Tricksters
Jim Cheney (in the Shadow of Civilization)
In this paper I examine themes of irony and alienation
endemic to the West and suggest that some of the tricksters so pervasive in
indigenous thought speak to this condition of alienation. In relation to this
theme I might mention one appropriation of indigenous thought specifically
intended to further Western cultural projects that I am particularly concerned
to avoid. Sean Kane, in Wisdom of the Mythtellers, addresses this temptation
toward appropriation exactly when he says:
Vulnerable to the lure of ancient
meaning . . . we can see too quickly in myth a release from our alienation. . .
. [But] this redemptive promise is offered, not by an ancient humanity living
within the earth’s allowances, but by a more recent agricultural humanity,
continuous with our own, which has reinterpreted all other forms of mythic
experience in the context of its own redemptive vision. . . . We forget that
all the work that various peoples have done—all the work that peoples must
do—to live with the Earth on the Earth’s terms is pre-empted by the dream of
transcendence.
Echoing contrasting themes that I will develop,
Kane continues: “What the mythtellers and the oral poets know is that truth
cannot be captured in a solitary idea. . . . It tumbles about in the polyphonic
stories told by the animals and birds and mountains and rivers and trees . . .
in the play of exchanges among them” (255).
The West: Irony and Alienation
In
his New Science (published in 1744), Giambattista Vico offers a theory
of the development and decline of human institutions “governed by the law of
entropy” (as Robert Pogue Harrison puts it in his remarkable study, Forests:
The Shadow of Civilization, the title of which informed the title of my
paper and upon which I draw freely in this section):
[O]nce the mind fully develops its
powers of abstraction, critical reason becomes ironic. Reflecting on the
pieties and customs of the past, irony discovers that they were based on errors
and arbitrary beliefs. Thus a consciousness that has reached the stage of irony
tends to repudiate the authority of tradition as lacking in either necessity or
justification. An ever greater ironic distance from the past leads to
skepticism about the institutions that had hitherto “preserved humanity”. . . .
If such irony follows its course toward unrestrained cynicism, it can create
the conditions for a new barbarism at the heart of the enlightened city of man.
Vico calls it the “barbarism of reflection.” (Harrison 11)
Such peoples,
Vico says, “have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own
private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride.
. . . Thus . . . they live . . . in a deep solitude of spirit” (Vico §1106). It is
the development of this ironic sensibility and its attendant mood of alienation
from both tradition and the earth that we now trace.
As
Sean Kane has argued: “When civilization gains a greater hardness of purpose .
. . the world of human effort is imagined to be pitted against a world of
shadowy forces ‘out there’. . . . There is a paradox building up here. It
involves an uncontrollable otherness that needs to be continually invoked as
the necessary opposite to human order. In such a contest between the human will
and . . . nature, the stage is set for the Greek tragedies” (239). This fateful
contest plays itself out in Greek tragedy and subsequent Greek philosophy.
Early
in its history something very like the indigenous conception of “prehuman flux”
(Luckert: Chapter VII), in which all animals (including humans) spoke the same
language and could don one another’s coats at will, is present in pre-Socratic
materialist philosophy as what Harrison calls a “preformal kinship of all
creation” (26). This kinship is given a tragic twist, however:
In the most extreme versions of
pre-Socratic materialism, the mere fact of coming into being, or assuming form,
entails a tragic estrangement from the source of being. The oldest fragment of
Western philosophy, attributed to Anaximander, expresses the doctrine in a
wondrous sentence: “Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass
away according to the order of necessity; for they must pay penalty and be
judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.” (27)
Mythologically,
the goddess Artemis “is the agent both of metamorphosis and the guardian of
nature’s mysterious matrix of forms” (26), while Dionysos, “the mask of
Artemis,” “is her emissary in the human world” (30). When Dionysos appears,
“the city loses its mind. Piety, laws, and the civic order break down before
his epiphany” (33), “all becomes indefinite in the Dionysian frenzy, for
Dionysos, like Artemis, liquidates the boundaries of form” (34). Dionysos
appears in Euripides’ The Bacchae “as the god who comes deliberately to
unbind all that civic law binds together” (36). This opposition between civic
order and “nature’s mysterious matrix” expresses itself in Greek thought as the
tragic: “Tragedy . . . was a reminder that every founding law is also a fatal
transgression—a transgression of some other law. Such is the essence of
polytheism: a plurality of laws laying equal claim to legitimacy, often in
strife with each other” (64).
Tragedy, in turn, gave way, Harrison argues,
to the triumphalistic claims of
Socratic philosophy—its love of an abstract, nontragic wisdom that looked to
contemplation—not Dionysian suffering—for its fulfillment. Turning against the
vegetative and animal origins of life, Socrates idealized and formalized the
essence of truth. . . . Whereas earthly forms had previously been seen to arise
from the primordial, preformal matrix of nature, they now were seen to descend
or derive from an ideal realm of disembodied form. This was the sort of
idealism that turned Socrates into one of the greatest apologists of the
city—its institutional abstraction from nature. (38)
The
idealization of form, then, is a response to a tragically-conceived
relationship between form and “nature’s mysterious matrix.” In contrast to this
conception of existence as fundamentally tragic, Joseph Meeker has pointed out
that the realism of comedy is closer to the “biological circumstances of
life” (Meeker 38) than is the idealism of tragedy and the idealism of the Greek
philosophy that followed.
Exploring what he calls “the comedy of survival,” Meeker notes that
structures in nature . . . reveal
organizational principles and processes which closely resemble the patterns
found in comedy. Productive and stable ecosystems are those which minimize
destructive aggression, encourage maximum diversity, and seek to establish
equilibrium among their participants—which is essentially what happens in
literary comedy. Biological evolution itself shows all the flexibility of comic
drama and little of the monolithic passion peculiar to tragedy. . . . Like
comedy, mature ecosystems are cosmopolitan. Whatever life forms may exist seem
to have an equal right to existence, and no individual needs, prejudices, or
passions give sufficient cause to threaten the welfare of the ecosystem
structure as a whole. Necessity, of course, is real. All must eat and in turn
be eaten, storms must come and go, and injustices must occur when so many
rightful claimants contend. But that is just the point: Comedy and ecology are
systems designed to accommodate necessity and to encourage acceptance of it,
while tragedy is concerned with avoiding or transcending the necessity in order
to accomplish the impossible. (41, 43-4)
Tragic idealism
is maladaptive, whereas comic realism is tuned to biological existence. As we
shall see in some indigenous peoples’ trickster narratives, comic realism, in
one of its moods, is
characteristic of many indigenous cultures.
Tragedy
gave way to idealism and, in its wake, the Christian tradition, in which “the
law of a single, universal God holds sway over the totality of creation. As a
result this law has only its own shadow to fear. The Christian revolution in
the West puts an end to tragedy as the highest form of wisdom, for Christianity
(like Platonism) promises a happy ending” (Harrison 64). With the rise to
dominance of monotheism, polyvocality (whether tragically or comically
conceived) is silenced. There is only the One Law and its outcast shadow, with
its critical, dialectical and, above all, ironic voice. Discordant voices live
in the shadow of the One Law.
This
“monotheism” can take a secular as well as a religious form. In the
secular world the One Law of “monotheism” takes the form of an Enlightenment
conception of the One Truth. Epistemology bends its efforts toward the search
for certainty, the method which will bring to light the One Truth, in
the shadow of which live prejudice, “myth,” “tradition,” superstition, the many
voices of polyvocal worlds with their sense of multiple truths. The voice of
irony achieves its apotheosis in the Enlightenment, the post-Christian era,
“broadly defined,” by Harrison, “in terms of historical detachment from the
past” (107). In “the shadow of Enlightenment ideology,” Harrison says, we find
“the ghost of irony . . . irony as the trope which . . . holds sway over the
post-Christian era as a whole. Irony is the trope of detachment” (108).
The
One Truth is projected away from the past, from tradition, and onto the future,
just as the One God is projected away from the many voices of this earth. We
live on a timeline which detaches us from the present and the earth, in an
uneasy tension between the untruth of the past and the Truth of the future, in
the mood of irony, detachment. “Detachment from the past . . . culminates in
one way or another with detachment from the earth. . . . Western civilization
has decided to promote institutions of dislocation in every dimension of social
and cultural existence. The international hegemony of these
institutions—metropolis, economy, media, ideology—has led to an aggravated confusion
about what it means to dwell on the earth” (198-9).
The
mood of irony generates at one and the same time, as two sides of the same
coin, moral idealism (as opposed to moral realism) and a corrosive
“barbarism of reflection.” Moral idealism is linked by Harrison to the timeline
of ironic detachment by way of the notion of the One Truth: “Worshippers of the
light, believers in ideas, lovers of the open horizon—these strong and
indomitable Western races subdued the forests long ago. Now Western Enlightenment
spreads abroad, bringing its light to places that have yet to conquer the
darkness. The light of that torch is fueled by morality—the European virtues of
faith, heroism, and self-sacrifice” (134). But this is the “light” of a false
dawn, merely one of the inflections of Vico’s “barbarism of reflection,” for
it, too, feeds on irony and detachment: “[T]here is nothing else to feed on at
this extremity of knowledge. Irony is the innermost truth of a civilization
that knows how to lie to itself about itself” (141). “The barbarism of
reflection entails deceit, the ‘soft words’ of irony. Veils of benevolent
rhetoric conceal treacherous intentions” (137).
Much is at stake here. The One Law
of Truth brings with it detachment from tradition and an ironic relationship to
the present. In the condition of ironic detachment the dwelling place of Truth,
of Enlightenment, is the future. Or, as an inflection of this, we dwell in the
mood of nostalgia, the search for a lost Truth (156). Either way, the
Enlightenment mood is fundamentally that of a search for origins or
foundations, whether they be in an edenic past or utopian future, or in the
timeless transcendence of God or Reason—both understood as the One Truth. The
search for one’s “roots” (in this sense) is of a piece with the search for the
“foundations” of knowledge. The present is radically out of joint with both
past and future, and so the search is for redemption, redemption from the
shadows into the light of the One Truth. The quest is ineluctably monotheistic.
Tricksters in the Mood of Irony
We
might expect that Euro-American readings of trickster literature would reflect
projections from the cultural contexts from which these readings emerge; and so
they do. It is the purpose of the present section to indicate something of the
Enlightenment flavor of much of the analysis of trickster literature. In a
later section I will suggest a reading more in line with post-Enlightenment (or
post-Modern) philosophy.
A
close reading of the literature on tricksters shows, I think, that they are
most often read through the lens of Enlightenment conceptions of Truth and
historical evolution or devolution. Drawing extensively on the work of Franchot
Ballinger, I focus here on one example—namely, that of the assimilation of
tricksters to the picaro that figures in Western picaresque novels. This, as
Ballinger notes, is part of a wider tendency to use the term ‘trickster’ in
reference to “certain popular culture heroes and Euro-American literary characters
as well: the Romantic outlaw, the con man, and particularly the fictional
picaro” (1991-2: 21).
“To
be sure,” Ballinger says,
there are general similarities
between Trickster and the picaro that make them appear to be blood brothers:
both are heroes of adventures recounted episodically; both are roguish
travelers whose transgressions against moral and civil strictures place them in
marginal relationship to their societies; both are said to be ambiguous
figures; and both seem to serve satirical ends. However, there are such
fundamental differences between the two, growing from their respective
cultures’ ontologies, and, of course, social configurations, that the
similarities pale and it is clear that we are looking at two quite different
characters. (1991-2: 21)
The
social marginality of both tricksters and picaros (in addition to their comic
character, of course) is the link between the two for Western authors. This
turns out to be a tenuous link, however, for “the characters’ marginality is of
quite different sorts and the humor is thus directed to different ends”
(1991-2: 21).
The
prevailing mood of the picaresque novel is irony. Picaresque novels are satires
of the failings of particular historical societies. The picaro is either
a reflection of (embodies) faults of the society—from which he has been
marginalized because society refuses to believe, or cannot see, that the
picaro’s failings are but a reflection of more general social failings—or
the picaro is “foil rather than . . . mirror” (1991-2: 22) of a corrupt
society, and “represents a promise of a superior moral order and harmony”
(1991-2: 23). “Given these qualities,” Ballinger says, “there is a disquieting
mixture of cynicism and idealism in many stories of the European picaresque
tradition” (1991-2: 26). Cynicism and idealism—traits central to the Age of
Irony we examined in the last section. “[T]he marginal picaro creates ambiguity
in a society that . . . cannot endure ambiguity” (1991-2: 28). The picaro,
Ballinger says, “is the victim of the selective moral-ontological breeding
attending the Western Judaeo-Christian search for moral certitude” (1991-2:
36). The picaro clearly roams in the shadow of the One Law. The mood of irony
prevails in the search for Truth.
Tricksters
stand in high contrast to the ironic figure of the picaro; the marginality of
tricksters evokes a vastly different world. Tricksters are as far removed from
the picaro as indigenous worlds are from the Western world of irony and Truth
Harrison describes.
To
begin with, tricksters are not satirical figures in the way the picaro is.
Defining satire as “the use of humor and irony to expose folly and vice so as
to effect change in human behavior” (1991-2: 23), Ballinger argues persuasively
that (contrary to Radin and Ricketts) trickster behavior is not to be
understood as satirical of either shamans or social norms and institutions. The
humor, rather, is directed at the trickster (and the trickster in us).
Ridicule is directed, for example, at the trickster who “would imitate without
the right—whether by initiation or sacred character—shamans or any other being
with mysterious powers” (1991-2: 23-4).
“Most
importantly,” Ballinger says, “we can see in the Native American trickster an
openness to life’s multiplicity and paradoxes largely missing in the modern
Euro-American moral tradition” (1991-2: 21). Tricksters do not exist in the
shadow of tribal searches for certitude in social norms and institutions,
satirizing in an ironic mode its benighted attempts to achieve these goals.
There is no closure in trickster stories: tricksters remain marginal, they do
not exist in some shadow that will pass when Truth is achieved. As Ballinger
puts it, tricksters “remain structurally and mythically marginal” (1991-2: 29).
“What makes Trickster mythically powerful is that he embodies all, reveals all
raw reality. He has the power of reality in his hands, prodigal though he is,
for like the sacred center, all flows in to him and in his travels he touches
all directions” (1991-2: 34).
The
other side of this coin that “reveals all raw reality” is that tricksters
define “the psychic-moral limits and nature of our humanity” (1991-2: 26). Far
from the cynicism and idealism that characterizes picaresque tales, is the
“cautionary and realistic” (1991-2: 26; see also Cordova) nature of the
expectations for people carried by trickster tales.
There
is, nonetheless, some point in likening the picaro to tricksters in that this
serves to contrast a tragic conception of human existence with what Joseph
Meeker has called the “comedy of survival.” What we see in Ballinger’s analysis
is that the comedy of survival, so nicely typified in biological systems, plays
itself out quite differently in various cultural settings. Cultures get the
tricksters they deserve, so to speak. The ironic mood of Enlightenment
alienation and its quest for foundations brought forth the picaro. Although the
cultures in which they occur are vastly different, tricksters and picaros are
recognizably related (though far from identical), as Meeker’s sketch of the
picaro shows:
The picaro’s birth is generally
obscure, often illegitimate, suggesting both his lack of social status and the
absence of any sense of tradition or continuity with the past. The chaotic
social environment in which he grows up has no niche prepared for him, and he
soon discovers that he must create whatever success he can from the rawest of
materials at hand. His experiences quickly awaken him to the realization that
no one will help him, that there is no obvious plan or order in the world, and
that his survival or failure will depend upon his own inventiveness. . . . The
picaro notes the chaotic complexity of society . . . , but he reasons that he
must meet it by becoming more complex himself, not by seeking simplicity.
(88-9)
It would be interesting and
enlightening to study in detail the various tricksters that find their way into
the literature of very different cultures. The stress in such studies should,
however, be on the differences between these tricksters (and hence the
differences between the cultures), the ways in which the “comedy of survival”
plays itself out in differing cultures.
Oral Traditions and the Postmodern
In a
recent interview, Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Chippewa) says that “Native
American storytellers were the first postmodernists” (McCaffery and Marshall:
53).
Vizenor’s point is that indigenous peoples in oral traditions were responsive
to the situated nature of knowledge. It was, in fact, literacy that
pretended to lift knowledge out of its context, producing timeless,
context-independent Truths (cf. Ong). Responding to this, contemporary reader
response theory, which evolved within postmodern literary theory, argues that
all texts, even those that pretend to the greatest objectivity, are heavily
contextualized. Even the so-called raw data collected by an anthropologist from
an informant is what it is in part as a function of the interview conditions
within which the ‘raw data’ are collected. Reader response theory adds the
reader into the mix as another dimension of the context which shapes meaning.
Meaning doesn’t simply preexist in the text for the reader to extract. Meaning emerges
as a function of the dynamic interaction of reader and text (See Sarris).
If
Vizenor is right in thinking that oral traditions resemble postmodernist views
to a far greater extent than they resemble modernist views (and I think he is),
my suggestion is that precisely because postmodernism developed against the
foil of modernism, whereas traditional, premodern cultures did not buy into
anything like modernism —the search for Truth and the mood of alienation and
irony within which this search was (is) conducted—the differences (as well as
the similarities, of course) between contemporary postmodernism and “premodern
postmodern” oral traditions should offer interesting insights into both.
In sections that follow I look at
two examples of ‘postmodern’ (premodern postmodern) tricksters: Taugi, the
Kalapalo psychological ‘postmodern’ trickster and Raven, the Haida ecological
‘postmodern’ trickster.
Taugi
(Kalapalo): A Psychological ‘Postmodern’
Trickster
In
this section I follow closely Ellen Basso’s ground-breaking work, In Favor
of Deceit: A Study of Tricksters in an Amazonian Society. Her study is both
valuable and (so far as I know) unique in that she places her understanding of
Kalapalo tricksters squarely within her understanding of Kalapalo culture.
Critical of both early and recent studies for focussing on themes and elements
of character, on “what makes Trickster different from others”—an approach that
leaves us “invariably restricted by a functional theory of the significance of
a few attributes of a character’s demeanor or identity[,] . . . usually the more
sensational attributes” (5)—Basso argues that we must instead attempt to
establish connections between tricksters in a culture’s stories and that
culture’s understanding of human experience and interpersonal behavior.
We have to focus attention on what
are clearly special qualities of intelligence in the actions of these
preeminently deceitful characters. . . . [T]he playful subterfuges of Kalapalo
tricksters, their wildly speculative thought, concrete inventiveness, fascination
with tinkering, and seemingly capricious and uninhibited experimentation are
often belied by the careful planning and cunning foresight that accompany their
experiments. The very attributes that make such tricksters inventive heroes and
clownish fools in the first place are, after all, natural necessities of human
intelligence, operating in practical, concrete, face-to-face relations that
people negotiate all the time. . . . (8)
Reflection on tricksters’ behavior—in particular,
tricksters’ tendency toward deceit and the creation of illusion—is at the same
time reflection on epistemological dimensions of relations between humans.
Illusionary consciousness and deceitful action “are treated by the Kalapalo as
if they were naturally, even usefully, part of the human condition, not just
exotic peculiarities of mythological characters who live in a confused and
ridiculous past” (355-6).
The Social Context of Knowledge: Validation Versus
Truth
Ellen
Basso’s study shows that, at least with respect to social, interpersonal
matters, the notion of Truth plays little if any role in Kalapalo culture. The
concept that fills the social space that Truth fills in Western culture is that
of validation. Whether in narrative dialogues or in conversations and greetings,
there occurs an ongoing process of ratification or validation of what is being
said. In storytelling situations a “responder-ratifier (‘whatsayer,’ tiitsofo)”
is an essential contributor to the development of the story as it is being told
by, for example, letting the speaker know that “the images he or she is
constructing are understood, appreciated, and agreed with,” and by changing the
direction of the story. “At the end of the story, a listener sums up what was
said, letting the narrator know . . . that he or she agrees with the narrator’s
conclusion” (234). Similarly in conversation, where, “[i]n particular, what are
affirmed are the feelings that are the motivation or specific reasons for goals
and plans, and sensory descriptions of events” (235). “Validation for the
Kalapalo is a matter of willingness to share an imagined or dreamed
configuration—a motive, plan, goal, sensory description, interpretation. To do
otherwise, to disagree, or to refuse to validate, is not so much to deny the
truth of the other person’s vision (that is, to focus in some way on the logic
of the argument) as it is to hesitate or even refuse to share that vision. Thus
it becomes an interpersonal matter” (237).
Validation is important for
reasons of social cohesion. Differences of opinion can be quickly disruptive
and, for the Kalapalo, “the ‘truth’ of the interpersonal relationship takes
precedence over the propositional truth of the parties’ statements. Another
point of view . . . threatens the basis of their society.” Through validation
“a way of life that all have agreed is worth living is perpetuated” (239).
Epistemology: Illusionary Consciousness
The
emphasis on validation rather than Truth suggests that Kalapalo epistemology
differs significantly from epistemologies closely tied to modernist conceptions
of Truth. Instructive in this regard is the Kalapalo’s attitude toward
deception in the process of validation.
The
Kalapalo term for “illusion,” “fabrication,” “deception,” “delusion,”
“slander,” “lie,” “mistake” (auginda), in contrast to Western uses of
these terms,
refers to action that imposes an
alternative sense of reality upon some subject of speech. Our sense of “lying”
revolves around our concern with propositional truth, and the violation of
conversational “sincerity.” For the Kalapalo, however, whether something
someone says is “true” or “false” is far less interesting to them than that the
statement “changes” or “hides” or “masks” something known or imagined, a matter
that the listener assumes to be shared knowledge. Also, “deception” involves
speech that . . . is unvalidated. . . . To use the word auginda thus
makes one focus less upon the propositional content of what is said . . . than
upon the fact that a different point of view or experience of an activity is
being shared and expressed in dialogical context. (242)
For the
Kalapalo, “deceit has less to do with truth or falsehood than with enactment of
an illusionary relationship. Such a relationship does not depend upon
validation and acceptance of responsibility, and may actually exist
independently of them. In other words, illusionary relationships involve
legitimate assertions of personal difference and of independence from society”
(3).
What
is at first glance puzzling and paradoxical is that even though validation is
of central cultural importance for the Kalapalo and while deceit, as we have
just noted, stands outside validation in various ways, yet the Kalapalo are
endlessly fascinated with deceit and, in fact, put a positive spin on the
notion:
[The] Kalapalo understand the
special quality of human life to be our ability to create illusions through
verbal and visual fabrications. Through these fabrications, many of the forms
and processes of experience are constituted and made intelligible. “Illusionary
consciousness” (as I call both the processes and resulting understandings) is
what makes people distinctive, accounting for their curiosity, their dreaming
and inventiveness, their sly cunning, and most of all their love of intrigue
and chicanery. While people also have a more detached, focused, anticipated,
detailed, and concretely sensory “material consciousness,” which they share
with other living forms, it is their ability to create . . . illusions that
separates humans from the rest of the natural world. (2)
This
situation is paradoxical only from the point of view of the Western conception
of the One Law (or Truth) and its shadow. Basso suggests understandings of
epistemology, self, and society for which this paradox dissolves. These
understandings also help us see the sense in which tricksters can be central
to indigenous peoples’ understandings of themselves while at the same time
wandering on the margins of social order. This characterization is certainly
true of Taugi, the most prominent trickster in Kalapalo narratives: “[Taugi’s]
actions are unratified and invalid, or even incapable of receiving validation.
. . . Taugi’s actions are therefore not developed through dialogue . . . but
monologically in his mind—or, for Kalapalo, through the spell-laden musical
mentation of the trickster’s itseketu [power]. (In other stories . . .
people are musically enchanted by Taugi, instead of being convinced or even
coerced through speech. At best, they only protest ineffectually to one
another. At worst, they are destroyed outright.)” (274). Yet Taugi is important
not only by way of contrast to important Kalapalo values but because of the centrality
of deceit and illusionary consciousness to Kalapalo society. Reality and self
are indeed multifaceted.
Basso
connects the concept of illusionary consciousness with various practices of
Kalapalo and other indigenous cultures seemingly designed to break the grip of
unified, focussed consciousness (what Basso calls “material consciousness”).
Rather than search for criteria of Truth, the Kalapalo and others look for
modes of accessing other dimensions of reality:
For the Kalapalo, the manner of
seeing influences the kind of understanding that takes place. For this reason,
they often allude to instances of material and illusionary consciousness by
using visual imagery. Thus, the fixed, direct gaze and a lively, healthy, alert
state of material consciousness are contrasted with the sideward glance and the
oblique view, dreaming, and the hallucinatory vision of the narcotized shaman
and the perilously sick, all instances of illusionary consciousness. But, more
narrowly, the activities involving illusion (and especially “deception”. . . )
are most directly associated with our ability to speak, and with the
genealogical connections between various primordial tricksters and human
beings, who have descended from them. These tricksters are, more than anything
else, verbally deceptive beings. For the Kalapalo, language is inseparable from
people’s illusionary sensibility, and especially from their ability to deceive
one another. It is the ability to speak, in other words, that makes human
relationships ambiguous. (2-3)
Basso
explicitly connects tricksters’ inconsistent, paradoxical behavior and ability
to experience inconsistency with “dissolving or scattering the self in order to
achieve a new personal understanding, a new identity” (7) that she suspects
might be involved in quests for visions and guardians. During a discussion of
the Winnebago trickster cycle collected by Radin, Basso asks,
Could there have been expectations
that during these crucial life events the world suddenly lost its normal
structure, or that a destructured world came into being, and with it the self
of the seeker became deconstructed? To what extent were the orgies of
self-abandonment connected with war-bundle rituals attempts to reclaim these
experiences of a destructured world? If we could answer these questions, we
might understand more clearly the various ways personal Winnebago events
achieved significance through the sacred trickster narratives. (8)
Here we begin
to see the importance of trickster narratives for a culture’s understanding of
itself. Basso concludes her study of Kalapalo tricksters with these words:
Most anthropologists have been
accustomed to working with an idea of a fixed psychic structure, generalized
over all situations and goals. That there are so many difficulties involved in
generalizing about tricksters has long been fascinating and perplexing.
However, if the idea of fixed psychic structure is questioned . . . then the
contradictions in the patterns of a trickster’s action need not be viewed as
anomalous or paradoxical. In fact, to the Kalapalo, those characters whose
action is stable and falls into a general pattern, whose goals and modes of
orientation to them seem not to vary, are regarded as excessively compulsive
and inflexible, and, ultimately, as failures of imagination. Pragmatic creativity
and flexibility, the ability to conceive of more than a single kind of relation
with other people, and the ability to fashion or invent a variety of thoughts
about one’s capacity as an agent, is, on the other hand, entirely human. . . .
Finally, what may appear to some to be an ambiguous sense of flux and of
indeterminacy in trickster stories can be understood more positively as a kind
of stroboscopic sense of multiple possibilities. This vision fixes in a
didactic, narrative frame the complex transiency of experience and the sense of
many different experiential worlds existing side by side. (356-7)
Closely
related to the idea of the plural self revealing the multiple dimensions of
reality—tricksters being the heightened exemplars of the scattering of the self
epistemologically necessary to access this plural universe—is Mary Douglas’s
suggestion that tricksters have “a social function of dispelling the belief
that any given social order is absolute and objective” (Doty and Hynes 21). As
William J. Hynes puts it (quoting Douglas) “Perhaps the greatest empowerment
that the trickster brings is the excitement and hope occasioned by ‘the
suggestion that any particular ordering of experience may be arbitrary and
subjective’” (212).
After
discussing the role of the clown in the Navajo Night Chant as “a test, a
challenge to order,” Barre Toelken says,
I think the
position of Coyote . . . is roughly analogous to this kind of challenge.
. . . Yellowman sees Coyote as an
important entity in his religious views precisely because he is not ordered.
He, unlike all others, experiences everything; he is, in brief, the exponent of
all possibilities. Putting this together with Yellowman’s comments . . . that
Coyote makes it possible for things to happen (or for man to envision the
possibility of certain things occurring), it seems to me that Coyote functions
in the oral literature as a symbol of that chaotic Everything within which
man’s rituals have created an order for survival. Man limits (sometimes severely)
his own participation in everything, but remains responsive to the exercise of
moral judgment on all things. Man, in ordering his life, thus uses certain
devices to help conceive of order—in this case stories which dramatize the
absence of it. The Coyote materials, then, may be seen as ways of
conceptualizing, of forming models of those abstracts which are at the heart of
Navaho religion. (230-31; see also Cheney [1995])
The
worlds of indigenous peoples are as far removed from the One Law (and its
shadow) as can be. Neither do they fall into the subtle traps of
postmodernism—which are triggered by its close proximity to the modernism it
critiques.
Postmodernism
(at least in its most influential forms) and indigenous cultures escape
modernism’s fixation on the One Truth in related but ultimately very different
ways. While for postmodernism “It’s words all the way down” and ‘truth’ (now in
small letters and scare quotes) is “negotiated,” for indigenous peoples issues
of truth don’t arise in the same metaphysical way they do in the West (whether
postmodern or modern) because for indigenous peoples “It’s world all the
way up.” Whereas for postmodernism ‘truth’ is a matter of social construction
and negotiation, for indigenous peoples truth (or the multifaceted faces of
reality) is revealed—the world from time to time reveals yet another of
its many dimensions. Reality is many masked, and is revealed in the masked,
ceremonial worlds of indigenous cultures. Masks—as deceit shows—may cover up
dimensions of reality, but more importantly, they reveal. The masked nature of
reality—and the importance of masks in indigenous cultures—is an index of
reality’s multiplicity. While for indigenous peoples the world unfolds in
multiple masks, for a postmodernist such as Richard Rorty this unfolding is
reduced to multiple “conversations of mankind.”
In
contrast to modernism, the indigenous view is that humans are epistemologically
limited not so much by error or by the world’s inaccessibility to direct
inspection as by the fact that reality is so multifaceted that we are limited
only in our imaginative (rather than metaphysical) ability to tap the
multifaceted reality that surrounds us.
“Why
tell the [Coyote] stories?” Barre Toelken asks Yellowman (Navajo).
“If my children hear them, they
will grow up to be good people; if they don’t hear them, they will turn out to
be bad.” Why tell them to adults? “Through the stories everything is made
possible.”
Why does Coyote
do all those things, foolish on one occasion, good on another, terrible on
another? “If he did not do all those things then those things would not be
possible in the world.” Yellowman thus sees Coyote . . . as an enabler whose
actions, good or bad, bring certain ideas and actions into the field of
possibility. . . . (Toelken: 221-2)
Similarly,
Ballinger says that as Trickster “violates the rules, as he gives free reign to
his multifarious personality, and as he thus shapes the world, he also shapes
human perception” (1991-2: 34). And, again:
If we non-Native Americans are
going to write and talk of Trickster’s ambiguity, it might be well to
remember—paradoxical though it seems—the term’s etymology: ambigere,
from the Latin, to wander about. Trickster wanders beyond conventional order
and among the many poles of the real world. . . . And where Trickster wanders
there is a mosaic of values and truths to experience, just as the Navajo
patient’s symbolic journey in a sing exposes him to the sources of complex
universal spiritual powers.(1991-2: 32)
[A]s he travels defying the norms,
Trickster swallows all, classifications and cracks, in his ravenous and
extravagant appetite for life. What makes Trickster mythically powerful is that
he embodies all, reveals all raw reality. He has the power of reality in his
hands, prodigal though he is, for like the sacred center, all flows into him
and in his travels he touches all directions. (Ballinger 1991-2: 34)
In
another article, Ballinger (1989) again notes the similarities between
trickster wandering narratives and other indigenous journey narratives such as
those of the Navajo. The Navajo tales follow a typical scenario; as Sam Gill
puts it:
The heroes, invariably in the
process of a journey, enter forbidden territories or violate some regulation
that is often unknown to them. As a consequence, they suffer in any number of
ways, even to almost complete annihilation. When the heroes are unable to get
out of their predicaments, mythological figures with special powers come to aid
and relieve their suffering by performing ceremonials that restore them and
also initiate the heroes into knowledge of the ceremonial ways. (25)
“Trickster’s
wanderings are both an embodiment of this pattern of mythic journeys . . . and
a comic inversion of the process” (Ballinger 1989: 17).
Tricksters
wander farther than these mythic heroes, however. The hero stories, although
they do open out on to new dimensions of reality, are linked to the
introduction of new rituals into the community. Tricksters wander into domains
that are not (except by comic inversion) brought back into the culture’s social
structure. As Basso might put it, tricksters explore dimensions of behavior
that are not, or even cannot be, validated within the culture’s social
structure. Yet tricksters’ behavior does not for that reason function merely as
a foil against which social norms are instituted, articulated, or justified.
The relationship between trickster behavior, social norms, and daily Kalapalo
life is considerably more complex than this. As we have seen, illusionary
relationships, of which Taugi is master, “involve legitimate assertions of
personal differences and of independence from society” (3) and, for the
Kalapalo at least, Taugi’s trickster attributes are “natural necessities of human
intelligence, operating in practical, concrete, face-to-face relations that
people negotiate all the time” (8; see Rice for similar comments concerning
Iktomi, spider, the Sioux trickster).
In a
culture that prizes social validation, trickster stories figure prominently in
deliberation concerning the relationship between the individual and society:
Kalapalo stories about deceit are
about how enacted emotions give meaning to particular contexts, relationships,
and goals, and thereby create several discrete points of view. . . . The
stories are extended commentaries on particular processes of awareness, not
strictly of “self,” but of the mutuality of selves, of a sense of personal
difference that nonetheless moves toward negotiation and comprehension, often
aiming toward reconciliation. Resolution is not always achieved, it is true.
More often, discrete points of view remain forever distinct and apart from each
other. The evidence of deception is of primary importance in developing this
awareness of mutuality and personal distinctiveness. The conclusion is that the
Kalapalo understand deception to be a fundamental mode of insight and
understanding in human thought. (351)
While
Taugi’s actions cannot be validated, “the destructive and unforeseen
consequences of his deceptive actions . . . seem inevitable adjuncts to his
particular kind of creative imagination” (111), an imagination that is
valued by the Kalapalo. Further, and more complexly,
While his actions can’t be validated,
there is an ambiguity to them that we see in the consequences he attributes to
them. Thatching grass is no longer easy to work with [due to Taugi’s
misanthropic behavior], but the very fact that it is now an unpleasant and
difficult material to work with makes human beings stronger, since they are
forced by necessity to work harder. It is in such hidden consequences that
Taugi’s trickster character achieves its most optimistic form of expression.
(275)
In sum: “There is a sense in these stories of reality
developed through paradox and contradiction, an emphasis on transiency and
multiple identities and powers, that suggests a skeptical view of a fixed and
invariant sensory universe, one that differs markedly from our own concern to
keep separate genuineness, naturalness, normality, honesty, and the morally
good on the one hand, and deception, falsehood, paradox, and evil on the other”
(2).
Tricksters and Culture: Comedy
Robert
Pogue Harrison, as we have seen, offers a tragic reading of pluralism, of
polytheism and polyvocality: “Tragedy . . . was a reminder that every founding
law is also a fatal transgression—a transgression of some other law. Such is
the essence of polytheism: a plurality of laws laying equal claim to
legitimacy, often in strife with each other” (64). Understanding the historical
movement from polytheism to monotheism as a movement from tragedy to comedy,
Harrison also understands comedy as essentially ironic.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition .
. . the law of a single, universal God holds sway over the totality of
creation. As a result this law has only its own shadow to fear. The Christian
revolution in the West puts an end to tragedy as the highest form of wisdom,
for Christianity (like Platonism) promises a happy ending. You have only to
choose it, by turning to the light of God. In its insistence that the happy or
sorrowful outcome (damnation or salvation) depends upon free will and no longer
upon a fatal order of necessity . . . , Christianity effectively destroys the
ideological basis of tragedy. . . . A new “comedy” pervades the ideology of law
in all its instantiations. (64)
Comedy, in
Harrison’s portrayal of it, appears in the shadow of the One Law and is
“essentially ironic, dialectical, and critical” (64). It is nonetheless comedy
because the One Law (whether secular or sacred) promises a happy ending.
But
just as there is a pluralism, a polyvocality, that is not tragic—
namely, that of the worlds of indigenous peoples—so there is a comedy that is
not ironic in Harrison’s sense—namely, that which does not live in the shadow
of the One Law, in the mood of detachment and alienation. This is Meeker’s
“comedy of survival,” a comedy at work in biological systems as well as in the
worlds of indigenous peoples and embodied in their tricksters.
Indigenous
clowns and tricksters engage in a kind of deconstructive burlesque in
relationship to the prevailing social structure (Cheney 1995). But this
burlesque, as Ballinger (1991-2) has argued, is not to be understood as
critical satire. It is, among other things, a celebration of
polyvocality, a denigration of the presumption to Truth that social structures
can easily slide into if not subjected to the mocking burlesque of clowns and
tricksters. As Yellowman said, “Through the [Coyote] stories everything is made
possible,” “If [Coyote] did not do all those things, then those things would
not be possible in the world” (Toelken 221). Tricksters reveal the masked,
polyvocal nature of reality to us, the comedy of survival in a
many-voiced world. Clowns and tricksters release perception from the grip of
the conventional.
Comedy is not a philosophy of
despair or pessimism, but one which permits people to respond with health and
clear vision despite the miseries the world has to offer. Its mode is immediacy
of attention, adaptation to rapidly changing circumstances, joy in small things
. . . the love of life and kinship with all its parts, the sharpening of
intelligence, complexity of thought and action, and strategic responsiveness to
novel situations. It permits people to accept themselves and the world as they
are, and it helps us to make the best of the messes around us and within us.
(Meeker 11)
We
live within multiple masked or ceremonial worlds, multiple songs of the world.
This is true of cultures generally, but is perhaps more obvious in the case of
indigenous peoples, given Western fixation on the One Law. Leslie Marmon Silko
expresses the ceremonial nature of the world this way in her novel Ceremony:
“But you know,
grandson, this world is fragile.”
The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies
of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs. . . . It
took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists
alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story
about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that
went with being human
. . . and this demanded great patience and love.
(36-7)
Language,
when well-wrought and mindful, gracious, is at once a distillation of
experience and the creation of delicate and ceremonial worlds, human worlds
within the larger and defining dimensions of more-than-human worlds.
“Spirituality and artistic creativity are not special powers provided so that
humans can transcend the natural world, but features of human biological
development useful for connecting humanity more deeply with the world” (Meeker
155).
Commenting on the autobiographical narrative of Iron Teeth, a Northern Cheyenne
woman, Peter Nabokov says that “her testimony seemed to exemplify how a
lifetime of taking spoken words as seriously as breaking horses or scraping
hides might economize the memory toward some transcendent narrative clarity”
(147).
Our
uses of language are actions, practices within, and generative of, ceremonial
worlds. Western culture emphasizes the information content of language and
story and hence an understanding of language as mirror of the world. But
language is primarily action, generative of the worlds within which we live,
breathe, and have our being, our identity.
We must take care what worlds we generate.
Diamond
Jenness reports a Carrier Indian of the Bulkley River as saying: “The white man
writes everything down in a book so that it might not be forgotten; but our
ancestors married the animals, learned their ways, and passed on the knowledge
from one generation to another” (540). What does “knowledge” mean here? It
means that Carrier Indians pass down the means—the stories, the ceremonies, the
rituals—of creating, or recreating, the worlds, the ceremonial worlds, within
which the ancestors lived. These stories, ceremonies, and rituals, when written
down, come to be understood as information. The white man wants to know what
beliefs are encoded in the utterances of indigenous peoples, he wants to treat
these utterances as mirrors of indigenous worlds. But the utterances function
primarily to produce these worlds. The white man is concerned with
ontology, correct descriptions of indigenous worlds. Indigenous people are
concerned with right relationship to those beings that populate the ceremonial
world; indigenous people are concerned with mindfulness.
The
ceremonial nature of cultural reality tends toward the ideal, or idealized,
however. Tricksters complement this ceremonial world and reveal its masked
quality. Tricksters wander outside masked reality, illuminating it, making it real.
As Ballinger puts this, “what is true in ceremony is not necessarily true in
the exigencies of the human condition. . . . [M]odel[s] of cosmic order . . .
must compete existentially with the concrete, daily experience of paradox,
precariousness and the threat of disorder. . . . Ritual may be a model of
belief;
Trickster, on the other hand, is a comic dramatization of experience flying in
the face of ritual” (1991-2: 30-1). Utopias or ceremonies without tricksters
are deadly idealisms. For this reason, we may suppose, tricksters are built
right into the heart of indigenous cultures.
In the West, however, tricksters (such as they are) are split off—they live,
like the picaro, in the shadow of the One Law.
The
Kalapalo perception of tricksters is, it seems to me, typical of many
indigenous tricksters. Taugi represents the full range of human
possibilities—possibilities that humans must ponder, contend with, and
sometimes make use of.
Taugi’s
pedigree is complex and varied. Taugi creates human beings; they are in his
lineage. Taugi’s grandfather is the creator Kwatingi, a person of “shiningly
creative, imaginative intelligence” (Basso 23), an exemplar of the central
Kalapalo values, “funita (‘loving,’ ‘cherishing,’ ‘compassionate’) and ifutisu
(‘respecting’) an ideal of inner control, dignity, and generosity” (24).
Taugi’s father, on the other hand, is Nitsuegi, the Black Jaguar, who
“represents in the extreme the creature the Kalapalo consider most dangerous to
human beings” (26). Taugi (and his twin brother), then
strikingly combine the human
attributes passed on to their mother from . . . Kwatingi (creative imagination,
technological inventiveness, compassion, love, respect) with the violent
character of their self-centered, unsympathetic father. The result is
creativity and invention that can be extended sympathetically to people, but
which can as often be steeped in self-centered violence. The twins’ moral
sensibilities are ambiguous, or more exactly, they refuse to take
responsibility for what they do and seem to feel no guilt. While they act
against powerful beings in favor of humanity, from their activities arise many
bothersome things (mosquitoes, menstruation, material decay) and all that is
dangerous, even dreadful, about human life (hatred between even the closest of
kin, witchcraft, the permanence of death). (26)
Humans, then
“are animal and mortal, mobile, creative, and compassionate. They exhibit an
intense capacity for eroticism, which not only enables them to reproduce, but
which is the source of some of their deepest conflicts. Human beings are verbal
and therefore especially deceptive and capable of violent and destructive
malevolence” (27).
Kwatingi’s
presence in stories of him may be “like an island, calming, comforting, and
healing, in a sea of turbulent episodes” (82), but he does not encompass all
that the Kalapalo, as human beings, aspire to. Taugi, trickster, who “acts
mainly through concealment and deception, through verbal and visual
subterfuges” (183) is in their blood as well.
It is as a small child . . . that
Taugi adopts the most complex and implacably self-contained personality. Here
he shows an acute self-consciousness: he acquires names, puts himself forward
by demanding to be seen and heard, engages in outrageous acts of revenge and
invents occult ways to make people die, and, more positively, penetrates the
deceits of others. Sometimes, too, he forgets his goals, thinks in a disorderly
way, tries out alternative roles, and otherwise seems flighty and
unpredictable. It is thus in his role of child that he appears the most
uncompromisingly unique, destructive, and disorderly. The older he is, the less
directly violent and antagonistic he is, but he is apparently also less capable
of revealing other people’s deceits to themselves—less aggressively insightful,
perhaps. (184)
The Kalapalo
perceive (and realistically accept) an inherent split in human nature “between
selfishness and whimsicality on the one hand and sympathy, sincerity, and trust
on the other” (214).
Although
“Taugi’s speech and action can’t actually be validated at all because he exists
outside the sphere of human social life” and his action is often “one-sided,
senseless destruction that doesn’t even benefit the destroyer” (275), yet, as
we have seen, there are often hidden consequences that benefit humans—make them
stronger for example—that would not be envisioned in any utopia we could invent
that did not involve the tensions and messiness that drive human lives (and
ecosystems). “The destructiveness and unforeseen consequences of [Taugi’s]
deceptive actions . . . seem inevitable adjuncts to his particular kind of
creative imagination” (111).
We
have also seen that for the Kalapalo “illusionary relationships involve
legitimate assertions of personal difference and of independence from society”
(3), an awareness of “the mutuality of selves, of a sense of personal
difference that nonetheless moves toward negotiation and comprehension” (351).
Deception is “a fundamental mode of insight and understanding” for the Kalapalo
(35).
[F]avoring and even welcoming
deception—recognizing that it is inseparable from being human—is important to
the successful maintenance of Kalapalo life. This is because deception helps
Kalapalo circumvent institutional order and intimidating roles and relationships;
it encourages skepticism of anything purporting to be fixed, rule-bounded,
dogmatic, and coercive; and, thus, it allows resistance to the status quo. At
the same time, the mythological favoring of deceit suggests a variety of ways
to resist conformity, showing Kalapalo there are ways of laughing at themselves
when they most need to appear to be adhering scrupulously to the moral order.
(356)
A “positive
tolerance of illusionary consciousness and deceptive action” (355) characterizes
Kalapalo culture.
Illusion
and deception are even important in lovemaking: “heightened eroticism seems
related to a ‘trickster’ form of sexuality, characteristic of Kalapalo, in
which things are never what they seem” (295-6).
In Basso’s final words, “what may
appear to some to be an ambiguous sense of flux and of indeterminacy in
trickster stories can be understood more positively as a kind of stroboscopic
sense of multiple possibilities. This vision fixes in a didactic, narrative
frame the complex transiency of experience and the sense of many different
experiential worlds existing side by side” (357).