Us3. Online.

{I’m prepping for another class, and these are more a product of wanting to keep recording most everything I read here. These are very worthwhile books, each with a significant blindspot that, while important to consider, also does not reduce their overall worth as resources on the subject of tricksters.}

I first bought Robert D. Pelton‘s The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight (1980) in 1991. I did not read it for many years, and then found it absorbing and compelling when I did. It was only later, on a second pass through it while writing my dissertation that I realized that Pelton had clearly had much of the same academic training I had, which was a bit of a shock.

It stands up to a third reading, but it’s a bewildering text in many ways. Pelton’s presentation of the trickster figures of the Ashanti, Fon, Yoruba, and Dogon peoples (Ananse, Legba, Eshu, and Ogo-Yurugu respectively) is nuanced, complicated, sophisticated, and sympathetic. It’s also almost bizarre in its avoidance of the question of Pelton himself, his “armchair” relationship to his subject matter, his (presumed) whiteness, and the politics involved in reading so deeply into “the other.”

Pelton is quite aware of the dangers of interpretation at a distance: in one of the best lines of the book, as a reaction to the heavy-handed attempts at interpretation of West African culture by a host of Europeans (Dumézil, Jung, many others), he writes

The Ashanti, however, are not trying to say something; they are saying something.

Indeed they are, and that something is not dependent on Western eyes for its explanation or understanding, Pelton’s included.

My suspicion is this is mostly a product of being written in the 1970s: there is a sense that what is missing most from The Trickster in West Africa is another chapter that situates Pelton’s scholarship within those frames, but academic awareness and grounded critique of those things blossomed in later decades. Regardless, what is present in the book is illuminating, and while much of it is difficult to grasp–at their core, West African trickster figures embody a host of contradictions that resist resolution as part of their very definition–wrestling with the ideas here is well worth the effort.

Lewis Hyde‘s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998) is an intelligent, wide-ranging romp through an impressive mind. Hyde–of whom I know very little–clearly spent a long time thinking about the Trickster figure, and what emerges is erudite and illuminating, and brings together figures as diverse as Hermes and Frederick Douglass into engaging conversation with each other.

For the most part, it works: that is, the points Hyde makes are salient and hold together, and while I don’t know that he really does much to analyze Trickster figures in their own contexts, he certainly helps enlarge our understanding of how they may function for contemporary readers.