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Trickster Makes This World
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Trickster Makes This World
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Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art - Discussion
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I am! I got a hardback edition from AbeBooks at an excellent price, and I'm excited to dive into it as soon as the chaos that is school slows to a halt... 'til next semester, anyways. :) I'm excited and concerned, since it seems to be more of an academic book than fiction, but I hope to approach it with an open mind.
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I love the title.
It's a lovely title, for sure. :) I'm excited to learn more about tricksters OTHER than Anansi and Coyote, too. I'm also curious as to how the author is going to tie Frederick Douglass in as a "trickster" figure. It seems strange, but if it's convincing, then... yay, I suppose. :)
I just happened to be reading Bakhtin for a class when I started this book, and I was quite struck by this passage: "The well fed take the artifice of their situation and pass it off as an eternal verity. They claim their poets create a bridge to the gods 'that bypasses the Promethean sacrifice, one that does not go through the belly' (as one scholar says of Hesiod). In the mythology of the trickster, when such claims are made, some 'mere' but hungry belly will see through the artifice and speak, if not the truth, then at least a falsehood sufficiently cunning to change the way the food is distributed. Or he will perpetrate thefts and tell lies that not only feed the belly (that’s the easy part) but upset the boundary markers by which the true and the false are differentiated."
The role of appetite -- the belly -- in motivating a trickster seems (roughly) analogous to the emphasis on the "lower bodily stratum" in carnival. In both cases, it seems that the tricky moves of the underclass have a potential impact that exceeds the immediate circumstances and disrupts the very categories that necessitated the original act of inversion and/or deceit.
And, as the parent of a small child, I was charmed by the idea that a lie can be a way of testing boundaries and exploring the possibility of creating a new world, one that's different from the parent-world. My daughter, who is five, went through a period of about a year when she told my husband (her father) that she hated him all the time. Her behavior suggested otherwise, and my husband was able to shrug it off (mostly), but we both came to the conclusion that she was testing to see if she was capable of radical separation from one of her parents. Now, she loves him again, but reading this book makes me think that, maybe now, she loves her dad on her own terms -- because she's tried the alternative, and discovered on her own that she does, indeed, love him.
Anatha wrote: "I am! I got a hardback edition from AbeBooks at an excellent price, and I'm excited to dive into it as soon as the chaos that is school slows to a halt... 'til next semester, anyways. :) I'm excite..."I don't know if you've started reading yet, but this book is scholarly in the best possible way. It's smart, but it's definitely written for a general audience. It's more like a wonderful memoir with learned digressions than a dense mass of theory for experts only.
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Great quote! Which Bakhtin book was it from? In the Trickster book there's a teaser quote from Bakhtin talking about "carnivalization of literature" in the Renaissance, but little else. I think it's from his book "Rabelais and His World." Since I'm currently enjoying a Renaissance history & art obsession due to a Renaissance Portraits exhibition I saw, that instantly got my attention. I'd love to know if it's worth reading the whole Rabelais book (or another of Bakhtin's).
Your Bakhtin quote also made me reflect on the worldwide Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring protests. Tricksters as revolutionaries? There's a lot of interesting game-changing boundary-testing (and breaking) going on these days.
The bits I've read so far of Trickster look exactly as you described it - scholarly AND written for a general audience. Fun! I hope other folks were able to find copies.
"as the parent of a small child, I was charmed by the idea that a lie can be a way of testing boundaries and exploring the possibility of creating a new world, one that's different from the parent-world."
What a great anecdote to relate to this discussion - thanks for sharing it. Children as unconscious, instinctive tricksters. I'll be curious to see if the book deals at all with the idea of self-awareness and growth in the trickster.
I just realized that without intending it, the last two books I read both dealt with forms of tricksters - Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman and Esther's Inheritance by Sandor Marai. In Anansi Boys, the trickster starts out smug, confident & in control and goes through a transformation due to love & imprisonment which changes his character into something less trickster-like. In Esther's Inheritance, the trickster is the same from beginning to end, any personal growth is an illusion and his impact on people and situations has the same destructive quality all through.
Trickster on a personal journey vs trickster as vehicle for change and nothing more. I'll be interested to see if or how the book deals with that.
i have a copy of this and y'all have made me interested to read it soon. i didn't think i was up to what i expected to be a more academic in tone read. it sounds like it's not as difficult as i anticipated. (i'm having trouble concentrating.)i like when the tricksters experience personal transformation more myself, though the kind that don't change much yet act as vehicles for change seem more common in fiction that plays with the archetype. i love the idea of the trickster on a personal journey of transformation that in turn acts as a vehicle for transformation in others.
Odette: Yes, the Bakhtinian stuff to which I refer is from the Rabelais book. I was reading it for a class on early modern stage comedy, driving myself crazy trying to find relevant material, and then I started noticing that all the quotations from secondary sources I found were from Bakhtin's introduction. I have come to the conclusion that 90% of scholars who quote Bakhtin have never read Rabelais and His World beyond the intro. I expect to remain among the 90%.
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