The Epic Trickster in American Literature

From Sunjata to So(u)l

Gregory E. Rutledge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136194825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Just as Africa and the West have traditionally fit into binaries of Darkness/Enlightenment, Savage/Modern, Ugly/Beautiful, and Ritual/Art, among others, much of Western cultural production rests upon the archetypal binary of Trickster/Epic, with trickster aesthetics and commensurate cultural forms characterizing Africa. Challenging this binary and the exceptionalism that underlies anti-hegemonic efforts even today, this book begins with the scholarly foundations that mapped out African trickster continuities in the United States and excavated the aesthetics of traditional African epic performances. Rutledge locates trickster-like capacities within the epic hero archetype (the "epic trickster" paradigm) and constructs an Homeric Diaspora, which is to say that the modern Homeric performance foundation lies at an absolute time and distance away from the ancient storytelling performance needed to understand the cautionary aesthetic inseparable from epic potential. As traditional epic performances demonstrate, unchecked epic trickster dynamism anticipates not only brutal imperialism and creative diversity, but the greatest threat to everyone, an eco-apocalypse. Relying upon the preeminent scholarship on African-American trickster-heroes, traditional African heroic performances, and cultural studies approaches to Greco-Roman epics, Rutledge traces the epic trickster aesthetic through three seminal African-American novels keenly attuned to the American Homeric Diaspora: Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Toni Morrison's Beloved.

1 Introduction

Then King Lion called the rabbit. The timid little creature stood before him, one trembling paw drawn up uncertainly.

“Rabbit,” cried the king, “why did you break a law of nature and go running, running, running, in the daytime?”

—Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears: A West African Tale (1975), retold by Verna Aardema

We now find that mythology also conceals an ethical system, but one which, unfortunately, is far more remote from our ethic than its logic is from our logic.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss (1978)

The hero is but welcome on troubled days.

—Malian Proverb

In a West African folktale famously retold by Verna Aardema in Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears: A West African Tale (1975),¹ King Lion, symbol of rulership, courage, and epic heroes, among other things, has convened a tribunal and called before it rabbit, a symbol of speed, soft frailty, and trickiness, among other things. “Rabbit,” cried the king, “why did you break a law of nature and go running, running, running, in the daytime?” (15). Seeking the ultimate cause for why Mother Owl has refused to call upon the sun to rise—a shading of the world bearing apocalyptic implications—King Lion does not punish rabbit, who was responding to a chain of events initiated by mosquito’s lie to iguana. That fact that the topic of the lie was mosquito-sized yams, which set in motion a series of events concatenating discord between iguana-python-rabbit and causing Mother Owl not to raise the sun, and the fact that this Sunless state threatened the entire world suggest four cardinal principles that characterize my study of the heroic epic performance.

First, all life is interconnected, from the smallest insects to the strongest animals. It is no accident that the story begins with mosquito, the carrier of disease, distorting the truth about yams, a staple crop. Iguana and python, water spirits who symbolize hydration, then become nonresponsive and wayward, directly endangering domestic stability. Even the tiniest fissures in the foundation of a healthy body and community can eventually threaten all of reality. Second, running in the daytime is a transgression of the laws of nature. It can be done for legitimate reasons, which the rabbit’s testimony reveals, but King Lion’s concern perhaps needs to be rearticulated: rabbit has been continuously “running, running, running, in the daytime,” and thus the world has been shaded. Rabbit’s exceptional behavior, which King Lion fears, has become normative and upset the balance. Third, King Lion and rabbit—archetypal symbols of heroic exceptionalism and fleet trickiness, respectively—are themselves engulfed by this threat. Fourth and finally, the cultural performance that informs the archetypes is the most important element in determining what roles they will play. In this tale, mosquito is the Trickster and rabbit a figure of domesticity who relies upon King Lion’s stable governance.

Unfortunately, the archetypes Lion and Rabbit, Epic Hero and Trickster, not the cultural performances that inform them, dominate our understanding. Teleological approaches limit our imaginations regarding these archetypes, for our tendency is to think of the abilities that define their purposes. Epic heroes are heroic and tricksters are tricky by this classic logic. Moreover, racial stereotypes join the archetypes such that Epic Hero in white Europe and Trickster in black Africa have become synonymous verities. Achilles and Odysseus are European heroes, adventurers, and builders, whereas Hare is an African trickster, a witty wordsmith who stands against custom and oppressive structure. But what if we concern ourselves with the early, pre-heroic part of epic cycles and mine them for universal principles and cultural particulars? Because the underdog position of the protagonist in the early portions of the epic narrative is akin to the trickster’s and the trickster often ends up occupying the place of Lion (or some other strong predator), the archetypes merge. But in spite of scholarly recognition of the trickster as the trickster-hero or culture-hero and the advent of performance-based scholarship on traditional African epics, both occurring in the 1970s, an absolutist regard for the divide prevails.

Surely, with the African-American renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, one expected it to be challenged. Many black scholars believed America’s Homeric performance to be the correlative—if not cause—of white supremacy just at the time traditional African epics were first being published and studies of the well-known African trickster were soon underway. In light of their understanding of the relationship between Homeric performance and the African trickster, Old Massa being outwitted by the slave, these scholars’ awareness of the movement of African culture—including traditional epics—across the Atlantic into New World slavery raises a question that impinges on the absolute purity of archetypal thinking: would not the cultural agency represented by traditional African epics have been reduced to the position of a trickster in a New World in which Homer’s epics defined much of the Western ontological sense and ensuing cultural performance?

The answer seems to suggest the existence of an epic trickster, the possibility that within the human condition’s giving rise to genres of heroic epic possibility lies the trickster type considered its antithesis. In other words, along with the African trickster-proper, some of whose tales crossed with slavery and survived verbatim, a corresponding aesthetic and figure within the traditional African epic performance—what I call the epic trickster— may have made a similar journey. But its berth in the New World, as its name implies, is the quintessence of paradox: African epic potentiality is the last ideology slaveholders would have embraced, and yet the substantial role the Homeric epics played in modern Western culture worked to make epic potentiality mainstream for these New World natives.

The possibility of the epic trickster raises another question: if the epic hero learned the modus operandi of the trickster, can the trickster-proper be subversive enough to deconstruct epic potentiality borne of the trickster’s guile and wit and the heroic epic protagonist’s unsurpassed physical abilities? Also, once such a trickster-savvy epic figure is unleashed, is there anything that can stop him/her/it? To face such questions in mythology is one thing, but the existence of an actual, real-world belief in heroic epic mythology is another, one that infuses a potentially apocalyptic urgency into them. Live Homeric performances can no longer speak to us, but living epic performances represent traditional wisdom about such.

If the dearth of Americanist—including African-Americanist—scholarship treating the traditional African heroic epic performance is statement by omission, the question such omission begs is clear enough: why focus on the traditional African heroic epic performance? Why, indeed, when, as Catherine Morley indicates in The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction (2009), a transnational, James Joyce–inspired study of European epic influences on John Updike, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo, “epic is critically regarded as a predominantly masculine genre” and “has long been considered the exclusive domain of the male literary genius, an incarnation of patriarchal values”? Morley’s subsequent statements defend her exclusive focus on white male authors, a notewor thy corpus if one realizes that addressing the problems of epic-centrism in Western (literary) history requires soul-searching within the majority community as well as work from minority artist-activists.

Still, Morley’s justification and literary genealogy provide answers to our original “why” question. Instead of a transnational focus and comparative methodology, she focuses on the “literary epic” as her source-text and holds that the epic is “originally a European genre” (3, 6). There are obvious problems associated with this Eurocentric positioning when one considers that the epics attributed to Homer² were originally oral performances; the absence of any definitive proof means that even The Epic of Gilgamesh cannot be claimed as the first epic, and the recent work on oral epic performance traditions situates Homer’s epics within a world genre and establishes them as frozen, limited versions without the participatory vitality of the original performances forever lost to us.

The literary epic is part of an epic narrative tradition itself originating, almost absolutely, in a storytelling performance tradition whose genesis truly existed at a time and place absolutely lost to us. But the epic’s folk roots, however literary it has become, still shape us and our cultural performance because we vigorously participate in the mythmaking endeavor tapped and amplified by contemporary novelists, film-makers, celebrities, musicians, video game creators, fashion leaders, advertising agencies, and, of course, politicians, just to name a few. Contemporary Western textuality must be understood as a performance in an intertextual, or contextual, environment: “Any print text is a product not just of an individual author’s mind, but also of the oral and published statements that the author has encountered” (W. Belcher 214).

The Iliad, as Martin Hammond believes, may be the “cornerstone of Western civilisation” (7), but historian James McLachlan suggests a vital aspect of the American neoclassical performance: the “Ciceronian Toga” was so central to Revolutionary War–era American iconography that it could be worn by a speaker who made “virtually no references to the classics” in a 1775 address and yet invoke in the “conscious and subconscious minds of his audience what might be called the ‘cultural code’” or “classical code” (82–84). Such a “cornerstone” is not only a “classical code” but also a “root metaphor,” a term used by anthropologists like Victor Turner and Sandra Barnes to describe how the concept behind a word may serve as the etymological underpinning for a broad range of cultural performances. Though tension between the ancients/Old Europe and the New World creates complications and forces us to recalibrate this model to account for its performative adaptability, Homer, like the toga, performs along a spectrum running from the conscious to the subconscious: from explicit references (e.g., Achilles and his heel, Odysseus’ odyssey), to explicit and implicit “utterances” from material symbols like togas and recreations of the Trojan Horse (e.g., the Trojan Horse Internet viruses and countless Trojan Horse reproductions) to the metaphors of the collective unconscious, a genetic commonality shared by all humans and generalized as epic or epical, but rooted in Homer as part of the West’s social contract.³

Perhaps because Homeric aesthetics and race, sex/gender, and class problems in America are so obvious, few scholars have bothered to approach Homer as a performance in which narrative is just one of numerous elements in the storytelling we may better apprehend by studying epic performance instead of making assumptions about myth from the Iliad and Odyssey narratives or archetypes. Indeed, what need for study of other epics if, as Aristotle first indicated in Poetics and literary theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin and Northrop Frye accepted, “Homer was the first to use all of the [epic’s formal] elements in a completely satisfactory way” (Bakhtin, “Epic” 39)?⁴

Fortunately, recent transnational theories and work on traditional African epics disprove this Aristotelian fallacy. The modern, narrative-based Homeric archetype may be too obvious and unambiguous, but the epic performance and its relationship to the novel and society are not. If Homer and the European literary tradition, which have been too transnational as far as West Africa is concerned since the mid-fifteenth century, are the foundational paradigms for Western literature and much of its civilization, imagine the monkey-wrench thrown into this ages-old universal if, out of the heart of darkness, the Congo, there comes an epic performance not associated with conquest? What if another, performed in present-day Nigeria, hails from a matrilineal society featuring a supreme Goddess? And what, finally, if there exists a third extant epic performance tradition in Senegambia, one whose imperialistic past has itself long fallen to the capriciousness of Fate to become an epic of ethnic unity in this conquered, colonized, and then post-colonial region?

Such are the Mwindo Epic, Ozidi Saga, and Sunjata Epic traditions, none of which is imperialistic now; the Ozidi Saga never belonged to an empire, and the Banyanga have never been conquest-oriented, though their Mwindo, in many respects, is more epical and mythological than the others and is realistic enough to recognize the potentiality—salutary and cataclysmic—of epic within humanity. Simultaneously full of epic potency and yet toothless, the binaries represented by these epics collapse in a number of ways helpful to us. They provide actual examples of how epic mythology is performed, the role of the individual body and the body-politic, the place of mind and body, a perspective on gender not obfuscated by the rise of nation-states and bourgeois hyper-individualism, and, perhaps most instructively, lessons beyond the “epics are bad because you do bad things to ‘other’ people” paradigm. Beyond battlefield endeavors of the Heroic Age scholars easily dismiss, these epics speak to and perform the self-victimization of the individual in full Trojan War mode and, more importantly, in an ontological frame in which the martial has become civic norm.

In short, these epics have bad-ass protagonists and antagonists, males and females, but no existing empire—or even past will-to-empire in some cases. What is the common element, if any, that these performances can convey to us in the Homer-centric literary tradition that, in fact, is all too full of performative folkness, though most classics scholars could/would never admit it? The answer to this performance-related question, I argue, is the transnational frame, useful, especially for those of West/Central African descent in the Americas, as a form of New Epic Studies that has as its object of study the epic performance in the diaspora. Thinking broadly about epic and novel and “planetary modernisms,” as Wai Chee Dimock’s work encourages us to do, and the absolute distance of Homeric narrative from Homeric performance Gregory Nagy has brilliantly excavated, puts Homer in the diasporic New World space just as surely as the Mwindic-Ozidic-Sunjatic (“MOS”) tradition is part of the African Diaspora.

The MOS-epic speaking-performance here is not top-down, greatness trickling green vitality down to the mouth-open and head-empty demos, or even the call-and-response staple of Africana studies, but a tricky call-and-be-called-out. “On with the story, man!” and “Tell it on, man!” the aged Okabou Ojobolo, storyteller par excellence, is repeatedly called-out to do by his jocular auditor-participants.⁵ It’s enough stress to make a strong man, not to mention a seventy-something-old fellow like Ojobolo, hard pressed to hold his water. His sweating is a rather nominal part of his performance, which includes, not surprisingly, rather frequent sprints to the Old Bard’s room.

The revolutionary, nonmilitaristic comeuppance of this jocular episode is lost if literariness, Europeanness, and Homeric epic are established as given universals. The leakiness is not just a personal weakness and response, but allusion to a greater threat seldom addressed: the ecological, green dimension of myth that speaks not only for us but to and against us.

The methodological urgency guiding this study of epic performance should be all too clear: “Everything,” Walter Benjamin notes in seeking to define allegory, is relevant when it comes to comprehending the epic performance in a given society (233). The challenge for would-be traditional African epic performance experts who believe, like myself, that epic heroics can be positive and spiritually salutary, is extreme; it requires one to balance artistry with structure/function and resist an apolitical insistence on epic artistry, with an attendant sense of supremacy, and the reduction or dismissal of African artistry, creativity, and higher thinking faculties to fit into an anthropologist’s typology of ritual.

For an African Americanist studying the epic performance, where the social epic of slavery and racism is real and now, everything is valuable. I see in the notion of nyama—a soul force of West African epic cre...