Читать книгу Trickster Makes This World - Lewis Hyde - Страница 15

To say simply that trickster lives on the road doesn’t give the full nuance of the case, for the impression one often gets is that trickster travels around aimlessly, and roads lead from one place to another. Here’s how the Chinese Monkey King is described at one point: “Today he toured the east; and tomorrow he wandered west … He had no definite itinerary.” Moments of transition in Native American stories typically read: “As he continued his aimless wandering …” Maybe the point of saying that trickster is on the road is to say that he has “the context of no context,” in George W.S. Trow’s wonderful phrase. To be in a particular town or city is to be situated; to be on the road is to be between situations and not, therefore, oriented in the ways that situations orient us.

In any event, trickster sometimes loses his bearings completely, and that is where we see most clearly the aimless portion of his traveling. In a story known widely in North America, Coyote has put his head into the empty skull of an elk and can’t get it out.

Coyote began to cry because he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t see where he was going. He yelled … and tried to pull the skull off but it was no use. Finally he wandered off.

Coyote bumped into something with his foot. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I am a cherry tree.”

“Good. I must be near the river.”

Coyote went on slowly like that, feeling ahead with his feet. If he could find the river he would know which way to go.

He bumped into something again. “Who are you?”

“I am a cottonwood,” the tree said to him.

“I must be very near the river now.”

Again he felt something with his foot. “Who are you?”

“I am a willow.”

“Indeed! I must be right at the river.”

Coyote was stepping very carefully now but still he was falling over things. Finally he tripped and fell in the river and the current took him away.

The motif of wandering blindly is repeated in the Winnebago trickster cycle. Here trickster has committed a series of wildly antisocial acts, ending in the accidental killing of a group of children during a fit of hunger. The father of these children chases trickster all over; he finally escapes only by running to “the place where the sun rises, the end of the world,” and leaping into the ocean. “As he did not … know where to find the shore, he swam along aimlessly.” Soon he bumps into some fish. Several species are named, the last of which—the white fish—is able to orient him and he finds the shore. Then, “again he wandered aimlessly about the world.”

Before long, he comes upon a plant that says to him: “He who chews me will shit!” Trickster does not believe it, eats the plant, and ends up producing such a pile of feces that he has to climb a tree. Then he falls from the tree and is blinded by his own filth.

He started to run. He could not see anything. As he ran he knocked against a tree. [He] cried out in pain. He reached out and felt the tree and sang:

“Tree, what kind of a tree are you? Tell me something about yourself!”

And the tree answered, “What kind of a tree do you think I am? I am an oak tree. I am the forked oak tree that used to stand in the middle of the valley.”

As in the earlier story, trickster bumps into one tree after another until he is led to water where he is able to wash himself.

The trees and fish in these stories have what I’d like to call “species knowledge.” They are the opposite of the aimless wanderer. They are placed in space the way a species is placed by its needs. Some species of fish swim near the shore, others don’t; there are trees like the willow that grow only at the water’s edge and trees that can grow at greater and greater distances from water. These stories, then, seem deliberately to set trickster’s aimless wandering against beings that are anything but aimless, beings that are situated in space by their nature.

Now let us set these tales alongside one of the most famous Native American stories, “The Bungling Host,” in which trickster, hungry as ever, drops in on some animal friend—bear or kingfisher or muskrat or snipe—who catches and prepares food in his own special way. Here is an episode from the Okanagon version (in which, by the way, Mole is Coyote’s wife):

One time there was no food at Coyote’s lodge. He … went to visit his brother Kingfisher.

“Kingfisher, what have you got to eat,” asked Coyote. “I am very hungry.”

Kingfisher did not like this rude way of talking, but he sent for his son and told him to go get three willow sticks.

Boy Kingfisher went out and got the sticks and came back. Kingfisher heated them over the fire until they were strong. Then he took them out, twisted them up and tied them to his belt.

He flew up onto the top of his lodge and from there he flew to the river and down through a hole in the ice. When he came up there was a fish hanging on each willow stick.

Coyote ate until his belly was round, but he saved some fish for his wife and his children at home.

“You must come over to see me tomorrow,” said Coyote.

“I don’t think I will come over,” said Kingfisher.

“Oh, you must come over. We will have a nice meal, you will like it. You come over tomorrow.”

Kingfisher didn’t want to go, but said he would.

The next day when Kingfisher came over Coyote told his son to go get three willow sticks. When Boy Coyote came back Coyote stuck the sticks in the fire until they were hard. Then he bent them up and stuck them on his belt. Then Coyote crawled up to the top of his lodge.

“What are you doing up there?” asked his wife.

“Why, you know I’ve done this before. I am getting food for our brother, Kingfisher.”

Coyote jumped off the top of the lodge down to the river but he missed the hole and broke his neck and was killed.

Kingfisher had been watching all the time. He walked over to where Coyote lay and took the three sticks from his belt and jumped into the hole in the ice. Soon he came up with many fish. Then he stepped over Coyote four times and Coyote came back to life.

“This is my way, not your way,” said Kingfisher. “I do not imitate others like you do.”

Coyote took the fish up to his lodge and showed them to Mole and to his children.

“Look at these big fish. I caught them the way Kingfisher did. Kingfisher is afraid of my power. He told me not to do this again. He knows my medicine is strong.”

Mole cooked the fish.

Two things—the stories just cited about “species knowledge” and the fact that one of trickster’s names is “imitator”—lead me to read “The Bungling Host” as a tale of an animal that does not have, as Kingfisher says, “a way.” Kingfisher, Snipe, Polecat, Bear, Muskrat—each of these animals has a way of being in the world; each has his nature. Specifically, each of them has his own way of hunting and, in these stories at least, he is never hungry, because he has that way. Coyote, on the other hand, seems to have no way, no nature, no knowledge. He has the ability to copy the others, but no ability of his own.

This lack has several consequences. For one thing it means, as Carl Jung put it, that trickster is “stupider than the animals.” Animals at least have inborn knowledge, a way of being, and trickster doesn’t. The animals know not to eat that plant that causes them to defecate mountains; the animals know which way the river is; the animals know how to hunt for their particular foods. Trickster knows none of this, and so ends up hungry, stumbling around covered in his own mess.*

It seems a dangerous position for an animal to be in, stripped of instinct. What possible use could there be in having lost the mother wit to be in the world? What conceivable advantage might lie in a way of being that has no way?

A first answer might be that whoever has no way but is a successful imitator will have, in the end, a repertoire of ways. If we can imitate the spider and make a net, imitate the beaver and make a lake, imitate the heron’s beak and make a spear, imitate the armadillo and wear armor, imitate the leopard and wear camouflage, imitate poison ivy and produce chemical weapons, imitate the fox and hunt downwind, then we become more versatile hunters, greater hunters. And although in “The Bungling Host” trickster fails as an imitator, elsewhere imitation is part of his power.

Perhaps having no way also means that a creature can adapt itself to a changing world. Species well situated in a natural habitat are always at risk if that habitat changes. One reason native observers may have chosen coyote the animal to be Coyote the Trickster is that the former in fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is, therefore, a consummate survivor in a shifting world. For one thing, coyote young, like human young, remain dependent on their parents for a long time. One naturalist writes that such neoteny, as it is called, “is a characteristic of all species that have not inherited a fixed repertory of behavior, but must learn how to survive … The neotenal coyote … meets change by learning new responses and is therefore capable of developing a whole new lifestyle.” As if by way of illustration, another naturalist, François Leydet, tells us that, in the early days of the American West, coyotes were much more social animals; they hunted in packs the way wolves do. But now

big gatherings of coyotes are seldom seen … Persecution forced the coyote to adopt more solitary ways, and since he subsists largely on small game that he can catch unassisted, he has been able to do so. This has allowed him to survive in regions where the big gray wolf has been exterminated: a hunter of large game, Canis lupus would not or could not abandon the pack organization which made him highly vulnerable to man.

Watching coyotes hunt in packs, the eighteenth-century wolf might well have said to them, “This is my way, not your way.” But two hundred years later the wolf, trapped in his “way,” is endangered, while coyotes are eating purebred poodles in Beverly Hills.

So this is one advantage a being, especially a predator, might have if it is not constrained to one way but has instead the ability to copy many ways. We can turn the conceit around, too, and find situations in which a being that is hunted might benefit from having no way, no instinctual knowledge. To set up this line of thought, let me begin with a question: Do animals lie?

The answer is both yes and no. Animals of course communicate with one another. Birds call from the trees, whales sing in the oceans, the deer gives its hoarse warning cry, or—to take the famous example—the honeybee dances to tell the hive how far away the flowers are, and in what direction. Moreover, in most cases these animals are telling the “truth” when they communicate with one another. Honeybees do not lie. Their “language” is constrained by instinct; no bee ever comes into the hive and says “The flowers are due west” when in fact they are northeast. The deer does not cry wolf when there is no wolf at hand.

Having granted all that, however, it is not hard to think of complications and exceptions. Surely there are deceptive animals. There are insects evolved to look as if they are twigs or dead leaves; there are flowers that eat insects by luring them with false advertising. In the Louisiana swamps, one finds the remarkable alligator snapping turtle, one of whose features is a “lure tongue,” a stubby white appendage which it sticks out until an unsuspecting fish checks to see if it’s edible. The frightened possum pretends to be dead, as does the pangolin. In the classic case, when the fox threatens the mother grouse, she pretends to have a broken wing so as to lead the fox away from her nest. Small birds feeding at ground level in the rain forests give a warning cry when danger is near, but one species can give a false warning cry, so as to have the ground to itself for a while.

So animals sometimes lie. But there is an important way in which these lying animals are just like animals that do not lie: both are constrained by instinct. The lying animal cannot lie creatively; it cannot vary its repertoire. The mother grouse never plays possum and the possum never plays grouse.

Such constraint makes lying animals vulnerable to any predator that gets wise to the ruse. Here we return to the first part of the chapter, for any animal bound by instinct is vulnerable to what I call “technicians of instinct.” As there are traps of appetite, so there are traps of instinct, traps that exploit an animal’s inborn methods, including the methods by which it otherwise eludes its enemies (as when Coyote turns the Buffalo’s fleetness against it). In short, an animal with one instinctual deception in its repertoire has some advantage over an animal with none, but that advantage is lost when it meets a predator who knows how to decipher the deception. Then it is stuck, trapped in its own defense.

So we have a second reason why it might be useful to have no way, no nature, no fixed instinctual responses. Having no way, trickster can have many ways. Having no way, he is dependent on others whose manner he exploits, but he is not confined to their manner and therefore in another sense he is more independent. Having no way, he is free of the trap of instinct, both “stupider than the animals” and more versatile than any. He stumbles around covered in his own filth, but by the same token he feeds in the house of Kingfisher, and the house of Bear, the house of Muskrat, the house of Bee. Moreover, if someone tries to trap him to bring him home for dinner, trickster can counter with a series of deceptions and slip from the trap. Bee and Bear, who cannot tell a lie, are easier to trap than Grouse, who has her single famous fib. But Grouse is easier to trap than trickster, whose fabulations never end.

In fact, we must now add creative lying to our list of trickster’s inventions. Trickster discovers creative fabulation, feigning, and fibbing, the playful construction of fictive worlds. It is trickster who invents the gratuitous untruth. In Northern California, the Maidu creation myth has several creators who collaborate to make the world, including a beneficent Earth-Initiate and a bungling Coyote. At one point Coyote laughs just when Earth-Initiate has warned him not to. Called to account, Coyote says, “Oh no, that wasn’t me who laughed.” This was the first lie.