![]() Wodehouse’s novels and short stories about Bertie Wooster and his perfect valet, Jeeves, might take issue with the assertion that Jeeves is a trickster. The theft of Hulga’s leg was not committed for the personal benefit of the thief, but for the radical reorganization of Hulga’s worldview.Īnyone who has read P.G. ![]() I been believing in nothing since I was born!” It’s the arbitrary nature of his thefts and this perfect articulation of his universal ambivalence that makes Manley an ideal trickster. Before he vanishes down the loft’s ladder with her prosthetic leg, Manley tells Hulga, “I’ve got a lot of interesting things … One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way.” He then adds, in reference to Hulga’s studies, “you ain’t so smart. Manley’s true self horrifies Hulga as the situation she thought she was in control of is suddenly inverted and she is forced to realize that she was the one who was being naive. Here it seems worth mentioning that tricksters are often preoccupied with lust in a manner that’s roughly similar to a Tex Avery cartoon. He takes from his Bible not only a bottle of whiskey, but a deck of pornographic playing cards and some condoms. Manley then reveals himself to be a scoundrel. Hulga believes she’s seducing an innocent until he invites her up into a hayloft and persuades her to remove her prosthetic leg. In Flannery O’Connor’s short story Good Country People, a cynical philosophy scholar named Hulga Hopewell is so distracted by her disdain for the assumed ignorance of the people around her that she ends up being taken in by the affected naiveté of a young Bible salesman named Manley Pointer. So what better image to encapsulate the trickster archetype than a Bible that’s been hollowed out to fit a flask of whiskey. Tricksters love playing with boundaries and one of their favorites is the line that separates the sacred from the profane. By highlighting them here I hope not only to make their status as tricksters clearer, but to demonstrate why that status is what makes their role in their stories and our imaginations so vital. Below I’ve called out three of my favorite examples, some of which might not be obvious instances of the archetype. As is their custom, these shapeshifters tend to hide in plain sight. As is their custom, these shapeshifters tend to hide in plain sight.īut Western literature isn’t devoid of tricksters. Satan is also commonly mislabeled as a trickster, though he fails the same important test since he tricks mankind out of hatred. Based on that criterion, one might suggest Robin Hood as a possibility, since robbing from the rich to give to the poor is an obvious assault on the established order, but an important element of that myth is that he believes his actions are just, and so he fails the test of ambivalence, one of the trickster’s defining features. But when thieves strive for riches or even just the pleasure of getting away with something, they fall short of the trickster who steals to reorder the world and keep it flexible. After all, tricksters are fixated on crossing and altering boundaries and thieves are known to violate the established boundaries of the law. Our favorite fictional thieves initially seem promising. There are many characters in contemporary stories that share some characteristics with tricksters, but most end up lacking in crucial ways. “We may well hope our actions carry no moral ambiguity,” Lewis Hyde writes in his book Trickster Makes This World, “but pretending it’s the case when it isn’t does not lead to greater clarity about right or wrong it more likely leads to unconscious cruelty masked by inflated righteousness.” This push toward an inflexible moral binary in many contemporary cultures has resulted in just the sort of problems that trickster characters can help address. However, tricksters are more common in polytheistic traditions, whose moralities tend to reflect the ambiguities of lived life more than monotheism’s prescriptive notions of right and wrong. Based on those qualities alone, one could see how well the presence of tricksters in our stories could help address much of the toxicity that exists in our culture. They’re clever, their lack of reverence for the status quo makes them dangerous to those empowered by societal norms, and their shamelessness is often a clarifying antidote to internalized oppression. In literature and myth, tricksters are powerful figures.
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