Preamble: Fruit of the Wound

Trickster finds fruit in every wound.

–a friend of mine, 2001 letter.

Professor Mary Magoulick, who teaches in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department of Georgia College, describes the Trickster as an archetypal character found in the folklore of numerous civilizations and societies. As the name would imply, the Trickster plays tricks. Wild pranks. On anyone. At any time.

For the most part, we love him because he isn’t afraid to ply his tricks on those who frighten us: the enemies of state; the crown, the boss, the bully, the government, or anyone else who’s too risky for us to get even with. Trickster gets even for us. The need for us to hold such an entity in our collective consciousness says a lot about what it is to live in a society with power inequities. As Prof. Magoulick explains:

Although trickster's actions and personality may seem ridiculous or extreme, some scholars have noted that he/she serves an important purpose in traditional and contemporary narratives. Trickster may work as a kind of outlet for strong emotions or actions in which humans cannot indulge. These actions are at the margins of social morality and normal behavior, so humans can express and feel things through the trickster that would be unsafe to express or experience outside of stories. In this sense the trickster is a kind of ‘escape valve’ for a society.

Of course Trickster doesn’t appear in the same guise to all peoples. Sometimes Trickster’s triumphant. Sometimes he pays for his transgressions. The Trickster is usually male. But in more gender equal societies, Trickster is sometimes female (e.g., Pippi Longstocking). In many cultures, Trickster is a god (e.g., Loki). Often, Trickster is an anthropomorphic animal who take on human characteristics (e.g., Br’er Rabbit). But he can sometimes take human form, if it’s clear that Trickster is only fictional.

While there aren’t a lot of things Trickster manifests consistently from culture to culture, there are some things that he has in common no matter what incarnation he takes. Prof. Magoulick lists some of them on her website. First of all, Trickster is neither good, nor evil. He is amoral. And he has a lot of negative traits: he’s lustful (for sex, power, blood, attention, etc.), he’s irresponsible, and he’s indifferent to the suffering he causes (some might characterize him as “mean-spirited”). And while he’s often very clever, he can be really, really stupid at the same time. On the other hand, he’s an “irrepressibly sympathetic character” who’s always funny and “lovable.”

And, in a strange sense, he is an heroic figure:

On her site, Prof Magoulick quotes a 1993 essay by Gerald Vizenor to demonstrate the purely fictional nature of the trickster:

Tricksters are real in stories but not in the flesh. Tricksters are not blood or material, but imagination, Tricksters are the kind of thought that raises hope, that heals, that cures that which cannot be traced....Tricksters do not represent the real or the material.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean, if Trickster actually existed, we’d string him up by his intimate anatomy. We’d find nothing humorous when his pranks headed our way. We definitely wouldn’t consider him adorable. We’d see him as a pest at best, or a threat at worse. Real life pranks, from real-life jokers, often entail a maliciousness or immorality designed to achieve specific means–whether it’s separating a sucker from his wallet, or manufacturing consent to support war, poverty or other evils.

Nevertheless, people sometimes encroach upon Trickster’s territory. Alan Abel and Joey Skaggs perpetrate hoaxes in order to expose the weaknesses in the fabric journalistic. And like Trickster, both men have their fans. One could also suppose that they get a big ego kick out of it. But their intent isn’t really all that malevolent.

Artistic hoaxes expose the shallowness of an audience that pays more attention to the artist than it does to the artefact. We don’t really judge the painting, per se. We judge the painter. The monetary value of an artwork really stems more in the identity of the artist than in the artistic statement, the technique, or the visual pleasure (or provocation) it offers. Sometimes, as in The Official Art Hoax of The X-Spot (i.e., Clubbo Records), the prank produces tangible works.

Although the artistic hoax isn’t all that harmful (except to a sucker’s ego), it is, like the pranks of the Trickster, an exertion of will for selfish reasons.  After all, as my friend said, he’d have to get some goodies out of the havoc he wreaks; otherwise there’s no sense in doing it.

Of course, one can note that when people successfully play Trickster, they do so behind a fictional persona. Abel (along with his wife, Jeanne, and his friend, Buck Henry), Skaggs, and Clubbo founders Joe Gore and Elise Malmberg all pulled off their pranks utilizing a slew of a false identities. So in this sense, the Trickster remains a fictional character to at least a negligible degree.

Because Trickster is fictional, we have nothing to fear from him. We love him because he can’t hurt us (usually–there are some exceptions to this). It’s the real-life jokers we have to look out for–in meatspace and cyberspace.  It’s their will and their payout that give us cause for concern.  We might not like how their desires conflict with our own.  And the fruit that they find in our wounds might be more than we can afford to lose.