Lewis Hyde, "Trickster Makes this World"

Trickster Makes this World (1998) is a semi-famous book about twentieth-century art, 90 percent of which focuses on the worldwide myth of the Trickster. The book has been extravagantly praised, but not by anthropologists or folklorists; it is artists and writers who love it. I am enough of a folklorist and anthropologist to understand why it might bother academic researchers – and, I imagine, storytellers rooted in Native traditions – but taken for what it is, it is quite wonderful.

I can remember first encountering traditional trickster tales and being both baffled and disgusted. In some traditions, stories of characters like Raven, Coyote, and Rabbit are the most holy lore, told only in winter, in complete darkness. Some of them concern first things: creation, the separation of earth from heaven, the origin of death. And yet, they are bizarre, ridiculous, disgusting, and immoral. In various stories Coyote plucks out his eyes and sends them for a walk, eats his way out from under a mountain of shit, burns his own anus when he mistakes it for a monster's mouth, lies, steals, cheats, disobeys direct orders from the high gods, and violates every taboo. Coyote is a creature of monstrous appetites for food, sex, and fun, frequently unable to restrain his desires. There is a whole class of stories in which somebody tells Coyote, "but above all, don't do X," whereupon Coyote immediately does X.

Why would sacred stories of cosmic origins be mixed up with such nonsense?

When Christian missionaries encountered such stories, first in Africa and then around the world, they often associted Trickster deities with Satan. They weren't just demonizing the enemy, but had understood something vital about these myths. In the Christian tradition it is the temptation of Adam and Eve by the Serpent that sets human history in motion, breaking the perfect sterility of life in Eden and launching us onto the path of birth, death, creation, and destruction. Many Tricksters do the same. As the missionaries saw, they played the part of Satan, evoking and invoking the desire that condemns humanity to life in a world where we can walk freely, but which is walled around with time and death.

One way to think about life is to imagine a balance between order and chaos; too much of either is intolerable. Other gods have a strong tendency toward order. Trickster upsets their orderly systems, breaks their rigid rules, and helps turn a perfect but perfectly boring universe into the crazy one we know. 

To Hyde, this is what avant garde art does. It shakes up our world by breaking rules and pointing the way from sterile stasis toward something more vibrant and interesting. Some modern artists, notably Picasso, have embraced this role and publicly identified with the Trickster. I wrote here several years ago that I see Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei as a Trickster figure, joking his way through a profound challenge to Chinese authority.

In one interesting section Hyde asks why avant garde art has often been criticized for obscenity. Systems of order, he writes, are often inscribed on bodies; the way people dress and carry themselves is often seen as the most powerful expression of social control:

It should by now be easier to see why there will always be art that uncovers the body, and artists who speak shamelessly, even obscenely. All social structures do well to anchor their rules of conduct in the seemingly simple inscrption of the body, so that only after I have covered my privates am I allowed to show my face to the world and have a public life. The rules of bodily decorum usually imply that the cosmos depends on the shame we feel about our bodies. But sometimes the lesson is a lie, and a cunningly self-protecting one at that, for to question it requires self-exposure and loss of face, and who would want that? Well, trickster would, as would all those who find that they cannot fashion a place for themselves in the world until they have spoken against collective slience. We certainly see this – not just the speaking out but the self-exposure – in Allen Ginsberg. . . . To the degree that other orders are linked to the way the body is inscribed, and to the degree that the link is sealed by rules of silence, the first stuttering questioning of those orders must always begin by breaking the seal and speaking about the body. (p. 172)

That's a typical bit of Hyde on art, using the cosmic significance of Trickster's ludicrous amorality to deepen our understanding of art from which many people have recoiled.

Another theme Hyde finds in Trickster stories is a dialogue about power, fate, and divinity. Many West Africans, and their New World descendants, use divination via lots to ascertain the will of the gods. But in many stories, the gods themselves resort to divination. What are they consulting, if not themselves? In the African traditions, divination was created by the Trickster figure – Eshu, Legba – when he separated the human and divine worlds. The most important conduit between heaven and earth, therefore, passes through the unreliable hands of the Trickster. Tricksters represent the limits on the Gods' power; they can do many things, but not control Raven, Coyote, or Eshu. This is why Trickster figures are abhorent to the Abrahamic faiths, which cannot accept any limit on God's majesty, and do not admit that there any situations when divine commandments should be disobeyed.

But if the Gods are good, and all powerful, and love us, why are things the way they are? Maybe because Trickster screwed up the Plan. In so doing, he gave us the opportunity to live freely, and to make choices that matter. But his gifts bear with them shreds of the original chaos against which the other Gods erected their creation. We may be free to walk along the cosmic border for a while, but in the world Trickster made we never cross to safety, and eventually fall back into the void.

Father Jetté wanted very much to make a collection of tales, but there were difficulties. The Ten'a were reluctant to let the Raven stories be put in writing, for one thing (though another group of tales – "the inane stories," Jetté calls them – could be had for the asking). Jetté tried to transcribe tales as they were being told, but the utter darkness frustrated him. Nobody would repeat the stories in daylight, and at night whenever he struck a match to light a candle, the storyteller fell instandly silent.