Trickster Makes This World Mischief Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde

CHAPTER I

Trickster Makes This Earth
Mischief, Myth, and Art

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By LEWIS HYDE
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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SLIPPING THE TRAP OF Ambition

The whitebait
Opens its black eyes
In the net of the Constabulary.
--Basho

THE Allurement THIEF

The trickster myth derives creative intelligence from ambition. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same existence grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking cant, practiced at hiding his tracks and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs. Trickster starts out hungry, simply earlier long he is primary of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of fine art. Aristotle wrote that Homer showtime "taught the rest of us the art of framing lies the right manner." Homer makes lies seem and then real that they enter the world and walk amid us. Odysseus walks among us to this day, and he would seem to exist Homer's own self-portrait, for Odysseus, also, is a master of the fine 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 kid with a hankering for meat.

But I'm making a direct line out of a narrative that twists and turns, and I'g getting ahead of myself. Nosotros must begin at the beginning, with trickster learning how to go on 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 in a higher place all else was hunting. At one point in the quondam Norse tales, the mischief-maker Loki has made the other gods so angry that he has to abscond and become into hiding. In the mountains, he builds himself a house with doors on all sides and so he can watch the 4 horizons. To charm himself by mean solar 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 perchance capture him, he takes linen cord and twists it into a mesh in the way that fishnets have been made e'er since. Just at that moment, the others approach. Loki throws the internet into the fire, changes into a salmon, and swims away. Merely the gods notice the ashes of his net and from their pattern deduce the shape of the device they need to make. In this fashion, Loki is finally captured.

It makes a nice keepsake of trickster's ambiguous talents, Loki imagining that first fishnet and and then getting defenseless 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 dorsum to similar origins. "Pull a fast one on" is dolos in Homeric Greek, and the oldest known apply of the term refers to a quite specific fob: baiting a hook to grab a fish.

East and due west, north and s, 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 forth by a big river when he got very hungry. He built a trap of poplar poles and willow branches and gear up it in the h2o. "Salmon!" he chosen out. "Come into this trap." Soon a big salmon came forth and swam into the chute of the trap and then flopped himself out on the bank where Coyote clubbed him to death. "I volition find a overnice place in the shade and broil this upwardly," thought Coyote.

Trickster commonly relies on his prey to assistance 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 pond upstream to spawn; sexual ambition or instinct gives them a item trajectory and Coyote works with it. Fifty-fifty with a baited hook, the victim'due south hunger is the moving role. The worm just sits at that place; the fish catches himself. Also, in a Crow story from the Western Plains, Coyote traps ii buffalo past stampeding them into the sun so they cannot run into where they are going, then leading them over a cliff. The fleetness of big 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 dominicus and toward a cliff, and then 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 as well get snared in his ain devices. Trickster is at once culture hero and fool, clever predator and stupid prey. Hungry, trickster sometimes devises stratagems to catch his repast; 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 center of the field there was a stick figure made of gum. Rabbit hit it with his foot and got stuck. He got his other pes stuck, then 1 hand then his other hand and finally his head. This is how Coyote found him.

"What are you doing similar this?" asked Coyote.

"The farmer who owns this melon patch was mad considering I would non swallow 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 volition take your place."

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

Coyote doesn't simply get stuck in gum traps, either; in other stories, a range of animals--normally sly cousins such as Play a trick on 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, and so, the myth contains a story about the incremental creation of an intelligence about hunting. Coyote tin can imagine the fish trap precisely because he's been a fish himself, as it were. Nothing counters cunning but more cunning. Coyote'south wits are precipitous precisely because he has met other wits, just as the country bumpkin may somewhen go a cosmopolitan if enough conviction men announced 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 rough alphabetize, Jerison finds that if we compare herbivores and carnivores at any particular moment in history the predators are ever slightly brainier than the prey. But the human relationship is never stable; there is a tedious step-by-stride increment in intelligence on both sides. If we chart the brain-torso ratio on a calibration of ane to x, in the archaic age herbivores become a 2 and carnivores a iv; thirty million years later the herbivores are up to 4 but the carnivores have gone up to 6; another xxx million years and the herbivores are upwardly to half dozen simply the carnivores are upwards to 8; finally, when the herbivores get upwards to 9, the carnivores are up to ten. The hunter is ever slightly smarter, but the prey is always wising upward. In evolutionary theory, the tension betwixt predator and prey is i 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 bully deal of sociology virtually coyotes in the American West. Ane story has it that in the old days sheep farmers tried to become rid of wolves and coyotes past putting out animal carcasses laced with strychnine. The wolves, they say, were killed in nifty numbers, simply 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 fob and skunk, but coyote simply rarely. Coyotes develop their own relationship to the trap; every bit 1 naturalist has written, "information technology is difficult to escape the conclusion that coyotes ... have a sense of humor. How else to explain, for example, the well-known propensity of experienced coyotes to dig upward traps, turn them over, and urinate or defecate on them?"

With this paradigm nosotros move into a tertiary human relationship between tricksters and traps. When a coyote defecates on a trap he is neither predator nor casualty but some 3rd thing. A fragment of a native Tlingit story from Alaska volition help us name that matter:

[Raven] came to a place where many people were encamped fishing.... He entered a house and asked what they used for allurement. They said, "Fat." And so 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 allurement. Now they got bites and pulled upward quickly, but at that place was aught on their hooks.

Raven eventually gets in trouble for this little pull a fast one on (the fishermen steal his nib and he has to pull an elaborate render-ruse to become it back), but for now the point is just 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 Thlokunyana. Thlokunyana is imagined to be a small-scale man, "the size of a weasel," and in fact 1 of his other names also refers to a cerise weasel with a black-tipped tail. A Zulu storyteller describes this animal equally

cleverer than all others, for its cunning is great. If a trap is gear up for a wild cat, [the weasel] comes immediately to the trap, and takes away the mouse which is placed there for the true cat: information technology 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 volition no longer take hold of game.

Coyote in fact and sociology, Raven and Thlokunyana 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 non get poisoned but he also gets nothing to eat. Raven and Thlokunyana 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 instance--just the bait thief doesn't enter directly into that oppositional eating game. A parasite or epizoon, he feeds his belly while standing merely outside the conflict between hunter and hunted. From that position the allurement thief becomes a kind of critic of the usual rules of the eating game and equally such subverts them, and then that traps he has visited lose their influence. What trapper'southward pride could remain unshaken once he's read Coyote's commentary?

In all these stories, trickster must practise more than feed his abdomen; he must practice 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 terminal is an important theme. In the Okanagon creation story, the Bully Spirit, having told Coyote that he must show the New People how to catch salmon, goes on to say: "I have important work for yous to practice ... In that location are many bad creatures on earth. You will have to kill them, otherwise they volition eat the New People. When you lot do this, the New People will honour you ... They will laurels you for killing the People-devouring monsters and for pedagogy ... all the ways of living." In North America, trickster stepped in to defeat the monsters who used to feed on humans.

The myth says, and so, that in that location are large, devouring forces in this globe, and that trickster'southward intelligence arose not merely to feed himself but to outwit these other eaters. Typically, this coming together is oppositional--the prey outwitting the predator. The allurement thief suggests a different, nonoppositional strategy. Here trickster feeds himself where predator and casualty meet, but rather than entering the game on their terms he plays with its rules. Perhaps, and so, another strength behind trickster's cunning is the desire to remove himself from the eating game altogether, or at least run into how far out he tin can get and even so feed his belly (for if he were to terminate eating entirely he would no longer exist trickster).

(C) 1998 Lewis Hyde All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-374-27928-four

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