![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaI've always been interested in the Trickster--in part through commedia dell'arte, where he turns up often, usually as Harlequin. And then he interested me because he is so transgressive--the rule-breaker, the stirrer-up of trouble, the fellow who cannot or will not color inside the lines. A character I am writing (or trying to write) has some elements of this.
So the following are some notes about Trickster, though these are just a start. There's lots more to say about him, and about his appearance in many quest stories, and sometimes in sentimental-education stories (two genres that HP falls into), and sometimes in Twilight of the Gods stories. Not to mention novels and so on.
I especially like the character because he is often not the protagonist or hero, but the other fellow--the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling. And sometimes even tell the story.
Trickster is not just one of the most entertaining and fascinating characters in myth and fiction, he is also the one who plucks the strings of Story, makes music out of words, and sets the world resonating.
He may be Harlequin, the sly servant, or the raggedy Russian trader in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (reconstructed in Apocalypse Now as the mad photographer played by Dennis Hopper), or Odysseus, or Tom Bombadil (and perhaps other characters in LOTR).
One of the reasons I loved Pirates of the Caribbean so much (aside from the fact that I'd watch Johnny Depp read the phone book or stare vacantly into space for a couple of hours) is that Jack Sparrow is a textbook-perfect Trickster. The screenwriters and Depp between them nailed pretty much every classic attribute of the character. So Jack Sparrow makes an excellent basic model.
Trickster is not always a nice fellow, to say the least. He has something in common with bad guys--liars and thieves and confidence men; cheats. In Norse mythology Loki is a Trickster; so is Rumplestiltskin. In Native American tales he is Coyote or Raven; from Yoruba myth comes Rabbit, who becomes Brer Rabbit in the South, and then Bugs Bunny. West Africa also has Eshu of the Crossroads, and Legba. In India he is Krishna the joker; In ancient Greece he is Hermes (Mercury of the Romans); and in Shakespeare he is Puck, and Tom O'Bedlam, and the Motley Fool in the Forest of Arden. He is a shape-shifter, and as such has a lot in common with the androgyne, the cross-dresser, and the masker. In his most powerful form, he is a god, and can reshape not only himself, but nature itself.
Trickster interests me most when he steps out of myth and into fiction. There, he does not always stick to the strict definition he has in myth. There are partial Tricksters all over fiction, and sometimes they are not easy to spot. They are usually marked by certain traditional attributes:
1. Motley's the only wear. They like colorful and ragged clothing, patchwork, flamboyant dress (e.g., fancy hats).
2. A rare facility with language; a tendency to speak in poetry, rhyme, puns, and codes. (Hyde writes at length about Trickster's "encoding mind" and its relation to poetic language.) Also, often, a connection to music--Hermes invents the lyre, Jester wears bells, the Pied Piper has his flute.
3. Quick wits, agile body. Trickster is always one step ahead of whatever game is going. He is a schemer, a plotter, a riddler. Similarly, he is good at sleight of hand; nimble, an acrobat, a tumbler.
4. Sometimes a fool and a bungler, sometimes mad (e.g., Tom o'Bedlam) or delirious.
5. Jokes and pranks. Laughter, both lighthearted and malicious, is Trickster's hallmark. He is whimsical and witty and charming. This is part of what makes him seductive and dangerous.
6. Masks and shape-shifting; transvestism and androgyny. Multiple names. Since Trickster is the god of ambiguity, he is also prone to changing his appearance (one reason for the colorful garb). Together with this goes duplicity, doubleness, switching sides, playing both ends against the middle.
7. Orientation toward the world and its structures is skewed--natural structures, such as gravity, gender, relationship to time (e.g., he is sometimes ageless, sometimes can fly, sometimes can give birth--these are especially common tropes in the commedia character of Harlequin).
6. Magic. Trickster often has magical powers or, in realistic settings such as some novels, a real-life equivalent: exceptional intuition or perceptiveness; or remarkable good luck; a habit of coincidences. If he is not always a god or avatar (Hermes, Loki, Krishna, Mercury), he may be touched by the gods. He is close to fate, chance, luck, and lives by them. His madness, recklessness, whimsy, and carelessness are also divinely inspired--unless they are inspired by the Devil.
* * *
The other thread I am particularly curious to explore is the idea of Withholding from the reader. Especially withholding information about the hero. This is a form of reader-torture that is parallel to hero-torture. (This parallelism brings me back to my obsession with the idea of the Reader/Book ship.) Withholding access to the hero (to his mind or heart, to important facts about him, to a clear sense of his identity, his moral position, etc.) is a kind of UST.
A few examples follow behind the cut tag.
Aragorn in LOTR (books; not so much in the movies).
We get hardly any real access to Aragorn, though if we comb through the Appendices, we can glean a lot of facts about his backstory. (And Tolkien does relent a little in giving us the Arwen/Aragorn ending, though only briefly.) As the books progress, Aragorn grows more distant and inaccessible. His accessible, charming, alluring Strider persona gradually disappears, until by the end the Hobbits (our usual point of access to the other characters) scarcely interact with him. Really the last time we get inside him at all is at Helm's Deep in the middle of vol 2.
Lymond and Nicholas. These are the heroes of two wonderful series of historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett. Both are tortured heroes, both impossibly attractive and seductive (in quite different ways), both tantalizing, and ultimately inaccessible to the reader, except in oblique fragments. Hard to talk about these characters without spoilers, so I will just recommend the books themselves.
Hamlet Well, is he mad or not? Is he in love with Ophelia or not? What does he really think, or feel, about anything? Who the hell knows?
And now, descending to a rather cheesy example: Michael in La Femme Nikita, the TV series, not the movie (where he is called Bob, which always cracks me up).
I feel about this show the way I feel about 99% of television: I think its politics are loathsome, the writing mostly embarrassing, and the storytelling fairly tedious. And like nearly all TV series, it takes a dive after the first season. But the actor who plays Michael has done great work with an otherwise stock character, and he is worth watching, if only to figure out why this technique works so well. He does very little (mostly running into dark warehouses, dressed in a black leather trenchcoat and shooting); he says less (mostly "go!" and "of course.")
The actor has said something rather interesting about the character, as written and performed over the course of nearly 5 years: that Michael does not change, does not develop, does not grow. And that most of his character is invisible.
To me that is rather interesting, and I think is connected with the idea of the Withheld Hero, though I'm not sure how. Sometimes heroes do not grow, learn, become better people, blah blah, because they don't need to. Odysseus doesn't need to "learn" anything; there are no moral lessons for him in the end. What he needs is to Get Home; he is the same man at the beginning and end of the poem. Ditto Jack Sparrow--in constrast to the young romantic hero of PotC, who undergoes a radical transformation from polite working-class fellow to law-breaking pirate and thence to member of the upper class (by marriage).
One could ask if Harry Potter is learning and growing or not. I think the answer to that is not nearly as obvious as it may seem. He is finding out about qualities (of mind, of heart, of insight and power) that he has; which may not be the same thing as learning new ones. And Aragorn is a difficult case, too. He faces and passes a number of important hero-tests in LOTR, and his flaw (if he has one) is a certain hesitancy to take command, a human anxiety which he either learns to shed--or else just sheds, without having to learn anything in order to do so.
So, what does the Trickster have to do with the Withheld Hero? Well, both are mysterious, and draw the attention and interest of the reader the way black holes draw light. Both stand in a relationship of extreme tension with the reader--something akin to UST. Both characters are, ultimately, not possessible by the reader. Which is at once frustrating and fascinating.
Yah, more on this at some point soon.
So the following are some notes about Trickster, though these are just a start. There's lots more to say about him, and about his appearance in many quest stories, and sometimes in sentimental-education stories (two genres that HP falls into), and sometimes in Twilight of the Gods stories. Not to mention novels and so on.
I especially like the character because he is often not the protagonist or hero, but the other fellow--the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling. And sometimes even tell the story.
Trickster is not just one of the most entertaining and fascinating characters in myth and fiction, he is also the one who plucks the strings of Story, makes music out of words, and sets the world resonating.
He may be Harlequin, the sly servant, or the raggedy Russian trader in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (reconstructed in Apocalypse Now as the mad photographer played by Dennis Hopper), or Odysseus, or Tom Bombadil (and perhaps other characters in LOTR).
One of the reasons I loved Pirates of the Caribbean so much (aside from the fact that I'd watch Johnny Depp read the phone book or stare vacantly into space for a couple of hours) is that Jack Sparrow is a textbook-perfect Trickster. The screenwriters and Depp between them nailed pretty much every classic attribute of the character. So Jack Sparrow makes an excellent basic model.
Trickster is not always a nice fellow, to say the least. He has something in common with bad guys--liars and thieves and confidence men; cheats. In Norse mythology Loki is a Trickster; so is Rumplestiltskin. In Native American tales he is Coyote or Raven; from Yoruba myth comes Rabbit, who becomes Brer Rabbit in the South, and then Bugs Bunny. West Africa also has Eshu of the Crossroads, and Legba. In India he is Krishna the joker; In ancient Greece he is Hermes (Mercury of the Romans); and in Shakespeare he is Puck, and Tom O'Bedlam, and the Motley Fool in the Forest of Arden. He is a shape-shifter, and as such has a lot in common with the androgyne, the cross-dresser, and the masker. In his most powerful form, he is a god, and can reshape not only himself, but nature itself.
Trickster interests me most when he steps out of myth and into fiction. There, he does not always stick to the strict definition he has in myth. There are partial Tricksters all over fiction, and sometimes they are not easy to spot. They are usually marked by certain traditional attributes:
1. Motley's the only wear. They like colorful and ragged clothing, patchwork, flamboyant dress (e.g., fancy hats).
2. A rare facility with language; a tendency to speak in poetry, rhyme, puns, and codes. (Hyde writes at length about Trickster's "encoding mind" and its relation to poetic language.) Also, often, a connection to music--Hermes invents the lyre, Jester wears bells, the Pied Piper has his flute.
3. Quick wits, agile body. Trickster is always one step ahead of whatever game is going. He is a schemer, a plotter, a riddler. Similarly, he is good at sleight of hand; nimble, an acrobat, a tumbler.
4. Sometimes a fool and a bungler, sometimes mad (e.g., Tom o'Bedlam) or delirious.
5. Jokes and pranks. Laughter, both lighthearted and malicious, is Trickster's hallmark. He is whimsical and witty and charming. This is part of what makes him seductive and dangerous.
6. Masks and shape-shifting; transvestism and androgyny. Multiple names. Since Trickster is the god of ambiguity, he is also prone to changing his appearance (one reason for the colorful garb). Together with this goes duplicity, doubleness, switching sides, playing both ends against the middle.
7. Orientation toward the world and its structures is skewed--natural structures, such as gravity, gender, relationship to time (e.g., he is sometimes ageless, sometimes can fly, sometimes can give birth--these are especially common tropes in the commedia character of Harlequin).
6. Magic. Trickster often has magical powers or, in realistic settings such as some novels, a real-life equivalent: exceptional intuition or perceptiveness; or remarkable good luck; a habit of coincidences. If he is not always a god or avatar (Hermes, Loki, Krishna, Mercury), he may be touched by the gods. He is close to fate, chance, luck, and lives by them. His madness, recklessness, whimsy, and carelessness are also divinely inspired--unless they are inspired by the Devil.
* * *
The other thread I am particularly curious to explore is the idea of Withholding from the reader. Especially withholding information about the hero. This is a form of reader-torture that is parallel to hero-torture. (This parallelism brings me back to my obsession with the idea of the Reader/Book ship.) Withholding access to the hero (to his mind or heart, to important facts about him, to a clear sense of his identity, his moral position, etc.) is a kind of UST.
A few examples follow behind the cut tag.
Aragorn in LOTR (books; not so much in the movies).
We get hardly any real access to Aragorn, though if we comb through the Appendices, we can glean a lot of facts about his backstory. (And Tolkien does relent a little in giving us the Arwen/Aragorn ending, though only briefly.) As the books progress, Aragorn grows more distant and inaccessible. His accessible, charming, alluring Strider persona gradually disappears, until by the end the Hobbits (our usual point of access to the other characters) scarcely interact with him. Really the last time we get inside him at all is at Helm's Deep in the middle of vol 2.
Lymond and Nicholas. These are the heroes of two wonderful series of historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett. Both are tortured heroes, both impossibly attractive and seductive (in quite different ways), both tantalizing, and ultimately inaccessible to the reader, except in oblique fragments. Hard to talk about these characters without spoilers, so I will just recommend the books themselves.
Hamlet Well, is he mad or not? Is he in love with Ophelia or not? What does he really think, or feel, about anything? Who the hell knows?
And now, descending to a rather cheesy example: Michael in La Femme Nikita, the TV series, not the movie (where he is called Bob, which always cracks me up).
I feel about this show the way I feel about 99% of television: I think its politics are loathsome, the writing mostly embarrassing, and the storytelling fairly tedious. And like nearly all TV series, it takes a dive after the first season. But the actor who plays Michael has done great work with an otherwise stock character, and he is worth watching, if only to figure out why this technique works so well. He does very little (mostly running into dark warehouses, dressed in a black leather trenchcoat and shooting); he says less (mostly "go!" and "of course.")
The actor has said something rather interesting about the character, as written and performed over the course of nearly 5 years: that Michael does not change, does not develop, does not grow. And that most of his character is invisible.
To me that is rather interesting, and I think is connected with the idea of the Withheld Hero, though I'm not sure how. Sometimes heroes do not grow, learn, become better people, blah blah, because they don't need to. Odysseus doesn't need to "learn" anything; there are no moral lessons for him in the end. What he needs is to Get Home; he is the same man at the beginning and end of the poem. Ditto Jack Sparrow--in constrast to the young romantic hero of PotC, who undergoes a radical transformation from polite working-class fellow to law-breaking pirate and thence to member of the upper class (by marriage).
One could ask if Harry Potter is learning and growing or not. I think the answer to that is not nearly as obvious as it may seem. He is finding out about qualities (of mind, of heart, of insight and power) that he has; which may not be the same thing as learning new ones. And Aragorn is a difficult case, too. He faces and passes a number of important hero-tests in LOTR, and his flaw (if he has one) is a certain hesitancy to take command, a human anxiety which he either learns to shed--or else just sheds, without having to learn anything in order to do so.
So, what does the Trickster have to do with the Withheld Hero? Well, both are mysterious, and draw the attention and interest of the reader the way black holes draw light. Both stand in a relationship of extreme tension with the reader--something akin to UST. Both characters are, ultimately, not possessible by the reader. Which is at once frustrating and fascinating.
Yah, more on this at some point soon.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 03:16 pm (UTC)Tom o'Bedlam is the Fool from King Lear, right? Or is it crazy!Edgar?
Also, I'm glad to see that Aragorn is a Withheld Hero. I always felt very distant from him in the books, but as a result I found his character completely uninteresting. Failed UST? Although it's interesting that you say so about Hamlet, considering Hamlet is always going on and on. I haven't read Hamlet recently enough to comment properly, but I remember that when reading Hamlet's speeches I felt more in touch with - feelings, I guess? The issues the kid was grappingly with? I found him a very real character, and quite authentically confused.
The enigma of the Fool? Hmmm. I think that Jack Sparrow does not really grow as a character, and that he definitely falls into the hard-to-understand information-withheld category as you call it. I think that delving deeper would ruin his character, or at least, change it into something else. Perhaps part of the Trickster is the not being able to understand? If you get inside someone's head, then you are forced to see their actions in a somewhat rational and sympathetic (in the sense that you relate to them) attitude, and that doesn't seem to fit with the rogue element that is the Trickster as you describe it.
Is the Trickster something that always has to put the reader firmly in third person perspective, then?
I feel about this show the way I feel about 99% of television: I think its politics are loathsome, the writing mostly embarrassing, and the storytelling fairly tedious.
What makes the 1%?
(Also, more people should reply to your entries! Poor you to be left with my mad rambling! Wah. I stared at the screen for several minutes before remembering about that crazy Russian guy in Heart of Darkness. Tangentially, everyone seems to think Apocalypse Now is really really great, but I am afraid to see it, since Heart of Darkness scared me quite horribly, and a movie could only be worse.)
What other archetypes interest you besides the Trickster? What other archetypes are there? Hero, Villian, Mentor. Sidekick? Love Interest? Hm.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 07:26 pm (UTC)Tom o'Bedlam is the Fool from King Lear? Or is it crazy!Edgar?
Edgar is crazy but not a Wonderful Fool--not touched by the divine. So one of Tom o'Bedlam's purposes is probably to make a distinction between kinds of madness. Lear himself goes mad in a 3rd way. Lear is such a complicated play...it's hard to say just how the archetypes all work in it.
I always felt very distant from [Aragorn] in the books, but as a result I found his character completely uninteresting. Failed UST?
UST is subjective; it fails pretty often. Aragorn was my first unrequited book!love; I haven't gotten over him yet. But the remoteness in Tolkien doesn't work for everyone. He gives us Strider, & then withdraws him as Aragorn passes from Real Person status to Mythic King status. It also happens to Frodo. (Which may be why many readers attach themselves to Sam. Sam stays in Real Person mode throughout.)
[...]when reading Hamlet's speeches I felt more in touch with - feelings, I guess[...] I found him a very real character.
That's true. His passion for...something...honor? life? the beauty of the world? comes through very clearly. Also his anger & deep distress. But though I sympathize with him, I never feel that I really know him, or understand what drives him. Vengeance? Love? But one can sympathize with both Trickster and with Withheld Hero. We want Jack to regain his ship; we want Aragorn to come into his own and become king. Sympathy is not understanding.
Perhaps part of the Trickster is the not being able to understand?
Definitely. That’s one thing he has in common with Withheld Hero. In the case of Trickster we can't understand because his way of thinking is often irrational (mad) or erratic. Or his purposes are at an oblique angle to ours, and we see them as skewed, unpredictable, random. "Rogue" is an excellent word for Trickster. It's possible for a Withheld Hero to also be a Trickster (e.g., Odysseus), but it's difficult to carry off. More commonly, Withheld Hero is marked by his singlemindedness, his clarity of purpose, his inhumanly clear focus, which are also hard for us to grasp.
Is the Trickster something that always has to put the reader firmly in third person perspective?
Not necessarily. Our old friend the Untrustworthy Narrator is sometimes a Trickster. E.g., in the movie *Brazil* the "trickster" is the director, the camera, the pov. In case you haven't seen it, I won't say more.
What makes the 1%?
The 1960s series The Prisoner and The Avengers. Dennis Potter's wonderful The Singing Detective."The 1st season of X-Files was hilarious & visually amazing. Single performances here & there. Monty Python, The Simpsons, Roadrunner cartoons. A million years ago, before it became awful, Mawsterpiece Theatah made a couple of remarkable historical dramas--notably one about Elizabeth I with Glenda Jackson. Taped in black-and-white, alas, so will probably never be reaired.
I love your posts; if I don't always answer, just picture me chortling madly at the screen.
RE Apocalypse Now: It is a very fine movie, though it suffers a nervous breakdown about 2/3 of the way through, and totally falls apart into a huge muddle. Scary, but also extraordinarily beautiful. It's interesting both for its attempt to reinvent the Conrad story in new terms, and for its essay on the surrealist road trip that was the Vietnam War. Yes: see it, but in a theater, not on a small screen.
What other archetypes interest you besides the Trickster? What other archetypes are there? Hero, Villain, Mentor. Sidekick? Love Interest?
I like them all, though Mere Love Interest is limited and boring. I like the way archetypes work--the balance between formulaic (and therefore identifiable, connectible) characterization and unique individual. I like the feeling one gets when one *feels* the archetype functioning within a favorite character--Story Itself surfacing for a moment within the story.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-30 03:56 pm (UTC)Eh, speak for thyself. *waves Faramir flag* ;D
Does Brazil have something to do with Nazis? I have no idea why that association popped into my head.
I also like the way archetypes work - but I like the idea of subverting them, luring the reader on to think they will act one way, and then have them turn out to be completely the other.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-30 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-30 05:14 pm (UTC)Subverting archetypes is excellent, but *really* hard to pull off. If it fails, then it is incredibly frustrating, because the reader does not get the payoff of fulfilment. One of the best examples I know is the books I mentioned above, by Dorothy Dunnett, in which the hero is both an uberhero--more brilliant, more adept, more clever, more competent, etc.--and a rat-bastard villain who does terrible things.
That's the classic subverted archetype, of course: the Antihero, like the Clint Eastwood character in Sergio Leone movies. And now that I think of it, that character often does have a good bit of Trickster in him--well, not in Clint's version so much, but in the Dunnett books. And in many other antiheroes--e.g., Yossarian in "Catch-22."
Trickser is the Great Subverter, after all. The God of Ambiguity. Hm. Must think more about this...
Thanks for the excellent link re meta, too.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-30 06:20 pm (UTC)There is a terrible action movie called "The Boys from Brazil," about a wacko who clones 100 Hitlers from some of his DNA. Falls into the Unintentionally Hilarious category.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-31 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 05:24 pm (UTC)This one's always been very difficult to me. I love the trickster characters but I sometimes suspect it's hard to really get them right. I've been writing for this Warner Bros. series and I did one book with Bugs Bunny and he was massively difficult to write for. Much moreso than Daffy. I love Bugs but it's these very elements that make him difficult--the dark side, the poetry of language. Also, of course, I was using real Bugs as the model and nowadays WB has turned him into more of a corporate schill who's sometimes literally lost his trickster qualities. It seems like this is something that people want to do a lot to trickster characters...they lose the element of danger that seems to important to them. In an essay I once read on Bugs they referred to him as a "Gentleman Anarchist," whose rule of thumb was that "if you insist on war, then he insists on victory."
Jack Sparrow, I agree, is another great example. One of the most fun things about JD's performance for me was the way he would surprise you with his line-readings. You could just never guess how he was going to react, yet he still made sense as a character.
Now I'm wanting to find a site somewhere where I can read up on more archetypes like this one...
no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 07:52 pm (UTC)Even setting aside what WB has lately done to Bugs, I think he’s an especially difficult form of Trickster--though a classic one. He is on the brassy, hard-edged end of the Trickster spectrum--the joy-buzzer, fart-bomb, violent bop-in-the-head version, which comes directly from Harlequin and his slapstick (which was a bat Harlequin used to whack people with--you can see it in old pictures). Compare his violence with Jack Sparrow, who carries only one bullet in his pistol, destined for one particular enemy, and who manages never to hurt or kill anyone else (IIRC). Jack is dangerous, and capable of doing harm, but he usually manages not to. Whereas Bugs delights in dropping pianos on people’s heads. Bugs is very broad. His glossolalia, his humor are not refined. As a Transgressor he is very direct. Whereas Daffy is just a chaotic, silly fellow, not a planner, incapable of *intending* harm, but a creator of messes by his disorganized nature. Jack has a touch of Daffy in him, but no Bugs.
It seems like this is something that people want to do a lot to trickster characters...they lose the element of danger that seems to important to them.
Because the Powers that Be find him endlessly threatening (with reason), so they want to domesticate him, defang him, make him cuddly. (This is the danger PotC2 will run. We’ll know if the screenwriters can do it when we see what they did with Shrek2. I have some faith that Depp will not let Disney go cuddly.) But stories with no danger in them, nothing important at risk, are dull exercises in getting from point A to point B. That’s why TV series with a spy or thriller plotline (X-Files, Nikita, Mission Impossible, Moonlighting, etc.) rely for their suspense and tension *not* on the whodunnit--the will-they-get-the-bad-guy plotline (which is a given, in the formulaic world of series TV)--but in the Big Relationship Question. Trickster adds an element of the unpredictable to any story he’s in--whether he is protagonist or secondary character. He’s very useful for that, but the danger is that he will take over the story. Joker is so much more interesting than Batman (in the movie). (And BTW, Batman vs. Joker is a wonderful example of Withheld Hero meets Trickster, though it was utterly botched in the movie, sadly.)
There’s an interesting gender divide among readers/viewers: men tend to get impatient with too much Relationship story; women get impatient with too much Plot. The wise solution is a lot of focus on the development of the character of the protagonist--who is he/she? What drives him/her? Here too, the Trickster provides an interesting but difficult option, because the Trickster does not have a real relationship with anyone. The minute he has a lasting relationship with a human being, he loses his Trickster status. (Which is exactly what happens to Odysseus when he finally gets home to Penelope. At that point one can only write The End.)
In an essay I once read on Bugs they referred to him as a "Gentleman Anarchist," whose rule of thumb was that "if you insist on war, then he insists on victory."
I like that. Who wrote it, do you know? In the screenwriters’ commentary on the PotC DVD (in which they refer directly to Jack as Trickster), one of them comments that there are 3 steps to becoming a pirate (Orlando Bloom’s story): 1) steal a small ship; 2) make a black flag; 3) declare war against the world. Bugs is a Trickster who has declared war against the world. But not in a bad way *g*.
Now I'm wanting to find a site somewhere where I can read up on more archetypes like this one.
There are probably many. I don’t know quite where one would start. But there are lots of books. I’ll post some titles...
Re:
Date: 2004-02-02 12:44 pm (UTC)Sound advice, I think. Character drives both plot and relationships, and all works out for the best. ;D
Here too, the Trickster provides an interesting but difficult option, because the Trickster does not have a real relationship with anyone. The minute he has a lasting relationship with a human being, he loses his Trickster status. (Which is exactly what happens to Odysseus when he finally gets home to Penelope. At that point one can only write The End.)
...and there we go with the answer to my other question.
I am really here looking for an appropriate place to add that perhaps Luna is the Trickster in HP? She has some Trickster qualities, although perhaps with her it's not so much functioning on another plane than having a simple belief in the ostensibly impossible. Maybe that's the same? *ponders* It would be interesting to have a female Trickster, even though they are supposed to be gender ambiguous. You know, it would make sense Tonks to be trickster-ish, if her character wasn't so very untricksterish despite her changing face.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-30 06:09 pm (UTC)Not all Tricksters have to have all the attributes. Androgyny is just one of many ways of signaling Ambiguity, doubleness, mask-wearing and changeability.
*clears throat*
Date: 2004-01-02 04:02 pm (UTC)Re: *clears throat*
Date: 2004-01-02 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-10 06:05 am (UTC)I also like Trickster characters. Well, not always, but I think that's maybe my problem.. sometimes I get very attatched to a story and then the Trickster mucks everything up and is occasionally cruel. But that's what they're there for. They shake things up for characters who are complacent.
I'm not sure I think of the Withheld Hero in the same way as the Trickster, although Tricksters are generally withheld. Hmm you said that already, both types are not possessible by the hero. I'm not 100% sure I got your concept of a withheld hero, though. Aragorn, for instance, didn't seem withheld in a tantalizing way, but more because Tolkien didn't consider those parts of him to be part of the story. But I know what you're talking about, just the same. I've never seen La Femme Nikita the TV show but I've seen characters like that--minor characters who do mysterious things in the background, who affects the main character's life in some way but the main character never gets to know the person or exactly what they do. That's tantalizing in itself, and then sometimes you get a great actor who can do the understated role in a way that just draws you in.
I also love archetypes. They're very nifty to think about and play with.
I don't know if you're a Buffy person. It's been said that Spike (or early Spike) has some trickster in him. That is partly true, but I've also heard Espenson say that Ethan Rayne is their Trickster, if they can be said to have a pure Trickster. I found this to be a nifty idea. I'm afraid I've only seen the Tricksters on your list (Loki, Puck) through the filter of Neil Gaiman (though he is a lovely filter to have).
I think I'm not speaking coherently. I'm a bit tired. *waves* Hi.