to change the character of ritual sacrifice, this meat-not-eaten appears as the consequence of a series of cunning subterfuges. In this story, only a thief could have effected the shifts in question; it is by virtue of that thief’s duplicity that the meat takes its double or, rather, multiple meanings. In A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco has this to say about what makes something a “sign”:
Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else … Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie . If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it annot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.
The baited hook, that “first trick” we looked at early on, might make a good example of a sign in this sense. A worm with no hook in it, a worm the fish can eat in safety, has, by Eco’s way of thinking, no significance, but the worm that says “I’m harmless” when in fact it hides a hook tells a lie and by that lie worms begin to signify (and fish, if they are smart, will begin to read before they eat). Only when there’s a possible Lying Worm can we begin to speak of a True Worm, and only then does Worm become a sign.
We shall return to questions of lying, but first I want to link Eco’s defin ition of a “sign” to the substitutions involved in thieving, and to the duplicity that produces the meat-not-eaten. To begin, I need to say a bit about what Apollo’s cattle mean and how they come to have that meaning. The classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant tells us that the cattle of the unmown meadow are somewhat unusual before Hermes steals them: they are neither wild nor domestic; they do not reproduce sexually (and thus have a fixed number); they are peaceful, beautiful, and immortal. Hermes, Vernant says, “takes these cows from the divine world … to the world of men, where they acquire domestic status” and where they become part of “the world as it is”; henceforth they live in stables, reproduce sexually, and are slaughtered to be eaten by humankind.
Eco is arguing, it seems to me, that what Vernant has as the cattle’s initial meaning—their immortality, and so on—exists only retroactively. If meaning cannot exist without the possibility of substitution, then so long as the cattle cannot be moved from their unmown meadow they cannot mean anything. Conversely, the moment at which they may be butchered and eaten is the moment at which their earlier state acquires its significance. Their meat means one thing on the hoof, another in the fire, and yet another hung in the barn. Hermes-the-Thief moves the meat from one situation to another and by such substitutions it comes to have its significance; it becomes a sign that can “tell” something. Especially in a case like this, where there is a rule against moving the cattle, there can be no signification without trickster’s duplicity, and the mind of a thief is the mind most fully able to encode and decode.
That given, let me come back to the idea that nóos is also born of restraint. We usually think of restraint as a virtue and when the Hymn mentions Hermes’ “proud heart” it’s hard to get away from the notion that something good is happening—this youngster is maturing, getting control of his impulses, and so forth. That is obviously the case in one regard, but we must not forget that duplicity surrounds the whole endeavor. No one imagines Hermes is about to shape up and become an Apollonian banker. This young god is restraining appetite now in favor of appetite later. Remember again what he says to his mother:
“Why should we be the only gods who never eat the fruits of sacrifice and prayer? Better always to live in the company of other deathless ones—rich, glamorous, enjoying heaps of grain—than forever to sit by ourselves in a gloomy cavern.”
In short, we are seeing appetite deferred or displaced rather than any full restraint or denial. As I argued earlier, Hermes has not given up eating; dedicating the smoke of sacrifice to himself, he forgoes the mortal portion so as to feast on a portion that will do him no harm.
• • •
It may be helpful at this point to summarize the ground we have covered and formulate a few conclusions. I ended the last chapter by presenting several ways in which trickster’s cunning has been imagined. He knows how to slip through pores, and how to block them; he confuses polarity by doubling back and reversing himself; he covers his tracks and twists their meanings; and he is polytropic, changing his skin or shifting his shape as the situation requires. Natural history offers wonderful examples of each of these. We see this cunning in the humpback whale casting its bubble net, in the fox doubling back to baffle the hounds, in the octopus blending with its chosen rock.
And yet these images fail to catch the full flavor of what we mean by cunning. We are speaking here of a kind of mind, and mind has a plasticity not usually found in the animal world. Odysseus and the octopus are both polytropic, but Odysseus is more so. Like an octopus, Odysseus could put on a rock-colored cloak if he needed to, but the octopus can never, like Odysseus, dress as a beggar against regal surroundings. The octopus does not consider its coloration. Odysseus and those who imagine him, on the other hand, have nóos, the mind that can form an image or representation of some sort and “float” it, detached, to be considered and shaped or changed before it is either discarded or acted upon. The story of Hermes hanging his meat-sign up in the barn suggests one answer to how such a mind came to be. Duplicity and deferral of appetite are key to its emergence, the implication being that signification evolved to help this animal slip the trap of appetite or at least better manage its constraints.
However the shift from unconsidered to considered trickery took place, once it has appeared we must reread the stories out of natural history as “just so” stories about cognition and culture. Now, in addition to the fox with its seven-holed lair, we have all forms of mental and social opportunism, from the mind that can sense loopholes in an argument to the pickpockets who hang out around railway depots. Now, in addition to the octopus squirting ink, we have the mind that can hide its assumptions in clouds of rhetoric or spin out opaque mythologies to preserve the barriers of caste and class. Beyond the fox that turns on its own scent to baffle the hounds, we now have the logician’s paradoxes and ideologies that conceal their own contradictions. In addition to animals that disguise their tracks and predators that see through the disguise, we now have the encoding and decoding mind, and all the arts of reading. In addition to nature’s polytropic beasts, we now have the imagination itself—the mastermind of tropes—and the world of art and artifice, from the bard who weaves a captivating tale to the disinformation officer who floats a cover story to lead an enemy astray.
In short, trickster’s cunning now takes on its mental, social, cultural, and even spiritual forms. But it does so with one particular limitation. Earlier, I suggested that if trickster were free of all appetite he would no longer be trickster. In a sense, this is a matter of definition; the mythology we’re looking at is constantly gustatory, sexual, and scatological. It seems to require, then, that we connect trickster’s inventive cunning to the body’s needs. With that in mind, I want to return to a topic we have several times approached, the idea that trickster invents the art of lying, for in this mythology that invention arises precisely where artifice and hunger are knit to one another.
“MERE BELLIES”
The woman next to me leaned back and closed her eyes and then so did all the others as I sang to them in what was surely an ancient and holy tongue. —Tobias Wolff, “The Liar”
Hermes is a day old when he steals Apollo’s cattle, and this first theft he follows smartly with his first lie. First theft, first lie: isn’t the same sequence of events a part of each of our childhoods? When I was five or six years old, living in England, I stole a five-pound note from my parents’ au pair. I hid this treasure in a tiny hole in the trunk of a fir tree down by the fish pond. The five-pound note in England in the early 1950s was as big as a handkerchief and must have been printed with richly colored inks, for now as I conjure my
