Chapter One—
The Trickster Aesthetic:
A Cross-Cultural Feminist Theory
Through the stories everything is made possible.
Yellowman, Navaho storyteller
Tricksters—the ubiquitous shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds—are the world's oldest, and newest, creations. Long familiar in folklore as Coyote, Anansi, Hermes, Iktomi, Maui, Loki, Monkey, Nanabozho, and Br'er Rabbit (to name a few), tricksters abound in contemporary American literature, especially in works by women of color. Consider the titles of three recent critical works by women of color: Amy Ling's Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry , Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , and Paula Gunn Allen's "'Border Studies': The Intersection of Gender and Color." Between worlds, borderlands, border studies—this common emphasis on straddling borders, or existing within or between them, evokes the trickster strategies many women of
color are developing in their lives and their writing. Tricksters appear prominently in recent novels by contemporary women of color: Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior (1976), China Men (1980), and Tripmaster Monkey (1989); Toni Morrison's Sula (1972), Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981); and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1993), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994). All focus on trickster characters and invent tricksterlike narrative forms. The trickster's resurgence in the fiction and the criticism of women writers of color suggests that the age-old trickster has not lost relevance in the modern world; rather, the trickster has become a key figure for personal and cultural survival in twentieth-century America.
In virtually all cultures, tricksters are both folk heroes and wanderers on the edges of the community, at once marginal and central to the culture. Tricksters challenge the status quo and disrupt perceived boundaries. Whether foolishly, arrogantly, or bravely, tricksters face the monstrous, transforming the chaotic to create new worlds and new cultures. In doing so, they offer appealing strategies to women writers of color who, historically subjugated because of both their race and their sex, often combine a feminist concern for challenging patriarchy with a cultural interest in breaking racial stereotypes and exploring a mixed cultural heritage. Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison situate the trickster as a key figure in their explorations of culture, gender, and identity. In their novels, tricksters serve to combat racial and sexual oppression and to affirm and create personal and cultural identity. Tricksters are not only characters, they are also rhetorical agents. They infuse narrative structure with energy, humor, and polyvalence, producing a politically radical subtext in the narrative form itself.
My discussion of literary tricksters assumes that neither literature nor literary criticism can be separated from its historical and cultural contexts.[1] Whereas much of the theory surrounding archetypal figures such as the trickster emphasizes the universality or timelessness of myth, my approach follows Estella Lauter's contention that myth is "part of the dynamic of history instead of being one of its reservoirs" (3).[2] In a study of the trickster in the African American tradition, John W. Roberts situates the argument for a dynamic theory of myth in a multicultural context. He calls for culture-specific models in the study of mythic or folk literature and argues that viewing western mythic traditions as universal "turns out to be extremely narrow and ethnocentric, especially . . . in the American context" (4). Mythic and folkloric figures such as the trickster play a crucial role in building and transforming culture; these figures are especially likely to appear when the culture's values or prosperity are threatened, either internally or externally. Myths, then, as they appear in literature, can be read as part of an effort for human and cultural survival. The trickster's role as survivor and transformer, creating order from chaos, accounts for the figure's universal appeal and its centrality to the mythology and folklore of so many cultures.[3] Critic and creator, the trickster challenges culture from both within and without, strengthening and renewing it with outrageous laughter.[4]
The primacy that Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison place on community and culture puts their work in a genre that Sandra Zagarell has recently identified as the "narrative of community," whose key features include double-voicedness, the primacy of
relationships, and ties to tradition (510).[5] The focus of narratives of community helps to clarify their usefulness to the trickster narratives of Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison. Tricksters, whose polyvalence and multivocality make them emblematic of the intersection of voices, play a central role in the connection of self and culture. Zagarell explains that in contrast to conventional narratives that place primary emphasis on the individual, narratives of community seek "to represent what gives the community its identity, what enables it to remain itself. . . . Writers understood communities to take form through negotiation among diverse, often recalcitrant components—people living at distances from each other; sometimes reluctant individuals; scarce resources; values, practices and lore that are threatened by time and change" (520).
Zagarell identifies time and change as threats to community; to those I would add persecution, immigration laws, relocation, enslavement, and genocide. Zagarell's description of the aims of narratives of community recalls Roberts's description of mythic literature as culture-building and as a continuing, dynamic response to cultural threat. Like Roberts, Zagarell emphasizes a recursive, nonlinear narrative structure: "narratives proceed episodically; the particular sequence of episodes is generally less important than the episodes' repeated exemplification of the dynamics that maintain the community" (520). The parallels between Roberts's and Zagarell's analyses are significant. Although Roberts's analysis focuses on myth and folklore, whereas Zagarell's concerns the daily life of the community, the goal in each case is the preservation and transformation of a shared culture that is threatened by destructive, chaotic forces. This is clearly an aim in the works of Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison,
and the similarities in Roberts's and Zagarell's descriptions of the process of community building suggest a clear link among cultural creation and preservation, the trickster, and the narrative form of these works.[6]
Writing a contemporary mythic novel involves not only recalling traditional stories but also revising them and even creating new ones, a strategy often associated with women's writing.[7] Yet "woman" is not the only, nor even necessarily the most important, group identity of concern to Kingston, Erdrich, and Morrison. Histories of enslavement, relocation, and persecution make ethnicity at least as salient a concern as gender to women writers of color. Reflecting these multiple concerns, Kingston, Erdrich, and Morrison engage in several types of revisionist mythmaking. As they draw on Chinese legend, Chippewa myth, and African American folktale, they not only question gender roles but also revise the traditional myths both of their ancestral backgrounds and of the dominant culture, to suit the needs of life in modern America. With trickster energy they revise myth, history, and narrative form to simultaneously draw on, challenge, and transform their cultures.
In much American feminist criticism, the recent growth of mythic themes in women's fiction is linked to political ambivalence or escapism. Rita Felski suggests that a concern with myth and spirituality in women's fiction often tends toward "a mystification of femininity and an uncritical celebration of irrationalism," a retreat "backward and inward" so as to escape a patriarchal public history from which women have been excluded (149). Annis Pratt similarly ascribes the use of cyclical plots, myth, and the surreal in women's fiction to their "alienation from normal concepts of time and space" (11).[8]
However, to read the use of myth and cyclical time as abnormal or escapist is to assume that a western, linear, empirical worldview is "normal." Kingston, Erdrich, and Morrison's trickster texts work against such a concept and toward a version of reality that derives from both within and outside of the western ethos. In doing so, they redefine myth and identity and create new novelistic forms to express their vision. Their writing is anything but escapist. As Toni Morrison explains, novels are political, and they function as a modern way of keeping communal stories alive:
We don't live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents don't sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories that we heard years ago. But new information has got to get out, and there are several ways to do it. One is the novel. . . . It should be beautiful, but it should also work . It should have something in it that enlightens; something in it that opens the door and points the way. Something in it that suggests what the conflicts are. ("Rootedness" 341)
Morrison's emphasis on "new information" highlights an important feature of the function of myth in these novels. If we see myth as a dynamic production of culture, then new information is vital to the continued life of the myth. Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison use myth and folklore extensively as part of this continuing process of building a culture and an identity.
In bringing these writers and works together in a comparative study, I do not intend to equate the widely different histories and experiences of three diverse American ethnic groups. Even apparently shared oppressions arise from differing historical condi-
tions, and my subsequent chapters attend to the traditions from which each author writes.[9] Erdrich, Morrison, and Kingston's coinciding concern with the trickster stretches across three figures: Nanabozho, Br'er Rabbit, and Monkey. Grouping these highly disparate tricksters in one study requires creating a discursive space where their similarities can intersect without obliterating their distinctiveness. Tricksters invent culture and demand culturally specific analysis. Yet the "cultures" of the late-twentieth-century authors in this study intersect and overlap, and I would argue that the common focus on tricksters in the works of Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison suggests kindred impulses toward challenging the possibility of a unified perspective, disrupting perceived histories of oppression, and creating new narrative forms.[10]
Though I attend later to important differences in the origins and development of trickster figures in Native American, Chinese American, and African American traditions, it is nevertheless useful here to sketch out several characteristics that most tricksters share. Victor Turner calls tricksters "liminal phenomena" and maintains that their wide presence in world literatures derives from their liminality, the "betwixt and between" state of transition and change that is a source of myth in all cultures ("Myth and Symbol" 580).[11] As liminal beings, tricksters dwell at crossroads and thresholds and are endlessly multifaceted and ambiguous. Tricksters are uninhibited by social constraints, free to dissolve boundaries and break taboos. Perpetual wanderers, tricksters can escape virtually any situation, and they possess a
boundless ability to survive. It is these last two qualities that make the trickster not simply a figure to laugh at but also a hero. Even while transgressing all boundaries, trickster always confirms a human and cultural will to survive.[12]
We cannot—nor would we want to—capture this slippery figure categorically, a fact that has long frustrated and mystified western scholars. Tricksters' lewdness and amorality have led to a negative perception of them as selfish, untrustworthy, and deceitful. Certainly, tricksters often are just that, but they also give life, teach survival, and define culture. In one figure, the trickster unites the sacred and the profane. Because western thought tends to separate honesty and goodness from deception and evil, tricksters, who comically unite opposites and upend categories and conventions, seem shocking, sensational, and morally bankrupt.[13] However, a glance at trickster traditions of Native American, African, and other nonwestern cultures reveals quite a different picture. Despite their apparent marginality and irreverence, tricksters are central, sacred, and communal figures in most nonwestern traditions. Though often bawdy and even anarchic, trickster tales teach through comic example and define culture by transgressing its boundaries. It may only be a western aversion to paradox and disorder, then, that so distorts the trickster's image in the popular imagination.
Despite our supposed disapproval, the trickster has long played a vital role in American literary history. Most studies of tricksters in American literature focus on the nineteenth-century confidence man.[14] William Lenz, discussing Poe, Melville, Twain, and others, calls the con-man "a distinctly American version" of the trickster, setting his birth as a literary convention in the 1830s and 1840s "flush times," when American expansion west fueled
dreams of a new country full of potentially exploitable possibilities (1).[15] According to Lenz's model, the con-man as literary convention dies out by the twentieth century, as the closing of the frontier constrains his speculative schemes.
Yet although the confidence man may have begun to disappear, other tricksters those drawn from African American, Native American, Chicano and Chicana, and Asian American traditions—flourished in the early twentieth century, as writers of color began publishing fiction in greater numbers than ever before. Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks's collection, Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective , uncovers trickster strategies in the works of writers such as Charles Chesnutt, Sui Sin Far, Mourning Dove, Zitkala-Sa[*] , and Frances E. W. Harper. For many turn-of-the-century writers, tricksters and trickster strategies represented the most viable way of negotiating the white, male-dominated American publishing industry: "Finding a style in which to write and get published required accommodating the monolithic, racist views of White America. For writers committed to their own people, it also required breaking through them. Such a transaction could only be handled covertly, or by finding strategies to negotiate with a dual audience. . . . From these circumstances . . . 'tricksterism' emerged" (Ammons and White-Parks 16). Unlike the peculiarly western, individually motivated, nineteenth-century confidence man, who never attained the mythic power held by tricksters in cultures with strong oral traditions,[16] tricksters for turn-of-the-century writers of color retain many nonwestern elements, including strong communal values.
True to their role as culture builders, tricksters appear at moments of identity crisis in American literature. In the
mid-nineteenth century, with the nation's constitution and borders in flux, writers such as Poe, Melville, and Twain searched for something distinctly American and focused on the wandering con-artist, who flourished on the frontier border towns and outposts precisely because of his or her fluid, ambiguous identity. Turn-of-the-century writers drew on trickster traditions to forge an identity and a writing voice out of clashing cultures and contradictory worlds. Trickster strategies such as masking have always been an integral part of American culture; Ralph Ellison points out that masking is "in the American grain" (55). Recalling Benjamin Franklin's self-presentation as a self-made man, Hemingway's sportsman pose, and Faulkner's farmer persona, Ellison says, "America is a land of masking jokers. We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense; when we are projecting the future and preserving the past. In short, the motives hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals" (55).
The resurgence of tricksters in contemporary, multicultural literature owes much in spirit to turn-of-the-century tricksterism as political resistance and creative expression.[17] Yet today's publishing industry and reading public are radically different from those at the turn of the century, and constructions of tricksterism have changed. African American, Asian American, Native American, Chicano and Chicana, and other literatures are thriving, exposing the narrowness and inadequacy of traditional canons.[18] The trickster's resurgence on the literary landscape signals a new crossroads in American literature and identity. The works of Leslie Silko, Sandra Cisneros, Gerald Vizenor, Ishmael Reed, and David Henry Hwang, to name a few, clearly demand trickster readings. As tricksters increasingly surface in contemporary
multicultural American literature and critical discourse, their historical presence in American literature will no doubt emerge as an important topic for critical attention. At the turn into the twenty-first century; tricksters are everywhere. Tricksters—multiform, disruptive, contradictory, boundary-crossing, particolored, and multilingual—define our national character.
Just as tricksters redefine American culture, they reinvent narrative form. The trickster's medium is words. A parodist, joker, liar, con-artist, and storyteller, the trickster fabricates believable illusions with words—and thus becomes author and embodiment of a fluid, flexible, and politically radical narrative form. Viewing the trickster as a rhetorical principle provides a useful framework for analyzing narrative structure in the works of Erdrich, Morrison, and Kingston. The narrative forms of their works share certain distinctive features: breaks, disruptions, loose ends, and multiple voices or perspectives. Current French feminist theory describes such narrative features as part of an écriture feminine , which connects a "feminine" style of writing to the female body. However, this view of narrative form is inadequate to a reading of Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison. In the words of Ann Jones, "It flattens out the lived differences among women. To the extent that each of us responds to a particular tribal, national, racial, or class situation vis-à-vis men, we are in fact separated from one another" (371).[19] Because an analysis of narrative form in the works of Kingston, Erdrich, and Morrison must account not just for the sex of their authors but also for their entire cultural context, the disruptions, spaces, and multiple voices in their narratives can most appropriately be understood in terms of what I call a "trickster aesthetic," which challenges an ethnocentric as well as a phallocentric tradition.
My contention that trickster novels challenge ethnocentrism draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the novel as "dialogized heteroglossia," or a diversity of points of view in conflict with one another. The interacting languages within the novel represent a freeing of diverse voices from "the hegemony of a single and unitary language" (Bakhtin 366).[20] As various social languages interact—through the characters' speeches, through changes in narrative voice, and through shifts in point of view—the novel form itself decentralizes any single worldview, presenting a potential challenge to ethnocentricity. With masks, laughter, and freedom from social laws and inhibitions, tricksters incarnate the carnivalesque. Tricksters have played a pivotal role in the multivocal, decentralizing aspects of the novel from its beginnings. Bakhtin traces the origins of the novel to the "current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces" found in parodic genres associated with the rogue, fool, and clown—all versions of the trickster.[21] A chief value of parody is in exposing any one perspective, or any one language, as necessarily limited. Tricksters can parody languages, and therefore worldviews, because of their liminal cultural position. Their location outside the confines of rigid social structures gives them a privileged perspective. In the novel, the ever-wandering trickster embodies a "linguistic homelessness" that results in "a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world" (Bakhtin 366). When trickster emerges as an active agent within the text, the dismantling of controlling ideologies becomes a key issue. Trickster authors privilege multivocality in order to emphasize that each perspective is different and cannot be eclipsed by an "absolute" perspective.
The political value that the trickster aesthetic places on multiple languages resembles features of écriture feminine . Diane
Price Herndl notices striking similarities between Bakhtin's theories of novelistic discourse and theories of a feminine language, observing that both "describe a multivoiced or polyphonic resistance to hierarchies and laughter at authority" (11). Price Herndl's description of feminine writing sounds strikingly tricksterlike: "A feminine language lives on the boundary. A feminine text overthrows the hierarchies. . . . It proves the hierarchies mistaken. Like the voices Bakhtin hears in the novel's carnival, the female voice laughs in the face of authority" (11). Price Herndl advocates a dialogic feminist criticism that "would resist offering 'a reading' and offer, instead, 'readings,'" emphasizing the polyphonic features of texts (18). She admits, however, that "at some point the political need for strategic readings may well outweigh the desire to escape monological, hierarchical ways of thinking and writing" (19). Indeed, it is largely this political need that determines my choice of a trickster aesthetic over a feminine language for analysis of narrative form in Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison. These writers seek to upset hierarchies not just because they have an inherent philosophical "feminine" dislike for binary oppositions, but because they pursue specific, racially and ethnically grounded sociopolitical purposes. It is the trickster's political exploitation of the carnival that makes the figure so attractive to these writers.
Although trickster tales can, and often do, offer a socially sanctioned way of institutionalizing rebellion in order to reinforce political and cultural norms (as when the tales teach morals through negative example), trickster also inherently questions the limits of order and thus carries the potential for radical (re)vision. As Andrew Wiget explains, "Trickster functions not so much to call cultural categories into question as to demonstrate
the artificiality of culture itself. Thus he makes available for discussion the very basis of social order, individual and communal identity" (94). Trickster's challenge to established order shows the limits of any social or political system and thereby prepares the way for creative change and adaptation. In both substance and subtext, contemporary trickster novels disrupt readers' comfortable worldviews and enable us to glimpse new possibilities.[22]
My trickster aesthetic envisions the trickster not only as an actual figure in the novel but also as a linguistic and stylistic principle. Two recent studies of the trickster have isolated the rhetorical as its principal terrain and clarified the connection between narrative form and ideological context. Henry Louis Gates Jr. locates the black English vernacular roots of the African American literary tradition in the African trickster Esu-Elegbara, whose African American descendant, the signifying monkey, continually outwits his foes with skillful stories and verbal barrage. The signifying monkey's power and identity lie in his mastery of verbal technique: "The monkey is not only a master of technique, he is technique" (Signifying 54) Gerald Vizenor similarly emphasizes the Native American trickster's relationship to form and style, translating the trickster's characteristics into features of language that make up what he calls "trickster discourse." In his view, the trickster is "disembodied in a narrative . . . a communal sign, a comic holotrope and a discourse" ("Trickster Discourse" 196).
This rhetorical disembodiment of the trickster, however, does not drain the trickster of social or political meaning. On the contrary, as Gates and Vizenor both suggest, the trickster's linguistic operation has serious ideological implications. Gates explains that the African American signifying monkey's act of "Signi-
fyin(g)" represents a radical undermining of the language and power structures of white America. Gates suggests that signifying amounts to a "political offensive":
Some black genius or a community of witty and sensitive speakers emptied the signifier "signification" of its received concepts and filled this empty signifier with their own concepts. By doing so, by supplanting the received, standard English concept associated by (white) convention with this particular signifier, they (un)wittingly disrupted the nature of the sign = signified/signifier equation itself. . . . [B]y supplanting the received term's associated concept, the black vernacular tradition created a homonymic pun of the profoundest sort, thereby marking its sense of difference from the rest of the English community of speakers. Their complex act of language Signifies upon both formal language use and its conventions, conventions established, at least officially, by middle-class white people. (Signifying 45–46)
Thus the signifying monkey's act of "signifying" becomes a critique of "the nature of (white) meaning itself." Words such as down , baby , and cool become double-voiced, or "decolonized" by investing previously understood words with alternative and perhaps contradictory meanings (50). Gates's analysis of the signifying monkey suggests how the African American trickster becomes both a figure and a linguistic means for one culture's "guerrilla action" against its oppressing culture's language and ideology.
Gerald Vizenor similarly connects the trickster's linguistic operations to cultural politics, emphasizing the trickster's indefinability and elusiveness by associating tricksters with the slipperiness of language: "the trickster is being, nothingness and liberation; a loose seam in consciousness; that wild space over and
between sounds, words, sentences and narratives" ("Trickster Discourse" 196). Yet Vizenor's postmodern view of the trickster is politically grounded: his description of trickster discourse seeks to free Native American literatures from the reductive, "tragic monologue" of cultural anthropology ("Trickster Discourse" 187). Vizenor specifically opposes his view of the trickster to a modernist view of the individualistic stoic "savage," whose survival "supported the notion of the vanishing tribes" ("Trickster Discourse" 193). Vizenor's trickster cannot be captured, precisely because he or she is not a figure but a mode of "communal signification" ("Trickster Discourse" 187). Like the signifying monkey, Vizenor's trickster discourse embodies communal and cultural strength through shared codes of meaning.[23]
In both Gates's and Vizenor's view, the trickster's postmodern operation in language signals a cultural critique of the most radical kind. The trickster's relevance to a politically revolutionary version of postmodernism has been noted by other writers as well. William Hynes notes that "the logic of order and convergence, that is logos-centrism, or logocentrism, is challenged by another path, the random and divergent trail taken by that profane metaplayer, the trickster" ("Inconclusive Conclusions" 216). Several critics connect the postmodern specifically to Americans of mixed cultural heritage, noting the usefulness of a postmodern view of identity in freeing stereotyped groups from essentializing notions of identity. "Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality . . . can open up new possibilities for the construction of self," explains bell hooks (Yearning 28).[24] We might view the trickster, who embodies a divided, fluid, shifting identity, as a mythic trope for the postmodern. Theories of the postmodern and theories of the trickster coincide and mu-
tually illuminate each other; perhaps trickster's biggest contribution to the postmodern is the notion that identity can be multiplicitous and that the deconstruction of a falsely unitary language need not lead to incoherence. If the tricksterized postmodernisms of Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison are politically grounded, so too are their varieties of magical realism. Elements of the sacred, of myth and fantasy, mix with history and "fact" in their trickster novels to create an altered sense of the real that challenges perceived, western ways of knowing. Trinh T. Minhha notes that it is only westerners who believe that elements such as the sacred and myth are incongruous with the real. She critiques the western emphasis on clarity within a broader perspective that includes paradox: "The language of Taoism and Zen . . . which is perfectly accessible but rife with paradox does not qualify as 'clear' (paradox is 'illogical' and 'nonsensical' to many Westerners)" (16). The trickster, who embodies paradox, provides a means for Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison to cultivate a larger sense of the real, a sense that transcends the magical realist label; the intermingling of mythic and mundane becomes another expression of a multifaceted worldview.
The trickster's gift for double-voiced discourse, the ability to assume various masks and embody multiple perspectives, explains the figure's appeal in the multicultural context in which Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison live and write. Bakhtin explains that the seeds of novel form could only have originated and flourished under conditions of "struggle between tribes, peoples, cultures and languages" such as the cultural bilingualism of ancient Rome, or, I would add, the cultural diversity of modern America (50). A
decentralization of worldview depends upon an awareness of diverse social groups constantly interacting with each other. We can look at the position of Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison in this light. Though they are not all bilingual in the traditional sense, each speaks several "languages" as they inhabit the various worlds of academia, modern popular culture, modern ethnic culture, and folk tradition.
Laguna Pueblo writer and critic Paula Gunn Allen explains of women of color that "it is not merely biculturality that forms the foundation of our lives and work . . . it is multiculturality, multilinguality; and dizzying class-crossing from the fields to the salons, from the factories to the academy, or from galleries and the groves of academe to the neighborhoods and reservations" ("'Border' Studies" 305). Similarly, in Between Worlds , Amy Ling notes that "the characteristics that Bakhtin identified as central to the novel in general . . . are, in particular, literally characteristic of our [Chinese American] authors. When one is not totally absorbed within a culture . . . as when one is conversant in different languages, one is able to see those cultures or languages from the outside and thus to see them more wholly than can the people imprisoned within a single language or perspective" (178). Chicana writer and critic Gloria Anzaldúa addresses this issue of language between cultures in her bilingually titled Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . In her preface she describes a new "language of the borderlands" that reflects the varied "codes" of her experience—English, Castillian Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Texano, to name a few (x). Anzaldúa stresses the positive effects of this mix of languages: "At the juncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized" (x).
To put it another way, because of their position "at the juncture of cultures," women writers of color are uniquely situated to speak as tricksters and to write out of a trickster aesthetic. bell hooks describes the tricksterlike "mode of seeing" that she developed as an African American growing up in a small Kentucky town:
The railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. . . . Living as we did—on the edge—we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. . . . This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view—a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity. (Feminist Theory ix)
Her description recalls Turner's characterization of tricksters as "edge men" ("Myth and Symbol" 580). hooks sees this trickster positionality and its mix of subversive and affirmative survival strategies as a source of personal and communal strength.
Gloria Anzaldúa perhaps relates her sense of self to the trickster most explicitly. Recalling the trickster's place at the crossroads, she calls herself "a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds" (Anzaldúa and Moraga 205). She draws on the image of the Yoruba trickster Eshu to describe the life journey of"la mestiza," the woman of mixed cultural heritage: "Eshu, / Yoruba god of indeterminacy, / . . . blesses her choice of path" (Anzaldúa 80). Anzaldúa explains that the new mestiza copes with her
tricksterlike position "by developing a tolerance for contradiction, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode. . . . Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else" (Anzaldúa 79). Anzaldúa's emphasis on ambivalence suggests the inability of that word, or any word, to capture her identity: "You say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva, a many-armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man's world, the women's. . . . A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web. Who me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me" (Anzaldúa and Moraga 205).[25] Part of the strength a trickster identity offers is its escape from the dismembering effect of affixing labels.
Paula Gunn Allen also explicitly relates women writers of color to the trickster, defining their art in specifically tricksterlike terms as "cunning crafting" and "our ways of signifyin"' ("'Border' Studies" 310, 312). The works of women of color, Allen observes, reveal the "process of living on the border, of crossing and recrossing boundaries of consciousness" ("'Border' Studies" 305). Significantly, Allen follows Henry Louis Gates Jr. in suggesting that the trickster, "who is male and female, many-tongued, changeable, changing and who contains all the meanings possible within her or his consciousness" be a model for the process of critical interpretation, a nonwestern alternative to "Eurocentric patriarchal self-preoccupation" ("'Border' Studies" 307).
Though hooks, Anzaldúa, and Allen all suggest a tricksterlike model for women writers of color, their strategic emphases are different, hooks stresses the trickster's negative task of "destroying dualism, eradicating systems of domination" (Feminist Theory
163), whereas Allen emphasizes the affirmative: "Artists of color can best do something other than engage in adversarial politics. . . . We need to invest our energies in our vision, our significances, and our ways of signifyin'" ("'Border' Studies" 312). Anzaldúa, perhaps truest to the trickster mode, has no one identifiable emphasis.
Drawing on this trickster positionality, Morrison, Erdrich, and Kingston become tricksters in telling their stories; they employ multiple perspectives and refuse to mediate with one clear authorial stance. By slipping in and out of different realities and states of consciousness, the writer as trickster blurs the boundaries between self and other, between male and female, between the real and the fantastic, and even between story and audience. Significantly, Morrison, Kingston, and Erdrich center their examination of sexism within their own cultures in the figure of the trickster. Baffling sexism within an oppressed racial group is an especially tricky business. "When one is black," bell hooks explains, calling oneself a feminist "is likely to be heard as a devaluation of the struggle to end racism" (Feminist Theory 29).[26] In discussing the complex positionality of women of color, Carolyn Denard suggests a way in which many women combine a feminist with an antiracial position by espousing an "ethnic cultural feminism" that encompasses a concern with "the particular female cultural values of their own ethnic group" (171). These "female cultural values" often intersect across cultures, but because of the differing cultural histories from which they evolve, they should not be treated as identical.[27] Feminist criticism, as Hazel Carby asserts, should interrogate "sexual ideologies for their racial specificity" (18).
Tricksters in most cultures are androgynous by definition, but male tricksters are more common than female tricksters.[28] In the
works of Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison, the most prominent trickster protagonists are male: Nanapush is the trickster narrator of Tracks , Wittman Ah Sing is the monkey protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey , and Son is the modern avatar of Br'er Rabbit in Tar Baby . For women writers with feminist concerns, this choice seems curious, until we consider the freedom a trickster protagonist allows. Tricksters embody paradoxes, which enables them to be simultaneously heroes and scapegoats. Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison permit the trickster to remain a symbol of cultural survival, but at the same time they explicitly question the sexism of their male tricksters, thereby critiquing the sexism of their cultures' myths and asserting counterperspectives through the novel's other voices (most notably, the narrator of Tripmaster Monkey , Pauline in Tracks , and Jadine in Tar Baby ). Moreover, each writer values and emphasizes the trickster's androgyny, and although their most prominent tricksters are male, each revises cultural myth and folklore to create female tricksters as well: Love Medicine 's Lulu Lamartine, Song of Solomon 's Pilate, and The Woman Warrior 's Brave Orchid.
As trickster authors, Erdrich, Kingston and Morrison revise oral traditions in written form to create their trickster aesthetic, using storytelling to shape their novels. Tricksters are consummate storytellers, wielding power over their listeners with their artful use of words. Paula Rabinowitz describes the social nature of storytelling as a narrative form: "As a social process, storytelling mediates social relations rather than providing moral prescriptions; the story's meaning is embedded in the telling, not in its final point. . . . A profoundly interactive process, storytelling provides
a cultural intersection between the personal and the political, the individual and the community; the teller, the tale and the audience" (28). Trinh T. Minh-ha also emphasizes the communal and culture-building aspects of storytelling, calling it "the oldest form of building historical consciousness in community" (148). In the words of Navaho storyteller Yellowman, "Through the stories everything is made possible."[29] Stories foster and create cultural identity, connect individual listeners to a shared tradition, and reveal new possibilities.
Trickster novels use storytelling to set up dialogue among characters and with the reader, thereby lending a sense of orality to the written text. The novels' lack of closure and their privileging of differing perspectives and voices emphasize dialogue, community, and the social process of storytelling. Gerald Vizenor's description of the trickster's function in Native American oral tales illustrates the trickster's relationship to this storytelling process. The trickster's multivalence and elusiveness suggest that because no one point of view is all-encompassing, all points of view, including those of the author, the narrator, the characters, and the reader or listener, together create the meaning of a story. Vizenor sees the trickster as a "communal sign" that makes the story a communal experience by connecting the various points of view ("Trickster Discourse" 193).[30] Vizenor emphasizes the reader's crucial role in recreating the story as he or she reads: "The active reader implies the author, imagines narrative voices, inspires characters, and salutes tribal tricksters in a comic discourse" (Trickster of Liberty x).
Storytelling makes the reader one of the community of listeners, and trickster authors implicitly or explicitly invite and even demand reader involvement. The dialogue is not resolved in a
trickster narrative, and the reader must negotiate a place within it. Leaving things open-ended or contradictory forces the reader to play a more active role in the construction of meaning, filling in the "gaps," as Wolfgang Iser says, by bringing "into play our own faculty for establishing connections" (Implied 280). Iser's description of the reading process in multivocal works sounds tricksterlike: "the reader's wandering viewpoint travels between all these segments, its constant switching during the timeflow of reading intertwines them, thus bringing forth a network of perspectives" ("Interaction" 113). In Vizenor's terms, the reader of a trickster narrative is acted upon as "the trickster liberates the mind" (Trickster of Liberty xi). The reader of trickster novels is anything but a passive, detached observer—a fact that takes on special importance in contemporary American trickster novels, which confront multicultural issues and address a multicultural audience. By becoming involved in the interpretive work, the reader becomes more sensitive to cultural boundaries and better equipped to cross them.[31] A multiplicity of voices and perspectives such as those present in a trickster novel can effect change in the reader; by engaging in dialogue with a text, readers open their own thoughts to change.[32]
The gaps that trickster authors Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison leave in their works are sites of enormous import. As the undefined borderland between two worlds, which is the specific domain of the trickster, the gap represents both an invitation and a challenge. On the one hand, ambiguity invites unprecedented freedom of expression and interpretation, which lends to the printed words the immediacy of orality. Bonnie TuSmith explains that for Kingston ambiguity is "the creative compromise of a literate mind conveying the improvisational immediacy of oral cul-
ture" ("Literary Tricksterism" 255).[33] As Trinh T. Minh-ha vividly puts it, "Blanks, lapses, and silences . . . settle in like gaps of fresh air as soon as the inked space smells stuffy" (16).
On the other hand, although gaps allow freedom and interplay and invite reader involvement, they also challenge the reader to step into the gap rather than use the writer as an easy bridge to another culture or perspective. In "The Bridge Poem," the opening piece to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color , Donna Kate Rushkin expresses the frustration and exhaustion that a trickster positionality can bring:
I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I'm sick of filling in your gaps. (Anzaldúa and Moraga xxi)
She tells the reader: "Stretch or drown / Evolve or die" (Anzaldúa and Moraga xxii). Like Rushkin, all of the trickster authors in the present study demand to be met part way. Maxine Hong Kingston, for example, voices her frustrations with the "cultural mis-readings" of American reviewers of her work, finding it "sad and slow that I have to explain . Again. If I use my limited time and words to explain, I will never get off the ground" ("Cultural Mis-Readings" 57). Like the paradoxical trickster figure, a between-world condition "carries both negative and positive charges" and can be both exhausting and exhilarating (Ling 177). One fully belongs nowhere, yet, as Nikki Giovanni has said, "Our alienation is our great strength. Our strength is that we are not comfortable any place; therefore we're comfortable
every place . We can go any place on earth and find a way to be comfortable" (quoted in Ling 177).[34]
In the novels of Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison, the trickster is both "disembodied" in narrative form and a bodily presence in the novel. The trickster fuses the affirmative power of folklore with the subversive power of laughter and critique. On every level of the text, the trickster disrupts expectations, challenges the status quo, and at the same time reaffirms the values of community.
Through their "cunning crafting," Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison create modern American tricksters, whose carnival laughter and scathing critiques challenge racial and gender stereotypes yet attest to the enduring strength of their cultural communities. These writers fulfill Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's hope for a "productive multivalence" and Gloria Anzaldúa's projection for "the new mestiza": "The future depends," Anzaldúa says, "on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality . . . la mestiza creates a new consciousness" (Lim 32; Anzaldúa 80). Through a trickster aesthetic, the narratives of Kingston, Erdrich, and Morrison engage readers in active dialogue with the texts' multiple perspectives, engendering a broader sense of the "real" and suggesting a mode for personal and cultural survival.
Though a trickster perspective is perhaps most accessible to women of color, who cross and recross gender, race, and class
boundaries, Amy Ling notes that the "between world condition . . . is characteristic of all people in a minority position," including all women (177).[35] Feminist critics have suggested that a tricksterlike receptiveness to other voices, the skill of speaking in and negotiating among several languages, is characteristic of women in general. In an influential study of women's moral development, Carol Gilligan argues that women's socially learned "sensitivity to the needs of others and the assumption of responsibility for taking care lead women to attend to voices other than their own and to include in their judgment other points of view"(17). Although Gilligan's study is necessarily limited in its acknowledged disregard for historical, social, or cultural variables, it has important implications for any culture in which women are the primary caretakers. Women's sense of self, Gilligan suggests, is informed by a weblike conception of relationship; self and other are "different but connected rather than . . . separate and opposed" (147). Paula Gunn Allen seconds this view with her discussion of the "self-in-relation," asserting that "to read women's texts with any accuracy, we need a theory that places the twin concepts of I and thou securely within the interconnected matrix of all and everything" ("'Border' Studies" 314). It is important to stress that connectedness, sensitivity, and receptiveness, often assumed to be "natural" in women, are fundamentally asexual traits, which we might more appropriately associate with the trickster's androgynous openness to others.
Many critics are quick to point out the vast differences in the histories, goals, and interests of white feminists and African American, Native American, Chicana, and Asian American femi-
nists.[36] Certainly, white American feminists have tended to ignore the lived experience of other American women in formulating their basis for protest and reform. As a white feminist critic, I have an interest in Erdrich, Morrison, and Kingston that grows out of a conviction like that of bell hooks, who states: "Every woman can stand in political opposition to sexist, racist, heterosexist, and classist oppression. . . . Women must learn to accept responsibility for fighting oppressions that may not directly affect us as individuals. . . . [The feminist movement] suffers when individual concerns and priorities are the only reason for participation. When we show our concern for the collective, we strengthen our solidarity" (Feminist Theory 61–62).
As the borders between cultures become paradoxically both easier to cross and more sharply delineated, tricksters will remain important figures "in the American grain" (Ellison 55). It makes sense to look to women of color, whose lives cross so many borders, for the best models of trickster strategy. In the words of Gloria Anzaldúa, "Living on borders, and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element. . . . There is an exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of humankind" (preface ix).
Each of the three authors considered here centers at least one of her novels on a trickster character: Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey , Erdrich's Tracks , and Morrison's Tar Baby . But trickster energy inspires all of their work. Because they draw on such different traditions, I treat each author's work separately. In The Woman War -
rior and China Men , Kingston adopts the trickster as a trope for cultural exploration. The Woman Warrior chronicles a young girl in trickster training, learning to cope with paradox from her trickster mother, Brave Orchid, who has lived "between worlds" in both China and America. China Men reclaims and creates Chinese American mythic history as a chronicle of trickster ancestors, who claim America through subterfuge, alias, and revolt. Kingston's concern with the trickster culminates in Tripmaster Monkey , which introduces Wittman Ah Sing, Berkeley beatnik and reincarnation of the Chinese Monkey King, as a model for personal and cultural identity.
Louise Erdrich's four novels, connected by geography, history, and genealogy, invent a trickster cycle that challenges "traditional" American history and contemporary popular attitudes toward Native Americans. The evolving narrative forms of Love Medicine , Tracks , and The Bingo Palace express the history of a Chippewa community in trickster terms that, far from reinforcing stereotypes of a vanishing tribe, emphasize variety, vibrancy, and continuance. Erdrich creates feminist revisions of the trickster in Fleur and Lulu and, in The Beet Queen , critiques the fragility of trickster identity when it is not grounded in community and tradition.
Morrison's work shows a recurring preoccupation with female iconoclasts, wanderers, adventurers, and drifters. For her, the trickster offers a way to challenge traditional versions of African American female identity and imagine new alternatives. Sula , Song of Solomon , and Tar Baby expand on and refigure traditional African American tricksters and conjurers in ways that fundamentally question the strength of the social fabric. Whereas Sula exposes the challenges of a trickster positionality, Song of Solomon 's visionary Pilate suggests the trickster's energy and
power, and Tar Baby presents conflicting versions of female trickster identity: tar woman Therese and unrooted, free-flying Jadine. Creator of worlds, epic bumbler, outrageous joker, expert transformer, consummate artist: the trickster lives in contemporary American literature, in all her myriad guises.