Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
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, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions.
The stories we’ve been looking at suggest adding a few lines about hunger to Nietzsche’s formulation. Trickster lies because he has a belly, the stories say; expect truth only from those whose belly is full or those who have escaped the belly altogether. Not that adding stomachs to Nietzsche’s idea changes it significantly, but it may shed some light on the matter of forgetfulness that he introduces at the end. To be forgetful of illusion is to be unconscious of it and in these stories it is hunger, I think, that threatens to disturb any such unconsciousness. Hunger prompts “mere bellies” to reveal the fictive nature of illusory truths, as if stomach acid, when it has nothing else to work on, will strip illusion of its protective amnesia. Hunger is the agent of a kind of anamnesis or unforgetting that Plato didn’t imagine, one that recovers the memory of artifice rather than the memory of eternals. (This is what happens in the Homeric Hymn: Hermes is hungry, and he disrupts the supposed eternal order of things.)
But such revelation is only half of trickster’s power in regard to “truth.” Just as he can slip a trap, then turn around and make his own, so he can debunk an illusion, then turn around and conjure up another (as Hermes does when he sings to Apollo). Where, after all, does Nietzsche’s “army of metaphors” come from in the first place, if not from some enchanting mastermind of tropes? And how did it fall into the unconscious? Perhaps that army carries with it some drug or soporific to induce forgetting in the provinces it conquers. In a variant version of the Hermes story, there are dogs set out to guard Apollo’s cattle, and Hermes puts them into a stupor. The Greek for “stupor” is lethargon, a combination of lethe (forgetfulness) and argon (lazy or slow). It’s the forgetful part I wish to mark. When Hermes is ordering the world on his own terms, he takes the watchdogs of the mind—acute, open-eyed, up all night—and numbs them with forgetfulness. Under his enchantment, illusion sinks below the threshold of consciousness and appears to be the truth.
I say all this partly to review the territory we have covered, but also to indicate how that territory opens onto issues that will concern me in the chapters that follow. My project here is not just to derive intelligence from appetite but to think more broadly about the kind of inventiveness that is figured in this mythology, the kind of art, in particular, that might spring from trickster’s spirit. In this line there is a long tradition that locates art in that trickster shadowland where truth and falsity are not well differentiated. The idea probably goes back to Aristotle, who thought the epic poets to be Cretan liars of a sort. “Homer more than any other,” he wrote, “has taught the rest of us the art of framing lies the right way.”
It is an old notion, then, that art and lying share a common ground, one that has had a hardy efflorescence in the modern world. The authors of modern novels have been known to describe themselves with that same language, from Defoe (who was said to “lie like the truth”) to Balzac (who said that “fiction is a dignified form of lies”) to Dostoevsky (who described Don Quixote as a novel in which truth is saved by a lie), down to Mario Vargas Llosa (who once declared: “When we write novels, what we do is create a profoundly distorted manifestation of reality, which we impose on readers, on society. Real literature has never told the truth. It has imposed lies as truths”). Virginia Woolf stirs the same muddy water in her introduction to A Room of One’s Own: “Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact … Lies will flow from my lips, but perhaps there is some truth mixed up with them.” Ralph Ellison has said that Invisible Man “take[s] advantage of the novel’s capacity for telling the truth while actually telling a ‘lie,’ which is the Afro-American folk term for an improvised story.” Even that highly ethical modern poet, Czeslaw Milosz, can be found defending “the right of the poet to invent—that is, to lie.”
In the visual arts, Pablo Picasso was the great confounder of the presumed distinction between truth and lies: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” Perhaps the most extended exposition on this theme is found in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay “The Decay of Lying,” an aesthete’s defense of art against the service crowd who are always out to impress it into their own private army of metaphors. “The telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of Art,” says Wilde, thinking of all those great creations (Milton’s Satan, Hamlet, Jane Eyre) who are more real and durable than the perishable women and men we know in fact. Thus Wilde honors Balzac, saying his characters “dominate us, and defy skepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.” Thus might we hope to have great liars at our dinner table rather than trivial pursuers of fact. “The aim of the liar,” Wilde writes, “is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society …”
Such assertions contain their own puzzles (What does Wilde mean by “beautiful untrue things”? How does Picasso “convince others”?), but for now I want merely to note where these artists place their work. Many of these statements are hard to understand if we cleave to any simple sense of what is meant by “truth” and “lies.” They are easier to understand if such opposites collapse, whereupon we are dropped back into trickster’s limbo, where boundary markers shift at night, shoes have no heel and toe, inky clouds attack transparency, and every resting place suddenly turns into a crossroads. These artists, that is to say, claim a part of trickster’s territory for their own, knowing it to be one of the breeding grounds of art and artifice.
Be that as it may, in what follows I hope to widen my reading of this mythology by turning more fully to that world of art and artifice. Not that we haven’t been there all along. In these pages I, too, have been slowly marshaling an army of metaphors, one I hope to deploy when I need it in pages to come. But I have tried, also, to organize this section around a single and somewhat literal-minded reading of the material. The trickster stories themselves suggest we look to appetite and the natural world for the roots of trickster’s cunning, and I have tried to do that. But to the degree that I’ve succeeded I have sometimes turned myself into Witless Coyote, thinking there are some plums to eat in “The Reflected Plums,” or thinking the marbled meat of Apollo’s cattle could really make Hermes’ mouth water.
It’s not that questions of appetite don’t lead to an interesting reading, it’s just that now that we have seen that Homer is a liar, now that we have come to travelers who multiply meanings as they move, we should be wary of getting too comfortable with any single line of analysis. These stories have as many senses as the contexts of their telling. Their tracks point every which way. Odysseus’ oar may also be a winnowing