Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
Hermes, and he seems to be inventing something his older sibling hasn’t seen before. The tracks he leaves have multiple meanings, disguised meanings, contextual meanings, ambiguity, a first hint of something that will come forward in the next chapter, the idea that the Hymn to Hermes is a creation myth for the mind that is a master of signs.
Seizing and blocking opportunity, confusing polarity, disguising tracks—these are some of the marks of trickster’s intelligence. The last of them leads to the final item on this initial list: if trickster can disguise his tracks, surely he can disguise himself. He can encrypt his own image, distort it, cover it up. In particular, tricksters are known for changing their skin. I mean this in two ways: sometimes tricksters alter the appearance of their skin; sometimes they actually replace one skin with another.
The latter may be harder to imagine, so let’s begin with an example from natural history. Because the mythology suggests it, I have been deriving each of trickster’s tricks from predator-prey relationships; to illustrate skin-changing, let’s take a case in which the prey is humankind and the predator is a microbe, Trypanosoma brucei, the protozoan that causes African sleeping sickness. This worm-like creature kills thousands of people each year in Africa. It enters the bloodstream through the bite of the tsetse fly and then begins to multiply. Once the invader is detected, the victim’s immune system fights back with the single weapon at its command: it produces antibodies specific to the shape of the intruder’s skin, or outer protein coat. But this trypanosome can change its skin into as many as a thousand shapes, and the immune system never catches up. Each time it produces an antibody specific to any one skin, brucei drops that skin and produces another from its enormous wardrobe. Brucei is like a con man at a masquerade; it is not attached to any particular mask or face or persona, but fluidly alters each as the situation demands.
There are many such shifty-skinned or versipellis animals. The flounder, like the chameleon, eludes its enemies by mimicking the sea floor: when it swims in pebbled seas it sports a pebbled back; when it swims in sandy seas it sports a sandy back. In the Greek tradition the creature most renowned for its wily skin is the octopus, which takes both the shape and the color of the rock to which it clings, then reaches out from that mineral disguise to snare and eat its prey.
For the Greeks, skin-shifting versatility was a virtue. The elegiac poet Theognis praises the octopus for its flexibility. It is better to shift one’s ground than to stand inflexibly and fight, Theognis says.
Present a different aspect of yourself to each of your friends … Follow the example of the octopus with its many coils which assumes the appearance of the stone to which it is going to cling. Attach yourself to one on one day and, another day, change color. Cleverness is more valuable than inflexibility.
Theognis’ word for “inflexibility” is atropia, or as we might anglicize it, a kind of non-tropic-ness. “Tropic” means “turning” (the phototropic plant turns to follow light); thus the non-tropic being is unturning, inflexible, fixed in its skin and quite unlike the octopus.
I introduce these lines from Theognis because they offer a neat link between skin-shifting and another way that trickster’s shiftiness has been figured. Trickster is polytropic, which in its simplest sense means “turning many ways” (though the Greek polutropos 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