is also translated “wily,” “versatile,” and “much-traveled”). There are three and only three characters in Greek literature who are said to be polytrophic: Hermes, Odysseus, and that deceitful Athenian general and Socratic pretty-boy, Alcibiades. Odysseus is named a polytropic man in the first line of the Odyssey; Hermes is the polytropic child in the Homeric Hymn.* As for Alcibiades, Plutarch’s Lives tells of the time when the Spartans sent orders that he be put to death. Alcibiades discovered the plot and escaped:
Resorting to Tissaphernes … for safety, he was soon first and fore most in that grandee’s favour. For his versatility [polutropon] and surpassing cleverness were the admiration of the Barbarian, who was no straightforward man himself, but malicious and fond of evil company. And indeed no disposition could resist and no nature escape Alcibiades, so full of grace was his daily life and conversation. Even those who feared and hated him felt a rare and winning charm in his society and presence.
Thus is trickster and thus is the polytropic man, shifty as an octopus, coloring himself to fit his surroundings, putting on a fresh face for each man or woman he meets, charming, disarming, and not to be trusted. (He makes a good politician, especially in a democracy, where many voters call for many faces.)
For the ancients, the ability to change one’s skin was not merely a matter of disguise, because the skin was often imagined to reveal the inner being. In some traditions, when a person wished to make it clear that he stood behind his deeds, when he wished to say “my true self did that,” he would say, “My skin did that.” To be able to change the skin therefore raises serious puzzles about identity, the kind of puzzle the immune system faces when trying to identify a trypanosome. If Odysseus can play so many roles, if he can play a part, as Athena once says, “as if it were [his] own tough skin,” then who is the real Odysseus? If the Norse trickster, Loki, can appear as a bird, a flea, a horse, and a fire, then who is the real Loki? If Raven can shed his raven cloak and become a cedar leaf, who is the real Raven? It is our habit to imagine a true self behind the shining images, but it is sometimes difficult to know if that self is really there, or just the product of our imaginings.
Take the hero of Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man, for example. In the course of that complicated book, a confidence man appears in a series of masks and roles, never as himself. That being the case, can we rightly say he has a self? And if he does, how can we describe that self with any, well, confidence? Melville’s hero wears so many seamless masks that many readers find him a little devilish, and consequently read the novel as an allegory: the Confidence-Man is the Devil. I suspect that Melville himself leaned toward that reading at times, but his novel doesn’t finally allow it. One can almost as easily make the counter case—that the Confidence-Man is a savior who only seems dark because he must work in a fallen world—and once that’s been done, if he might be the Devil or he might be Christ, we must probably admit that his “true self” is hopelessly hidden, or doesn’t exist.
Some classicists have argued that a similar problem faces the reader hoping to find the true Odysseus. Pietro Pucci contends that because Odysseus is always manipulating reality, disguising his body and telling lies about his past, he “removes himself from his ‘real’ self and falls into shadowy and intermediary postures in which he will at once be himself and not himself, true to his temper and disloyal to it.” If we presume to identify a real Odysseus behind his fabulations we should at least be aware that the presumption is ours, Pucci argues, concluding that “the disguising scenes [themselves] are what create the illusion of his ‘real self.’”
These are difficult cases; identifying the “self” of an animal predator such as Trypanosoma brucei may be a little easier because all its disguises serve a single end: they help it feed upon its host. The real self is in the feeding. The real octopus has a constant belly below its shifting skin. But not all shape-shifters have such unitary and identifiable ends. If we find a trickster who has managed to distance himself from appetite, how can we be sure what really moves his reversals? As soon as we begin to think that Melville’s Confidence-Man is governed by greed alone, we find him giving away gold pieces. With some polytropic characters it is possible that there is no real self behind the shifting masks, or that the real self lies exactly there, in the moving surfaces and not beneath. It’s possible there are beings with no way of their own, only the many ways of their shifting skins and changing contexts.
* And, it should be said, terribly dependent on others, though “dependent” might not be the right word: trickster can be a bungling host because he’s such an agile parasite.
*Hermes becomes Mercurius or Mercury in Rome and in the Middle Ages. Carl Jung points out that in alchemical texts “Mercurius, following the tradition of Hermes, is manysided, changeable, and deceitful. Dorn speaks of ‘that inconstant Mercurius,’ and another calls him versipellis (changing his skin, shifty).”
A SIGN OF YOUTHFUL THEFT
As I write these pages a mother cardinal nesting near the house is driving herself nuts pecking at her own reflection in my study window. She is convinced there is another bird there, an interloper, a threat to her nest, her eggs, her territory. If I pull the shade, or even prop a book up against the glass, the reflection disappears and the bird calms down. But some days I forget to perform this small, interspecies favor and now the glass is covered with the greasy smudges of her wing tips, like a script with only two brush strokes, a cryptic testament to the stubborn persistence of her limited brain.
A story we’ll call “The Reflected Plums” was once told all over the North American continent. Here is the version in the Winnebago trickster cycle:
Trickster happened to look in the water and much to his surprise he saw many plums there. He surveyed them very carefully and then he dived down into the water to get some. But only small stones did he bring back in his hands. Again he dived into the water. But this time he knocked himself unconscious against a rock at the bottom. After a while he floated up and gradually came to. He was lying on the water, flat on his back, when he came to and, as he opened his eyes, there on the top of the bank he saw many plums. What he had seen in the water was only a reflection. Then he realized what he had done. “Oh, my, what a stupid fellow I must be! I should have recognized this. Here I have caused myself a great deal of pain.”
In the Winnebago cycle, immediately following this event trickster fools some mother raccoons into leaving their children alone so that he might eat them. To get the raccoons to leave their young, trickster tells them where the plums are: “You cannot possibly miss the place … for there are so many plums there … If, toward evening, as the sun sets, you see the sky red, you will know that the plums are causing it. Do not turn back for you will surely find it.” As Paul Radin points out, the joke here is that for the Winnebago “a red sky is the stereotype symbol for death. This is what it should have meant to the foolish women for their children are about to be killed.” Trickster is toying with them, offering them a figurative hint as to what is about to happen; they take his language literally, however, and suffer the consequences, just as trickster himself took the reflected plums literally and consequently suffered. As is often the case, we see trickster being simultaneously stupid and clever—one minute taking an image for the real thing, the next teasing others too dumb to hear an image for its layered senses.
