Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Hyde Lewis

Author:Hyde, Lewis [Hyde, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-08-16T21:00:00+00:00

[Douglass:] The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease. From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren … .

A kind of collective magic activates a shame threshold. The group marks a boundary and those who try to cross it, if they feel the communal Argus eyes upon them, will suffer shame’s physical seizure, the flushed skin, the bound tongue. Perhaps when Maia says that Hermes “wears the cloak of shamelessness” we are meant to imagine a garment that shields him from this collective spell. Whatever the case, he has the freedom of motion and the freedom of speech that leaves the collective magic powerless. The hooks of shame can find no purchase on this lad with the trick shoes. He refuses absolutely the picture of the world implied by his elders’ morality, and refuses also the hierarchy that goes with it. Where others might sit quietly, he improvises a new song, “the way teenagers sing out insults at a fair.”

Hermes’ shamelessness is not the only device by which he erases thresholds, disturbs boundary markers, and muddies up the clear divisions that once organized Apollo’s world. Tricksters sometimes speak in a way that confuses the distinctions between lying and truth-telling or (to preserve the useful words “true” and “false”) undercuts the current fictions by which reality is shaped. The statement “Hermes did not steal the eternal cattle” is a lie in the initial context of the Hymn when Apollo’s world is still intact, but afterwards—when they are no longer eternal, when Hermes has the herder’s whip—it feels a little quaint to call it a lie. Similarly, the assertion “The slaves didn’t steal Colonel Lloyd’s fruit” might be a lie in the fictive world of plantation culture but true in a world that takes slavery itself to be a form of theft. Before that shift can take place, however, the old story must lose its charm. It must be moved into the space where its design is perspectival and temporal, not eternal. To make that happen, trickster enters the old story in a way that makes its former clarity collapse into befuddling contradiction, like the octopus filling a transparent sea with obscuring ink.

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