| This study is about tricksters and the conflicts they precipitate between oral and literary traditions. Greek Odysseus and Hermes, African Eshu, and Native American Coyote are all tricksters—guileful trouble-makers who inhabit and manipulate boundaries between cosmic orders, social divisions, and opposites like good and evil, order and chaos, meaning and nonsense. In the first chapter, I suggest that tricksters are inherently connected to the oral medium, personifying the elusiveness of the spoken word and the ambiguity and contradiction that, according to Havelock and Ong, characterize oral thought. But what happens to oral tricksters in literary narratives?; In the three following chapters, I analyze American, Russian, and Ukrainian texts where tricksters come into conflict with literary conventions designed to curtail ambiguity and generate self-consistent meanings. I begin with Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus folklore collections (1880 and 1883), where the author becomes trapped between desire and reluctance to subordinate African-American Brer Rabbit (who symbolizes tricky, confrontational story-telling) to an Anglo-American “plantation fiction” representation of story-telling as inter-racial communion.; Widely recognized as a trickster, Brer Rabbit establishes a paradigm for analyzing Slavic folk characters who have never before been interpreted as tricksters, the Russian royal impostor Pugachev and the Ukrainian Cossack Mamai. Aleksandr Pushkin's historical novel The Captain's Daughter (1836) narrates how a young nobleman Grinev transforms himself from a flat neo-classical fool into a cunning trickster, learning the art of equivocation from Pugachev, but then becomes trapped in limbo between these opposed character types. In Oleksandr Il'chenko's “chimerical” novel The Cossack Never Dies (1958), it seems that tricky Mamai is reduced to a dutiful and earnest positive hero of government-sponsored Socialist Realism, but in a mind-bending trickster's joke, Il'chenko makes Socialist Realism an instrument of its own undoing.; Like Harris, Pushkin and Il'chenko do not resolve tensions between oral tricksters and literary strictures in any simple, unequivocal way, but paradoxically oscillate between conforming to and subverting literary conventions, between re-creating tricksters and destroying them. And so in literature, as in oral traditions, the trickster challenges interpreters to read without reducing contradiction to self-consistency, but to derive meaning from uncertainty itself. |
