![]() It is a prodigious and perhaps unprecedented leap from the microbial to the literary-a leap that is fascinating to watch, but one we might hesitate to follow. If the microbe was "like a con man," then the con man must be like the microbe. Hyde concludes this part of his argument with a few paragraphs on Melville's The Confidence Man, suggesting that this book, in which "a confidence man appears in a series of masks and roles, never as himself," is in some sense an outgrowth of the evolutionary dodginess he has detailed. What Hyde seems to be getting at in his discussion of appetite is that tricks or lies are a basic survival mechanism, and that they become more sophisticated as one ascends the evolutionary ladder from primitive to complex and from prey to predator-indeed trickery is what propels such evolution: "The mythology of trickster figures is, by one reading, the story of intelligence arising from appetite." Advancing from the microbial level, Hyde explicitly relates trickster to natural evolution, citing several examples from the animal world where predators and their prey evolve new tricks to outwit each other in the eternal game of appetite. So Hyde proposes a biological basis for shiftiness, which eventually finds expression in trickster stories-Trickster represents an essential striving, a basic life force like that posited by Freud. The microbe changes its outer protein coat, Hydes tells us, to escape human antibodies: it "is like a con man at a masquerade." In fact (in one of the more peculiar parts of his argument), he takes us all the way back to the protazoan Trypanosoma brucei, the "predatory" microbe that causes sleeping sickness. ![]() Hyde, who has a marked propensity for generalizing and universalizing, takes a sort of fractal approach, drawing sweeping conclusions from minute details. preserve a set of images from the days when what mattered above all else was hunting." He sees, in other words, the trickster impulse as a throwback to our most ancient conditions, a sort of vestigial tale that we wag behind us even as we evolve more sophisticated cultural forms. The first and most basic of these traps is the "trap of appetite," from which "the trickster myth derives creative intelligence." "Trickster starts out hungry, but before long he is master of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of art." Hyde thinks that "trickster stories. Viewing the trickster as an inevitable cultural outgrowth of natural law, Hyde portrays Trickster as a basic response to inescapable traps of the human condition. Hyde divides his analysis into four parts, beginning with the "Trap of Nature" and ending with the "Trap of Culture"-an organization that reflects the basic movement of his argument from natural to cultural history. "What is a sermon that surpasses the teaching of the Buddha and the Patriarchs?" Yün-men was asked. ![]() In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde, author of the admired The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983), looks at the trickster figure in folklore and mythology, extrapolates a sort of universal trickster impulse, and considers expressions of that impulse in modern art and literature. Tom Christensen reviews Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |