Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms

MYTHICAL TRICKSTER FIGURES

MYTHICAL TRICKSTER FIGURES

Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms

EDITED BY

WILLIAM J. HYNES & WILLIAM G. DOTY

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa & London

Copyright © 1993

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Paperbound Printing 1997

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mythical trickster figures : contours, contexts, and criticisms / edited by William J. Hynes and William G. Doty.

                p.     cm.

            Includes bibliographical references (p.     ) and index.

            ISBN 0-8173-0857-1

            1. Trickster. 2. Animals, Mythical. I. Hynes, William J. II. Doty, William G., 1939–

        GR524.M96   1993

        291.2′13—dc20

92-19629

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8285-8 (electronic)

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND PERMISSIONS

ONE

William J. Hynes and William G. Doty

INTRODUCING THE FASCINATING AND PERPLEXING TRICKSTER FIGURE

TWO

William G. Doty and William J. Hynes

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THEORETICAL ISSUES: THE PROBLEM OF THE TRICKSTER

THREE

William J. Hynes

MAPPING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MYTHIC TRICKSTERS: A HEURISTIC GUIDE

FOUR

William G. Doty

A LIFETIME OF TROUBLE-MAKING: HERMES AS TRICKSTER

FIVE

Laura Makarius

THE MYTH OF THE TRICKSTER: THE NECESSARY BREAKER OF TABOOS

SIX

Mac Linscott Ricketts

THE SHAMAN AND THE TRICKSTER

SEVEN

Christopher Vecsey

THE EXCEPTION WHO PROVES THE RULES: ANANSE THE AKAN TRICKSTER

EIGHT

Robert D. Pelton

WEST AFRICAN TRICKSTERS: WEB OF PURPOSE, DANCE OF DELIGHT

NINE

Robert S. Ellwood

A JAPANESE MYTHIC TRICKSTER FIGURE: SUSA-NO-O

TEN

William J. Hynes and Thomas J. Steele, S.J.

SAINT PETER: APOSTLE TRANSFIGURED INTO TRICKSTER

ELEVEN

T. O. Beidelman

THE MORAL IMAGINATION OF THE KAGURU: SOME THOUGHTS ON TRICKSTERS, TRANSLATION AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

TWELVE

Anne Doueihi

INHABITING THE SPACE BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND STORY IN TRICKSTER NARRATIVES

THIRTEEN

William J. Hynes

INCONCLUSIVE CONCLUSIONS: TRICKSTERS—METAPLAYERS AND REVEALERS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND PERMISSIONS

This collection of essays benefitted directly from the work of an international research consultation, the Trickster Myth Group within the American Academy of Religion. Working together for a period extending over five years, more than forty scholars shared insights and honed their individual analyses of various tricksters. In an age all too often characterized by disciplinary isolation and occasional ideological rigidity, such a critical team effort and synergistic process resulted in a cohesive approach, served to sharpen the ways in which we defined the trickster phenomenon, and highlighted areas where it still escapes definition. Many of the best essays from this collaboration are revised here: Hynes (chapter 2), Doty (chapter 4), Vecsey (chapter 6), Pelton (chapter 7), Ellwood (chapter 8), Ricketts (chapter 10), and Hynes (chapter 13). These essays have been supplemented by other important critical essays and an inclusive bibliography.

Works included here from previous appearances in journals are by arrangement; we are grateful for permission to include them. At the early stages of the editorial work, both Mary Douglas and the now-deceased Victor Turner were encouraging to us and helpfully critical. Hynes would like to acknowledge the personal support of Margie Shurgot and the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Doty the personal support of Joan T. Mallonée, the financial support of the Research Overhead Fund, and material support from the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Alabama.

So many other people helped make this work possible that we will not attempt formally to acknowledge them here. Instead we acknowledge in their help the presence of the trickster who constantly battles to break down our resistance to chaos, disorder, insight, and new knowledge.

The Mudhead clown used as a design at the beginning of each section of this book is from a photograph of a storyteller figure by Dorothy and Paul Gutierrez, Santa Clara Pueblo, from the collection of William Doty. The basis for the cover design by Paula Dennis is a photograph of David Aguirre’s Trickster (32 inches high; 1990), initially shown at the Brigitte Schluger Gallery, Denver, and a gift from Hynes to Doty.

We gratefully recognize the following for granting permission to reprint or to print works in this volume:

Presses Universitaires de France, for Laura Makarius’ chapter, translated here.

Journal of Religion in Africa 12/3 (1981) 161–77, Christopher Vecsey’s chapter here.

For Beidelman’s chapter here, reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association from American Ethnologist 7:1, February 1980. Not for further reproduction.

Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, for Anne Doueihi, Trickster: On Inhabiting the Space Between Discourse and Story, 63/3 (1984): 283–311, an abbreviated version of which is included here as Chapter 12.

The University of California press, for approximately thirty-five pages, abridged and revised here, from The Trickster in West Africa by Robert D. Pelton, copyright © 1980 by University of California Press.

ONE

INTRODUCING THE FASCINATING AND PERPLEXING TRICKSTER FIGURE

William J. Hynes & William G. Doty

Well, I tell you dis, ef deze yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun, en giggle, giggle, giggle, I let you know I’d a-done drapt um long ago.

—Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus stories, cited by Lawrence C Levine, ‘Some Go Up and Some Go Down’: The Meaning of the Slave Trickster.

Almost all non-literate mythology has a trickster hero of some kind. American Indians had the great rabbit and coyote, the ravens, and blue jay. And there’s a very special property in the trickster: he always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. He’s both a fool and someone who’s beyond the system. And the trickster hero represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn’t decided it wants to deal with. The mind structures a lifestyle, and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities. He doesn’t respect the values that you’ve set up for yourself, and smashes them.

—Joseph Campbell, in An Open Life

Brer Rabbit, cited in our first epigraph, is just one of many intriguing trickster figures.¹ For centuries, perhaps millennia, and in the widest variety of cultural and religious belief systems, humans have told and retold tales of tricksters, figures who are usually comical, yet serve to highlight important social values. They cause laughter, to be sure, as they profane nearly every central belief, but at the same time they focus attention precisely on the nature of such beliefs.

The diversity and complexity of the appearances of the trickster figure raise doubt that it can be encompassed as a single phenomenon. Perhaps just such diversity and complexity help explain why three decades have lapsed since the first comprehensive portrait of the trickster appeared, in Paul Radin’s The Trickster (1955).² The number of studies of individual tricksters has grown, and the range of trickster phenomena is now such that many scholars argue against a generalizing, comparativist view. Others of us have continued to argue that there are sufficient inherent similarities among these diverse figures and their functions to enable us to speak, at least informally, of a generic trickster figure.

In the editors’ perspective as well as that of many of the contributors, we seek to build upon Radin in a critical manner. While we acknowledge the inherent difficulties in speaking about such a complex figure, we steer a course between those who see the trickster as so universal a figure that all tricksters speak with essentially the same voice and those who counsel that the tricksters belonging to individual societies are so culture-specific that no two of them articulate similar messages. Consequently, in contrast to Radin and his fellow essayists, Carl Jung and Karl Kerényi (Radin 1955), we do not argue for archetypal roots in a transcendental human psyche, and we are less interested in origins than in cultural manifestations. But in contrast to a number of contemporary social scientists, the essays here generally do represent the belief that important aspects of a trickster figure can be identified across several different cultures. The fact that trickster phenomena contain similar features in several societies leads us to examine comparative social functions, psychological mechanisms, literary traces, relationships to religious systems, and ritual transformations.

This book presents a variety of tricksters set within their specific sociocultural settings across a wide variety of cultures. Some of the tricksters to be encountered include the African Ananse, Eshu, and Legba; Western tricksters such as Hermes, Saint Peter, and Herschel; Native American figures such as Coyote, Wakdjunkaga, and Manabozo; and such Asian tricksters as Susa-no-o, Sun Wuk’ung, Agu Tampa, and Horangi. Readers will find many examples of trickster episodes in this book, appearing across a wide range of contexts.

Published collections of African or Native American tales usually include segments devoted to the trickster, and an inclusive collection of trickster tales ranging worldwide would require several volumes (Apte 1985: ch. 7 provides a convenient summary of trickster tales). The figure is central in many European materials and in the Orient, but because trickster myths are focal in nine of the eleven Native American regions (Bierhorst 1985: 17–18), contemporary American scholarship in particular ignores the figure at the risk of irrelevance.

Here is a sample tale, involving the Southwestern trickster, who is often Coyote:

Hearing a strange sound coming from an old elk skull, Coyote looks inside and finds a village of Ants (or Wasps) having a Sun Dance. He makes himself small in order to get inside the skull and see better, but presently his body returns to normal size and his head is stuck inside the skull.

He wanders into a village and announces, I am holy; I have supernatural power; you must give me something! The awe-stricken people pass him in a procession, marking him with pollen as is customary in that region [as a blessing]. But the last person in line is a smart aleck boy who is carrying a stick behind his back. When he reaches Coyote he brings the stick down with all of his might across the old elk skull, and it cracks and falls off. That’s what you should have done long ago, Coyote tells them, but instead you wanted too much supernatural power (Lipan Apache, cited by Ricketts 1964: ch. 8: 18, from Opler 1938b: 169–70).

What does such a story mean? Such a question should address initially two sorts of contexts. The first is the specific, local, tribal, historically bounded context that is the province of the ethnographer, the historian of a particular religious tradition, or the critic studying micro-level manifestations of a particular behavior. But there is a second context, less studied today than previously, and that is the broader context of what seems to be the wider phenomena of general human cultural expression. Essays in this book heed the former, but they also engage the latter context, the query directed toward the widest significance, and broadest frame. Here the disciplines of the humanities have long been at home, and here lie the distinctive contributions of this volume.

In some curious ways representative of conservative social teachings, tricksters appear primarily at the points of growth and change that represent the exponent of all possibilities (Toelken and Scott 1981: 89). Their stories provide a fertile source of cultural reflection and critical reflexivity that leaves one thoughtful yet laughing; and what a culture does with laughter reflects its vitality, flexibility, and creativity. Certainly humans often take themselves too seriously, a foible Oscar Wilde hit squarely when he suggested that such an attitude is the world’s original sin (Pearson 1946: 196).

Essays in this volume respect the laughter, as they trace the elusive trail of trickster figures through a number of religions and cultures, myths and histories, individuals and societies. We have sought to go beyond such widely recognized materials on the trickster figure as the essays in Paul Radin’s The Trickster (1955), Mac Linscott Ricketts’s 1966 article on The North American Indian Trickster, and Robert Pelton’s 1980 book, The Trickster in West Africa, by presenting data from a wider range of cultures and by approaching them through the views of specialists from several disciplines.

In this initial chapter we introduce some of the developments leading to a volume such as this. We glance at some of the methodological issues in trickster studies, anticipating chapter 2. And we begin reflection on the problematic attitude toward comic figures typical of our own culture—we reject the common assumption that if something is comical or entertaining, it cannot represent socially significant material. After naming some of our biases, we provide an overview of the contributions to the book.

THE METHODOLOGICAL TANGLE

Anyone attempting to study tricksters faces significant methodological issues. For example, at one extreme one finds colleagues trained in Jungian psychology talking about the the trickster as a universal archetype to be encountered within each of us and in most belief systems. At the other extreme, some anthropologists have called for the elimination of the term trickster altogether because it implies that a global approach to such a figure is possible whereas they find it appropriate to focus only upon one tribal or national group at a time (see Basso 1987, and Beidelman 1980—reprinted as chapter 11, this volume).

Although these methodological issues are raised in a distinctly contemporary manner, they are in fact classical in substance, inasmuch as they form part of traditional epistemological debates about universals and particulars. The West has witnessed such debates from the time of Plato and Aristotle, on through the medieval struggles between the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas and the nominalism of William of Occam, through nineteenth-century controversies about idealism and realism, and more recently in Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinctions between the methods of the natural sciences and those of the human sciences. The underlying question is whether we can attain general knowledge or only knowledge of particular cases.

We appreciate the cautions contributed by some of our social science colleagues who advise us to study only particular belief systems and the testimony about the meaning of those systems elucidated by persons from within these systems. At the same time we also take seriously advice from other colleagues who find hints of common ground and similar human experience among very diverse belief systems; although accepting such advice, we still reject any simplistic universalism that would assert the existence of universal knowledge on the basis of only one or two systems. We also reject being limited solely to particular cases. Hence we oppose a nominalism that holds any given particular to be so radically individual and different from all other particulars that there can be no similarity between particulars and that general knowledge is therefore fundamentally impossible. Surely no one today is prepared to agree with the fourteenth-century William of Ockham and the subsequent severe-rationalist position that each human being is so distinctively individual that we cannot speak at all about humankind!

Nineteenth-century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey attempted to resolve some of the dichotomies when he distinguished between the methodology of the natural sciences, in which a general rule is established only by the repeated confirmation of the particular, and the methodology of the human sciences (which he calls the sciences that deal with Geist, the human spirit that cannot always be limited to the rule of the particular). How the two approaches complement one another remains to be resolved by the academic disciplines. The one point of view is captured in Beidelman’s citation (1980: 27) of Evans-Pritchard (1963: 16): any claim to universality demands in the nature of things an historical or psychological explanation, and thereby defeats the sociological purpose, which is to explain differences rather than similarities. The noted Renaissance historian G. R. Elton represents the other side of the issue in terms of his own scholarly craft: Meaningful interconnection in the particular, illuminating generalizations beyond the individual case—these are the marks that distinguish the inspired and inspiring historian (1969: 126).

In this volume we attempt to tack back and forth from the particularities of specific tricksters within their respective belief systems, on the one hand, and the meaningful interconnection between particulars and elucidating generalizations, on the other hand. One tack counterbalances the other. We believe that the reader will gain here an understanding of both particular and more universal characteristics of the trickster (more technical discussion of these issues appears in chapter 2).

Given the particular methodological tangle that attends studies of anthropological themes or issues today, some may wonder at our temerity in presenting this collection of essays. At an anecdotal level, several of our colleagues have been amused that an academic vice-president and a former department chairperson would focus upon a figure famous for outlandish ploys, irreverent language, and extreme displays of individualism. Likewise more than once we confronted the suggestion that our analysis must be suspect because we or our readers might enjoy the materials too much! But through our charting of matters tricksterish, we came to appreciate fully the Renaissance dictum serio ludere—play seriously! We find a direct ratio between the degree of seriousness attending a given belief and the degree of laughter and play necessary to hold the first in check. (We discuss trickster-laughter further in chapter 2.)

CRUDE AND LEWD MORALISTS

The rude mockery, even scatology, present in trickster stories is not simply anti-religious or anti-social criticism. As Brian Street notes in the case of the Zande trickster Ture, the trickster tales can be seen as moral examples re-affirming the rules of society; or rather they serve as a model for these rules, demonstrating what happens if the prescriptions laid down by society are not observed (1972: 85). Street suggests that we ought not to exclude entirely the possibility that such figures may voice anti-social feelings, insofar as the trickster often represents the obverse of restrictive order (86–90), but we must remember that tricksters or cultural clown-figures are not, as they would be considered in our culture, individually motivated deviants, but socially sanctioned images or performers (Tyler 1964: 195–96). John Bierhorst (1987) recognizes the moralistic, social-sanctioning aspect of trickster materials in his collection of Coyote tales for children when he concludes each one with an Aesop-like moral saying.

So far this introductory chapter has already highlighted some reasons for carefully heeding trickster materials: they are often entertainments involving play or laughter, but they are entertainments that are instructive. Tricksters map for some societies just how one ought to act just as formal moralists inform members of a Western society about proper roles, but tricksters are not stuffed shirts in the bargain: indeed tricksters are comical if not marginal figures, and they represent sacred beings in some cultures, but not in others (Bierhorst 1985: 13). There may be moralistic instruction, as when the myth-history by which approved behaviors have come about is recited; or when deviant speech patterns on the part of the principle characters signal that they are transmitting specifically heightened information (emphasized by Beidelman 1980: 31).

Ellen Basso’s In Favor of Deceit: A Study of Tricksters in an Amazonian Society (1987) has taken seriously Beidelman’s advice to focus upon specific analysis of trickster language. Basso claims that her discourse-focused and socially contextualized study is the first to show the connections between the content of trickster stories, their tellings, and lives as actually lived (3–4), although Anne Doueihi has analyzed one text where there is a flagrant juxtaposition of the discursive, signifying aspect of the narrative and the referential, signified aspect of the text as story (1984: 284). Earlier, more global approaches are being supplemented today with more specific context-respective analyses that take into account the full narrative and performative textures of the tellings.

Besides presenting examples of trickster tales in various contexts, and the ways these tales are interpreted variously, we suggest that such study of mythical materials is useful within our own contexts: frequently the breaching and upending process initiated by tricksters in their challenges to the accepted ways of doing things highlights the possibilities within a society for creative reflection on and change of the society’s meanings. (See the extensive study of nonsense, Stewart 1979, and of the modern outsider figure, Wilson 1956, as well as Babcock-Abrahams 1975 on marginality and 1984 on clowning, and 1978—a strong collection of essays on social revisioning.)

Barbara Babcock-Abrahams’s sympathetic account reveals just how such stories promise to expose dimensions of human creativity: As Trickster travels through the world, develops self, and creates for mankind haphazardly, by chance, by trial and error without advance planning, he reenacts the process that is central both to perception and creation, to the constant human activity of making guesses and modifying them in light of experience—the process of ‘schema and correction’ (1975: 181). A similar comment by Ellen Basso, applied to questions of the functioning of human intelligence, reinforces such real world aspects in trickster materials: The very attributes that make such tricksters inventive heroes and clownish fools in the first place are, after all, natural necessities of human intelligence, operating in practical, concrete face-to-face relations that people negotiate all the time, sometimes with considerable immediacy (1987: 8; cf. 183–84, on Taugi’s intelligence). As examples of trickster figures surface across the essays in this book, these observations by Babcock and Basso will be illustrated many times.

PERSPECTIVES AND STRUCTURE OF THIS VOLUME

Several biases surface in this book. First, the editors are scholars trained in the humanities, primarily in the study of religions, but with additional training in the classics, historiography, literature, psychology, and anthropology. We adopt a broadly based, interdisciplinary approach toward human phenomena and literary texts rather than any one specialized perspective.

Second, we take explicit issue with a central theme of the work of Paul Radin and others, when they view the trickster as representing an important but very primitive stage in the progressive or evolutionary development of humankind. For example followers of Carl Jung would say that this development occurs culturally as well as individually (the most intellectually stimulating study of Western culture using such a model is Neumann 1954; see Belmonte 1990 for a revisionist-Jungian position). Although not a Jungian, Greenway (1964: 90) also speaks of the evolution of the trickster into the culture-hero and later (1965: 58) refers to the earlier levels as representing those of retarded children. Many other examples of such ethnocentric developmentalism could be cited.

Third, we are persuaded that plurality, plurivocity, and ambiguity are essential to the trickster Gestalt: this mythological figure encompasses many different social positions, is utilized by different societies to inculcate various types of behavior, and may have manifold modes of appearance even within one culture. After the figure was named within analytical disciplines, it began to be used as a helpful descriptor for a very wide range of characters. A more monochromatic figure would provide a simpler treatment, but with the kaleidoscopic nature of trickster and his tendency to metamorphose into surrounding types with variant or different orientations (Beecher 1987: 7, n. 4), we are repeatedly led toward greater, not less, typological complexity. (Some of our own interest in typological characterization surfaces again in chapters 2, 3, and 13.)

The reader will find that this book reflects several levels of trickster studies: it includes (1) traditional sketches of trickster figures within specific societies, (2) summaries and surveys across more than one culture (crosscultural or crossnational), and (3) considerations of the trickster within the overall perspective of religious figures, both as mythological models and in terms of the ceremonial clown or clown society whose representatives often have significant roles in supervising ritual performances.

Essays here also contain (4) methodological reflections about how best to study such figures, (5) critiques of the traditional methodological approaches, and (6) revisionist pieces, for example Beidelman and Doueihi, the former from an anthropologist’s perspective that distrusts the comparative, the latter from the perspective of literary deconstruction influenced by narratology. No one essay should be seen as representative of a single methodology or theoretical perspective, because most of them engage more than one of the levels listed here, and frequently more than one culture area.

Insofar as truly interdisciplinary work can be initiated by persons working from different locations and academic perspectives, we feel such work is begun here. We do not argue naively for the value of cross-disciplinary or cross-cultural attention, but seek to present a case for it as the problem of universals resurfacing in contemporary ethnography (for example, Beidelman’s 1980 essay uses terms that reach back to Greek and medieval philosophy—universalism, nominalism, literalism, and realism).

Trickster studies have matured to the point where it is necessary to review their history, and Doty and Hynes do that in chapter 2, Historical Overview of Theoretical Issues: The Problem of the Trickster. To review the history is also to engage theoretical and methodological issues, and we begin with those most specific to tricksters and conclude with the widest matters of interpretation.

In chapter 3, Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide, William Hynes offers a cross-cultural typology of common features of the trickster selected from a wide range of examples; these can serve as an orienting guide to some of the complexities of the trickster that will be encountered throughout the book. It is heuristic (helping one to discover or learn) because the application of this guide will cause revision of the guide itself.

In chapter 4, William Doty’s A Lifetime of Trouble-Making: Hermes as Trickster presents an extended analysis of the iconography of Hermes, his rich role within the original Greek context, and his early and continuing centrality to Western mythology, particularly in determining characteristic features according to which tricksters have been studied.

One frequently cited essay in trickster studies is translated into English for the first time in this volume: the French anthropologist Laura Makarius’s The Myth of the Trickster: The Necessary Breaker of Taboos, chapter 5, suggests an ingenuous argument that tricksters such as Manabozo, Maui, Legba, and Eshu develop out of the role of the magician who is able to violate divine taboos in order to gain and pass along essential cultural gifts for society. Pelton (1980: 243–48) discusses this essay as a neo-Durkheimian approach.

Mac Linscott Ricketts, a scholar who has been influential in trickster studies ever since his 1964 University of Chicago dissertation directed by Mircea Eliade, offers here The Shaman and the Trickster, chapter 6. Utilizing a wide range of Native American materials, he argues that the trickster is a humanistic parody of sacred shamanistic activities.

Christopher Vecsey’s The Exception Who Proves the Rules: Ananse the Akan Trickster, chapter 7, probes the social-cultural contexts of African trickster myths and suggests that in breaking the rules, the trickster confirms the rules.

The work of Robert Pelton is now central in scholarly study of tricksters thanks largely to his The Trickster in West Africa (1980). Pelton’s chapter here, West African Tricksters: Web of Purpose, Dance of Delight, chapter 8, proposes a philosophical-theological case that the trickster figure serves as symbol for the transforming power of the human imagination and for the transcendence of the human condition.

Robert Ellwood’s essay, A Japanese Mythic Trickster Figure: Susa-no-o, chapter 9, argues a position contrary to that of Pelton and Ricketts, who see the trickster as satirically antagonistic toward the shaman; Ellwood counters that the shaman and the king are closely intertwined.

William Hynes and Thomas Steele collaborated to write Saint Peter: Apostle Transfigured into Trickster, chapter 10. They investigate one of the rare exceptions to the paucity of tricksters in much of western Christianity by exploring a noteworthy example in Mexico and the American Southwest where the Yaqui create a full-blown trickster out of Saint Peter.

T. O. Beidelman’s The Moral Imagination of the Kaguru, chapter 11, develops a strong critique of comparative studies on the basis of examining the complex phenomenon of one set of trickster figures in Africa.

Anne Doueihi discusses Western criticism and (see Doueihi 1984) develops a critique of traditional approaches to trickster materials from a deconstructive perspective in Inhabiting the Space Between Discourse and Story in Trickster Narratives, chapter 12. She argues that most approaches have misread the trickster as part of Western colonial domination of otherness.

In the final chapter, Inconclusive Conclusions: Tricksters—Metaplayers and Revealers, chapter 13, Hynes advances a series of possible explanations for the widespread phenomenon of the trickster and for the apparent contradiction that belief systems maintain such deconstructors as tricksters within themselves rather than considering them out of bounds from the start.

The Bibliography at the end of the volume is comprehensive for English-language studies of trickster materials and includes all references for essays in this book.

The reader may begin reading in this volume wherever desired. Although there is a logical order to the chapters, each can stand on its own. Those unfamiliar with tricksters may wish to begin with the general guide offered in chapter 3 or examine several individual tricksters immediately. Those who are already knowledgable may wish to begin with the history of the methodological issues presented in chapter 2.

Each chapter makes good use of original trickster materials that seem to manifest a life and fecundity all their own. This collection of studies sheds considerable new light upon the traces of this immensely complex, maddening, fascinating, and elusive figure.

TWO

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THEORETICAL ISSUES: THE PROBLEM OF THE TRICKSTER

William G. Doty & William J. Hynes

For almost a century Western scholars have treated the trickster figure as troublesome. More than twenty years ago, Mac Linscott Ricketts, who initiated much of the contemporary discussion, declared that comprehension of the trickster figure is one of [our] most perplexing problems (1966: 327). A more recent essay by Karl Kroeber, Deconstructionist Criticism and American Indian Literature, suggests that, given the degree of noncomprehension of the trickster figure, it is perhaps the most bewildering to a modern reader of many poorly understood aspects of Native American literature (1977: 73).

We hope in this