and befuddlement that the first lie initiates. It upsets the polarity between truth and falsity to emerge later with a new polarity, perhaps (“Hermes is truly the Keeper of the Herds”), but one set up with different boundary markers (the herder’s whip has been shifted from one hand to another).
I want to back off a little here in order to widen this point and connect it to questions of appetite. All cultures have particular vocabularies that are deployed in paradigmatic patterns, in locally understood webs of signification. We enter such a web when we hear “Raven Becomes Voracious.” The Tsimshian have all these terms and characters—intestines, salmon roe, the animal chief, sunlight, the Queen Charlotte Islands, slaves, sea-lion bladders, and on and on—which hang together in a locally felt manner. There is no story about burning the brain of a dead boy, only the intestines; the ancient Raven doesn’t fly toward the Islands, only away from them. The terms are knit together in certain ways, not in others. American capitalist democracy has its webs too, of course. Weight loss, natural foods, Valley Forge, atomic power, the family, free trade, white bread: any citizen can spin a narrative of these things that will make sense to any other citizen. The story is always that George Washington didn’t tell a lie; the cigarette always has a natural flavor.
Typically, such webs of signification are built around sets of opposites: fat and thin, slave and free, for example, or—more categorically—true and false, natural and unnatural, real and illusory, clean and dirty. What tricksters sometimes do is to disturb these pairs and thus disturb the web itself.
Earlier I showed how any animal that is prey for a baited trap does well to develop the wit to see past the bait. The stories themselves suggest a kind of incrementally growing cunning that ends with a creature smart enough to defer hunger and steal the bait. Now, we see similar cunning in terms of the polarities that organize webs of signification. At the start of the Homeric Hymn, for example, Hermes is at one pole of such a set of opposites: he is not-Olympian, not-legitimate, not-the-object-of-sacrifice. He could have settled for that position or he could have settled for simple contrariety (stealing food for the rest of eternity). He does neither. He leaves what Theodore Roethke called “the weary dance of opposites” and finds a third thing. Just as the bait thief turns the predator-prey relationship itself into his feeding ground, so the master liar (thief, deceiver) takes the web of signification itself as the site of his operations. When he does so, that web loses its charm, its magic. After Thlókunyana has stolen the bait from a trap, that trap no longer catches game. After Hermes has told the lie that makes Apollo laugh and played his charming lyre, Apollo’s righteousness no longer serves. Yasoda’s sense of mine and thine is subverted when Krishna makes her smile.
Once the web has lost its charm, its terms lose theirs; suddenly they seem contingent and open to revision. For those epi-predators who work with the signifiers themselves rather than the things they supposedly signify, language is not a medium that helps us see the true, the real, the natural. Language is a tool assembled by creatures with “no way” trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs; it is a tool those same creatures can disassemble if it fails them.
It is in this line that I understand a remark in Plato to the effect that Hermes invented language. In the Cratylus Plato discusses the origins of certain words, especially the names of the gods. At one point he says, “I should imagine that the name Hermes has to do with speech, and signifies that he is the interpreter [hermeneus], or messenger, or thief, or liar, or bargainer; all that sort of thing has a great deal to do with language …” He goes on to propose that two Greek words meaning “to tell” and “to contrive” were combined to form “the name of the God who invented language and speech,” because Hermes is “the contriver of tales or speeches.”
The idea that Hermes invented language seems in accord with the earlier suggestion that duplicity is the precondition of signification. When discussing the token that Hermes makes to honor his youthful crime, I underscored the combination of theft, appetite, and restraint that went into its creation, and I took that stolen “meat-not-eaten” to mark the simultaneous appearance of signs and of the double-dealing mind that creates them. Plato works from a similar intuition: without the wit to deceive, he assumes, one would not have the wit to come up with language in the first place.
The notion that trickster invents language appears more than once in this mythology, though with considerable variation. Sometimes he creates multiple languages to replace a single primal tongue; sometimes he invents the “inner writing” of memory or the “inner language” of self-knowledge; sometimes he invents picture writing or hieroglyphics; and sometimes, as in Plato, he is the author of language itself. A trickster from the Canadian north woods, for example, is said to have been around before human speech and, in ancient times, to have “brought words over” from the animals to human beings. A somewhat more modest claim is the most common of all: what tricksters quite regularly do is create lively talk where there has been silence, or where speech has been prohibited. Trickster speaks freshly where language has been blocked, gone dead, or lost its charm. Here again Plato’s intuition—that deceit and inventive speech are linked—holds, for usually language goes dead because cultural practice has hedged it in, and some shameless double-dealer is needed to get outside the rules and set tongues wagging again.
But here I want to pause; a full discussion of speech and speech-lessness belongs in a later chapter. I have organized this first part of the book around questions of appetite, and now that I have come to language itself and its webs of signification we are at an outer limit of that hunger narrative. There is a quantum leap between “traps of appetite” and the “traps of culture” that people weave with language; an inquiry into the latter belongs to the sections that follow.
That said, however, let us not forget that appetite brought us this far. We have traveled from the invention of the fish trap to the invention of language, from the alligator snapping turtle luring suckers with its pale tongue to silver-throated Hermes baiting Apollo with charming lies. The point throughout has been to show that the mythology of trickster figures is, by one reading, the story of intelligence arising from appetite. To recall much of the argument so far, remember the image of Raven diving into the ocean to steal fat from fishermen’s baited hooks. Set in the tension of predator-prey relationships, tricksters seem by turns wise and witless: Smart-Trickster invents that baited hook, Witless-Trickster would swallow it, and in the give-and-take between those poles other levels of intelligence slowly appear until we get to Even-Smarter-Trickster, the one who has the wit to steal the bait. Raven is that epi-predator who continues to satisfy his needs while managing enough distance from them that he responds to the smell of meat with reflection rather than reflex.
Part of this mythology links that distancing from need to the invention of sacrifice, as if trickster, ensnared in his own intestines, burns a part of them, consciously restraining his hunger in hopes of its later and more durable satisfaction. In some of the stories, trickster seems to have stepped back from instinct as well as need. Wandering aimlessly, stupider than the animals, he is at once the bungling host and the agile parasite; he has no way of his own but he is the Great Imitator who adopts the many ways of those around him. Unconstrained by instinct, he is the author of endlessly creative and novel deceptions, from hidden hooks to tracks that are impossible to read.
This genealogy of trickery brought us finally to questions of lying and truth-telling, to the sort of contingent claims that make up those webs of signification we call mythologies, cultures, ideologies—claims such as “The cattle belong to Apollo,” or “There are seven major impulse disorders”; claims like “A modest woman covers her face,” “American policy supports emerging democracies,” “Hispanics can be of any race,” “All men are created equal.”
Long ago, Friedrich Nietzsche offered a wonderful way to think of such assertions. The truth, he said in a famous passage, is
a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened,
