Читать книгу Trickster Makes This World - Lewis Hyde - Страница 20

The truest poetry is the most feigning. —Shakespeare

The mind-boggling falsity that calls the truth itself into question is what interests me here, not the simple counterfactual statement (“I didn’t,” when in fact I did). Anyone whose lies merely contradict the truth is still part of a game whose rules have preceded him; he or she merely inverts the case, offering not-A in place of A. The problem is to make a “lie” that cancels the opposition and so holds the possibility of new worlds. Let’s go back to the Hymn to Hermes for an example, a case of lying that muddies the line between the true and the false.

Remember that Hermes’ crime spree starts because “he was hungry to eat meat.” At the outset, that is, he is a mere belly, an agent of hunger’s cunning, and though he doesn’t eat he nonetheless later lies in the way that bellies will. For the first of his falsehoods we find him back in his mother’s cave, snuggled down in his cradle as if he hadn’t been out all night stealing. Here Apollo, who has been searching high and low for his missing kine, discovers the thief and threatens to throw him into the underworld unless he confesses his crime. Hermes, cooing in his blankets, denies all guilt:

“Why are you yelling like a bully, Apollo? You’ve come here looking for cows from your pasture? I haven’t seen them. I haven’t heard a word about them. No one’s told me a thing. I can’t give you any information, nor could I claim the reward for information.

“Do I look like a cattle driver? A big strong guy? That is not my kind of work. I am interested in other things: I care for sleep above all, and the milk of my mother’s breasts, and a blanket over my shoulders, and warm baths.

“I’d advise you not to talk like this in public; the deathless gods would think it odd indeed, a day-old child bringing field animals into the courtyard. You’re talking wildly. I was born yesterday; my feet are tender and the ground is rough beneath them.

“Still, if you insist, I am willing to swear a great oath by my father’s head, and vow that I didn’t steal your cows and that I haven’t seen anyone else steal your cows—whatever ‘cows’ may be, for, to tell you the truth, I only know of them by hearsay.”

The straight-shooting god of sunlight and order is momentarily charmed out of his anger: “Far-working Apollo laughed softly then, and said to Hermes: ‘My dear boy, what a tricky-hearted cheat you are!’” This is the first of two Olympian chuckles in the Hymn, each of which offers Hermes an opportunity to change the world into which he has been born. In this case, Apollo’s laugh marks the moment at which he first loosens his grip on the cattle; his laughter melts his righteous anger and a touch of detachment enters.

With such humor, trickster’s first lie differs from the way I earlier imagined a child lying about a theft. Trickster feels no anxiety when he deceives. He is often dependent on others, to be sure, but that dependence rarely constrains him. He does not fear separation from his elders and so can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation. Krishna or Hermes, Coyote or Raven—when one of these speaks his first lie he is the eternal child who cannot be significantly damaged and so may cleave to the pure and playful delight of floating fiction in the face of stern reality.

But to come back to the idea that trickster’s lies somehow call the truth into question, let me juxtapose Hermes’ fibs to those that Krishna tells in a similar situation. In the typical tale of Krishna as a child, his mother Yasoda has to leave the house and tells her boy not to steal the household butter while she’s gone. As soon as she leaves, Krishna goes to the larder, breaks open the pots full of butter, and eats it hand to mouth. When Yasoda returns she finds her child on the floor, his dark face besmeared with creamy white. To her reprimands Krishna has many clever replies. He says, for example, “I wasn’t stealing butter; there were ants in the butter jars and I was simply trying to keep them out.” Or he says that his apparent naughtiness is actually her fault: “These little bracelets you gave me chafed my wrists; I tried to soothe the sores by smearing butter on them.” For our purposes, however, the most telling reply is this: “I didn’t steal the butter, Ma. How could I steal it? Doesn’t everything in the house belong to us?” At this point Yasoda, like Apollo, laughs, charmed by her cunning and shameless child.

Our ideas about property and theft depend on a set of assumptions about how the world is divided up. Trickster’s lies and thefts challenge those premises and in so doing reveal their artifice and suggest alternatives. One of the West African tricksters, Legba, has been well described in this regard as “a mediator” who works “by means of a lie that is really a truth, a deception that is in fact a revelation.” That’s how Krishna works, too. When he is the thief of hearts, for example, he disturbs all those who have been foolish enough to think their hearts are their own property, not the property of god. As the thief of butter Krishna upsets the categories that his mother has established to separate him from that food of foods. It is in this sense that his lies subvert what seemed so clear a truth just moments ago. Suddenly the old verities are up for grabs. Who gave Apollo those cattle in the first place, anyway? Who exactly decides how the sacrifice should be apportioned? Who was the original owner of the butter that Yasoda guards so carefully? Who gave all of Pennsylvania to William Penn?

For trickster’s lies to provoke doubt in this way, he must draw his adversaries into his own uncanny territory. It is a space ruled by the disarming charm of the very young child. It is a traveler’s space where everything is on the road, cut loose from any clear locale. Here the citizens walk their livestock backward and speak a weird reversing language. Krishna’s lie belongs to a class of statements that double back to subvert their own contexts. His is cunning or crooked speech because it undercuts the situation from which it takes its meaning. In Greek philosophy it was Parmenides who declared that “Cretans are always liars,” but the joke is that Parmenides himself was a Cretan, so the sentence plus its speaker make a befuddlement, an aporia, an inky sea.

The same joke is built into the Cretan lies that Odysseus tells, though, as I said earlier, only one of his auditors gets it. After Odysseus is set on the shores of Ithaca, Athena appears to him, disguised as a shepherd. She asks who he is and wary Odysseus pretends to another identity, inventing a tale to explain why he might be left alone on this shore: he killed an evil man, but had to flee; his shipmates abandoned him, and so forth. The tale begins with the words, “Far away in Crete …” and Athena is amused. Her smile is the facial gesture of those who knowingly occupy the space of trickster’s lies, for mind itself is amused by these reversals.

Athena’s smile, then (like Apollo’s and Yasoda’s), must also indicate that we are in the presence of that consciousness called nóos. The sequence of Cretan lies points to this conclusion. Not long after his conversation with Athena, Odysseus deals with the oafish suitor whom he must defeat to regain his kingdom. He lies to this man, too, but the fellow hasn’t a clue what’s going on, a point that Homer underscores with the man’s name: Antínoös. This man is wholly unable to hear the complexity of Odysseus’ words and pays for his deafness with his life. Only nóos gives the mental poise needed to navigate in deep ambiguity. Antínoös is little more than fish bait in those seas.

The thieving and lying that initiate the trip into this inky territory give trickster the chance to remake the truth on his own terms. Another look at the Hymn to Hermes will illustrate how this might work. As I read the story, Hermes, born in a cave of a secret liaison, is out to change his station in life. To that end, he not only steals the cattle and lies to everyone; once he has gotten their attention, he makes a kind of peace with Apollo. At the appropriate moment he turns on the charm. Taking out his lyre and playing a beautiful melody, he begins “to soften that stern, far-shooting archer,” and before long, “bright Apollo laugh [s] for joy as the sweet throb of that marvelous instrument stole into his heart, and a gentle longing seized his listening soul.” Hermes sings Apollo a theogony, “the story of the gods … how each came to be … and how each came to have what now is theirs.” I suspect we are meant to imagine this as a theogony of Hermes’ own design, a reshaping of old stories, as Hesiod must have reshaped old stories. In addition, I suspect that this new Hermetic theogony includes both Hermes and Apollo in its cast and as such amounts to simultaneous self-promotion and flattery. At the end Apollo is helplessly enchanted, whereupon Hermes gives him the lyre. In return, Apollo “placed his shining whip in Hermes’ hand, ordaining him Keeper of the Herds.” From now on, this newcomer will “tend… the ranging, twisted-horned cattle.”

By the end of the Hymn, then, Hermes has been made the Keeper of the Herds and, in scenes I haven’t cited, much more: he is admitted to the Pantheon, he is an acknowledged son of Zeus, he has been given a share of prophetic powers, he has become the messenger of the gods, the guide to Hades, and so on. None of this would have happened had he confessed guilt when Apollo first approached him. On the contrary, a true confession would have been an accession to the status quo and would have locked him in it forever. Spoken at the boundary of what is and is not the case, however, his lies unsettled and moved that boundary. Thieving and lying were not his only tools, to be sure (he is a charmer and enchanter as well), but the theft and the lie are the crucial first steps.

Moreover, once he has been ordained the Keeper of the Herds, Hermes’ profession of innocence seems less like a lie, for when the keeper of a thing takes possession of it he is not rightly called a thief. Hermes might take a leaf from Krishna’s book and say, “I didn’t steal the cattle; aren’t I their Keeper? Don’t I carry the herder’s whip?” Such is the fruit of that journey into paradox and befuddlement that the first lie initiates. It upsets the polarity between truth and falsity to emerge later with a new polarity, perhaps (“Hermes is truly the Keeper of the Herds”), but one set up with different boundary markers (the herder’s whip has been shifted from one hand to another).

I want to back off a little here in order to widen this point and connect it to questions of appetite. All cultures have particular vocabularies that are deployed in paradigmatic patterns, in locally understood webs of signification. We enter such a web when we hear “Raven Becomes Voracious.” The Tsimshian have all these terms and characters—intestines, salmon roe, the animal chief, sunlight, the Queen Charlotte Islands, slaves, sea-lion bladders, and on and on—which hang together in a locally felt manner. There is no story about burning the brain of a dead boy, only the intestines; the ancient Raven doesn’t fly toward the Islands, only away from them. The terms are knit together in certain ways, not in others. American capitalist democracy has its webs too, of course. Weight loss, natural foods, Valley Forge, atomic power, the family, free trade, white bread: any citizen can spin a narrative of these things that will make sense to any other citizen. The story is always that George Washington didn’t tell a lie; the cigarette always has a natural flavor.

Typically, such webs of signification are built around sets of opposites: fat and thin, slave and free, for example, or—more categorically—true and false, natural and unnatural, real and illusory, clean and dirty. What tricksters sometimes do is to disturb these pairs and thus disturb the web itself.

Earlier I showed how any animal that is prey for a baited trap does well to develop the wit to see past the bait. The stories themselves suggest a kind of incrementally growing cunning that ends with a creature smart enough to defer hunger and steal the bait. Now, we see similar cunning in terms of the polarities that organize webs of signification. At the start of the Homeric Hymn, for example, Hermes is at one pole of such a set of opposites: he is not-Olympian, not-legitimate, not-the-object-of-sacrifice. He could have settled for that position or he could have settled for simple contrariety (stealing food for the rest of eternity). He does neither. He leaves what Theodore Roethke called “the weary dance of opposites” and finds a third thing. Just as the bait thief turns the predator-prey relationship itself into his feeding ground, so the master liar (thief, deceiver) takes the web of signification itself as the site of his operations. When he does so, that web loses its charm, its magic. After Thlókunyana has stolen the bait from a trap, that trap no longer catches game. After Hermes has told the lie that makes Apollo laugh and played his charming lyre, Apollo’s righteousness no longer serves. Yasoda’s sense of mine and thine is subverted when Krishna makes her smile.

Once the web has lost its charm, its terms lose theirs; suddenly they seem contingent and open to revision. For those epi-predators who work with the signifiers themselves rather than the things they supposedly signify, language is not a medium that helps us see the true, the real, the natural. Language is a tool assembled by creatures with “no way” trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs; it is a tool those same creatures can disassemble if it fails them.

It is in this line that I understand a remark in Plato to the effect that Hermes invented language. In the Cratylus Plato discusses the origins of certain words, especially the names of the gods. At one point he says, “I should imagine that the name Hermes has to do with speech, and signifies that he is the interpreter [hermeneus], or messenger, or thief, or liar, or bargainer; all that sort of thing has a great deal to do with language …” He goes on to propose that two Greek words meaning “to tell” and “to contrive” were combined to form “the name of the God who invented language and speech,” because Hermes is “the contriver of tales or speeches.”

The idea that Hermes invented language seems in accord with the earlier suggestion that duplicity is the precondition of signification. When discussing the token that Hermes makes to honor his youthful crime, I underscored the combination of theft, appetite, and restraint that went into its creation, and I took that stolen “meat-not-eaten” to mark the simultaneous appearance of signs and of the double-dealing mind that creates them. Plato works from a similar intuition: without the wit to deceive, he assumes, one would not have the wit to come up with language in the first place.

The notion that trickster invents language appears more than once in this mythology, though with considerable variation. Sometimes he creates multiple languages to replace a single primal tongue; sometimes he invents the “inner writing” of memory or the “inner language” of self-knowledge; sometimes he invents picture writing or hieroglyphics; and sometimes, as in Plato, he is the author of language itself. A trickster from the Canadian north woods, for example, is said to have been around before human speech and, in ancient times, to have “brought words over” from the animals to human beings. A somewhat more modest claim is the most common of all: what tricksters quite regularly do is create lively talk where there has been silence, or where speech has been prohibited. Trickster speaks freshly where language has been blocked, gone dead, or lost its charm. Here again Plato’s intuition—that deceit and inventive speech are linked—holds, for usually language goes dead because cultural practice has hedged it in, and some shameless double-dealer is needed to get outside the rules and set tongues wagging again.

But here I want to pause; a full discussion of speech and speech-lessness belongs in a later chapter. I have organized this first part of the book around questions of appetite, and now that I have come to language itself and its webs of signification we are at an outer limit of that hunger narrative. There is a quantum leap between “traps of appetite” and the “traps of culture” that people weave with language; an inquiry into the latter belongs to the sections that follow.

That said, however, let us not forget that appetite brought us this far. We have traveled from the invention of the fish trap to the invention of language, from the alligator snapping turtle luring suckers with its pale tongue to silver-throated Hermes baiting Apollo with charming lies. The point throughout has been to show that the mythology of trickster figures is, by one reading, the story of intelligence arising from appetite. To recall much of the argument so far, remember the image of Raven diving into the ocean to steal fat from fishermen’s baited hooks. Set in the tension of predator-prey relationships, tricksters seem by turns wise and witless: Smart-Trickster invents that baited hook, Witless-Trickster would swallow it, and in the give-and-take between those poles other levels of intelligence slowly appear until we get to Even-Smarter-Trickster, the one who has the wit to steal the bait. Raven is that epi-predator who continues to satisfy his needs while managing enough distance from them that he responds to the smell of meat with reflection rather than reflex.

Part of this mythology links that distancing from need to the invention of sacrifice, as if trickster, ensnared in his own intestines, burns a part of them, consciously restraining his hunger in hopes of its later and more durable satisfaction. In some of the stories, trickster seems to have stepped back from instinct as well as need. Wandering aimlessly, stupider than the animals, he is at once the bungling host and the agile parasite; he has no way of his own but he is the Great Imitator who adopts the many ways of those around him. Unconstrained by instinct, he is the author of endlessly creative and novel deceptions, from hidden hooks to tracks that are impossible to read.

This genealogy of trickery brought us finally to questions of lying and truth-telling, to the sort of contingent claims that make up those webs of signification we call mythologies, cultures, ideologies—claims such as “The cattle belong to Apollo,” or “There are seven major impulse disorders”; claims like “A modest woman covers her face,” “American policy supports emerging democracies,” “Hispanics can be of any race,” “All men are created equal.”

Long ago, Friedrich Nietzsche offered a wonderful way to think of such assertions. The truth, he said in a famous passage, is

a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions.

The stories we’ve been looking at suggest adding a few lines about hunger to Nietzsche’s formulation. Trickster lies because he has a belly, the stories say; expect truth only from those whose belly is full or those who have escaped the belly altogether. Not that adding stomachs to Nietzsche’s idea changes it significantly, but it may shed some light on the matter of forgetfulness that he introduces at the end. To be forgetful of illusion is to be unconscious of it and in these stories it is hunger, I think, that threatens to disturb any such unconsciousness. Hunger prompts “mere bellies” to reveal the fictive nature of illusory truths, as if stomach acid, when it has nothing else to work on, will strip illusion of its protective amnesia. Hunger is the agent of a kind of anamnesis or unforgetting that Plato didn’t imagine, one that recovers the memory of artifice rather than the memory of eternals. (This is what happens in the Homeric Hymn: Hermes is hungry, and he disrupts the supposed eternal order of things.)

But such revelation is only half of trickster’s power in regard to “truth.” Just as he can slip a trap, then turn around and make his own, so he can debunk an illusion, then turn around and conjure up another (as Hermes does when he sings to Apollo). Where, after all, does Nietzsche’s “army of metaphors” come from in the first place, if not from some enchanting mastermind of tropes? And how did it fall into the unconscious? Perhaps that army carries with it some drug or soporific to induce forgetting in the provinces it conquers. In a variant version of the Hermes story, there are dogs set out to guard Apollo’s cattle, and Hermes puts them into a stupor. The Greek for “stupor” is lethargon, a combination of lethe (forgetfulness) and argon (lazy or slow). It’s the forgetful part I wish to mark. When Hermes is ordering the world on his own terms, he takes the watchdogs of the mind—acute, open-eyed, up all night—and numbs them with forgetfulness. Under his enchantment, illusion sinks below the threshold of consciousness and appears to be the truth.

I say all this partly to review the territory we have covered, but also to indicate how that territory opens onto issues that will concern me in the chapters that follow. My project here is not just to derive intelligence from appetite but to think more broadly about the kind of inventiveness that is figured in this mythology, the kind of art, in particular, that might spring from trickster’s spirit. In this line there is a long tradition that locates art in that trickster shadowland where truth and falsity are not well differentiated. The idea probably goes back to Aristotle, who thought the epic poets to be Cretan liars of a sort. “Homer more than any other,” he wrote, “has taught the rest of us the art of framing lies the right way.”

It is an old notion, then, that art and lying share a common ground, one that has had a hardy efflorescence in the modern world. The authors of modern novels have been known to describe themselves with that same language, from Defoe (who was said to “lie like the truth”) to Balzac (who said that “fiction is a dignified form of lies”) to Dostoevsky (who described Don Quixote as a novel in which truth is saved by a lie), down to Mario Vargas Llosa (who once declared: “When we write novels, what we do is create a profoundly distorted manifestation of reality, which we impose on readers, on society. Real literature has never told the truth. It has imposed lies as truths”). Virginia Woolf stirs the same muddy water in her introduction to A Room of One’s Own: “Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact … Lies will flow from my lips, but perhaps there is some truth mixed up with them.” Ralph Ellison has said that Invisible Man “take[s] advantage of the novel’s capacity for telling the truth while actually telling a ‘lie,’ which is the Afro-American folk term for an improvised story.” Even that highly ethical modern poet, Czeslaw Milosz, can be found defending “the right of the poet to invent—that is, to lie.”

In the visual arts, Pablo Picasso was the great confounder of the presumed distinction between truth and lies: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” Perhaps the most extended exposition on this theme is found in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay “The Decay of Lying,” an aesthete’s defense of art against the service crowd who are always out to impress it into their own private army of metaphors. “The telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of Art,” says Wilde, thinking of all those great creations (Milton’s Satan, Hamlet, Jane Eyre) who are more real and durable than the perishable women and men we know in fact. Thus Wilde honors Balzac, saying his characters “dominate us, and defy skepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.” Thus might we hope to have great liars at our dinner table rather than trivial pursuers of fact. “The aim of the liar,” Wilde writes, “is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society …”

Such assertions contain their own puzzles (What does Wilde mean by “beautiful untrue things”? How does Picasso “convince others”?), but for now I want merely to note where these artists place their work. Many of these statements are hard to understand if we cleave to any simple sense of what is meant by “truth” and “lies.” They are easier to understand if such opposites collapse, whereupon we are dropped back into trickster’s limbo, where boundary markers shift at night, shoes have no heel and toe, inky clouds attack transparency, and every resting place suddenly turns into a crossroads. These artists, that is to say, claim a part of trickster’s territory for their own, knowing it to be one of the breeding grounds of art and artifice.

Be that as it may, in what follows I hope to widen my reading of this mythology by turning more fully to that world of art and artifice. Not that we haven’t been there all along. In these pages I, too, have been slowly marshaling an army of metaphors, one I hope to deploy when I need it in pages to come. But I have tried, also, to organize this section around a single and somewhat literal-minded reading of the material. The trickster stories themselves suggest we look to appetite and the natural world for the roots of trickster’s cunning, and I have tried to do that. But to the degree that I’ve succeeded I have sometimes turned myself into Witless Coyote, thinking there are some plums to eat in “The Reflected Plums,” or thinking the marbled meat of Apollo’s cattle could really make Hermes’ mouth water.

It’s not that questions of appetite don’t lead to an interesting reading, it’s just that now that we have seen that Homer is a liar, now that we have come to travelers who multiply meanings as they move, we should be wary of getting too comfortable with any single line of analysis. These stories have as many senses as the contexts of their telling. Their tracks point every which way. Odysseus’ oar may also be a winnowing fan, but that hardly exhausts its meanings. Burying the handle of a winnowing fan in a heap of grain is a sign that the harvest is done. Burying a sailor’s oar in a heap of earth is the sign that marks that sailor’s grave. Maybe when an oar stands over a grave it does come to the end of its meanings, for then the traveler’s journey is done. But who would want such closure? “Rabbit jumped over Coyote four times. He came back to life and went on his way.”