The Trickster Figure in American Literature

Winifred Morgan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137344724
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This book analyzes and offers fresh insights into the trickster tradition including African American, American Indian, Euro-American, Asian American, and Latino/a stories, Morgan examines the oral roots of each racial/ethnic group to reveal how each group's history, frustrations, and aspirations have molded the tradition in contemporary literature.

C H A P T E R 1

INTRODUCTION

America is woven of many strands.

I would recognize and let them so remain.

Our fate is to become one and yet many.

This is not prophecy but description.

—Ralph Ellison¹

THE CHALLENGE

In 1952, before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, even before Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954, a far-seeing Ralph Ellison envisioned a United States of America where despite its flaws and limitations, its all-too-different citizens worked to understand and work with one another for the common good. His great novel, The Invisible Man, moved the nation closer to the future he predicted.² Today, for all the dissonance surrounding the fact, the United States of America is a multicultural, multiethnic nation.³ Groups that were once hidden or ignored minorities populate swathes of mid-American small towns as well as large coastal cities, the traditional entry immigrant points into the country. Latinos live in Iowa and Georgia; second-generation Vietnamese have settled into large areas of the Gulf Coast; and Hmong and Somali immigrants have found a home in Minneapolis. Most American Indians have at least some European-American or African-American ancestors. A biracial man has been elected president. Yet, since the United States is a nation made up of many nations, the heterogeneous composition of its population as well as its contradictory values inevitably still produce conflicts among its citizens. Americans belong to the United States by right of citizenship, yet that is only the legal tie. At a deeper, more emotional level, they belong by virtue of subscribing to a common set of principles. In the United States, the citizenry is bound to the nation primarily by its promise of an equal chance to succeed and equality before the law—the Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the Preamble to the Constitution’s promise of “justice, . . . domestic tranquility, . . . common defense, . . . general welfare, and . . . blessings of liberty.” The United States is unique among modern nations in that it has chosen both to define itself in terms of its ideals and to become a country of dissimilar peoples bound primarily by those ideals. If a case can be made for American exceptionalism, this is it.⁴ From time to time—after an election where the other side has won, when someone from an untraditional background or ethnicity takes over leadership in business or public life, being part of a neighborhood or crowd where no one seems familiar—this situation leads to every American feeling like an outsider, a member of the minority.

Furthermore, the United States of America is a nation of individualists professing egalitarian ideals. Even those who vehemently espouse the concept of equality tend to think they want to be equal with those who are “ahead” or “above” them in society, rather than those whose status is “beneath” or “behind” them. Reality is far messier than the intellectual principles. Most Americans are more enamored with the idea than the reality of equity. As the speaker in Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B” says, “Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. / Nor do I often want to be a part of you, / But we are” and a few lines earlier, “That’s American.”⁵ Every day, Americans deal with the contradiction between the idea that everyone is equal and a common yen to get ahead regardless of the means. So what or who gives hope to disparate groups faced with this impasse?

In 2011, William T. May, a leading ethicist, weighed in on the tug-of-war between the desire for personal gain in American life and the ideals offered in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution. Testing the National Covenant calls readers to consider the covenantal biblical origins of both documents as well as their Lockean origins and that the country thus has an ongoing covenantal responsibility to complete what has been “projected” by the two documents. May closes by saying that

Of the voiceless there are always plenty—the repressed in hierarchical societies, the excluded in communitarian societies, and those hobbled at the gate in competitive, egalitarian societies. In its imperfection a nation that boldly declared at its outset, “We the People,” recognizes some mix of all these faults in its own life, as it keeps covenant with the unfinished political agenda ahead.⁶

Angela Glover Blackwell and her colleagues, Stewart Kwoh and Manuel Pastor, are more pragmatic than May, but they too believe that the United States needs to recognize that, regardless of individual preferences, the future of the country will be multicultural. That fact, Blackwell argues, demands that only by working toward not just legal equality but also providing significant equity and inclusion among all of its people can the nation flourish. Without access to educational, health, and transportation systems, access to adequate grocery stores and protection from displacement as their neighborhoods “improve,” for example, citizens are offered an empty promise. Even worse from a political point of view, the country impoverishes itself by not investing in the people whom it needs to prosper in the future. The future of everyone, after all, depends on the existence of a healthy and educationally prepared young population capable of paying taxes to support health care and social security.

Beyond May’s legalistic and altruistic approach and the more pragmatic approach of Blackwell and her colleagues, I suggest an examination of trickster stories produced by American men and women who belong to five different ethnic/racial groups in response to their experiences of inequity and exclusion. In addition to May’s and to Blackwell and her colleagues’ rational expositions of the problem, I believe Americans can learn from tricksters who encode a collective emotional response on the part of groups that feel they have not been treated right. Niigonwedom James Sinclair speaks of stories being the vessel that carries the cores of Anishinaabeg life.⁷ Stories, and particularly trickster stories, encapsulate the self-awareness of both oral and literate cultures. As “outsiders,” people call on the trickster’s contrariness in dealing with what they perceive as injustices. Trickster stories thus allow the rest of us to experience vicariously another culture’s deepest discontents. In addition, tricksters often suggest routes around the impasse between the promise of but lack of equity that any group is experiencing. Their neighbors, of course, may not appreciate the trickster’s alternative solutions; so perhaps they might want to revisit those proposed by May, Blackwell, and others.

Just as educators increasingly use the “salad bowl” rather than the “melting pot” metaphor to help students understand American society, Americans of every background are coming to recognize that they need to develop greater understanding of one another since differences such as historical backgrounds, current needs, and aspirations remain significant to how individuals and groups approach common social concerns. The “we” and “ourselves” in American culture is far broader than the particular parochial background each citizen comes from; the simple nineteenth-century understanding of American culture, repeating the notion that everyone else will “melt” into ways established by upper-class Anglo-American males, does not match twenty-first-century reality. The American “we” encompasses all its citizens, and the country works best when it recognizes the fact. Fortunately, American literary tricksters offer readers insights about people who might otherwise always remain “other.” Especially when Americans read the imaginative literature of other Americans with whom they do not automatically identify, they have the opportunity, as Toni Morrison says, “to examine centers of the self and to have the opportunity to compare these centers with the ‘raceless’ one with which [they] are, all of [them] most familiar.”⁸ Race and ethnicity offer one area where American citizens rub against one another; differences in class and gender lead to further touchiness and sometimes major conflicts, and contemporary trickster literature explores all of these dissonances.

WHAT IS A TRICKSTER?

The short answer is to think of the story about Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. Br’er Rabbit and every trickster is transgressive in the cause of creativity. In the best-known American versions, the core of the Tar Baby story finds the undeserving but guileful Br’er Rabbit escaping his just punishment. In most versions of the tale, he is lazy; usually, he is a thief as well. In the Tar Baby tale and others, Br’er Rabbit encapsulates many trickster qualities. But the trickster is more than just a lazy thief with a talent for evading even cunning traps. Every culture’s tricksters have a lot in common with what a Smithsonian article refers to as the “puny pip-squeaks” in the animal world who often, research is discovering, “get the girl” despite all expectations.⁹ They are the “little guys” who overcome overwhelming odds to triumph despite their apparent lack of stature, heft, or promise.

The long answer is complicated. Tricksters represent freedom from all restraint. They frequently astonish with their ability to achieve creative breakthroughs. But they also embody what Carl Jung would call the shadow side in human nature and frequently engage in what most humans consider unacceptable, even taboo, behavior. Tricksters fascinate Jung and others because—like the male birds in Richard Conniff’s Smithsonian article who manage to impregnate the prize females despite their inability to win the female’s favor in a fair fight—tricksters reverse expectations. They are apparent weaklings who theoretically should not, but do, beat the competition. They are the losers who win: Among oral trickster traditions, Pedro Urdemales not only steals his boss’s herd of pigs, he leaves the man thinking that the pigs are salvageable, only caught in a bog. The Monkey King—only a monkey after all—connives so successfully that he almost oversets heaven. Jack bumbles along and sells his mother’s cow for beans. Yet he manages to kill the giant and end up with a fortune. Although his foolishness wipes out his achievement, Coyote almost eliminates death. And Br’er Rabbit, of course, regularly outwits the much stronger Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. These and other tricksters from oral culture overset expectations and thus have long appealed to people who yearn for something other than the usual outcome.

Tricksters cannot be pinned down. They are “both/and” creatures—both villains, for example, and culture heroes; likely to do good or evil to humankind; usually highly sexed males whose closest connections are nonsexual attachments to older women. Nonetheless, all tricksters share many of the characteristics that folklorist Barbara Babcock-Abrahams explains in “A Tolerated Margin of Mess.”¹⁰ Pulling together much of the earlier critical anthropological literature about tricksters, Babcock-Abrahams elaborates a series of central points about tricksters. They are, first of all, marginal—not in a pejorative sense but as a reflection of all the in-between and “anti-structural” states Babcock-Abrahams is discussing. Next, tricksters are not put upon. The Spanish Pedro Urdemales of oral literature, for example, may be stuck at the bottom of the country’s socioeconomic scale but successfully spends every waking moment throwing disquiet into the hearts of his oppressors. Rather than worrying about banishment or fitting in, tricksters invite chaos; in their hands it becomes a farce,¹¹ and hence a source of relief from otherwise absolutist norms. Thus, in modern literature, but picturing a postmodern landscape, Gerald Vizenor’s Fourth Proude Cedarfair and his family navigate a violent land almost devoid of fossil fuels where only the clowns make sense. Tricksters are both “central to the action” and capable of “dissolv[ing] events” and “throw[ing] doubt on the finality of fact.”¹² Tricksters explode preconceptions, so Nina Marie Martínez’ s ¡Caramba! makes a joke of male pretensions to superiority. Barbara Babcock-Abrahams lists 16 interrelated forms of “anomalousness”¹³ that characterize tricksters. Whatever category a trickster encounters, he¹⁴ blurs and confuses the distinctions that make it a category. Yet Babcock-Abrahams argues that even the apparent “antistructure [in trickster tales] implies structure and order”¹⁵ because the trickster consistently disrupts order.

WHERE ARE TRICKSTERS FOUND TODAY?

These days, tricksters—and trickster tales—proliferate in those social spaces where people from different backgrounds rub against one another; and that includes most parts of the United States. When the promises in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution are not realized, contemporary trickster literature takes realistic details from the lives of people intimately acquainted with the flaws of the world they live in and suggests where and how Americans might bring reality into closer alignment with the nation’s ideals. While trickster discourse¹⁶ certainly outlines major sources of social discontent in the United States, it also proposes ways in which Americans might overcome that discontent and come closer to the ideals encompassed in their official rhetoric.

Tricksters are aptly fashioned to spot the contradictions between American rhetoric and practice, deflate its self-satisfaction with humor, and suggest alternative approaches. In Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, Lewis Hyde asks readers to notice that tricksters proliferate wherever a society has “dirt” (Hyde’s word) to hide, whenever it clings to something it would prefer remained unexamined. In response to that implicit challenge, tricksters invariably rise up and challenge any attempt to gloss over what those in power prefer to ignore. Americans value freedom, and tricksters embody ultimate, even anarchic freedom. In fact, to quote Mark Twain’s response after Matthew Arnold complained that Americans lacked awe and reverence, “A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.”¹⁷ Twain might also have mentioned the way American irreverence is often wrapped up in humor. Some of America’s most memorable public tricksters, from Mark Twain himself to Will Rogers and more recently from Red Foxx to Steven Colbert, have always been best known as humorists. Tricksters excel at irreverence, and American literature continues to call upon a world of trickster traditions to preserve the liberty of its peoples.¹⁸

PARTICULAR TRICKSTERS REFLECT PARTICULAR OUTLOOKS

Because the trickster traditions of each ethnic group encode each group’s hopes and its communal interpretation of life in the United States, contemporary trickster literature is especially helpful in understanding the aspirations and frustrations of people from different backgrounds. Although American tricksters’ ancestors come from earlier cultures, they have become American and reflect ingrained attitudes of groups now living in the United States. No one traditional culture’s trickster, however, can speak for all Americans; and each group’s tricksters view American culture from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 African Americans and an Enduring Tradition
• 3 Coyotes and Others Striving for Balance
• 4 Trickster Seeking His Fortune
• 5 Heirs of the Monkey King
• 6 Rough Mischief, Irreverence, and the Fantastic
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: The Monkey King
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index