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malsperanzaThis is part 2 of notes on Trickster. Part one is here
Whether or not Trickster can (sometimes) be blended with the Withheld Hero is something I'll write about when I do that post.
A lot of these ideas come from Lewis Hyde's wonderful book, Trickster Makes This World (NY: North Point Press, 1998). Hyde doesn't talk much about Harlequin, but uses Coyote, Loki, and Krishna instead--more specifically mythic characters. In any case,
The Trickster is whimsical, creative, wayward, random. He is disorderly, disruptive, disorganized, and often very funny. He can be malicious, though he is not usually cruel--at least not by intent. But his love of jokes and pranks gets him into trouble, and the world with him. He is a bringer of change, a riddler, a questioner of the proper order of things, a disturber of the peace.
He is witty, clever, sly, and cunning; he thinks faster than everyone else and his mind follows patterns that differ from most people's normal thought structures. He can juggle and calculate and dance. He is sometimes a great lover, but more often he does not love at all. But he has great appetite. And great charm.
Trickster travels; he is on the move. He lives often between places, On the Road (Kerouac), at the Crossroads. He "belongs to the periphery, not the center."
Perhaps the greatest Trickster in literature is Homer's Odysseus in the Odyssey. He is described in the first line of the poem as polutropos, polytropic: the many-minded man, or the man of many ways, or the man of multiple twists and turns. He is a brilliant liar, a master of disguises, inveterately curious, a master of the art of bait-and-switch, something for nothing (or, as Jack Sparrow says, "Take what you can, give nothing back.")
Trickster's insatiable curiosity--nosiness, thirst for knowledge--is a force in itself, not purposeful, not directed toward one particular end. Yet it is parallel to the reader's insatiable curiosity to know more about the Trickster, to understand him (to possess him). But no matter how much we want to know Trickster's backstory, we can't. E.g., we want to know more about Jack Sparrow--where he comes from, whether he is gay or straight, how he got the Black Pearl, where he got the magical compass, etc. But the minute we know these things, Jack will lose his magic power over us (knowledge = power) and will cease to be a Trickster. We will be in a power position in relation to him, not the other way round. Both the Hero and the Trickster maintain their magical powers via their mystery--their unknowableness.
Trickster's relationship to love
Trickster is a loner, a wanderer; he doesn't have a love interest (or he has many). When Odysseus finally gets home, returns to Penelope, he ceases to be a Trickster (we may presume), and becomes a good king. His last tricks are those he uses to regain Penelope (disguises, lies). But the act that wins her is not a trickster act; it is a hero act: he uses the bow that no one else can draw. When/if Trickster falls in love, he loses his Trickster attributes, and his magic. What's the connection? Love is human, fixed, focused. It is the opposite of Trickster's discursive, distractable habit of mind. Ultrafocused Hero is, in this sense, the flip side of Trickster.
The Trickster may be the protagonist of the story; he may even in some sense be heroic, but he is not the hero in the classic, iconic sense, because his story has no closure. Trickster doesn't get the girl, nor does he settle down. Rather, he is the artist (conjurer of something from nothing), the catalyst, the rainmaker who enters the story of the hero and heroine and triggers changes in them or their world, which bring about their happy (or tragic) ending.
This is not to say that Trickster can't live happily ever after, only that we cannot be sure if he is doing so or not, because his standards for measuring happiness are not ours. However much Harlequin may desire to marry Columbine, he has no intention of setting aside his slapstick or his bag of tricks. And he would not love Columbine if she were not a bit of a Trickster herself. It is possible that for Trickster, happiness consists in having some company on the road, at least for a while.
As an agent of change, Trickster is a manipulator of circumstance and chance. To use the Greek poetic terms, he is the opposite of Fate (moira), Necessity (ananke), and Destiny (nemesis). He is catalytic without particular purpose, random and accidental. He is the recombiner who generates new DNA, but blindly, without intentionality.
Trickster a born liar, a manipulator, and therefore a good story teller. His stories tend to be about himself. The stories he tells are not exactly true, but not exactly false, either. He's constantly inventive, because he is constantly in sticky situations that require new creative sparks to resolve. (And for other reasons, too.)
Some quotes from Lewis Hyde:
Trickster is "the god of the threshold in all its forms."
"All tricksters are 'on the road.' They are the lords of in-between. A trickster does not live near the hearth; ... He passes through ... when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, ... He is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town (the one where a little market springs up). He is the spirit of the road at dusk. ... The road that trickster travels is a spirit road as well as a road in fact. He is the adept who can move between heaven and earth, and between the living and the dead. As such, he is sometimes the messenger of the gods and sometimes the guide of souls [psychopomp], carrying the dead into the underworld or opening the tomb to release them ... Sometimes ... trickster [is] a thief, one who steals from the gods"[as Prometheus stole fire, and many fairytale tricksters steal gold, or a magic token from a witch].
"...In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish--right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead--and in every case, trickster will cross the line and blur the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone's sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of moral ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox."
* * *
A short digression on the history of Harlequin
Harlequin, the foolish, clownlike, sly servant of commedia dell'arte, has his origins in a blend of Roman satyr (satire) comedy and medieval mystery plays. The mystery plays were Christian allegorical street pageants in which events from the Bible and were performed on high holidays. Mixed in with the Christian characters were some older ones, borrowed from vernacular and folk theater traditions and the classical Latin comedies (Terence, Plautus, et al.). Among these were a number of devils, demons, and tricksters, many of whom turn up in Dante and other medieval texts. One of these is Alichino, who is mentioned in Inferno XXI:
"...Alichino here,
And Calcabrina, and Cagnazzo thou,
With Ciriatto of the tusks, and those
Who form the ten that Barbariccia leads,
Fanged Draghignazzo, Graffiacane,
Hellbat, and Libicocco next, and he
That deepest-hued in peculation glows,
Fierce Rubicante...."
Most of these names are sly puns on the names of Florentine families about whom Dante had, um, mixed feelings. The names have specific, mostly scatalogical meanings, such as Dogscratcher, Frostyheels, Foultail (or Farty), Filthybitch, and Curlybeard. These demons are wicked but half-comical creatures, and their silly names are as clownish as Shakespeare's clowns--Dogberry, Custard, Bottom, Touchstone) The meaning of Alichino's name, however, is unclear.
In any case, his name soon becomes Arlecchino, then Hellequin or Harlequin in French.
The meaning of Arlecchino's name, unlike most of the other names in commedia dell'arte, is obscure. (Others are named, for example, Pulcinella, Little Flea, anglicized to Punchinello, later Punch; Pedrolino, or Little Peter; Pantalone, Big Pants (among other interpretations); Brighella, whose name means "creator of imbroglios," or Schemer; Zanni (anglicized to Zany), whose name is just the Venetian spelling of Gianni, Johnny; etc.)
Besides Dante, another early appearance by Harlequin was in the Medieval French miracle plays, under the name Hellequin. There he is the messenger of the Devil, and comes straight from the Underworld, or the inside of the Earth (one explanation for why his mask has a blackened face), and leading a boisterous gang of evil spirits, la Maisnie Hellequin.
In commedia dell'arte, Harlequin may carry a more mystical meaning as a possible avatar of god or the gods, especially together with his counterpart Pedrolino (Pierrot in French). In that case, his multicolored diamond-patterned costume suggests that he is a representation of life, its many-sidedness and riches; while Pierrot, with his melancholy whitened face and his loose white shroudlike pyjamas, suggests the realm of the dead. (cf. www.askoxford.com/languages/culturevulture/general/harlequin)
But Harlequin's name is even more intriguing. There is a possible semantic connection to the medieval Arabic term akhlaq or aghlaq--although such etymologies are always speculative. Since I don't know Arabic, I can't confirm any of this; it was suggested to me by a friend with an interest in Sufism, and I include it for what it's worth. In modern Islam, "the word akhlaq is the plural for the word khulq which means disposition. ‘Disposition' is that faculty (malakah) of the soul which is the source of all those activities that man performs spontaneously without thinking about them. Malakah is a property of the soul which comes into existence through exercise and repetitive practice and is not easily destroyed."
But the word is also associated with the peripatetic Sufi mystics who traveled in Arabic Spain in the Middle Ages. "These people were called (plural) aghlaqin, pronounced with gutteral r and hard q as arlakeen, arlequin). This is--I am told--an Arabic play upon the words for 'great door' and 'confused speech.'
Harlequin's blackened face (later a black mask) may refer to his origins as a devil, but the mask's traditional features are also Negroid, suggesting that he is an exotic stranger--from a distant land (i.e., North Africa). This and some other connections of the character suggest an origin in Dionysiac Greek drama (Dionysios being the Stranger God, the God from Asia, as his name indicates--Dios + Asios).
All in all, Harlequin as he evolved in commedia dell'arte is in no way a benign figure--he is the clever thieving servant, violent on occasion (his weapon is the slapstick, a bat with which he whacks other characters), libidinous, witty.
* * *
Edited to add:
is an excellent website with all the basic information about Harlequin in the commedia dell'arte"
http://shane-arts.com/Commedia%20Stock%20Characters%20Arlechinno.htm
Part 3: the example of Jack Sparrow.
Whether or not Trickster can (sometimes) be blended with the Withheld Hero is something I'll write about when I do that post.
A lot of these ideas come from Lewis Hyde's wonderful book, Trickster Makes This World (NY: North Point Press, 1998). Hyde doesn't talk much about Harlequin, but uses Coyote, Loki, and Krishna instead--more specifically mythic characters. In any case,
The Trickster is whimsical, creative, wayward, random. He is disorderly, disruptive, disorganized, and often very funny. He can be malicious, though he is not usually cruel--at least not by intent. But his love of jokes and pranks gets him into trouble, and the world with him. He is a bringer of change, a riddler, a questioner of the proper order of things, a disturber of the peace.
He is witty, clever, sly, and cunning; he thinks faster than everyone else and his mind follows patterns that differ from most people's normal thought structures. He can juggle and calculate and dance. He is sometimes a great lover, but more often he does not love at all. But he has great appetite. And great charm.
Trickster travels; he is on the move. He lives often between places, On the Road (Kerouac), at the Crossroads. He "belongs to the periphery, not the center."
Perhaps the greatest Trickster in literature is Homer's Odysseus in the Odyssey. He is described in the first line of the poem as polutropos, polytropic: the many-minded man, or the man of many ways, or the man of multiple twists and turns. He is a brilliant liar, a master of disguises, inveterately curious, a master of the art of bait-and-switch, something for nothing (or, as Jack Sparrow says, "Take what you can, give nothing back.")
Trickster's insatiable curiosity--nosiness, thirst for knowledge--is a force in itself, not purposeful, not directed toward one particular end. Yet it is parallel to the reader's insatiable curiosity to know more about the Trickster, to understand him (to possess him). But no matter how much we want to know Trickster's backstory, we can't. E.g., we want to know more about Jack Sparrow--where he comes from, whether he is gay or straight, how he got the Black Pearl, where he got the magical compass, etc. But the minute we know these things, Jack will lose his magic power over us (knowledge = power) and will cease to be a Trickster. We will be in a power position in relation to him, not the other way round. Both the Hero and the Trickster maintain their magical powers via their mystery--their unknowableness.
Trickster's relationship to love
Trickster is a loner, a wanderer; he doesn't have a love interest (or he has many). When Odysseus finally gets home, returns to Penelope, he ceases to be a Trickster (we may presume), and becomes a good king. His last tricks are those he uses to regain Penelope (disguises, lies). But the act that wins her is not a trickster act; it is a hero act: he uses the bow that no one else can draw. When/if Trickster falls in love, he loses his Trickster attributes, and his magic. What's the connection? Love is human, fixed, focused. It is the opposite of Trickster's discursive, distractable habit of mind. Ultrafocused Hero is, in this sense, the flip side of Trickster.
The Trickster may be the protagonist of the story; he may even in some sense be heroic, but he is not the hero in the classic, iconic sense, because his story has no closure. Trickster doesn't get the girl, nor does he settle down. Rather, he is the artist (conjurer of something from nothing), the catalyst, the rainmaker who enters the story of the hero and heroine and triggers changes in them or their world, which bring about their happy (or tragic) ending.
This is not to say that Trickster can't live happily ever after, only that we cannot be sure if he is doing so or not, because his standards for measuring happiness are not ours. However much Harlequin may desire to marry Columbine, he has no intention of setting aside his slapstick or his bag of tricks. And he would not love Columbine if she were not a bit of a Trickster herself. It is possible that for Trickster, happiness consists in having some company on the road, at least for a while.
As an agent of change, Trickster is a manipulator of circumstance and chance. To use the Greek poetic terms, he is the opposite of Fate (moira), Necessity (ananke), and Destiny (nemesis). He is catalytic without particular purpose, random and accidental. He is the recombiner who generates new DNA, but blindly, without intentionality.
Trickster a born liar, a manipulator, and therefore a good story teller. His stories tend to be about himself. The stories he tells are not exactly true, but not exactly false, either. He's constantly inventive, because he is constantly in sticky situations that require new creative sparks to resolve. (And for other reasons, too.)
Some quotes from Lewis Hyde:
Trickster is "the god of the threshold in all its forms."
"All tricksters are 'on the road.' They are the lords of in-between. A trickster does not live near the hearth; ... He passes through ... when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, ... He is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town (the one where a little market springs up). He is the spirit of the road at dusk. ... The road that trickster travels is a spirit road as well as a road in fact. He is the adept who can move between heaven and earth, and between the living and the dead. As such, he is sometimes the messenger of the gods and sometimes the guide of souls [psychopomp], carrying the dead into the underworld or opening the tomb to release them ... Sometimes ... trickster [is] a thief, one who steals from the gods"[as Prometheus stole fire, and many fairytale tricksters steal gold, or a magic token from a witch].
"...In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish--right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead--and in every case, trickster will cross the line and blur the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone's sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of moral ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox."
* * *
A short digression on the history of Harlequin
Harlequin, the foolish, clownlike, sly servant of commedia dell'arte, has his origins in a blend of Roman satyr (satire) comedy and medieval mystery plays. The mystery plays were Christian allegorical street pageants in which events from the Bible and were performed on high holidays. Mixed in with the Christian characters were some older ones, borrowed from vernacular and folk theater traditions and the classical Latin comedies (Terence, Plautus, et al.). Among these were a number of devils, demons, and tricksters, many of whom turn up in Dante and other medieval texts. One of these is Alichino, who is mentioned in Inferno XXI:
"...Alichino here,
And Calcabrina, and Cagnazzo thou,
With Ciriatto of the tusks, and those
Who form the ten that Barbariccia leads,
Fanged Draghignazzo, Graffiacane,
Hellbat, and Libicocco next, and he
That deepest-hued in peculation glows,
Fierce Rubicante...."
Most of these names are sly puns on the names of Florentine families about whom Dante had, um, mixed feelings. The names have specific, mostly scatalogical meanings, such as Dogscratcher, Frostyheels, Foultail (or Farty), Filthybitch, and Curlybeard. These demons are wicked but half-comical creatures, and their silly names are as clownish as Shakespeare's clowns--Dogberry, Custard, Bottom, Touchstone) The meaning of Alichino's name, however, is unclear.
In any case, his name soon becomes Arlecchino, then Hellequin or Harlequin in French.
The meaning of Arlecchino's name, unlike most of the other names in commedia dell'arte, is obscure. (Others are named, for example, Pulcinella, Little Flea, anglicized to Punchinello, later Punch; Pedrolino, or Little Peter; Pantalone, Big Pants (among other interpretations); Brighella, whose name means "creator of imbroglios," or Schemer; Zanni (anglicized to Zany), whose name is just the Venetian spelling of Gianni, Johnny; etc.)
Besides Dante, another early appearance by Harlequin was in the Medieval French miracle plays, under the name Hellequin. There he is the messenger of the Devil, and comes straight from the Underworld, or the inside of the Earth (one explanation for why his mask has a blackened face), and leading a boisterous gang of evil spirits, la Maisnie Hellequin.
In commedia dell'arte, Harlequin may carry a more mystical meaning as a possible avatar of god or the gods, especially together with his counterpart Pedrolino (Pierrot in French). In that case, his multicolored diamond-patterned costume suggests that he is a representation of life, its many-sidedness and riches; while Pierrot, with his melancholy whitened face and his loose white shroudlike pyjamas, suggests the realm of the dead. (cf. www.askoxford.com/languages/culturevulture/general/harlequin)
But Harlequin's name is even more intriguing. There is a possible semantic connection to the medieval Arabic term akhlaq or aghlaq--although such etymologies are always speculative. Since I don't know Arabic, I can't confirm any of this; it was suggested to me by a friend with an interest in Sufism, and I include it for what it's worth. In modern Islam, "the word akhlaq is the plural for the word khulq which means disposition. ‘Disposition' is that faculty (malakah) of the soul which is the source of all those activities that man performs spontaneously without thinking about them. Malakah is a property of the soul which comes into existence through exercise and repetitive practice and is not easily destroyed."
But the word is also associated with the peripatetic Sufi mystics who traveled in Arabic Spain in the Middle Ages. "These people were called (plural) aghlaqin, pronounced with gutteral r and hard q as arlakeen, arlequin). This is--I am told--an Arabic play upon the words for 'great door' and 'confused speech.'
Harlequin's blackened face (later a black mask) may refer to his origins as a devil, but the mask's traditional features are also Negroid, suggesting that he is an exotic stranger--from a distant land (i.e., North Africa). This and some other connections of the character suggest an origin in Dionysiac Greek drama (Dionysios being the Stranger God, the God from Asia, as his name indicates--Dios + Asios).
All in all, Harlequin as he evolved in commedia dell'arte is in no way a benign figure--he is the clever thieving servant, violent on occasion (his weapon is the slapstick, a bat with which he whacks other characters), libidinous, witty.
* * *
Edited to add:
is an excellent website with all the basic information about Harlequin in the commedia dell'arte"
http://shane-arts.com/Commedia%20Stock%20Characters%20Arlechinno.htm
Part 3: the example of Jack Sparrow.
