the eye-juggler story, the one I heard all those years ago in the Arizona dusk, substituting “white man” for “Coyote” throughout. Suddenly I was more convinced than ever that the story had been directed at me; it was I, after all, who was hitchhiking aimlessly around the countryside, playing by my own rules, burning up other men’s gasoline. I was being offered a little advice.
The Navajo have a number of motives for telling Coyote tales. At the simplest level, the stories are entertaining; they make people laugh; they pass the time. Beyond that, they teach people how to behave. Coyote ought not to do things more than four times; he ought to have proper humility; he ought to have proper respect for his body. Part of the entertainment derives from his self-indulgent refusal of such commands, of course, for there is vicarious pleasure in watching him break the rules, and a potentially fruitful fantasizing, too, for listeners are invited, if only in imagination, to scout the territory that lies beyond the local constraints (what does Coyote see from that high tree?).
According to the folklorist Barre Toelken, who lived among the Navajo for many years, several other levels of motive lie beneath these. Most important, Navajo Coyote stories are used in healing rituals. They are a kind of medicine. “Eye-juggler” is not just a critique of Coyote’s egotism; its telling also plays a role in any healing ritual intended to cure diseases of the eye. (Did I have some “eye disease” after four years of college? Maybe it was time for a break from book learning?) As entertainment, the story stirs up a fantasy of amusing disorder; as medicine, it knits things together again after disorder has left a wound. In fact, to tell the story without such moral or medicinal motives does a kind of violence to it, and to the community (so that the teller would be suspected of engaging in witchcraft).
All this makes it clear that there are limits to the idea that trickster is everywhere in the modern world. It is true that such has occasionally been the aboriginal diagnosis of whites who take such pride in having created a mobile, individualistic, acquisitive civilization. But once one has a sense of the complex uses of Coyote tales one can see that most modern thieves and wanderers lack an important element of trickster’s world, his sacred context. If the ritual setting is missing, trickster is missing. If his companions—all the other spiritual forces within whose fixed domains he carries on his mischief—are no longer with us, then he is no longer with us. Hermes cannot be rightly imagined without the more serious Apollo whose cattle he steals, or the grieving Demeter whose daughter he retrieves from the underworld. The god of the roads needs the more settled territories before his traveling means very much. If everyone travels, the result is not the apotheosis of trickster but another form of his demise. Here we have come back in a roundabout way to the earlier point: trickster belongs to polytheism or, lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people and institutions and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly disturbed.
Most of the travelers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level. Trickster isn’t a run-of-the-mill liar and thief.* When he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds. When Pablo Picasso says that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” we are closer to the old trickster spirit. Picasso was out to reshape and revive the world he had been born into. He took this world seriously; then he disrupted it; then he gave it a new form.
In this book, in any event, it is mostly to the practices of art that I turn in hopes of finding where this disruptive imagination survives among us. A handful of artists play central roles in my narrative—Picasso is one, but also Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston, and several others. (I also devote a chapter to the American slave Frederick Douglass, whose art was oratory and whose field of action politics.) My argument is not, however, that any of these figures is a trickster. “Trickster” is abstraction enough, already distanced from particular embodiments like Hermes and Coyote. Actual individuals are always more complicated than the archetype, and more complicated than its local version, too. Ralph Ellison once wrote a peeved response to a friend’s attempt to fit Invisible Man into the pattern suggested by West African tricksters and their American progeny such as Brer Rabbit. “Archetypes, like taxes,” Ellison wrote, “seem doomed to be with us always, and so with literature, one hopes; but between the two there must needs be the living human being in a specific texture of time, place and circumstance … Archetypes are timeless, novels are time-haunted.” Such is the voice of the specific (the ectype) complaining about the general, the mottled evidence talking back to the refined theory. “Don’t dip my novel in that vat of archetype acid.”
My own position, in any event, is not that the artists I write about are tricksters but that there are moments when the practice of art and this myth coincide. I work by juxtaposition, holding the trickster stories up against specific cases of the imagination in action, hoping that each might illuminate the other. If the method works, it is not because I have uncovered the true story behind a particular work of art but more simply that the coincidences are fruitful, making us think and see again. Such goals are in keeping with trickster’s spirit, for he is the archetype who attack all archetypes. He is the character in myth who threatens to take the myth apart. He is an “eternal state of mind” that is suspicious of all eternal, dragging them from their heavenly preserves to see how they fare down here in this time-haunted world.
*Many, myself included, find the connotations of “trickster” too limited for the scope of activities ascribed to this character. Some have tried to change the name (one writer uses Trickster-Transformer-Culture Hero, which is apt but a touch unwieldy). Others stick to local names, complaining that the general term “trickster” is an invention of nineteenth-century anthropology and not well fitted to its indigenous objects. This is partly true; indigenous terms doubtless allow a fuller feeling for trickster’s sacred complexity. But his trickiness was hardly invented by ethnographers. Hermes is called mechaniôta in Homeric Greek, which translates well as “trickster.” The West African trickster Legba is also called Aflakete, which means “I have tricked you.” The Winnebago Indian figure is called Wakdjunkaga, which means “the tricky one.” Trickery appeared long before anthropology.
* I elaborate these brief remarks in an appendix on gender at the end of the book.
* As for the pre-modern or traditional tricksters, the notes to this introduction contain a list of those who will come forward in this book.
*In Nigeria in the late 1920s, ethnographers found their informant telling tales of the Yoruba trickster Eshu as being about “the Devil,” for this is what the missionaries had taught him to do. (Translations of the Bible into Yoruba use “Eshu” for “Devil.”) The same thing happened in neighboring Dahomey, where Christians were sure they’d found Satan disguised as the trickster Legba, and recast the story of Adam and Eve with Legba hired locally to play the serpent. In America, when Paul Radin worked among the Winnebago (circa 1908–18), he found members of “the new semi-Christian Peyote cult” convinced that the Winnebago trickster Wakdjunkaga was the Devil. Commenting on a story in which trickster has fooled a flock of birds, an informant told Radin, “We, the Winnebago, are the birds and Wakdjunkaga is Satan.” In the thirteenth century, a similar confusion arose around the Norse trickster Loki.
*People have regularly suggested to me that tricky politicians are modern tricksters, but I’m skeptical. It isn’t just that their ends are usually too mundane and petty, but that
