Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
down to the earth. There he breaks the box and now, thanks to Raven the thief, we have daylight in this world.
Perhaps all theft is opportunity theft in the sense that where something is protected a thief needs a break or pore in the guard through which to enter and carry off the goods. The hole in the sky that frames this part of the Tsimshian Raven cycle is only one of several such pores Raven finds or creates. For one thing, he slips into the family by finding, as it were, a porous woman and a way to enter her. As a crying baby he then subverts the group’s defenses (as con artists sometimes use their children to soften up the mark). All good people are vulnerable to the helpless, unhappy child. If Raven had approached the lodge armed with weapons and demanding the Daylight-Box in a loud voice, he would have had a fight on his hands. But as a helpless babe he is not only welcomed and washed, he is actually given the prize. Trickster, then, is a poreseeker. He keeps a sharp eye out for naturally occurring opportunities and creates them ad hoc when they do not occur by themselves.
Now let’s reverse the picture and come back to trickster as trapper. As opportunism is a part of this cunning, so, too, is the blocking of opportunity, and to block opportunity one needs to create the impenetrable or non-porous, the net so fine there is no way to slip through. Natural history provides many examples of such pore-blocking wit at work. One of my favorites is the method that humpback whales use to trap the tiny fish they feed on. When the humpback whale comes upon a school of herring, it dives deep and then swims in a slow circle, exhaling all the while, so that a cone of bubbles rises through the water. The herring in the school misperceive this “bubble net” as a barrier through which they cannot swim. Having confined the school, the whale then rises through the center of the bubble net, its mouth open and filling with fish.
The octopus has a similar trick, only this one is used defensively. When threatened by a predator, the octopus darkens the water with a jet of ink, turning transparency into a murky, impenetrable, non-porous medium. In both cases, of course, the impenetrability is an illusion. The darkness around the octopus is only an artificial night; the herring are trapped not by bubbles but by their own defenses and perceptive limitations. Still, in each case the artifice suffices.
Trickster himself plays with the porous and non-porous in any number of tales that focus on tunnels and burrowing animals. Remember that the Zulu trickster Thlókunyana is a small being associated with the weasel. In one story, he has moved into the leopard’s household, tricked the mother leopard, and eaten her children. Knowing he will eventually be discovered, Thlókunyana makes himself an escape route, a long tunnel with a distant, hidden outlet. When the leopard finally realizes what has happened to her children, Thlókunyana disappears into his hole. The leopard follows, thinking the burrow has a single entrance and Thlókunyana will easily be trapped. But before the leopard knows what’s happening, wily Thlókunyana has come out his secret exit, doubled back, and set spears around both entrances; when the baffled leopard emerges she is killed. In a common North American version of this “tunnel trick,” Coyote lures his enemy into a tunnel, then builds fires at each end—trapping his victim and roasting his dinner at the same time.
The initial trick in all such tales is to have made a burrow in the first place. The rabbit with a hole has a pore in the earth, a self-made opportunity to escape the fox. But the animal with a single-entrance burrow is also in danger of being trapped in its own hole, so the second trick is to dig a second entrance, or a third, or fourth. The Greeks thought the fox the epitome of animal cunning and imagined her dwelling to have seven entrances. But no matter how many entrances, we’re still in the land of opportunism, of ever increasing porosity. The third trick, then, is to block the entrances when need be, turning pores into barriers. Just as the Greek poros is a passageway, a hole in the skin, so aporos is an impassable place, something that cannot be seen through. What Thlókunyana or Coyote do is to turn an escape route into a trap, a hole into a snare, a poros into an aporos, a clear medium into an aporia.
In rhetoric and logic, “aporia”—the English word derived from aporos—means a contradiction or irreconcilable paradox. To experience aporia is to be caught in a tunnel with a fire at either end, to be bewildered by clouds of ink or encircled by a net of bubbles. No matter how many times you reverse yourself, you’re still caught. Aporia is the trap of bafflement, invented by a being whose hunger has made him or her more cunning than those who only think to travel forward through a transparent world.
One mark of trickster’s mind, then, is that it exploits and frustrates opportunity. To move to a related but distinct feature—trickster’s cunning in regard to doubling back or reversing himself—let us take a somewhat more complicated example of the trap of bafflement. When the baby Hermes steals fifty of his brother Apollo’s cattle, he resorts to several clever ruses to hide his theft. First of all, he makes the cattle walk backward so that their footprints give the impression they were walking toward the meadow from which they were stolen. Second, Hermes makes himself a pair of tricky sandals, binding to his feet bunches of myrtle twigs and tamarisk, leaves and all. His own tracks are thus hard to read; they seem to point in all directions; they have no orientation. Hermes also zigzags as he walks and perhaps, being Hermes, flies a little between steps so that his apparent stride is strange. Later, Hermes throws his sandals into a river and spreads sand over the ashes of his sacrificial fire. (This is what travelers do to hide their camps; they bury each night’s campfire so as to move invisibly on their journey.)
In short, Hermes makes all the signs of his theft hard to find and harder to read. He covers his tracks, obviously, and those he doesn’t cover he confuses with what I’d like to call “confounded polarity.” Hermes’ sandals have no “heel and toe,” and therefore seem to go both ways at once, just as the cattle do when they move forward backward. Folklore about foxes has it that a fox, pursued by the hounds, will sometimes run a distance and then double back on its own tracks; when the hounds come to the place where the fox turned they are flummoxed and wander around barking at one another.
With both the cattle tracks and his sandals Hermes similarly confuses or erases polarity. It is as if, lost in the woods, you took out a compass and the needle spun aimlessly instead of pointing north. You could not then get oriented or find a path; you could not proceed. In this way, confounded polarity makes the world unpassable and is a kind of aporia. It blocks all passage by destroying the orientation that passage requires. When Apollo comes upon the tracks that Hermes and the cattle leave, he is stopped in his own tracks, unable to move:
And when the Great Archer made out the footprints, he cried out: “Well, well! This is remarkable, what I’m seeing. Clearly these are longhorned cattle tracks, but they all point backwards, toward the fields of daffodils! And these others, they are not the tracks of a man or a woman, nor of a gray wolf or a bear or lion. And I don’t think the shaggy-maned Centaur leaves such prints. What swift feet took these long strides? The tracks on this side of the path are weird, but those on the other side are weirder still!”
Such is the voice of the baffled man caught in a set of cunning reversals.
A scene such as this, with one character tracking another, points back to the earlier discussion of cunning that arises from the tension between predators and their prey. The animal able to read tracks has an invaluable tool in its hunting repertoire, as the animal able to disguise its tracks has a tool for its defense. Moreover, to read a track is an ancient and elemental interpretive act. From a broken twig, the depth of a footprint, a whiff of urine, a bit of fur snagged on a thorn, the hunter infers the presence of a particular animal, infers its direction, speed, size, habits. From potentially cryptic signs, the hunter speculates toward larger meanings. Stories about tricksters and tracking are therefore stories about reading and writing. The tale of Hermes and Apollo, in particular, pits a skilled encoder against a skilled decoder, a wary writer against a cunning reader. The writer makes his tracks lie in hopes of misleading the reader; the reader tries to get at a second or third level of signification so he can figure out what really happened.
Some humor is built into this scene, for normally Apollo is the god who can read a sign. Whenever a bird drops from the clouds, Apollo is the one who notices it and announces the meaning hidden from all less gifted readers. Apollo knows the mind of Zeus; he has prophetic powers; he has his own oracle at Delphi that brings him a handsome