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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.
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Date: 2003-12-30 03:57 pm (UTC)