Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
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.” Cretans were understood to be “lazy bellies” and liars by nature, so Odysseus is hanging a lantern on his own fibs, though—as we shall see—only one of his auditors sees the light.)
The general point here is that, in the Homeric world, travelers and itinerant oral poets were presumed to adjust their tales to fit the tastes and beliefs of a local audience. Sometimes in the Odyssey people say a wanderer will always lie because he has a belly; other times they say he will lie until he’s fed. Either way, we have again the link the Muses claim between lying and being a mortal who must eat. Conversely (as we saw when speaking of sacrifice), an immortal being is by definition one who is free of the odious stomach; the Muses have it that immortal truths cannot be uttered except by those who are similarly free.
The classicist Gregory Nagy suggests that the Muses’ claim to belly-free truth can be better understood if it is set in the history of archaic Greece. Before the eighth century B.C., Greek cities were quite separate from one another; after the eighth century, less so. Before the eighth century, each city would have its own gods and its own poetic traditions, often radically distinct from one another. After the eighth century, Greece was marked by a growing pan-Hellerism—a “surge of intercommunication among the cities”—and with it a muting of differences in tradition and belief.
These two periods bring with them two kinds of poets. On the one hand, when localities differ radically from one another, it is understood that a traveling poet will vary his repertoire as he moves around. If the true and the false shift as the poet wanders, then the poet will be shifty, too. On the other hand, the pan-Hellenic bard hoped to recite, says Nagy, “to Hellenes at large—to listeners from various city-states who congregate at events like pan-Hellenic festivals—and what he recites remains unchanged as he travels from city to city.”
Odysseus fits the earlier model, the poet who adjusts his song to his setting. When Odysseus is not sure of his position, he tells people what they want to hear. He even lies to his wife when he first finds her among the suitors, “making many falsehoods … seem like the truth,” until the tears flow down her face. By contrast, we can take Hesiod himself as a model of the later poet; his poems are addressed to pan-Hellenic audiences and attempt to embody values common to all Greeks.
Thus Nagy argues that the opening lines of the Theogony “can be taken as a manifesto of pan-Hellenic poetry, in that the poet Hesiod is to be freed from being a mere ‘belly’—one who owes his survival to his local audience with its local traditions: all such local traditions are pseúdea ‘falsehoods’ in face of the alethéa ‘true things’ that the Muses impart specially to Hesiod.” In this Theogony, “the many local theogonies of the various city-states are to be superseded by one grand Olympian scheme.”
The tension around which this history is built—variant local truths versus invariant global truths—is not unique to ancient Greece, of course. The story has surely been repeated all over the world whenever travel and contact forced contests of belief upon people who once felt secure in their isolation. To illustrate with a tension from the project at hand, a tricky character in Native American mythology is called Raven on the North Pacific coast, Mink or Blue Jay farther south; on the Plains, the Plateau, and in California he is Coyote; in the Southeast he is Rabbit; in the Central Woodlands he is Manabozho or Wiskajak; the Iroquois call him Flint and Sapling; Glooscap is his name among the Northeast Algonquins. Moreover, he is not the same in each place. Coyote never steals whale fat from any fisherman’s hook. Raven makes his parents-in-law young again in an Eyak story from the Copper River delta in Alaska; that story isn’t told anywhere else on the continent. In an Ingalik tale from the lower Yukon, Raven becomes the lord of the land of the dead, a detail that appears nowhere else on the continent.
Any theorist who comes along and says that a figure called “trickster” unites all these is a bit like Hesiod, making a pan-American tale out of many local stories. Nor is it just modern scholars who work selectively with the tales, highlighting parts that fit the pattern and passing over those that don’t. Oral cultures always have. Homer did. Native Americans did for centuries (groups in the upper Yukon reshaped coastal Raven stories to their own purposes, to take but one example). Wherever travelers carry stories from place to place there will be reimaginings, translations, appropriations, and impurities. Only the new versions won’t be described with those words; artfully told, they will be known as “the truth.”
In this line, Nagy notes that the firming up of a pan-Hellenic theogony must have entailed the extinction of many local theogonies, and it will be useful for a moment to imagine the status of the Muses’ claim to “truth” from the point of view of one of those contested or suppressed “local truths.” If you thought that Demeter was the Queen of the Gods, how does it look to have her subsumed under Zeus’ shield (especially by the misogynist Hesiod)? If Raven was your culture hero, how does it feel to have him subordinated to some character called Smart-Beaver? From the local position, the assertion that mountain Muses speak the “truth” may seem the ultimate falsehood, and the claim that they are free from the belly just a clever disguise, a rhetorical trick by which lies are made to look like genuine things. From this point of view, Hesiod’s assertion that his picture of the world comes from beings who do not suffer hunger is a poet’s clever way of masking his own falsehoods.
Moreover, from the point of view of a contested “local truth,” what does it mean to be free of the belly? It could be that those who claim such freedom are just well fed. The belly is less demanding when there is plenty to eat, after all, and one is not buffeted by hunger if one is not regularly hungry. I’m simply saying that it’s easier to control one’s appetites if one controls the food supply. An old canard has it that self-restraint is inborn in the ruling classes; it’s more likely the case that aristocrats can appear to govern their neediness because they aren’t in fact needy at all.
In short, the counterclaim to the Muses’ scorn of hungry shepherds would have it that the satiated are the ones who bend the truth to their own ends. The well fed take the artifice of their situation and pass it off as an eternal verity. They claim their poets create