Читать книгу Trickster Makes This World - Lewis Hyde - Страница 18

As I write these pages a mother cardinal nesting near the house is driving herself nuts pecking at her own reflection in my study window. She is convinced there is another bird there, an interloper, a threat to her nest, her eggs, her territory. If I pull the shade, or even prop a book up against the glass, the reflection disappears and the bird calms down. But some days I forget to perform this small, interspecies favor and now the glass is covered with the greasy smudges of her wing tips, like a script with only two brush strokes, a cryptic testament to the stubborn persistence of her limited brain.

A story we’ll call “The Reflected Plums” was once told all over the North American continent. Here is the version in the Winnebago trickster cycle:

Trickster happened to look in the water and much to his surprise he saw many plums there. He surveyed them very carefully and then he dived down into the water to get some. But only small stones did he bring back in his hands. Again he dived into the water. But this time he knocked himself unconscious against a rock at the bottom. After a while he floated up and gradually came to. He was lying on the water, flat on his back, when he came to and, as he opened his eyes, there on the top of the bank he saw many plums. What he had seen in the water was only a reflection. Then he realized what he had done. “Oh, my, what a stupid fellow I must be! I should have recognized this. Here I have caused myself a great deal of pain.”

In the Winnebago cycle, immediately following this event trickster fools some mother raccoons into leaving their children alone so that he might eat them. To get the raccoons to leave their young, trickster tells them where the plums are: “You cannot possibly miss the place … for there are so many plums there … If, toward evening, as the sun sets, you see the sky red, you will know that the plums are causing it. Do not turn back for you will surely find it.” As Paul Radin points out, the joke here is that for the Winnebago “a red sky is the stereotype symbol for death. This is what it should have meant to the foolish women for their children are about to be killed.” Trickster is toying with them, offering them a figurative hint as to what is about to happen; they take his language literally, however, and suffer the consequences, just as trickster himself took the reflected plums literally and consequently suffered. As is often the case, we see trickster being simultaneously stupid and clever—one minute taking an image for the real thing, the next teasing others too dumb to hear an image for its layered senses.

Whether or not it is right to say that this story’s sequence of events describes trickster learning something, it is right, I think, to say that the story portrays a character living on the cusp of reflective consciousness. Trickster embodies reflection coming into being; in him we see both the need for reflective consciousness (without it he suffers) and the rewards of that consciousness (with it he exploits the world). In addition, we have a narrative in which mental experience (trickster playing with an image) replaces physical experience (trickster actually jumping in the water, hitting his head). We see trickster waking to symbolic life or becoming aware of his own imagination and its powers.

How, in the history of an individual consciousness, does such an awakening come about? More perplexing, how, in the history of the race, did imagination itself emerge? How did mind first acquire the ability to make images and how then did it come to reflect on its images? In trickster’s case, how did mental fakery come to replace incarnate fakery? What happened between the witless straight man who takes reflected plums literally and the double-talker who says “red sky” to mean “I’m about to eat your kids”?

We cannot take on such questions without pausing to differentiate some things that I have been mixing up. In describing the marks of trickster’s cunning, I have been conflating natural history with mental and cultural phenomena. It is one thing for trypanosomes to change their skins; another for Raven to become a leaf floating in spring water; another still for storytellers to have imagined Raven in the first place, or for one of us to reimagine him. Before picking these strands apart, however, we should remember that the mythology itself asks us to confuse them. Coyote stories point to coyotes to teach about the mind; the stories themselves look to predator-prey relationships for the birth of cunning. These myths suggest that blending natural history and mental phenomena is not an unthinking conflation but, on the contrary, an accurate description of the way things are. To learn about intelligence from the meat-thief Coyote is to know that we are embodied thinkers. If the brain has cunning, it has it as a consequence of appetite; the blood that lights the mind gets its sugars from the gut.

Nevertheless, the cunning of animals is not the cunning of Alcibiades. The octopus, the flounder, the trypanosome—each of these creatures has its tricks, but none reflects upon its own devices. The alligator snapping turtle has that clever tongue, but it’s a one-trick turtle, never able to fashion new lures for new suckers. As we’ve seen, even when these creatures lie, their deceptions lack the plasticity of human deceit. The octopus has no choice in the matter; if for some strange reason it would be useful to turn scarlet on a gray rock, it couldn’t do it. It is bound to its own reflexes in which gray rocks evoke gray skins. And the feedback system that produced those reflexes is not located in the octopus’s mind but in evolution’s slow, dimwitted carnage.

That said, let us ask again how, in the history of cunning, the lure tongue gives way to the mind that imagines lures.

As with inquiries into the origin of language, there may be no good way to answer such questions. In earlier drafts of this chapter, I rehearsed some of the ways that evolutionary biologists have tried to respond, but I always had the feeling that mysteries were being shunted from one area to another, rather than resolved. The strangeness and wonder of reflective imagination seems still to elude the grasp of biological narrative. I suspect it still eludes all narrative. And yet, with humility beforehand, it’s hard to resist speculation.

Several places in the trickster mythology itself seem to me to suggest a creation story for the imagination. “The Reflected Plums,” as we’ve seen, implies that the pain of trickster’s witlessness moves him toward reflection. To this, let’s add a thought-provoking sequence of events from the Hymn to Hermes. Remember what happens as Hermes finishes his sacrifice:

Then glorious Hermes longed to eat the sacrificial meat. The sweet odor weakened him, immortal though he was; and yet, much as his mouth watered, his proud heart would not let him eat. Later he stowed the meat and fat away in the high-roofed barn, setting them high up as a token [sêma] of his youthful theft.

Hermes, that is, takes some of the sacrificial flesh and hangs it up in the barn to show what he’s done. The Hymn calls this meat a sêma, which in Homeric Greek means a marker, sign, or token. To reflect a little on what’s going on in this scene, we might first decide who is meant to see this sign. For what audience has Hermes posted it? One likely answer is Apollo. After all, later Hermes seems to provoke a confrontation with Apollo, and perhaps, now that his theft has been carried out, he’s beginning to advertise.

This makes some sense, but in fact Apollo never does notice the token, and when Hermes leaves it in the barn he is still wrapping himself in secrecy (in the same scene he dumps his trick shoes in the river and hides the traces of his fire). It seems more likely, then, that Hermes is presenting this sêma to himself. This is the child, after all, who makes a sacrifice in complete solitude so as to direct a crucial part of it to himself. There is a strong self-reflective strain in this Hymn; the god is making a world for himself. Like the writing we do in our journals, some tokens are addressed first and foremost to their maker. Hermes in this case may be creating an image for his own reflection. I’ll come back to this point in a moment, but to give it its full weight let’s turn to the question of what the token stands for.

The Hymn itself tells us the first way to understand it: it’s a sign of Hermes’ “youthful theft.” It has something to do with childhood and with cunning appropriation. Moreover, if this scene describes the invention of sacrifice, if sacrifice is ritual apportionment, and if Hermes’ invention is rightly read as a change in apportionment, a change in the rules—then the meat in the barn betokens all of that as well. It is a sign of a shift in the order of things, a new wrinkle in the code by which the portions are to be distributed.

Finally, let’s not forget that the immediate context of this sêma is the pivotal moment in which Hermes desires but does not eat the sacrificial meat. This seems crucial: there could be no meat from which to make a token if Hermes had eaten; therefore, the token must carry with it the meaning “meat-not-eaten” and with that the memory of appetite restrained, the belly denied in favor of something else. In this line it is useful to know that in Homeric Greek the word sêma belongs to a group of related words, a semantic cluster that includes the word for “mind” (nóos) and verbs that have to do with noticing, recognizing, interpreting, encoding, and decoding. Nóos and sêma go together; you don’t get the one without the other. You don’t get a sign without the mental faculty to encode and decode its meanings.

My suggestion, then, is that this “sêma of his youthful theft” marks the move from incarnate life (meat one actually eats) to symbolic or mental life (meat made to stand for something else). It marks that transition and stands for that transition. Furthermore, marking the move from belly-meat to mental-meat, it marks as well the awakening of the nóos, the mind that creates and reflects upon signs. This nóos is no flounder-brain with its hard-wired reflexes, but the mind of a mammal without a “way”—one that can step back from the objects of its desire and imagine them. The scene is a little nóos creation story in which Hermes, getting wise to the bait, imagines but does not eat the mortal portion.

This trickster tale also tells us several things about how that encording (imagining, signifying) mind comes into being. First, it implies that nóos awakes with restraint of appetite. We do not get a sêma until we have the “not” of meat-not-eaten. It should be pointed out that this restraining “not” comes from Hermes himself, rather than any external authority. This is not the psychoanalytic narrative in which a child’s acquisition of language coincides with his or her growing sense of parental constraint. Here we get the link between mastery of symbols and a prohibitory “no,” but when Hermes’ heart says that “no” to his salivating mouth, the constraint is self-made and the mood is one of bright-eyed duplicity rather than loss and guilt.

Such bright-eyed duplicity, in fact, is the second thing the Hymn marks about the encoding mind. After all, stolen from Apollo and then used in a sort of Hermetic shell game to change the character of ritual sacrifice, this meat-not-eaten appears as the consequence of a series of cunning subterfuges. In this story, only a thief could have effected the shifts in question; it is by virtue of that thief’s duplicity that the meat takes its double or, rather, multiple meanings. In A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco has this to say about what makes something a “sign”:

Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else … Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie . If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it annot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.

The baited hook, that “first trick” we looked at early on, might make a good example of a sign in this sense. A worm with no hook in it, a worm the fish can eat in safety, has, by Eco’s way of thinking, no significance, but the worm that says “I’m harmless” when in fact it hides a hook tells a lie and by that lie worms begin to signify (and fish, if they are smart, will begin to read before they eat). Only when there’s a possible Lying Worm can we begin to speak of a True Worm, and only then does Worm become a sign.

We shall return to questions of lying, but first I want to link Eco’s defin ition of a “sign” to the substitutions involved in thieving, and to the duplicity that produces the meat-not-eaten. To begin, I need to say a bit about what Apollo’s cattle mean and how they come to have that meaning. The classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant tells us that the cattle of the unmown meadow are somewhat unusual before Hermes steals them: they are neither wild nor domestic; they do not reproduce sexually (and thus have a fixed number); they are peaceful, beautiful, and immortal. Hermes, Vernant says, “takes these cows from the divine world … to the world of men, where they acquire domestic status” and where they become part of “the world as it is”; henceforth they live in stables, reproduce sexually, and are slaughtered to be eaten by humankind.

Eco is arguing, it seems to me, that what Vernant has as the cattle’s initial meaning—their immortality, and so on—exists only retroactively. If meaning cannot exist without the possibility of substitution, then so long as the cattle cannot be moved from their unmown meadow they cannot mean anything. Conversely, the moment at which they may be butchered and eaten is the moment at which their earlier state acquires its significance. Their meat means one thing on the hoof, another in the fire, and yet another hung in the barn. Hermes-the-Thief moves the meat from one situation to another and by such substitutions it comes to have its significance; it becomes a sign that can “tell” something. Especially in a case like this, where there is a rule against moving the cattle, there can be no signification without trickster’s duplicity, and the mind of a thief is the mind most fully able to encode and decode.

That given, let me come back to the idea that nóos is also born of restraint. We usually think of restraint as a virtue and when the Hymn mentions Hermes’ “proud heart” it’s hard to get away from the notion that something good is happening—this youngster is maturing, getting control of his impulses, and so forth. That is obviously the case in one regard, but we must not forget that duplicity surrounds the whole endeavor. No one imagines Hermes is about to shape up and become an Apollonian banker. This young god is restraining appetite now in favor of appetite later. Remember again what he says to his mother:

“Why should we be the only gods who never eat the fruits of sacrifice and prayer? Better always to live in the company of other deathless ones—rich, glamorous, enjoying heaps of grain—than forever to sit by ourselves in a gloomy cavern.”

In short, we are seeing appetite deferred or displaced rather than any full restraint or denial. As I argued earlier, Hermes has not given up eating; dedicating the smoke of sacrifice to himself, he forgoes the mortal portion so as to feast on a portion that will do him no harm.

• • •

It may be helpful at this point to summarize the ground we have covered and formulate a few conclusions. I ended the last chapter by presenting several ways in which trickster’s cunning has been imagined. He knows how to slip through pores, and how to block them; he confuses polarity by doubling back and reversing himself; he covers his tracks and twists their meanings; and he is polytropic, changing his skin or shifting his shape as the situation requires. Natural history offers wonderful examples of each of these. We see this cunning in the humpback whale casting its bubble net, in the fox doubling back to baffle the hounds, in the octopus blending with its chosen rock.

And yet these images fail to catch the full flavor of what we mean by cunning. We are speaking here of a kind of mind, and mind has a plasticity not usually found in the animal world. Odysseus and the octopus are both polytropic, but Odysseus is more so. Like an octopus, Odysseus could put on a rock-colored cloak if he needed to, but the octopus can never, like Odysseus, dress as a beggar against regal surroundings. The octopus does not consider its coloration. Odysseus and those who imagine him, on the other hand, have nóos, the mind that can form an image or representation of some sort and “float” it, detached, to be considered and shaped or changed before it is either discarded or acted upon. The story of Hermes hanging his meat-sign up in the barn suggests one answer to how such a mind came to be. Duplicity and deferral of appetite are key to its emergence, the implication being that signification evolved to help this animal slip the trap of appetite or at least better manage its constraints.

However the shift from unconsidered to considered trickery took place, once it has appeared we must reread the stories out of natural history as “just so” stories about cognition and culture. Now, in addition to the fox with its seven-holed lair, we have all forms of mental and social opportunism, from the mind that can sense loopholes in an argument to the pickpockets who hang out around railway depots. Now, in addition to the octopus squirting ink, we have the mind that can hide its assumptions in clouds of rhetoric or spin out opaque mythologies to preserve the barriers of caste and class. Beyond the fox that turns on its own scent to baffle the hounds, we now have the logician’s paradoxes and ideologies that conceal their own contradictions. In addition to animals that disguise their tracks and predators that see through the disguise, we now have the encoding and decoding mind, and all the arts of reading. In addition to nature’s polytropic beasts, we now have the imagination itself—the mastermind of tropes—and the world of art and artifice, from the bard who weaves a captivating tale to the disinformation officer who floats a cover story to lead an enemy astray.

In short, trickster’s cunning now takes on its mental, social, cultural, and even spiritual forms. But it does so with one particular limitation. Earlier, I suggested that if trickster were free of all appetite he would no longer be trickster. In a sense, this is a matter of definition; the mythology we’re looking at is constantly gustatory, sexual, and scatological. It seems to require, then, that we connect trickster’s inventive cunning to the body’s needs. With that in mind, I want to return to a topic we have several times approached, the idea that trickster invents the art of lying, for in this mythology that invention arises precisely where artifice and hunger are knit to one another.