enough confidence men appear to school him.

Some recent ideas in evolutionary theory echo these assertions. In Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence, Harry Jerison presents a striking chart showing the relative intelligence of meat-eaters and the herbivores they prey on. Taking the ratio of brain to body size as a crude index, Jerison finds that if we compare herbivores and carnivores at any particular moment in history the predators are always slightly brainier than the prey. But the relationship is never stable; there is a slow step-by-step increase in intelligence on both sides. If we chart the brain-body ratio on a scale of 1 to 10, in the archaic age herbivores get a 2 and carnivores a 4; thirty million years later the herbivores are up to 4 but the carnivores have gone up to 6; another thirty million years and the herbivores are up to 6 but the carnivores are up to 8; finally, when the herbivores get up to 9, the carnivores are up to 10. The hunter is always slightly smarter, but the prey is always wising up. In evolutionary theory, the tension between predator and prey is one of the great engines that has driven the creation of intelligence itself, each side successively and ceaselessly responding to the other.

If this myth contains a story about incrementally increasing intelligence, where does it lead? What happens after the carnivore gets up to 10?

There is a great deal of folklore about coyotes in the American West. One story has it that in the old days sheep farmers tried to get rid of wolves and coyotes by putting out animal carcasses laced with strychnine. The wolves, they say, were killed in great numbers, but the coyotes wised up and avoided these traps. Another story has it that when trappers set metal leg traps they will catch muskrat and mink and fox and skunk, but coyote only rarely. Coyotes develop their own relationship to the trap; as one naturalist has written, “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that coyotes … have a sense of humor. How else to explain, for instance, the well-known propensity of experienced coyotes to dig up traps, turn them over, and urinate or defecate on them?”

With this image we move into a third relationship between tricksters and traps. When a coyote defecates on a trap he is neither predator nor prey but some third thing. A fragment of a native Tlingit story from Alaska will help us name that thing:

[Raven] came to a place where many people were encamped fishing … He entered a house and asked what they used for bait. They said, “Fat.” Then he said, “Let me see you put enough on your hooks for bait,” and he noticed carefully how they baited and handled their hooks. The next time they went out, he walked off behind a point and went underwater to get this bait. Now they got bites and pulled up quickly, but there was nothing on their hooks.

Raven eventually gets in trouble for this little trick (the fishermen steal his beak and he has to pull an elaborate return-ruse to get it back), but for now the point is simply that in the relationship between fish and fishermen this trickster stands to the side and takes on a third role.

A similar motif appears in Africa with the Zulu trickster known as Thlókunyana. Thlókunyana is imagined to be a small man, “the size of a weasel,” and in fact one of his other names also refers to a red weasel with a black-tipped tail. A Zulu storyteller describes this animal as

cleverer than all others, for its cunning is great. If a trap is set for a wild cat, [the weasel] comes immediately to the trap, and takes away the mouse which is placed there for the cat: it takes it out first; and when the cat comes the mouse has been already eaten by the weasel.

If a hunter does manage to trap this tricky weasel, he will have bad luck. A kind of jinx or magical influence remains in the trap that has caught a weasel and that influence forever after “stands in the way” of the trap’s power; it will no longer catch game.

Coyote in fact and folklore, Raven and Thlókunyana in mythology—in each of these cases, trickster gets wise to the bait and is therefore all the harder to catch. The coyote who avoids a strychnined carcass is perhaps the simplest case; he does not get poisoned but he also gets nothing to eat. Raven and Thlókunyana are more cunning in this regard; they are bait-thief tricksters who separate the trap from the meat and eat the meat. Each of these tales has a predator-prey relationship in it—the fish and the fishermen, for example—but the bait thief doesn’t enter directly into that oppositional eating game. A parasite or epizoon, he feeds his belly while standing just outside the conflict between hunter and hunted. From that position the bait thief becomes a kind of critic of the usual rules of the eating game and as such subverts them, so that traps he has visited lose their influence. What trapper’s pride could remain unshaken once he’s read Coyote’s commentary?

In all these stories, trickster must do more than feed his belly; he must do so without himself getting eaten. Trickster’s intelligence springs from appetite in two ways; it simultaneously seeks to satiate hunger and to subvert all hunger not its own. This last is an important theme. In the Okanagon creation story, the Great Spirit, having told Coyote that he must show the New People how to catch salmon, goes on to say: “I have important work for you to do … There are many bad creatures on earth. You will have to kill them, otherwise they will eat the New People. When you do this, the New People will honor you … They will honor you for killing the People-devouring monsters and for teaching … all the ways of living.” In North America, trickster stepped in to defeat the monsters who used to feed on humans.

The myth says, then, that there are large, devouring forces in this world, and that trickster’s intelligence arose not just to feed himself but to outwit these other eaters. Typically, this meeting is oppositional—the prey outwitting the predator. The bait thief suggests a different, non-oppositional strategy. Here trickster feeds himself where predator and prey meet, but rather than entering the game on their terms he plays with its rules. Perhaps, then, another force behind trickster’s cunning is the desire to remove himself from the eating game altogether, or at least see how far out he can get and still feed his belly (for if he were to stop eating entirely he would no longer be trickster).

EATING THE ORGANS OF APPETITE

What god requires a sacrifice of every man,
woman, and child three times a day?
—Yoruba riddle

Not many stories purport to explain the origins of appetite, but one may be found at the beginning of the Tsimshian Raven cycle from the North Pacific coast. A desire to escape the trap of appetite, and some limit to that desire, organizes “Raven Becomes Voracious.”

It seems that the whole world was once covered with darkness. On the Queen Charlotte Islands there was a town in which the animals lived. An animal chief and his wife lived there with their only child, a boy whom, they loved very much. The father tried to keep his son from all danger. He built the boy a bed above his own in the rear of his large house. He washed him regularly, and the boy grew to be a young man.

When he was quite large, this youth became ill, and before long, he died. His parents wept and wept. The animal chief invited the tribe to his house. When they had assembled, he ordered the youth’s body to be laid out. “Take out his intestines,” he said. His attendants laid out the youth’s body, removed the intestines, burned them at the rear of the house, and placed the body on the bed which the father had built for his son. Under the corpse of their dead son, the chief and the chieftainess wailed every morning, and the tribe wailed with them.

One morning before daylight, when the chieftainess went to mourn, she looked up and saw a young man, bright as fire, lying where the body of her son had lain. She called to her husband, who climbed the ladder and said, “Is it you, my beloved son? Is it you?” “Yes, it is I,” said the shining youth, and his parents’ hearts were filled with gladness.

When the tribe came to console their chief and chieftainess, they were surprised to see the shining youth. He spoke to them. “Heaven was much annoyed by your constant wailing, so He sent me down to comfort your minds.” Everyone was very glad the prince lived among them again; his parents loved him more than ever.

The chief had two great slaves—a miserable man and his wife. The great slaves were called Mouth at Each End. Every morning they brought all kinds of food into the house. Every time they came back from hunting, they brought a large cut of whale meat with them, threw it on the fire, and ate it.

The shining youth ate very little. Days went by. He chewed a little fat, but he didn’t eat it. The chieftainess tried to get him to eat, but he declined everything and lived without food. The chieftainess was very anxious about this; she was afraid her son would die again. One day when the shining youth was out for a walk, the chief went up the ladder to where his son had his bed. There was the corpse of his own son! Nevertheless, he loved his new child.

Sometime later, when the chief and chieftainess were out, the two great slaves called Mouth at Each End came in, carrying a large cut of whale meat. They threw the whale fat into the fire and ate it. The shining youth came up to them and asked, “What makes you so hungry?” The great slaves replied, “We are hungry because we have eaten scabs from our shinbones.” “Do you like what you eat?” asked the shining youth. “Oh yes, my dear,” said the slave man.

“Then I will taste the scabs you speak about,” replied the prince. “No, my dear! Do not wish to be as we are!” cried the slave woman. “I will just taste it and spit it out again,” said the prince. The slave man cut a bit of whale meat and put a small scab in it. The slave woman scolded him, “O bad man! What are you doing to the poor prince?”

The shining prince took the piece of meat with the scab in it, tasted it, and spat it out again. Then he went back to bed.

When the chief and his wife returned, the prince said to his mother, “Mother, I am very hungry.” “Oh dear, is it true, is it true?” She ordered the slaves to feed rich food to her belo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part One: Trap of Nature
• Interlude
• Part Two: Two-Road Chance
• Part Three: Dirt Work
• Part Four: Trap of Culture
• Conclusion
• Appendix I. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes
• Appendix II. Trickster and Gender
• Appendix III. Monkey and the Peaches of Immortality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Art credits
• Index
• Introduction
• About the Author
• Also by Lewis Hyde
• Copyright Page
• Promo page for other Canongate titles