There was consternation in the household when this theft was discovered and suspicion naturally fell on my brother and me. As with the time I lit a fire in my wastebasket, I denied everything. I held out as long as I could, but my mother must have brought me around because I remember leading her to the hiding hole. I think I resolved the tension by making up a story about another boy, a recent houseguest, whose clever crime I had had the luck to witness. My mother let the improbability pass, and I guided her, with a touch of pride, to the secret depository. The hole into which I had put the note I took to be the home of some small bird; memory’s narrative of my theft ends with gem colors lifting from the duff and fibers of that nest.
Such stories border on the mythology of the trickster; perhaps all of childhood does. Who among us in early youth did not sometime steal food or money and then lie about the theft? When we did, what did it mean? Reading mythologically, how should we understand our first transgressions?
For one thing, these crimes play with the possibility of separation from one’s elders. At least briefly, there are two worlds, the real one of the theft and the imaginary one of the lie. For an actual child, if memory serves me, this doubling comes with some anxiety. There is the threat of punishment and anger, of course, but beyond that a separation from our parents is a risk because theirs is our only world and we depend upon it. With or without that anxiety, the first lie is a particularly weighted act of imagination. It is a motivated fiction, and a probe into the craft thereof. We may not actually doubt the reality of our parents’ world, but still, a lie is a bit of an experiment with its solidity, an artificial world sent out to see if it can blend in and survive. If it can, the authority of the “real” may be shaken slightly and the first lie bring an early awareness of artifice.
Here let me refine an earlier point about lying. I began with Umberto Eco’s idea that a sign is something that can be taken as substituting for something else, and I used Apollo’s cattle as an example: Hermes switches them from place to place and by these substitutions they begin to signify, first one thing and then another. The idea was that trickster’s duplicity is a precondition of signification, a point I qualified by noting that in this case there is a rule against moving the cattle. Without the qualification, we get the general case, which is simpler: “substitution” is the precondition of signification, whether or not thieving is involved. An example will clarify the point and, by contrast, help show why, in this mythology, we get the special case in which thieving and lying are in fact a necessary part of the creation of meaning.
At one point in the Odyssey, Odysseus is given a task: he must take an oar and travel inland until someone mistakes it for a winnowing fan. A winnowing fan is a sort of shovel used to toss grain into the air so that wind will carry away the chaff; it looks exactly like an oar. There is a complicated point to this task in the Odyssey, having to do with making reparations for an insult to the god of the sea, but what is of interest here is the simpler matter of mistaking one thing for another or, better, the idea that a single thing can have two meanings in two places. The same object is “oar” at the seaside and “winnowing fan” up in some hill town. With that, we see how Traveler-Odysseus is connected to Cunning-Speaker-Odysseus, for only the person who has traveled (in fact or in mind) can realize that the meaning of an object (or a word) is connected to its location or context. Men and women who have never left the village might not know that. Only the polytropic, “much-traveled” mind can know that.
The oar begins to signify as soon as it substitutes for the winnowing fan, a substitution possible because Odysseus can carry the oar from one place to another. It’s as if nothing is significant until it’s portable; we must be able to move it, in fact or in mind, from one context to another. That motion needs no theft or lie in the case of Odysseus’ oar, but Apollo’s cattle are another matter. As I argued earlier, the meaning the cattle have in their unmown meadow—their immortality, their asexuality, and so on—exists only retroactively. They can’t mean anything until they can be moved from the meadow. The moment at which they show up in another context, butchered, is the moment at which their earlier state takes on its significance. So again we come to the point that in this mythology theft is the beginning of meaning. To put it another way, a prohibition on theft is an attempt to constrain meaning, to stop its multiplication, to preserve an “essence,” the “natural,” the “real.” There is no prohibition on carrying an oar inland, so any traveler may multiply its meanings. There is a prohibition on moving the cattle of Apollo; only a thief can make them signify.
Both lying and thieving multiply meanings against the grain, as it were. A lie is a kind of mental imitation of a theft (when Hermes lies about the cattle, he does with words what he did with the cows themselves). A child’s first theft and first lie are pivotal in the history of the intellect, then, for with them the child is not just in the world of signification, fantasy, fabulation, and fiction; she is in that world as an independent creator, setting out to make meaning on her own terms, not subject to the prohibitions that preceded her, just as, with his theft and his lies, Hermes sets out to make a cosmos on his own terms. Such is the mythological weight of the first lie. I myself was a failure as a mythic thief and liar, of course; I never leveraged those five pounds into a world of my own design; with my confession I scurried back to a childhood authored by my parents. Though, come to think of it, I never fully confessed. There, too, I told a lie, a secondary fib featuring a second little boy. I see him still, standing near the pine tree with a wooden sword the gardener helped me make.
I am seeking out the mythological meaning of the first lie that trickster tells. If we come at the question from another angle—trickster’s relationship to truth-telling—we will be able to link his lies to our initial topic, appetite. At the beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony, the Muses come down from Mount Helicon and speak to the poet. He’s with friends tending flocks of sheep, and the Muses address them with scorn—” Shepherds living in the fields, base objects of reproach, mere bellies!”—and go on to point out how different are those who live on the high mountain: “We know how to say many falsehoods that look like genuine things, but we can also, whenever we are willing, proclaim true things.”
The Muses believe that human beings are unlikely to tell the truth because they are “mere bellies,” ridden by their appetites. This is an old conceit, well illustrated by several scenes in the Odyssey. Visiting the Phaeacian court, for example, Odysseus says that his belly makes him forget his story, and asks to be fed. He doesn’t say directly that he will lie if he isn’t fed, he says he will “forget,” but it amounts to the same thing, for the root of “forget” is leth-, and to tell the truth is to be a-lethes. “If you want me to speak the truth,” Odysseus is saying, “you had better tend to my shameless belly.”
Similarly, when Hesiod’s Muses say they are “willing” to speak truth, the line probably echoes Eumaios, the swineherd in the Odyssey, who says that hungry wanderers are “unwilling” to tell true things. The remark comes late in the epic when Odysseus has returned to Ithaca disguised as a beggar. The first man he runs into is this swineherd who tells him that travelers often show up in Ithaca pretending to have news of the lost king, Odysseus. As the swineherd explains it, “Wandering men tell lies for a night’s lodging, for fresh clothing; truth doesn’t interest them.”
Of course Odysseus is in fact the returned king, and he keeps dropping hints to that effect. He even says at one point, “Your lord is now at hand,” but the swineherd won’t believe him. He asks Odysseus to get serious and tell his “true” story, and Odysseus obliges with a lie. “My native land is the wide seaboard of Crete,” he says, and spins a tale full of the concrete, specific detail (“he had lost the top of his right ear”) that liars use to make falsehoods seem like the truth. He ends by saying that he has heard Odysseus will soon return, to which Eumaios replies, “Why must you lie …? You needn’t lie to be a guest here.” The swineherd rejects as a fabrication the single part of the story that is true. (The recurrent lies Odysseus tells at the end of the Odyssey are called “Cretan lies” because he typically begins them saying “My native land … is Crete.”
