Читать книгу Trickster Makes This World - Lewis Hyde - Страница 16

The fish swims through its expansive, watery world and suddenly trickster blocks its passage, makes its world less expansive, less fluid. If the fish itself is tricky, if it has the wit to slip the trap, it will do so by finding a breach in the wickerwork, a rip in the net, an escape hatch its enemy has not noticed. Either way, we have a first mark of trickster’s cunning: it closes off a passage to capture its prey, or it finds a hole to elude its foe. It can seize an opportunity or block an opportunity.

I say “opportunity” because there is an old link between that word and the open passage a fish trap blocks. In The Origins of European Thought, Richard Onians explains that “opportunity” comes from the Latin porta, which is an “entrance” or “passage through.” The word is associated with doors and entranceways (portal, porch, portico), and an opportunus, then, is what offers an opening, or what stands before an opening, ready to go through. For the Romans, a porta fenestella was a special opening that allowed Fortune to enter. The Greek root is poros, which is a passageway for ships but also any passageway, including one through the skin, that is, a pore. Poroi are all the passages that allow fluids to flow in and out of the body. A pore, a portal, a doorway, a nick in time, a gap in the screen, a looseness in the weave—these are all opportunities in the ancient sense. Each being in the world must find the set of opportunities fitted to its nature. The giant’s pathway is often blocked, but bacterial landscapes are almost pure poroi. The briar patch is a wide-open field for Brer Rabbit. Darkness is opportunity to the owl and bat, water is opportunity to the fish—until some fish trap blocks the way.

But let us leave these etymological haunts and return to trickster’s opportunistic craft. A good example immediately follows “Raven Becomes Voracious” in the Tsimshian Raven cycle. Remember that before Raven acquires his appetite the world is covered in darkness, and that when he arrives in this world to distribute the fish and edible berries, he finds the people distressed by this endless night. He’s distressed, too—after all, how will he feed himself if it’s always dark? Remembering that there was light in the heaven from which he has come, Raven resolves to return and steal it.

Putting on his raven skin, he flies upward until he finds the hole in the sky. Entering it, he takes off his raven skin and goes to sit by a spring near the house of the chief of heaven. There he waits until the chief’s daughter comes to fetch water, whereupon Raven changes himself into a leaf from a cedar tree; the girl swallows him when she drinks the water. She becomes pregnant and bears a child. Her family is delighted; they wash the boy regularly and soon he has grown enough to crawl around the lodge. But all the time he cries. As he crawls he cries out, “Hama, hama!” and the great chief becomes troubled. He summons his wise men to help him quiet the child. One of them understands that the child wants the box that hangs on the wall of the chief’s lodge, the box where daylight is kept. They put it on the floor by the fire and the child stops crying. He rolls the Daylight-Box around the house for several days, occassionally carrying it to the door. One day, when the people have more or less forgotten about him, he shoulders the box and makes a dash for the hole in the sky. The family gives chase but before they can catch him he slips on his raven skin and flies down to the earth. There he breaks the box and now, thanks to Raven the thief, we have daylight in this world.

Perhaps all theft is opportunity theft in the sense that where something is protected a thief needs a break or pore in the guard through which to enter and carry off the goods. The hole in the sky that frames this part of the Tsimshian Raven cycle is only one of several such pores Raven finds or creates. For one thing, he slips into the family by finding, as it were, a porous woman and a way to enter her. As a crying baby he then subverts the group’s defenses (as con artists sometimes use their children to soften up the mark). All good people are vulnerable to the helpless, unhappy child. If Raven had approached the lodge armed with weapons and demanding the Daylight-Box in a loud voice, he would have had a fight on his hands. But as a helpless babe he is not only welcomed and washed, he is actually given the prize. Trickster, then, is a poreseeker. He keeps a sharp eye out for naturally occurring opportunities and creates them ad hoc when they do not occur by themselves.

Now let’s reverse the picture and come back to trickster as trapper. As opportunism is a part of this cunning, so, too, is the blocking of opportunity, and to block opportunity one needs to create the impenetrable or non-porous, the net so fine there is no way to slip through. Natural history provides many examples of such pore-blocking wit at work. One of my favorites is the method that humpback whales use to trap the tiny fish they feed on. When the humpback whale comes upon a school of herring, it dives deep and then swims in a slow circle, exhaling all the while, so that a cone of bubbles rises through the water. The herring in the school misperceive this “bubble net” as a barrier through which they cannot swim. Having confined the school, the whale then rises through the center of the bubble net, its mouth open and filling with fish.

The octopus has a similar trick, only this one is used defensively. When threatened by a predator, the octopus darkens the water with a jet of ink, turning transparency into a murky, impenetrable, non-porous medium. In both cases, of course, the impenetrability is an illusion. The darkness around the octopus is only an artificial night; the herring are trapped not by bubbles but by their own defenses and perceptive limitations. Still, in each case the artifice suffices.

Trickster himself plays with the porous and non-porous in any number of tales that focus on tunnels and burrowing animals. Remember that the Zulu trickster Thlókunyana is a small being associated with the weasel. In one story, he has moved into the leopard’s household, tricked the mother leopard, and eaten her children. Knowing he will eventually be discovered, Thlókunyana makes himself an escape route, a long tunnel with a distant, hidden outlet. When the leopard finally realizes what has happened to her children, Thlókunyana disappears into his hole. The leopard follows, thinking the burrow has a single entrance and Thlókunyana will easily be trapped. But before the leopard knows what’s happening, wily Thlókunyana has come out his secret exit, doubled back, and set spears around both entrances; when the baffled leopard emerges she is killed. In a common North American version of this “tunnel trick,” Coyote lures his enemy into a tunnel, then builds fires at each end—trapping his victim and roasting his dinner at the same time.

The initial trick in all such tales is to have made a burrow in the first place. The rabbit with a hole has a pore in the earth, a self-made opportunity to escape the fox. But the animal with a single-entrance burrow is also in danger of being trapped in its own hole, so the second trick is to dig a second entrance, or a third, or fourth. The Greeks thought the fox the epitome of animal cunning and imagined her dwelling to have seven entrances. But no matter how many entrances, we’re still in the land of opportunism, of ever increasing porosity. The third trick, then, is to block the entrances when need be, turning pores into barriers. Just as the Greek poros is a passageway, a hole in the skin, so aporos is an impassable place, something that cannot be seen through. What Thlókunyana or Coyote do is to turn an escape route into a trap, a hole into a snare, a poros into an aporos, a clear medium into an aporia.

In rhetoric and logic, “aporia”—the English word derived from aporos—means a contradiction or irreconcilable paradox. To experience aporia is to be caught in a tunnel with a fire at either end, to be bewildered by clouds of ink or encircled by a net of bubbles. No matter how many times you reverse yourself, you’re still caught. Aporia is the trap of bafflement, invented by a being whose hunger has made him or her more cunning than those who only think to travel forward through a transparent world.

One mark of trickster’s mind, then, is that it exploits and frustrates opportunity. To move to a related but distinct feature—trickster’s cunning in regard to doubling back or reversing himself—let us take a somewhat more complicated example of the trap of bafflement. When the baby Hermes steals fifty of his brother Apollo’s cattle, he resorts to several clever ruses to hide his theft. First of all, he makes the cattle walk backward so that their footprints give the impression they were walking toward the meadow from which they were stolen. Second, Hermes makes himself a pair of tricky sandals, binding to his feet bunches of myrtle twigs and tamarisk, leaves and all. His own tracks are thus hard to read; they seem to point in all directions; they have no orientation. Hermes also zigzags as he walks and perhaps, being Hermes, flies a little between steps so that his apparent stride is strange. Later, Hermes throws his sandals into a river and spreads sand over the ashes of his sacrificial fire. (This is what travelers do to hide their camps; they bury each night’s campfire so as to move invisibly on their journey.)

In short, Hermes makes all the signs of his theft hard to find and harder to read. He covers his tracks, obviously, and those he doesn’t cover he confuses with what I’d like to call “confounded polarity.” Hermes’ sandals have no “heel and toe,” and therefore seem to go both ways at once, just as the cattle do when they move forward backward. Folklore about foxes has it that a fox, pursued by the hounds, will sometimes run a distance and then double back on its own tracks; when the hounds come to the place where the fox turned they are flummoxed and wander around barking at one another.

With both the cattle tracks and his sandals Hermes similarly confuses or erases polarity. It is as if, lost in the woods, you took out a compass and the needle spun aimlessly instead of pointing north. You could not then get oriented or find a path; you could not proceed. In this way, confounded polarity makes the world unpassable and is a kind of aporia. It blocks all passage by destroying the orientation that passage requires. When Apollo comes upon the tracks that Hermes and the cattle leave, he is stopped in his own tracks, unable to move:

And when the Great Archer made out the footprints, he cried out: “Well, well! This is remarkable, what I’m seeing. Clearly these are longhorned cattle tracks, but they all point backwards, toward the fields of daffodils! And these others, they are not the tracks of a man or a woman, nor of a gray wolf or a bear or lion. And I don’t think the shaggy-maned Centaur leaves such prints. What swift feet took these long strides? The tracks on this side of the path are weird, but those on the other side are weirder still!”

Such is the voice of the baffled man caught in a set of cunning reversals.

A scene such as this, with one character tracking another, points back to the earlier discussion of cunning that arises from the tension between predators and their prey. The animal able to read tracks has an invaluable tool in its hunting repertoire, as the animal able to disguise its tracks has a tool for its defense. Moreover, to read a track is an ancient and elemental interpretive act. From a broken twig, the depth of a footprint, a whiff of urine, a bit of fur snagged on a thorn, the hunter infers the presence of a particular animal, infers its direction, speed, size, habits. From potentially cryptic signs, the hunter speculates toward larger meanings. Stories about tricksters and tracking are therefore stories about reading and writing. The tale of Hermes and Apollo, in particular, pits a skilled encoder against a skilled decoder, a wary writer against a cunning reader. The writer makes his tracks lie in hopes of misleading the reader; the reader tries to get at a second or third level of signification so he can figure out what really happened.

Some humor is built into this scene, for normally Apollo is the god who can read a sign. Whenever a bird drops from the clouds, Apollo is the one who notices it and announces the meaning hidden from all less gifted readers. Apollo knows the mind of Zeus; he has prophetic powers; he has his own oracle at Delphi that brings him a handsome little income. In any other tale he would surely be able to read a set of tricky footprints, but this hymn belongs to Hermes, and he seems to be inventing something his older sibling hasn’t seen before. The tracks he leaves have multiple meanings, disguised meanings, contextual meanings, ambiguity, a first hint of something that will come forward in the next chapter, the idea that the Hymn to Hermes is a creation myth for the mind that is a master of signs.

Seizing and blocking opportunity, confusing polarity, disguising tracks—these are some of the marks of trickster’s intelligence. The last of them leads to the final item on this initial list: if trickster can disguise his tracks, surely he can disguise himself. He can encrypt his own image, distort it, cover it up. In particular, tricksters are known for changing their skin. I mean this in two ways: sometimes tricksters alter the appearance of their skin; sometimes they actually replace one skin with another.

The latter may be harder to imagine, so let’s begin with an example from natural history. Because the mythology suggests it, I have been deriving each of trickster’s tricks from predator-prey relationships; to illustrate skin-changing, let’s take a case in which the prey is humankind and the predator is a microbe, Trypanosoma brucei, the protozoan that causes African sleeping sickness. This worm-like creature kills thousands of people each year in Africa. It enters the bloodstream through the bite of the tsetse fly and then begins to multiply. Once the invader is detected, the victim’s immune system fights back with the single weapon at its command: it produces antibodies specific to the shape of the intruder’s skin, or outer protein coat. But this trypanosome can change its skin into as many as a thousand shapes, and the immune system never catches up. Each time it produces an antibody specific to any one skin, brucei drops that skin and produces another from its enormous wardrobe. Brucei is like a con man at a masquerade; it is not attached to any particular mask or face or persona, but fluidly alters each as the situation demands.

There are many such shifty-skinned or versipellis animals. The flounder, like the chameleon, eludes its enemies by mimicking the sea floor: when it swims in pebbled seas it sports a pebbled back; when it swims in sandy seas it sports a sandy back. In the Greek tradition the creature most renowned for its wily skin is the octopus, which takes both the shape and the color of the rock to which it clings, then reaches out from that mineral disguise to snare and eat its prey.

For the Greeks, skin-shifting versatility was a virtue. The elegiac poet Theognis praises the octopus for its flexibility. It is better to shift one’s ground than to stand inflexibly and fight, Theognis says.

Present a different aspect of yourself to each of your friends … Follow the example of the octopus with its many coils which assumes the appearance of the stone to which it is going to cling. Attach yourself to one on one day and, another day, change color. Cleverness is more valuable than inflexibility.

Theognis’ word for “inflexibility” is atropia, or as we might anglicize it, a kind of non-tropic-ness. “Tropic” means “turning” (the phototropic plant turns to follow light); thus the non-tropic being is unturning, inflexible, fixed in its skin and quite unlike the octopus.

I introduce these lines from Theognis because they offer a neat link between skin-shifting and another way that trickster’s shiftiness has been figured. Trickster is polytropic, which in its simplest sense means “turning many ways” (though the Greek polutropos is also translated “wily,” “versatile,” and “much-traveled”). There are three and only three characters in Greek literature who are said to be polytrophic: Hermes, Odysseus, and that deceitful Athenian general and Socratic pretty-boy, Alcibiades. Odysseus is named a polytropic man in the first line of the Odyssey; Hermes is the polytropic child in the Homeric Hymn.* As for Alcibiades, Plutarch’s Lives tells of the time when the Spartans sent orders that he be put to death. Alcibiades discovered the plot and escaped:

Resorting to Tissaphernes … for safety, he was soon first and fore most in that grandee’s favour. For his versatility [polutropon] and surpassing cleverness were the admiration of the Barbarian, who was no straightforward man himself, but malicious and fond of evil company. And indeed no disposition could resist and no nature escape Alcibiades, so full of grace was his daily life and conversation. Even those who feared and hated him felt a rare and winning charm in his society and presence.

Thus is trickster and thus is the polytropic man, shifty as an octopus, coloring himself to fit his surroundings, putting on a fresh face for each man or woman he meets, charming, disarming, and not to be trusted. (He makes a good politician, especially in a democracy, where many voters call for many faces.)

For the ancients, the ability to change one’s skin was not merely a matter of disguise, because the skin was often imagined to reveal the inner being. In some traditions, when a person wished to make it clear that he stood behind his deeds, when he wished to say “my true self did that,” he would say, “My skin did that.” To be able to change the skin therefore raises serious puzzles about identity, the kind of puzzle the immune system faces when trying to identify a trypanosome. If Odysseus can play so many roles, if he can play a part, as Athena once says, “as if it were [his] own tough skin,” then who is the real Odysseus? If the Norse trickster, Loki, can appear as a bird, a flea, a horse, and a fire, then who is the real Loki? If Raven can shed his raven cloak and become a cedar leaf, who is the real Raven? It is our habit to imagine a true self behind the shining images, but it is sometimes difficult to know if that self is really there, or just the product of our imaginings.

Take the hero of Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man, for example. In the course of that complicated book, a confidence man appears in a series of masks and roles, never as himself. That being the case, can we rightly say he has a self? And if he does, how can we describe that self with any, well, confidence? Melville’s hero wears so many seamless masks that many readers find him a little devilish, and consequently read the novel as an allegory: the Confidence-Man is the Devil. I suspect that Melville himself leaned toward that reading at times, but his novel doesn’t finally allow it. One can almost as easily make the counter case—that the Confidence-Man is a savior who only seems dark because he must work in a fallen world—and once that’s been done, if he might be the Devil or he might be Christ, we must probably admit that his “true self” is hopelessly hidden, or doesn’t exist.

Some classicists have argued that a similar problem faces the reader hoping to find the true Odysseus. Pietro Pucci contends that because Odysseus is always manipulating reality, disguising his body and telling lies about his past, he “removes himself from his ‘real’ self and falls into shadowy and intermediary postures in which he will at once be himself and not himself, true to his temper and disloyal to it.” If we presume to identify a real Odysseus behind his fabulations we should at least be aware that the presumption is ours, Pucci argues, concluding that “the disguising scenes [themselves] are what create the illusion of his ‘real self.’”

These are difficult cases; identifying the “self” of an animal predator such as Trypanosoma brucei may be a little easier because all its disguises serve a single end: they help it feed upon its host. The real self is in the feeding. The real octopus has a constant belly below its shifting skin. But not all shape-shifters have such unitary and identifiable ends. If we find a trickster who has managed to distance himself from appetite, how can we be sure what really moves his reversals? As soon as we begin to think that Melville’s Confidence-Man is governed by greed alone, we find him giving away gold pieces. With some polytropic characters it is possible that there is no real self behind the shifting masks, or that the real self lies exactly there, in the moving surfaces and not beneath. It’s possible there are beings with no way of their own, only the many ways of their shifting skins and changing contexts.

* And, it should be said, terribly dependent on others, though “dependent” might not be the right word: trickster can be a bungling host because he’s such an agile parasite.

*Hermes becomes Mercurius or Mercury in Rome and in the Middle Ages. Carl Jung points out that in alchemical texts “Mercurius, following the tradition of Hermes, is manysided, changeable, and deceitful. Dorn speaks of ‘that inconstant Mercurius,’ and another calls him versipellis (changing his skin, shifty).”