We think we like Tricksters, and sometimes we do. There are no public opinion surveys about mythological Tricksters, but the role is often displaced, to use Northrop Frye’s term, onto human beings, in both literature and life, and we find such characters appealing insofar as they are rebels against a falsely repressive order. In the Roman New Comedy that was Shakespeare’s Classical model when he began to write comedies, the young lovers who are prevented from getting married by the tyranny of arbitrary parental authority and social convention are often helped by a “tricky slave” who formulates a clever plot to outwit the powers that be and bring about the happy ending. Although the plot rarely goes as planned, and chaos ensues, all’s well that ends well, to quote one of Shakespeare’s titles. Shakespearean comedy plays many variations on the type.
Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream actually is a mythological Trickster: he is a type of nature spirit who serves Oberon, the king of the fairies. He is supposed to resolve the romantic plot by applying “love juice” to the eyes of a sleeping lover, but of course he gets the wrong lover. Puck murmurs to Oberon the equivalent of “Oops, my bad,” but he is in fact delighted by his error: “And those things do best please me / That befall preposterously” (3.2.120-21, Bevington edition). Oberon addresses him by saying, “How now, mad spirit? / What night-rule now about this haunted grove?” (3.2.4-5), “Night-rule” is an interesting term: it suggests that the Trickster’s chaos is not mere randomness but a kind of alternative law to that of daylight society. To foreshadow, that alternative law is what, borrowing from the anthropologist Victor Turner, in a previous newsletter I called “liminality,” a boundary condition in which opposites are not just reversed but ultimately identified, forming a two-in-one, “Two cherries on one bough,” a figure that moves all through the play. In Measure for Measure, the Duke of Vienna temporarily abdicates as order figure but returns disguised as a tricky Friar with a plot to save the male lover’s life. The “night-rule” in this case consists of the old scam of the “bed trick,” substituting one girl for another in the dark.
Mythological Tricksters can be rebels against the gods themselves, and in doing so can become what mythologists call “culture heroes,” figures who bring all the arts and sciences from heaven down to earth, thus lifting humanity from savagery to civilization. The most famous Trickster culture hero is the Greek Titan Prometheus, with his gift of stolen fire. Again the trick does not go quite as planned, for not only does Zeus nail Prometheus to a rock but shows that two can play at the Trickster game, taking his revenge by duping Prometheus’s dimwit brother Epimetheus into accepting as gift the first woman, Pandora, with her jar of troubles. It is likely that Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound was the first play of a trilogy whose final play would have reconciled Zeus and Prometheus, creating a new and greater order out of a conflict of opposites. The politically revolutionary Shelley was outraged by this, and wrote his own Prometheus Unbound in which the tyrannical king of the gods is overthrown. Both Shelley and Blake were also outraged by the triumph of what they saw as an authoritarian God over the titanic figure of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. As we saw last week, Blake, partly in response, created his own rebel figure, the fiery-haired Orc, spirit among other things of the American Revolution. Blake’s disciple George Bernard Shaw in The Devil’s Disciple portrayed a minister who abandons his calling to join the American Revolution. Such rebel figures are innately attractive, including Milton’s Satan, who is so appealing that Blake said Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it.
Trickster figures, however, as their name implies, generally have more luck with fraud rather than force. Milton’s Satan is more successful speaking to Eve with a forked tongue than he was as leader of an army of rebel angels. In fact, the seduction of Eve by a smooth-talking serpent was the first con. The Trickster as con artist manipulates his victims with lies, often skillfully making them believe they are in on the con even as they are being conned. Milton’s Eve convinces herself that she might put one over on God himself, even though she knows God sees everything, like a student who convinces himself he won’t be caught cheating, because the Trickster is a master manipulator who exudes sincerity. Sam Bankman-Fried, the recently convicted crypto con artist, knew how to play the role, down to the air of boyish innocence and the wild hair. Harlan Ellison, whose story “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Tick-Tock Man” was mentioned in last week’s newsletter, said about crooked gambling in casinos in another story, “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”: “Some of these games go way back.”
The first great Trickster in Western literature is Odysseus in the Odyssey, and he impresses even the goddess Athena with his lying. “You play a part as if it were your own tough skin,” she says. A liar is a master of language, and we are moving at this point beyond the initial view of the Trickster as the embodiment of natural vitality. Indeed, Odysseus’s most famous victim, the Cyclops, is the one who fits that description, but he is a stupid lout, all appetite and no brains. Odysseus wins by brains rather than brawn: it is how he can defeat 108 suitors, because they, like the Cyclops, are stupid and dominated by their appetites, merely with high-born social polish to cover it up. Book 19 of the Odyssey recounts the famous story of how Odysseus got his name, which is a pun in Greek meaning something like “alienated.” He was named by his grandfather Autolycus, a thief, but a lucky thief because he was favored by Hermes, god of thieves. The Trickster in Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale is named Autolycus, a pickpocket and hawker of broadsheet ballads, the ancestor of tabloids and TikTok:
Here's another ballad, of a fish that appeared upon the coast on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sun this ballad against the hard hearts of maids. It was thought she was a woman and was turned into a cold fish for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her. The ballad is very pitiful and is true. (4.4.274-80).
In Shakespeare’s time, Ben Jonson wrote his two great plays about con artists, Volpone, and The Alchemist. “Volpone” means “the fox,” so that his Trickster protagonist even has the typical animal form, one that evokes Reynard the Fox of the medieval animal fables. Among modern writers, Thomas Mann was fascinated by Tricksters, from the Biblical Jacob who cheats his own brother in the Joseph tetralogy to his late, unfinished novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954). America is the land of the con, and American artists have always been fascinated by con artists, from Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man to two brilliant films that appeared in the same year, 2013: American Hustle and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (the Trickster in figurative animal form yet again). Apparently grifting has become such an American thing that when English fantasist Neil Gaiman recounts a plot to con the gods themselves, he sets it in America and calls it American Gods (2001; TV series 2017-2021). But the two plotting gods, both Tricksters, are immigrants, Odin and Loki, both working to foment the chaos on which they thrive. Such behind-the-scenes collusion between the high god and the Trickster suggests that both are really Tricksters, indeed the two sides of the same Trickster, a scenario that repeats itself in the Book of Job, where God commissions Satan to torment Job to win a wager. Both Jung and Northrop Frye have commented on the Trickster characteristics of the Old Testament Yahweh.
We enjoy the con artist Tricksters when their victims are either venal themselves or exasperatingly stupid. But the more sympathy we have for innocent people who may be cheated out of everything, even their lives, the more uneasy we become, for in these cases we begin to see that the Trickster can have, or be, a Jungian shadow, characterized by a coldly calculating ruthless selfishness. In the Henry IV history plays, Falstaff plays the Merry Prankster, the life of a party that never stops. But occasionally the mask slips. He makes money off the government by conscripting men who are so unhealthy and unfit that he knows they are mere cannon fodder; he has no qualms when Mistress Quickly, who dotes on him, pawns her plate in order to pay his bills. Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys (2006) turns on the conflict between the two sons, one a god and one human, of Anansi the Spider, the West African and African American Trickster. The divine brother is utterly amoral and thinks nothing of destroying his brother’s life, ruining his career and sleeping with his girlfriend. His allure derives partly from supernatural enchantment, partly from the fact that all the world loves a charming cad. A more displaced version of the same plot is Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955, film version with Matt Damon in 1999), in which the titular Trickster murders a rich playboy and becomes his double. He is not apprehended, walks away rich, and in fact appears in three sequels.
In his later career, Blake became increasingly aware that his rebel Orc and authority figure Urizen formed the kind of false either-or opposition that he called a Negation. The opposites of a Negation merely go round in an ironic cycle, one opposite rising as the other falls. The vital young Orc is either defeated by the old power-monger Urizen or, worse, ages into and becomes him, like the Boomers of our time who are now, a half century after the 60’s, voting for Trump and dictatorship. And make no mistake: the political tragedy of our time is that Trump is a Trickster, and people have always known it. That is why they voted for him in 2016: he was their wild card, an outsider who promised to break up the political and social system that they thought, with considerable justice, was rigged against them. He breaks all the rules and has 91 indictments, and that is exactly what thrills them. His business empire was built upon con artistry, and there is something about the cheerful amorality of the huckster, the card sharp, the bullshit artist, that people find attractive because secretly they identify with it. A conscience is such a burden, and shouldering that burden makes people serious, a drag to be around. In all areas of life, Trump draws people not despite his violation of the rules but because of it. He grabs women by the pussy and then boasts about it exactly as in the old blues songs. He even breaks the rules of grammar and spelling, and couldn’t care less about correctness. Ron DeSantis rants about “woke” behavior, meaning all those new rules we are supposed to observe, but all he does is talk. Trump is where woke really goes to die. Even the orange hair is deliberate symbolism, suggesting that at 78 he is still a fiery-haired Orc, whereas sleepy Joe is a doddering old Urizen.
The people who love Trump say they want change, but that does not mean they want a new political, economic, and social system to replace the present one. Systems just bore them, which saves Trump the trouble of pretending to have solutions to various social problems. People are miserable—peevish, as I said in a recent newsletter—and they do not really want solutions. At heart, their malaise is an unacknowledged nihilism: Trump appeals to them because “Move fast and break things” was his motto long before Big Tech adopted it. It may be that the “fascist” label does not altogether fit Trump. Fascism wants Urizenic law and order, the world of Orwell’s 1984, and it is true that some of Trump’s followers are fascistic, notably the Christian nationalists who hope that their godless leader will establish a theocracy. But Trump himself does not want order: like Heath Ledger’s Joker, he wants chaos, and that gives him a destructive charismatic energy that would-be autocrats cannot match. They look boring in comparison. The only politician who came up to Trump’s level of Tricksterism was Boris Johnson. Brexit was a total con job, a masterpiece of breaking things, but people forgave Boris because he was never boring like all the other politicians. This is a man who partied during Covid.
Insofar as he is only part of a Negation, the Trickster’s anarchistic energy degenerates into nihilism. The Romantics watched the French Revolution disintegrate into the Reign of Terror, ending in the Emperor Napoleon. We saw this at the end of the 60’s, where the Flower Children of the Summer of Love gave way to the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army, ending in “Tricky Dick” Nixon and his Watergate crew of grifters. And we are waiting for the last act as what began as the hopefulness symbolized by the election of the first African American president might, if we are not lucky, end by replaying the American Revolution in reverse. Trump says he will only be a dictator on Day One. That is because there will not be a Day Two. The Trickster cannot remain merely an opponent of order. He needs to be incorporated into a third principle in which energy and order are true Contraries.
Our understanding of that mysterious third begins with the awareness that the Trickster, as we suggested previously, is not merely a figure of natural energy. In a tradition that goes back in the West to Plato’s Cratylus, Hermes, the most influential Greek Trickster of them all, is a master of language, maybe even its inventor. But his speech is not the “effective communication” that we are supposed to teach in freshman composition: it is double, duplicitous, equivocal: like the speech of the serpent, forked. It may not always be a lie, but it is ambiguous, like the language of oracles and other soothsayers such as Macbeth’s witches. One celebrated Trickster, Eshu of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, actually is an oracle, traveling between heaven and earth, bringing messages from the chief god Ifa. The ability to travel up and down the vertical axis mundi is the primary gift of the shaman in northern cultures, and shamans are often ornery, wily, occasionally malicious Trickster figures. Oracular, riddling Trickster language is obscure—it is, as we say, hermetic, a term derived from the name of another Greek Trickster, Hermes. The modern science of interpretation is called hermeneutics, and we are not surprised to find that the central dilemma of hermeneutics is an unsolvable Möbius-strip paradox of the many and the one called the “hermeneutic circle”: we cannot understand the whole of anything until we understand the parts, but we cannot understand the parts without understanding the whole that is their context. Typical Tricksterism. In Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, mentioned earlier, all language eventually breaks down into aporias, moments of undecidability. Derrida’s philosophy has left-wing affinities, being part of a larger movement called post-structuralism which, as the name implies, is subversive of the intellectual and ideological order system upon which Western culture depends, a culture that seeks Urizenic domination even as it pretends otherwise.
We have said that as a Negation, the opposites of order and energy, intellect and desire, cancel each other out. Yet this is a false relation, for in nature order needs energy or it subsides into mere entropy. Nature is process, continual growth and change, but natural energy expresses itself through forms. A flower is a process arrested in a moment of stillness as a form. In the same way, human desire needs intellect to discern its object. There is a power of recognition that sees forms as forms. Intensified, it may see the form as beautiful, so that truth becomes beauty, as Keats said. In a moment of what is called aesthetic arrest we see the rose as beautiful; in a similar moment, a man may see a woman and recognize her as a woman, then in a moment of aesthetic arrest may recognize her as beautiful, as Stephen Dedalus does the girl wading in the water at the climax of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If the intensity is raised one more level, he will recognize her as the One, and fall in love with her, as Dante did with Beatrice. If he is a poet, he may identify the rose and the woman as two forms of the same thing, though distinct.
This power of arresting flux into form, chaos into an order that is a revelation or manifestation of energy and change rather than their negation, is the imagination, and its verbal unit is the metaphor, the identification that says A is B. In his later mythology, therefore, Blake’s new hero, replacing Orc, is Los, the figure of creative imagination. Nietzsche, in his book The Birth of Tragedy, had a very similar intuition. He said that Greek tragedy resulted from the union of Apollo, the god of form and order, with Dionysus, a Trickster god of energy, change, and passion. But unfortunately, in his later career he developed this binary as a Negation and gave his allegiance to Dionysus, not recognizing that there was a third principle that united the two, the principle of art, of the uniting imagination. Dionysus, however, is a Trickster and played a typical Trickster’s joke: Nietzsche lapsed into permanent psychosis after proclaiming that he was Dionysus, so the philosopher was conned out of his very self, a catastrophic form of identity theft. Dionysus is a good representative of the ambiguity of the Trickster. He is gender-ambiguous, and, in his role as Bacchus, god of the grape harvest, the patron of drunkenness, guest of honor at Finnegan’s wake. But in Euripides’ play about him, The Bacchae, he turns into a terrifying figure. The repressive order figure, Pentheus, who tries to arrest him is torn apart by his own mother and other female Bacchantes.
Imagination is thus the form of the Trickster that appears as a third factor, although it is really the opposites seen united as Contraries into a single form resembling the Taoist yin-yang emblem. If this seems difficult, well, it is, so much so that it took a long time even for a mind as powerful as Blake’s to understand the distinction fully. There is a further implication that makes it even more difficult, and that is that the imagination itself has a dark side, a Jungian shadow. The con artist Tricksters we have been examining are indeed artists: they create illusions that lead people to their destruction. Iago, perhaps the most sinister Trickster in Shakespeare, conjures up ugly, hateful pictures in Othello’s jealous head like a black magician. Art can create, but it can also destroy.
The profoundest study of Tricksters is Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998), a dazzling meditation with original insights on practically every page, and yet beautifully readable. Hyde’s title points to the fact that in some Creation myths the creating deity is a Trickster, in which case the process may be more ridiculous than sublime. In one Egyptian Creation myth, the deity, not having a partner, creates the world by masturbation; in one Indigenous myth, he shits it. Another way to take that title phrase is that Trickster makes this world, not the ideal world that God made and saw was good, but the one the serpent made by conning Eve and Adam with lies and illusions. And that illusion has not gone away. We live in it, and feel powerless to wake up. In other words, it is the ultimate con, and we are its victims, still being conned by it. It is so stubbornly persistent that most people take it for real, and therefore live lives of resignation, sometimes of despair. Despair is exactly the goal of the dark imagination’s nihilism. To me, perhaps the greatest moment in all of Blake is the debate, the agon, in his epic Jerusalem between Los, the creative imagination, and his own despair, personified as a self-pitying figure known as the Spectre of Urthona. The difference between them is caught in one devastating line: “Los reads the stars of Albion, the Spectre reads the Void between the stars.”
Despair, the feeling of inevitable fatality, is the shadow side of the Trickster’s delight, which originates in despair’s opposite, a sense of play. Hyde, in a typical flash of insight, says of the Trickster Coyote that, although he is an animal, he does not have instinct, “species knowledge”: he has no way, a word that resonates throughout the Bible, as when Jesus says, “I am the way.” Hyde asks: “What conceivable advantage might lie in a way of being that has no way?” (43). His answer is that such a creature might have “a repertoire of ways,” and thus “the ability to adapt to a changing world” (43). Exactly: the opening lines of the Odyssey describe Odysseus as polytropos, literally as the man of “many turnings.” Robert Fagles translates the phrase as “the man of twists and turns.” It is his polytropos inventiveness and cunning that enable Odysseus to survive in a dangerous world.
But the Trickster imagination might do more than adapt to its situation. It might disrupt the con by refusing to play according to the house rules, which are always rigged. It might decide to play its own game, to pave its own way. Hyde puts it memorably:
Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox. (7)
Somewhat further on, Hyde takes up the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, in which we hear that Hermes, while still a baby, stole the cattle of Apollo by walking them backwards into a cave, so that all the investigating authorities saw was cattle walking out of a cave. As usual, the Trickster’s ploy depends to a great degree on the obtuseness of his opponents. A mythological joke, yet Trickster jokes are always between jest and earnest, and Hyde goes on to state the profound implications of this joke:
At the start of the Homeric Hymn, for example, Hermes is at one pole of such a set of opposites: he is not-Olympian, not-legitimate, not-the-object-of-sacrifice. He could have settled for that position or he could have settled for simple contrariety (stealing food for the rest of eternity). He does neither. He leaves what Theodore Roethke called “the weary dance of opposites” and finds a third thing. (77)
One way he does so is by inventing art. He gives Apollo the gift of the lyre he has invented, so that Apollo becomes the leader of the Muses. In a famous aphorism, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said people do not understand how what is borne in opposite directions is in agreement with itself, like the framework of a bow or a lyre. The translation is much disputed, but it seems to me that what it clearly implies is that the strings of a stringed instrument, whether a lyre or a guitar, are held in a tension of opposition that is what makes music possible. But what holds them in that tension is a third thing, the framework, the uniting form. Hyde, implicitly following Derrida’s deconstruction, says that all of culture is constructed by language, and that language typically falls into binary categories:
Typically, such webs of signification are built around sets of opposites: fat and thin, slave and free, for example, or—more categorically—true and false, natural and unnatural, real and illusory, clean and dirty. What tricksters sometimes do is to disturb these pairs and thus disturb the web itself. (74)
However, the disturbance is not merely negative. Tricksters may decreate binaries that are merely closed sets, but they may at the same time open them into new connections, recreate them into a whole webwork of connections, a web worthy of Anansi the Spider. The word “text” goes back to textus, meaning web, as in “textile.” Jung has a mind-boggling essay on “The Spirit Mercurius” in alchemy, Mercury being of course another name for the Trickster Hermes. It is a catalogue of wild paradoxes: Mercurius (or quicksilver) is the prima materia or primeval chaos with which the alchemical process starts—yet it, or he, is also the Philosopher’s Stone, the goal of the process (235). This means that his beginning is his end: therefore, “As the uroboros dragon, he impregnates, begets, bears, devours, and slays himself” (223). This Möbius-strip identity is a way of twists and turns indeed. As Bottom wants to do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mercurius plays all the parts in his topsy turvy theatrical production. He makes his own way, and, like Jesus, he is the way. He creates his world, and he is his world. If only we could detach from the illusion of the con, we would see that that is true of all of us. It sounds like madness, but Trickster thinking always does.
References
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998.
Jung, C.G. “The Spirit Mercurius.” In Alchemical Studies, translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 13 in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Bollingen, 1967. 191-250.
Another excellent essay, thank you. Much of your writing reminds me of some of the notions I get from Heidegger and I wonder whether you've ever explored that angle. Why are some Trickster conventions okay in some cultures but not okay in others? Heidegger would say it's because the Trickster archetype, at some level, is a reflection of a collective cultural consciousness, aka Dasein. The same Trickster who mesmerizes one person horrifies another. Part of my fascination with Frye and Heidegger, I'll admit, is the training it provides to those of us who don't want to be tricked.