December 8, 2023
There are binaries—and yet there is a third. Life is an interplay of opposites, but there is always something that confounds the scheme of categories, disrupting its neatness, keeping it from settling down into a periodic table of oppositions. The Trickster is the third. In mythology, there are divine and demonic beings, but everywhere also, East and West, ancient and modern, there are Tricksters who are ambiguous, neither exactly gods nor exactly demons but somehow both, and yet neither, inherently paradoxical. This notion of a both/and, neither/nor paradox sounds sophisticated and intellectual, but modern versions of Trickster-thinking, such as the deconstructionism of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, are conceptualized versions of something that appeared in myths and folktales before philosophy existed at all. Tricksters are among the most fascinating figures in mythology, and among the most important, even though at first they may appear to be mere comic relief. Though they are that too—I would not want to underestimate the value of comic relief in this world.
What is perhaps most difficult to understand about the Trickster is that he may at first appear to be indeed part of a binary opposition, namely, that of energy and desire versus law, order, and control. For the Trickster is subversive of all established order, whether political, religious, moral, intellectual, or even artistic, and he may be demonized for it by the establishment. In his incisive essay “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure,” C.G. Jung cites as a “classic” on the subject an 1890 novel on Pueblo mythology by Adolf Bandelier called The Delight Makers, saying, “I was struck by the European analogy of the carnival in the medieval Church, with its reversal of the hierarchic order” (255). Some Tricksters are more likeable than others, but even the more malicious ones, like the Norse Loki, may have a rapier wit. They are all delight makers, and that is notable because they are all, if not rebels, at least troublemakers, though sometimes inadvertently. Often, they don’t mean to make trouble, but in fact they are trouble, and bring chaos and anarchy with them just by walking in the door. Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp is a perfect example: in Modern Times, he accidentally gets pulled into industrial machinery and becomes literally a monkey wrench in the works, Monkey being, by the way, a Trickster figure in Chinese mythology.
Mind you, not everyone is delighted: establishment figures may become more furious at Trickster figures than at outright demonic ones. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a good example. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Zeus establishes order in the cosmos by defeating various beings symbolic of natural chaos. Some, like the monster Typhon, can merely be killed; others, like the Titans who fought a 10-year war with the Olympian gods, can be thrust down into Tartarus, the lowest part of the underworld. But Prometheus, although himself a Titan, refused to join the war. He is not an enemy, but Zeus is arguably more annoyed by him than by any enemy. Enemies are useful: they are an opportunity for Zeus to show off his power and gain glory. Prometheus, on the other hand, outsmarts and therefore embarrasses Zeus publicly, and Zeus responds with the fury of a bureaucrat who has repeatedly been made a fool of in front of his underlings. First, Prometheus tricks Zeus into accepting the inferior part of the animal sacrifice, not just once but for all time, because a contract is a contract. Then he steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, for which Zeus crucifies him on a rock with an eagle devouring his liver. Hesiod tells the story of Prometheus twice, once in the Theogony and once in the Works and Days, because he is a conservative law-and-order kind of guy and has a compulsion to twist the story to save face for Zeus and make Prometheus look bad, but he is so clumsy about it that his bias is transparent and ineffectual.
Those who are neither authority figures themselves nor apologists for them may be delighted by the Trickster’s subversiveness. We live within power structures that constrain us at every point. The first word we learned beyond the names for our parents—those authority figures—was “no,” and we are subject to a moral code, most of whose items begin with “Thou shalt not.” What is most constrained is our instinctual nature, not in the sense of hard-wired animal behavior patterns but in the sense of the urges and impulses that derive from the needs and pleasures of the body. “Socialization” consists of disciplining or repressing those appetites. The pleasure principle is controlled by rituals and taboos surrounding its twin focuses of food—eating, drinking, elimination—and sex. The power drive develops from a need to control the individual’s own impulses into a need to control other people’s. Hence authoritarianism and its need to regiment, its need to turn society into a mass of obedient drones.
There are tyrannies of coercion, with their hard labor, armies, and police. But a subtler type of tyranny, and more effective because it is internalized, is a tyranny of time. Citizens of societies not officially dictatorships are kept in order by being conditioned to run, like machines, as parts of a clockwork mechanism controlled by schedules and deadlines—an ominously significant word—enforced by close supervision. This has greatly increased in recent years as ruthless companies like Amazon and UPS tout the speed and efficiency of their delivery service—at the expense of their warehouse workers and drivers, who are denied bathroom breaks and observed by cameras. A satire by one of my favorite fantasists, Harlan Ellison, “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” is more biting now than when it was published in the relatively leisurely days of 1965. The Ticktockman controls a regimented society whose watchword is efficiency. Enter the Trickster who calls himself Harlequin, who, in a marvelous scene, literally gums up the works by dumping jellybeans into the moving walkway taking workers to their shift. Ellison spends two paragraphs describing this because what is important is not the action but the feeling involved:
Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin workers, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!
In the following paragraph, “The shift workers howled and laughed and were pelted, and broke ranks.” Then the slidewalk mechanism is jammed, “and everyone was dumped thisawayandthataway in a jackstraw tumble, and still laughing and popping little jelly bean eggs of childish color into their mouths. It was a holiday, and a jollity, an absolute insanity, a giggle” (30) The schedule is delayed by only 7 minutes, but because everything is connected in what we now call supply chains—well, we know what happens when those are disrupted. The Harlequin is a delight maker, raining joy and childhood and holidays out of the sky like many-colored manna upon a world whose inhabitants had been as mechanical as their world. For a moment, the citizens have become as little children again, for children are naturally Tricksters, like Calvin of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, wreaking havoc on the world of responsible adults.
The Trickster may be projected as a figure in myth, folktale, and literature, but there is a repressed Trickster in all of us, always seeking mischievously to get out, to escape the censor through various impulsive verbal outbursts or Freudian slips and various impulsive actions, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes annoying, sometimes oddly charming. In addition, as an archetypal figure, the Trickster has a collective aspect, and down through history, more flexible societies have learned that it is prudent to provide a safety mechanism to bleed off some of the pressure of pent-up desire in the form of holidays in which the normal social order is not just relaxed but turned upside down. The Romans had a festival called Saturnalia somewhere around the winter solstice, named after the god Saturn who ruled during the Golden Age when there were no laws because there were no need of them. Saturnalia was characterized by role reversal: slaves could insult their masters, and the masters might even serve them at table. Gambling was temporarily legal, for gambling celebrates chance rather than order. The Middle Ages had two festive periods of licensed disorder and revelry. One, like the Roman Saturnalia, was solstitial: the 12 days of Christmas, ending in “12th night.” The other was Carnival, reaching a climax in Mardi Gras or “Fat Tuesday,” the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the austerities of Lent. During carnival, symbolic role reversal was again, so to speak, the disorder of the day. Sometimes a Boy Bishop and a Lord of Misrule were elected, Trickster parodies of religious and secular authority respectively. Social morality was inverted, including sexual morality. When I was younger, during Mardi Gras in New Orleans women would compete to win glass beads by lifting their shirts. Indulgence in food and drink was not only condoned but encouraged, which is why Mardi Gras is “Fat” Tuesday. People dressed in grotesque costumes with exaggerated body parts or animal parts. The relaxation of ordinary restraints during such holidays was a calculated risk on the part of the social authorities. The rowdiness was always at a risk of going too far and getting out of control, and frequently did. However, the period of license allowed people to release enough of their pent-up frustrated desire that the temporary overturn acted to prevent the greater overturn latent in the word “revolution.” When the festivities were over, everyone returned to their proper law-abiding roles again. Carnival was a kind of mock revolution with a conservative purpose, working in the end to preserve the status quo.
Shakespeare was well aware of the old folk customs, which influenced his comedies, especially the group named “festive comedies” in a famous book by the critic C.L. Barber. The culminating festive comedy, which the Expanding Eyes podcast is examining right now, is Twelfth Night, whose subtitle is Or: What You Will. In Shakespeare’s time, “will” had a secondary meaning of “desire,” and is also a pun upon Shakespeare’s first name. Twelfth Night is about a society in which carnival-style misrule is ongoing because its rulers are dysfunctional and preoccupied with games of love. The comic subplot, which usually in Shakespearean comedy involves the lower-class characters, instead is taken up with the antics of dissolute aristocrats, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria, who is not a servant but a gentlewoman. A similar social class inversion is true of Shakespeare’s most famous Trickster, Falstaff in the history plays, who hangs out with low-life characters but is actually Sir John Falstaff. Some critics feel that Shakespeare gave Falstaff some of the traits of the medieval Lord of Misrule. Sir Toby’s crowd is given to such antics as singing drunken songs in the middle of the night. In real life, they would be an irritating nuisance, but in comedy they embody the festive spirit, and are joined by an actual Clown or jester appropriately named Feste. Northrop Frye identifies a type he calls the “refuser of festivities” who becomes as close as comedy comes to a villain. He is often an unsympathetic order figure, represented here by Olivia’s steward Malvolio, whose name means “ill will.” Sir Toby’s crew respond to Malvolio’s attempts to crack down on them with an elaborate plot in which he is totally humiliated. The ringleader of the plot is Feste, who acts as the Trickster, shutting Malvolio up in the dark and speaking to him in two different voices as different characters, good cop and bad cop. Trickster revolt against refusers of festivity can get surprisingly sadistic, and in one case, that of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, modern audiences find the treatment hard to accept despite the fact that Shylock seeks murderous revenge.
Some Tricksters in myth and folktale can shift their gender, becoming the earliest examples of “gender fluid” or “non-binary,” confounding the “normal” categories. In the Winnebago Trickster cycle studied by anthropologist Paul Radin, Trickster changes into a woman and actually marries the chief’s son, having a child by him.
In Twelfth Night, “what you will,” meaning what you desire, refers most of all to gender and sexual desire. Duke Orsino thinks his new servant “Cesario,” actually the heroine Viola in male disguise, is a rather feminine young man, but is increasingly drawn to “him” nonetheless. Viola, out of love for the Duke, woos Olivia in his name—but Olivia develops a crush on “Cesario” instead, not realizing she is infatuated with another woman. Viola has an identical twin brother, Sebastian, so that gender identity is further confounded when he shows up. When originally performed, the gender bending would have been even more complex because all the women’s parts were played by men, so that Viola was a woman character disguised as a man, but played by an actual man. In all of Shakespeare’s plays, human identity is viewed not as an essence but as a series of roles we play, including gender roles, which means that human life is theatrical. The idea that all the world’s a stage is far more than a catchphrase to Shakespeare.
The title of Mike Leigh’s brilliant film Topsy Turvy (1999) captures the same idea. In the film, a behind-the-scenes depiction of the making of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado, the term “topsy turvy” refers to the creative frenzy involved in any theatrical production, the craziness of trying to pull off the seemingly impossible act of getting the librettist and composer (who quarrel), the actors (who are variously dysfunctional), set and costume designers, lighting people, and so on to cooperate and come together to present a unified performance when the curtain goes up. Thus, carnivalesque chaos seems a necessary part of the creative process. This is not unique to the ensemble arts. The solitary act of writing still involves entering a period of inward carnival, a letting go and allowing the chaos of what Freud called the primary process of the unconscious to have free rein, in hopes of seeing what might eventually be made out of it. With some artists, the Trickster that is their creative self takes over their whole personality. Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (1979) portrays Mozart this way. Mozart’s rival Salieri cannot understand why God has given the gift of musical genius to a giggling idiot who (in the 1984 film version by Milos Forman) is first seen under a table groping a servant girl. The Harlequin that appears in so many Picasso paintings is a self-identification. The legend of Picasso is that of the iconoclastic artist demonically possessed by endless creative energy and limitless appetites, both furthered by a ruthless will. Dylan Thomas, lacking the ruthlessness, was torn apart like Dionysus, specifically Dionysus in his role as Bacchus, god of alcoholism. And on to rock and pop stars who have dramatized various aspects of the Trickster archetype, from the gender ambiguities of David Bowie to the theatrical diabolism of Jim Morrison.
We have seen that the Trickster as individual subversive and carnival as collective social overturn are embodiments of a larger pattern, which seems, at least at first, to be a binary pattern, an agon or conflict between human desire and the forces that constrain and repress it. This is especially true when the forces of order and control become too dominant, so that the individual or society becomes one-sided, overly repressed, which provokes the Trickster spirit into rebellion. The great literary treatment of this theme is Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which characterizes the figures of restraint and desire as Angels and Devils respectively. The conventional social view is that Angels are good because they believe in control and order based on repression of desire, and Devils are evil because they want to let all hell break loose, so to speak, and unleash all the unruly desires that terrify all right-minded people. Angel versus Devil is the kind of false binary that Blake calls a Negation, a dualistic either-or opposition such as we saw last week in looking at the imagery of darkness and light. Blake is not just choosing the Devils over the Angels, not advocating some kind of Satanism. That simply reverses the problem. Blake’s real view is expressed by his title: in a marriage, two become one, equal parts of a greater identity.
It is true, however, that he gives some impression of doing so because he is trying to compensate for the one-sidedness of conventional society, which privileges control and order and demands “self-discipline.” One of the famous aphorisms in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is that, in Paradise Lost, Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Blake is of the Devil’s party and, to speak precisely, damned well knows it. Desire is energy, and “Energy is eternal delight.” Blake in his early work advocated the release of energy repressed by false order in all areas of human life. He wrote poems praising the French and American revolutions as uprisings of the spirit of liberty against tyranny. He wrote a poem advocating sexual revolution and the emancipation of women. He attacked the abuses of the Industrial Revolution, including child labor. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of the great satires, and satire is the literary genre that most embodies the Trickster spirit. He loves putting things in a way that he knows will shock the uptight and respectable, such as “Better to murder an infant in its cradle than to nurse unacted desires,” but which usually contain a profound insight—for it is unacted desire that turns violent and may murder infants, or mow down people with a semi-automatic weapon. In Blake’s own mythology, the character who represents the attitude of the Angels is Urizen, whose name suggests both “reason” and “horizon.” What Urizen means by reason is the compulsion to bound everything within the horizon of “one law,” so that everything is thereby “under control.” He is a false God, the white-haired old tyrant on the throne condemning people even for having passions, much less acting on them. His enemy is the rebel Orc, with fiery hair. On one level, their antagonism is the conflict of summer and winter, of red and white: the name “Urizen” may also suggest “frozen.” Thus, not just in Marriage but all his earlier work, Blake writes warmly of Devils and coldly of Angels, puns intended.
When the rebellion of spontaneous impulse against conformist limitation occurs, the rebel side will often be represented by a Trickster figure. The contest in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest between the Trickster McMurphy, with his red hair, and Nurse Ratched, the control freak in her prim white uniform, repeats the contest of Orc and Urizen. The book became iconic because it captured much of the spirit of the 60’s, at least the early, idealistic, hopeful phase of the 60’s before it faltered, like the French Revolution before it. I should know because I was there as a young hippie marching under Orc’s banner—rather consciously, in fact, because it was during that time that I discovered Blake and first read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Trickster in his Orc phase, in which he represents the pleasure principle unbound, may have considerable value as a compensatory figure. If you grew up as a Roman Catholic in the hellfire days before Vatican II, it was liberating to encounter Blakean aphorisms such as “Enough—or, too much” and “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
The Trickster has always confronted people with “the wisdom of the body,” a wisdom that starts with the recognition that we have a body, whose functions are not always dignified and whose appetites get us into continual trouble. Paul Radin’s classic book The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956) supplies a list of episodes that includes the following: “Trickster [accidentally] burns anus and eats his own intestines”; “Trickster and the laxative bulb” (I leave that one to the reader’s imagination); and “Trickster falls in his own excrement.”
In literature, the greater the satire, the greater the likelihood that it will be “vulgar,” meaning that it will violate the taboo against mentioning “shameful” bodily organs, bodily functions, and bodily desires. In fact, it will compensate by an exuberance of sheer physicality. (Another aphorism from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Exuberance is beauty”). The giants who appear so often in satire—in Rabelais, in Swift, in the folktales of Paul Bunyan—have gigantic urges and appetites. The gluttony of some of the animal Tricksters in American Indigenous stories often gets them into big trouble, but it never stops them, nor do they ever learn from their punishments. The same is true of the drunkenness that can be called part of an Irish Trickster and carnival tradition of no-holds-barred drinking, which is why James Joyce titled Finnegans Wake, his mythological epic of universal fall and redemption, after an Irish drinking song in which Tim Finnegan, a hod carrier, fell off a ladder while drunk, was taken to be deceased, but revived during his own wake when whiskey was splashed on him. In more unimproved versions of the lyrics, he cries out, “Thunderin’ Jesus, did ye think I’m dead?” The song’s refrain is “Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake.”
As for sex, the road of excess includes not only the serial promiscuity of a Don Juan but the additional excess of high-spirited boasting about it. In his song “Don’t You Leave Me Here,” Jelly Roll Morton, whose very name is obscene, claims,
Now I never had one woman at a time Now if you see me tell me I’ve had Six seven eight or nine
Enough, or too much. Trickster lust can be quite resourceful. In one of the myths of the Winnebago, recounted in anthropologist Paul Radin’s classic book The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956), the Trickster detaches his penis and sends it like a heat-seeking missile to embed itself in his object of pursuit. The blues is not “woke,” and neither are some folktales. They challenge us to decide what is truly anti-social and mistreats other people and what is merely uptight social propriety. They are rebellious, rowdy genres, and have no patience with prudery, especially prudery parading as self-righteousness. Trickster art is not for the easily offended.
Moreover, in Joyce, in Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers, in Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, in Thomas Pynchon, in Samuel R. Delany, the affirmation of sexual desire expands beyond the boundaries of “normal” sex into the “polymorphous perverse,” perversity being defined by Freud as any sex not proceeding towards reproduction. The Trickster insists that the human condition is accurately defined, despite anxious denials, by the Internet meme Rule 34: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” Even Jung couldn’t handle the physicality of Joyce’s Ulysses, calling it a gigantic tapeworm, the reduction of life to an alimentary canal. Which is a bit odd since Jung learned much of what he knew from Goethe’s Faust, in which Faust not only plays the Don Juan role with poor Gretchen but attends not one but two Walpurgisnachts or witches’ sabbaths, big orgiastic parties of unbridled instinct. Thus, Shakespeare’s Falstaff has all the characteristics of the Trickster: he is gigantic and notorious for his drunkenness and his lust. Satirists of this kind are not really trying to reduce life to a tapeworm: it would be hard to find more intellectually powerful and artistically controlled novels than those of Joyce, Davies, Pynchon, and Delany. But such satirists refuse to let the intellectual and aesthetic deny the reality of the body. When a woman asked Joyce if she may kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses, he said no, it did a lot of other things too.
Orc, the natural energy that breaks up repressive social order as spring breaks up the ice of a frozen river, was the hero of Blake’s earlier poetry. His later work does not repudiate Orc but increasingly recognizes that the Orc-Urizen contest is what he called a Negation, an either-or binary in which each opposite merely negates the other. True opposites are what he called Contraries, and “Without Contraries is no progression.” Blake’s evolution follows that of the Trickster figure itself, from being merely one half of a binary opposition to being a third phenomenon that is more elusive and paradoxical, yet which holds the promise of a way beyond mere either-or thinking. But I find that the Trickster has played one of his jokes and divided himself in two. This newsletter is long enough, and its discussion will have to be continued next week.
References
Ellison, Harlan. Paingod and Other Delusions. Pyramid, 1965.
Jung, C. G. “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure.” In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 9, part 1, 2nd edition, of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Bollingen, 1959, 1968. 255-74.
Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. Schocken Books, 1956, 1972.