Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster

Author(s): Franchot Ballinger

Source: MELUS, Vol. 17, No. 1, Native American Fiction: Myth and Criticism (Spring, 1991 -
Spring, 1992), pp. 21-38
Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
(MELUS)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/467321
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Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and The
Native American Trickster
Franchot Ballinger
Universityof Cincinnati
The Trickster-incorrigible, insatiable,deceptive, comic and trans-
forming-is a nearly ubiquitous figure in world triballiteratures.He
seems to have an especiallyprominentposition in the oraltraditionsof
Native Americans.The epithet Tricksterhas also been applied to cer-
tain popular culture heroes and Euro-Americanliterarycharactersas
well: the Romanticoutlaw, the con man, and particularlythe fictional
picaro. In fact, BarbaraBabcock-Abrahamsexplicitly associates the
tricksterand the picaro,even assertingthat Trickstertales might well
be termed "picaresque"(Tolerated159).In their Literature of theAmeri-
canIndian,an anthologyintendedto be a text,Sandersand Peek make a
similarassociation(66).Tobe sure,therearegeneralsimilaritiesbetween
Tricksterand the picaro that make them appear to be blood brothers:
both areheroes of adventuresrecountedepisodically;both are roguish
travelerswhose transgressionsagainstmoral and civil stricturesplace
them in marginal relationship to their societies; both are said to be
ambiguous figures; and both seem to serve satirical ends. However,
there are such fundamental differences between the two, growing
fromtheirrespectivecultures'ontologies,and, of course,socialconfigu-
rations,thatthe similaritiespale and it is clearthatwe arelooking at two
quite differentcharacters.By examining the common ground of their
comedy, marginality,and "ambiguity,"I will contrastthe picaro and
the tricksterso as to suggest how the latteris a distinctivedramatization
of the Native Americanview of life. Most importantly,we can see in
the Native American tricksteran openness to life's multiplicity and
paradoxeslargelymissingin themodernEuro-American moraltradition.1
To begin then, perhaps the marginality of the charactersto their
societies is the trait from which all others proceed. Certainly,in both
Trickstertales and picaresquefiction,the fact that the protagonistslive
at the edge of society's respectable environs (morally and in terms
often of actual social status) or even act beyond such frontiers is the
vehicle for much of the humor in the stories, but the characters'
marginalityis of quite differentsorts and the humor is thus directed to
different ends. In the picaresquenovel, society, not human society in
MELUS, Volume 17, Number I (Spring 1991-1992)
22 FRANCHOT BALLINGER

general but the author's contemporary society, is largely the object of

satire. Unlike the trickster tales, which exist in the ahistorical world of
myth, the picaresque novel treats the idiosyncrasies of an historical
society. No matter how familiar to succeeding generations the novel's
human types, foibles and vices might be, the novel exists because its
author is at odds with his society, which has corrupted or lost essential
values, generally ethical-social but also, especially in early examples,
religious values. The picaro is then the means by which these values,
their loss and society's responsibility in their loss are examined, and
his marginality is the comic instrument by which that examination is
completed.
This young man (occasionally woman) usually (by the standards of
society) of low birth or obscure origins (perhaps orphaned and thus
without family status) and disreputable background travels about
surviving by his wits, which often means living by begging, theft,
deception and even, as in the case of Grimmelhausen's Corasche,
sexuality.2 Thus the picaro is marginal because in background, behav-
ior, values, personality he doesn't fit society's categories for respect-
able status. Even when, for one reason or another, the picaro acts
within his society-with or without its consent-rather than at the
fringes, he is marginal, for he is not permitted integration to its accepted
moral structure. In any event, it is through the psychological distance
afforded by such marginality that the picaro becomes the agent of
satire. Actually, in the context of their marginality, there are two kinds
of picaro, each satirizing society from a different perspective depending
on the moral coloring each takes on. The first-favored particularly in
early Spanish and German picaresque novels-is marginal because of
his society's hypocrisy and self-delusion. Sharing with all men some
intrinsic moral disorder, perhaps the pride of Original Sin, this picaro
might be seen as a mirror of all that is worst in his society, but that
society would have us believe that his sins are all his own and therefore
casts him out. His adventures in the cracks and on the margins of
society mirror the conflict between man's conscience and his desire for
amoral freedom and, further, emphasize that the society of fallen
humanity fails at its own ideals not because they are impossible of
human achievement but because social man's venal perceptions and
general concupiscence make attainable morality only a tartuffish vision.
Guzman de Alfareche illustrates this picaro. The second picaro is
probably more familiar to most readers. At least initially less tainted
than the first (Roderick Random, for instance), this picaro also satirically
reveals society's moral disorder and corruption from the margins, but
as a foil rather than as a mirror. His society, too, is hypocritical and
lives false values, but this picaro is marginal not because society
refuses to acknowledge him as its moral scion but because his charac-
THE PICARO AND THE TRICKSTER 23

ter puts him at the margin. Many of this picaro's adventures may
result from an innocent yielding to his own roguish but not evil
nature: his spontaneous authenticity places him at the margin of a
society which cannot tolerate genuine innocence and which brands
him therefore as an incorrigible reprobate. Although his freedom from
social canon may seem to be disorderly and to threaten all with
disorder, he, in fact, represents a promise of a superior moral order
and harmony. This second picaro is relatively blameless, perhaps even
represents humanity as it was meant to be; his character is less suspect
by authentic standards than society would have us believe. Society, on
the other hand, is not blameless, and its character is ripe for questioning
and satirization. It is in the ironic contrast between the ostensibly
disreputable picaro beyond the pale and the safely ensconced social
man that the author finds his satire. Although this picaro is sometimes
corrupted by the deceitful world and comes to share certain of its
values, even while he maintains his marginality, he illuminates society's
dark corners so that what is disclosed remains as an after-image,
regardless of his final status. In conclusion then, both picaros are
marginal because their societies define them as such and the definition
makes satire possible.
The humor and marginality of the Native American trickster are
directed quite differently. First, we should note that Trickster tales are
not always satirical in ways they are claimed to be. Paul Radin says
that some of the humor in the Winnebago Trickster cycle is satirically
directed at ritual. If he meant by satire our usual use of the term (that is,
the use of humor and irony to expose folly and vice so as to effect
change in human behavior), we probably should not take him at his
word. It is doubtful that even the most skeptical of storytellers believed
that his entertainment could or ought to transform ritual or its mythic
sources, that which belief and experience proved must be for the
spiritual and physical well-being of humanity. Radin is on safer ground
when he describes the stories as an "outlet for voicing protest against
the many, often onerous obligations connected with the Winnebago
social order and their religion and ritual" (152). One can certainly
protest while still accepting the inevitability of that which is protested.
(I shall have more to say on this subject in discussing Trickster's
"ambiguity.") Ricketts argues also that trickster tales are satirical of
the shamans, but a satirically antinomian Trickster is essential to his
portrait of the figure as a kind of native secular humanist.3 Actually,
there is no evidence beyond conjecture that the tales satirize shaman-
ism, at least to the degree that Radin suggests and that Ricketts clearly
asserts. (However, such popular motifs as The Eye-Juggler, the
Sharpened Leg, the Bungling Host and others as well do suggest that
ridicule is appropriate for those who would imitate without the right-
24 FRANCHOT BALLINGER

whether by initiation or sacred character-shamans or any other being

with mysterious powers.4) While there may be some doubt about the
degree and nature of satire in the trickster tales, there can be no doubt
that there are burlesque and parody aplenty. The butt of such humor is
Trickster himself and the trickster in all humans. In the picaresque
novel, the marginality of the picaro, whether un-social or anti-social
man, is part of the satirization of society. In the trickster tales, Trickster's
marginality-the unsocialized man-is in various ways the object of
humor.
Unlike the picaro, Trickster's marginality is not due to an accident
of birth or to the distorted moral assumptions about caste and propriety
of a stratified society. Deirdre La Pin writes of the African Yoruba
trickster, Tortoise, that his origin is "wholly obscure; and hence, for
reasons of birth he is denied the social place and definition enjoyed by
others. Without parents, he cannot claim the rights of family and
property as a person who truly belongs" (330). The temptation to
apply La Pin's characterization of Tortoise's social condition to the
Native American trickster is great because he, too, is often of obscure
origin and thus of unclear social status. Sometimes, however, as in the
case of the Clackmas Chinook Coyote or the Winnebago trickster,
Trickster is a headman of some sort, and so the terms of the social
contract give him social standing, which, of course, he continually
abuses. But even when his origins are murky, this trickster is not
perceived as the social bastard, as is the picaro and, it seems, the
Yoruba Tortoise. Actually any obscurity in the American Trickster's
origins seems to function as an image of and not the cause of his mar-
ginality. Trickster's marginality is not to be understood, then, in terms
of his status location in the social web. The Native American trickster
is on or beyond the margin because of his character alone. Typically,
Trickster.wanders from place to place-from one village to another or
throughout the wilderness. This failure to "bond" physically to the
established social order (of which he is often a member) corresponds
to his failure to bond psychically to socialized humanity, for governed
by instinct and dedicated to the self-indulgent pursuit of his own
appetites as he is, he possesses none of the individual self-discipline
and self-awareness that sustain social order and stability. This las-
civious, gluttonous, arrogant, disobedient, greedy, cruel, reckless, lazy,
clever, tricky, creative, transforming, funny fellow repeatedly ma-
nipulates and violates our conventional moral notions, unlike the
picaro whose marginality is the consequence of the Catch 22's of his
society's moral strictures and categories. Furthermore, rather than
growing from the corruption of society (the picaro is part of the
European tradition which sees corrupting influences in the civilized as
opposed to the natural), Trickster's vices and follies are all his own.
THEPICAROAND THETRICKS'I'E1l 25

Yet, we must recognize that his antisocial,insatiable,libidinous pro-

clivities are in all humans at all times. He is, in the words of Karl
Luckert,an "archaicall person"(7). To whatever degree satire is to be
found in trickstertales, it is to be found in this fact. And so Tricksteris
marginalin anothersense:his foolishbehaviorsets by negative example
the marginswe must not pass, and our laughterlays the fences at this
frontier.Although the humor of the tales is aimed at the protagonist,it
is also a warning against imitating his ridiculous excesses, not that it
does much good, for we share timelessly, ineradicably some of
Trickster'sinevitableabsurdityand fall prey repeatedlyto many of the
same vices with consequences similar to those that befall him. As
Radinconcludes, "Ifwe laugh at him, he grins at us. What happens to
him happens to us" (169).
But there is more to Trickster'smarginalitythan the surveying of
moral and social boundaries and laughter at one who transgresses
them. Trickster also defines in many ways the limits and nature of our
humanity, even while we laugh at him. For example, his paradoxical
character is sometimes nothing less than a cartoon of our own para-
doxical confrontation with our mortality. Never mind that unlike us
he-immortal mortal-walks away laughing from his own brushes
with mortality (his or another's) or that he somehow is repeatedly
resurrected from various deaths to play the fool another day in another
story; psychologically, he is mortal through and through. He can be
simultaneously absurdly myopic and pathetic. In the story Ramsey
titles "The Girl Who Married A Ghost," for example, the trickster Blue
Jay is killed in a prairie fire when returning home from visiting his
sister in the land of the dead. Returning among the ghosts, now as one
of them, Blue Jay continues his high jinks, refusing to believe in the
possibility of his own death (Coyote 161-65). Even in our amusement,
however, we must feel a touch of pity for such blindness which fails to
accept its own mortality, but we also recognize perhaps that it is self-
pity we feel which turns the laughter on ourselves. In "Coyote In Love
With a Star," Coyote is quite human in his tenacity, even if the desired
one is a being beyond reasonable mortal desire. And when the star
takes him into the sky with her, only to let him tumble to earth, we
recognize that he has gotten his comeuppance once more for reaching
beyond his limits, but with the acknowledgment that there is a twinge
of regret that there must be such limits and that we must suffer
because of them (Coyote 210-11). And finally, in "Coyote and the
Shadow People," Coyote-failing to retrieve his wife from the land of
the dead because as always his impatience makes following directions
and self-discipline impossible-touches us nevertheless, for his lack of
restraint grows from his all too human desire for his wife (Coyote 33-
37).
26 FRANCHOT BALLINGER

To sum up then, the European picaro's marginality is largely a

matter of socially imposed definition; he is delimited by the codes and
categories of his society. The picaro's fictional creator turns his character,
this marginalia, into a satirical gloss on that corrupt society. Given
these qualities, there is a disquieting mixture of cynicism and idealism
in many stories of the European picaresque tradition. The Native
American trickster, on the other hand, is inherently a marginal charac-
ter; he is what all are at one time or another and what some are all the
time, unsocialized or asocial humankind. The call and response of his
undisciplined egocentricity and weak-willed flesh and our answering
laughter define the psychic-moral limits and the nature of our humanity.
The parody and paradox of trickster tales create laughter that is
neither cynical nor idealistic, but rather cautionary and realistic in its
expectations for man.
In a general way, the comic treatment of the picaro's and the
trickster's marginality as it relates to their fictional worlds and the
moral worlds of their audiences appears to have at least one thing in
common: in both we seem to experience what is generally termed
ambiguity. In the picaresque tradition, this ambiguity is related to the
interplay between fictional style and Euro-American moral categories.5
Early picaresque novels were often ambiguous in tone because of
the conflict between the author's moral aims and the dictates of classi-
cal style. In such works as Roig's Lo Spill and Aleman's Guzman de
Alfareche, the author's intentions are ostensibly moral, yet scenes of
immorality are conveyed with a comic delectation that seems almost
to negate any possibility of moral edification. Such ambiguity is a
result of a doctrinaire adherence to the classical separation of styles in
which the treatment of everyday low life subjects-whether social
class, occupation or actions in real places-required the "low" style, in
effect a comic style. Thus by definition the exploits of the low-born
picaro on the fringes of society had to be treated comically. Having
become part of the literary convention, this tendency to portray with
diverting gusto the bawdier and more ribald aspects of the picaro's life
continued. However, in the picaresque novel the life of "sin" is often
more entertaining than the morality recommended to us. When we
consider this stylistic convention in the context of the picaresque
novel's traditional first person point of view, the ambiguity is intensi-
fied. Speaking in retrospect, the narrator recounts frankly, entertain-
ingly, his disreputable past. On the one hand, the narrator's adventures,
moral freedom and candor are attractive to the reader. On the other
hand, the narrator seems "split between an experiencing 'I' [an 'I' still
relishing its past] and a narrating 'I' [one ostensibly speaking from
conversion]." There is a "radical estrangement between inner and
outer man" so that his confession seems untrustworthy, "lurid,
THE PICARO AND THE TRICKSTER 27

voyeuristic" (Babcock-Abrahams, Liberty's 110). The tone of the con-

fessions hardly seems appropriate for the born-again social sinner the
narrator often represents himself to be.
In both early and more recent picaresque novels, another central
cause of ambiguity is the picaro's inversion of values. His life turns
society's conventional moral categories topsy turvy so that the
utility, if not the validity, of such distinctions becomes a matter of
debate. In El Buscon,for example,evil is initiallyequated with unreality
and deception with the real and normal. But... the reality that young
Pablos confronts is so grotesque and deformed that he can only cope
with this evil by assuming a role which is not a true one, by opting for
unreality....Throughthis nondisjunctionQuevado raisesthe moraland
metaphysical question, "Whatdoes it mean to choose unreality with
one's eyes open?"(Babcock-Abrahams, Liberty's 110)

Similarly, Lazarillo de Tormes must adopt deception in order to sur-

vive his master's cruelty. A more familiar example for most American
readers of the picaro adopting unreality as reality (although in this
case unwittingly) and the further inversion of values is Huck Finn,
with his "sound heart" and "deformed conscience," who in his acts of
intrinsic goodness makes himself, society's criminal, into an inadvertent
hero, in the process revealing the moral blindness of even those he
loves and admires most. Such inversions join with the reader's per-
ception that the picaro's "natural," perhaps even initially innocent,
values seem more authentic than those of the reader's society. In those
picaresque novels where the hero is somehow reintegrated into soci-
ety, thus apparently confirming the reader's social and moral order,
we might feel even that something valuable has been lost to the picaro
and his society. Still, in the picaro's inversion of values, that life the
reader lives is stripped and shown to be false. At any rate, its values
are no longer so clearly defined and acceptable. All of this, of course, is
part of the author's tactic of satirical questioning. But the picaro
threatens our orderly world as he leads us to the suspicion that our
moral categories are wrong because we have misconstrued reality and
the nature of good.
Much of the ambiguity of the picaresque novel is due then to the
ambivalence of both creators and audiences toward this protagonist
who is at the same time an attractive free spirit and a threat to the
moral and social order to which all outside the novel subscribe. The
picaro's life is one "that the social fabric can't survive without disin-
tegration" (Babcock-Abrahams, Tolerated 154). Thus the picaro
stimulates an uneasy polarization of values. But Euro-American,
Christian culture survives by clear definition of categories. Indeed, the
entire Christian conception of history-individual and cosmic-as a
28 FRANCHOT BALLINGER

struggle against the evil empire demands such definition. As Stanley

Diamond points out, two works central to the Euro-American and
Christian world view, the BookofJoband Plato's Republic,are bent "upon
denying human ambivalence and social ambiguity" (xii-xiii). Miroslav
Holub notes the same tendency in Christian culture in his poem, "The
Last Judgement":

In the landscape of chaos

one-way streets
are a real relief.
In the landscape of extinction
precision is more than godliness. (142-44)

But, again, the marginal picaro creates ambiguity in a society that,

like Othello, cannot endure ambiguity. To complicate matters more,
the picaro himself sometimes displays ambivalence about the mar-
ginality of his or her life, for even while living at the fringes of society,
the picaro may pursue many of the same values as society and re-
peatedly attempt accommodation, even if in some cases that means
accepting what is most unsavory in society. Thus Gil Blas, the product
of a respectable environment to begin with, ends up finally adopting
the ideals of the eighteenth-century gentleman (Parker, 121-22). Moll
Flanders achieves final gentility, although in the process losing much
of herself (Michie 75-92). And even Huck Finn, although he intends to
light out for the Territory, is still burdened by the baggage of his
society's definitions. Finally, however, the picaro's society dominates,
and one sometimes has the sense of having witnessed nothing more
than a rite de passage to respectability. At the end of his journey, the
picaro may appear to be, or may be in fact, unrepentantly at odds with
society, but nevertheless submits to its rule. Tom Jones, for example, if
we can classify him as a picaro, though essentially unchanged and
winking every inch of the way, is brought back into the fold. Regard-
less of whatever affection for and imaginative identification with the
picaro the reader might feel, the culture which gave the picaro birth
demands such resolution, which is dramatized in the kinds of closure
the picaresque novel uses. Babcock-Abrahams identifies three alter-
native endings for picaresque novels (Liberty's 111). The first two,
marriage and punishment, including death, dramatize society's last
word and the protagonist's integration. Gil Bias and Guzman provide
examples of such closure. The third, a "to be continued" ending leaves
matters somewhat more indecisive, as in El Buscon. (However, I be-
lieve that even in many of these there is evidence of moral closure.)
In one way or another, then, at the conclusion of the picaresque
novel, its protagonist often lives less or not at all on the margin.
THE PICARO AND THE TRICKSTER 29

Trickster, on the other hand, remains structurally and mythically

marginal, "exploit[s] and make[s] permanent the liminal state of be-
ing," as Babcock-Abrahams says in another context (Liberty's 105).
Except for some of those exasperating and long bewildering cases where
Trickster makes a pitch at the last to be a culture hero, he survives only
in a timeless irremediable marginality. This condition is reinforced by
the absence of closure in most collections of trickster stories.6 Of course,
the conditions of the oral tradition contribute to the absence of closure,
just as the linearity of the literate tradition of which the picaresque
novel is a part contributes to closure. Still the oral tradition does not
preclude closure, as many stories demonstrate. There seems to be a
kind of M6bius strip continuity about trickster cycles in the way that
episodes can he told sequentially or picked up at any point in Trickster's
career. This is appropriate for the kind of indeterminacy that Trickster's
marginality represents.
While "ambiguity" is the word found most frequently in discussions
of Trickster's and the picaro's marginality, the truth of the matter is
that, while we might use the same term for both, by no means are we
talking about the same kind of character.
As I've shown above, the ambiguity which attaches to the picaro is
largely an effect of the society with which he is at odds. He is marginal
because society classifies him as such. Rather than a tolerance for his
behavior, society asserts a kind of control by classifying him, or more
accurately, by denying him a place in any of its classes, hence making
him marginal. Still, that society admiringly and enviously glances
from the corner of the eye at the picaro's apparent freedom and joyous
existence, which as stated above often spring from more authentic
moral sources than society's values. This ambivalence generates a
confusion in the beholder, a state of mind that is transferred to the
beheld. Most of the ambiguity of the picaro, then, is in the eyes of
society. It has little to do with the nature of the picaro himself.
What we call ambiguity in Trickster, on the other hand, is part and
parcel of the character himself. Mircea Eliade capsulizes the Native
American trickster as "both intelligent and stupid, near the gods by his
'primordiality' and his powers, but even nearer men by his gluttonous
hunger, his exorbitant sexuality, and his amorality" (157). To be sure,
there is often an ambivalencesuggested in Native American attitudes
toward Trickster. For instance, many (but not all) regard Trickster
figures with mixed awe and amusement. When the Anishinabe listeners
laughed at a trickster story, the story teller would interrupt himself to
say, "Nanibozhu is also smiling and pleased because his great exploits
are admired" (Chamberlin 195). Such irony points up the mixed na-
ture of the Native American attitude. But the ambivalence is a re-
sponse to what Trickster represents-that is, he indeed elicits am-
30 FRANCHOT BALLINGER

bivalence-rather than a confusion of moral judgement in the audi-

ence.
One might argue that we can use such terms as ambivalenceand
ambiguity in reference to Trickster only by applying Euro-American,
especially Christian, moral assumptions. The denotative and connota-
tive limitations of one culture's terms applied to another people's
experiences and perceptions certainly raises that specter, as do our
continued and repeatedly inconclusive attempts to arrive at some
analytical and classificatory grasping of Trickster. We may be at-
tempting for Trickster what the picaro's society accomplishes for him:
prescription by taxonomy.
Frequently, the discussion of Trickster's ambiguity is couched in the
classificatory terms of dualism. Radin, for instance, trying to delineate
the multifarious personality and role of Trickster is finally reduced to
simply listing dualisms: "He became and remained everything to
every man-god, animal, human being, hero, buffoon, he who was
before good and evil, denier, affirmer, destroyer and creator" (169).
Levi-Strauss, in a well-known characterization of Trickster, adopts a
different strategy toward the dualistic when he calls Trickstera mediator
who "occupies a position halfway between two polar terms" and who
therefore "must retain something of that duality-namely an am-
biguous and equivocal character" (441). No doubt, Trickster's con-
trariness encourages such attention to dualities. We find further en-
couragement in noting the prominence of various dualisms in Native
American society and ceremonialism: moieties such as Winter and
Summer People, religious dualities, Sun Father and Earth Mother,
male rain and female rain, tree and rock. Still, focussing on contraries
as dualism and taking our lead from ceremonialism when observing
Trickster may be, arguably, one reason for our difficulties with com-
prehending him. Perhaps we are looking with the wrong eyes.
In ceremony and social structure, the goal is to balance eternal
forces and cosmic dualisms, or at other times to reinforce their
complementarity, perhaps even to mediate them, but as Eliade says in
another context, "what is true in eternity is not necessarily true in
time" (167). We might rephrase this for Trickster as what is true in
ceremony is not necessarily true in the exigencies of the human con-
dition. The contrast here is between the promise of ritual to harmonize
humanity with the order of cosmic life and the actualities of human
experience. Coyote's role as marplot in the Maidu creation myth, as in
others, reminds us that the grand design of the gods is not always of an
appropriately human dimension, and it is Coyote who establishes the
human realities of earthly life (Loeb 467-93). In other myths and
ceremony, dualism (along with its foliation in the sacred directions) is
the conceptual stuff of more than one model of cosmic order, to be
THE PICARO AND THE TRICKSTER 31

sure, but these models must compete existentially with the concrete,
daily experience of paradox, precariousness and the threat of disorder.
The truth is that the opposing forces of life aren't always and can't
always be balanced. There are times when even the boundaries of the
sacred directions seem inadequate to contain experience. There are
finally times when life asserts itself over ritual. Trickster reminds us of
all this by making us laugh at the patness of our beliefs. Ritual may be
a model of belief; Trickster, on the other hand, is a comic dramatization
of experience flying in the face of ritual. This is not to argue, as I believe
Ricketts essentially does, that Native Americans were or are a sort of
aboriginal humanists. At the same time, however, we should not
assume that Native Americans were so enraptured by ritual and the
hierophanies of their spiritual lives that they were anesthetized to
other levels of experience. Rather, like the sacred clowns (whom we'll
look at briefly later) Trickster reminds us (whether in mythic or non-
mythic story) that there is another reality which must be taken into
creative account along with the sacred, timeless, cosmic reality: that is,
the human reality of the paradoxical here and now. (Babcock-Abraham
calls Trickster "paradox personified," Tolerated 148.) It is no coinci-
dence that, of all the mythic figures of various tribes, Trickster is the
one shown by the oral tradition to be wandering about experiencing
the twentieth century.
More simply, and less conjecturally, it may be that we see in the
dualistic approach to Trickster the influence of what Luckert calls "the
matter/spirit dichotomy of the Indo-European worldview. Once an
ontology has been cut into opposing halves, and once the parts have in
a given language been named, speakers of that language will thence-
forth have great difficulty thinking about that which was once an
undivided whole" (4). In a similar vein, Melville Jacobs writes, "Ele-
ments that feel contradictory in Western Civilization were fused in
normal Chinook personalities" (151). If Trickster seems to mediate
between two poles only, if he seems a bundle of dualities, these
appearances may be a consequence of our own misfiring perceptions.
In our efforts to know something about Trickster, it might be best to
forget our customary use of ambiguity as something with two or more
meanings which, our culture biases tell us, must be resolved or "medi-
ated" somehow. For Trickster there can never be resolution, no matter
how many Euro-American scholars put their shoulders to the wheel.
Like a subtatomic particle, Trickster never allows final definition of
time, place and character. He never settles or shapes himself so as to
allow closure, either fictional or moral. We may believe that we have
somehow fixed him at one moment, but if we look from another angle,
he's gone; if we ask a different question, we get a different answer
which, we must confess, is conterminus with the first. It may be that
32 FRANCHOT BALLINGER

from the Native American view, Trickster is marginal not only in the
sense that he refuses to abide by human moral and behavioral categories
but also in the sense that he eludes all attempts to place him within the
categories of definition and classification (especially in "either/or" or
"both" terms). His "liminality" is inevitable, for he can never come in
from the periphery, never allow himself stasis. Among the Dakotas,
stories about the trickster Ikto traditionally ended with "And from
then on, who knows where Ikto went next?" (Deloria 8). If we non-
Native Americans are going to write and talk of Trickster's ambiguity,
it might be well to remember-paradoxical though it seems-the
term's English etymology: ambigere,from the Latin, to wander about.
Trickster wanders beyond conventional order and among the many
poles of the real world.
To be sure, Euro-American picaros roam in their adventures, as do
tribal tricksters from elsewhere, but in few of their stories is the liminal
man's wandering as emphatic and as dominant a theme as in the
Native American's adventures. Between villages, in the non-human
realm throughout the wilderness-the Native American Trickster is
the quintessential wanderer. We need only recall formulaic closings to
stories, like that of the Dakotas above, or the equally formulaic open-
ings to trickster episodes ("Coyote was going there") to understand
the truth of this statement. And where Trickster wanders there is a
mosaic of values and truths to experience, just as the Navaho patient's
symbolic journey in a sing exposes him to the sources of complex
universal spiritual powers. It is best to think of Trickster not as one
who mediates bivalence (any stay-at-home can do this) but rather as
one whose wanderings reveal to us multivalence, the "many-sidedness
of what is."7 Similarly, Trickster's power to transform himself rein-
forces our perceptions of him as an image of many-sidedness .
One brief example must suffice in explanation. The following epi-
sode is from the Gros Ventre oral tradition, but can be found in other
versions among other tribes. "Nixant was traveling. As he went, he
heard the noise of a sundance." Searching about for the source of the
sounds, he discovers mice holding a dance in an elk skull. Commanding
the hole through which he looked to enlarge, he puts his head in the
skull, scattering the mice in the process, and becomes stuck in the
skull. Unable to see, he stumbles off, bumping into trees (which
identify themselves for him, thereby revealing that he is getting closer
to the river) until he finally falls into the river. As he floats toward a
camp, he frightens swimmers who think that he is a bax'aan (water
monster). When Nixant says, "I allow only girls to get me," two girls
wade in and catch the skull by the horns and pull him to shore. He
grabs one of the girls and begins to have sex with her. Now aware of
his identity, everyone else runs back to camp spreading the alarm that
THEPICAROAND THETRICKSITER 33

Nixant is raping a virgin. The girl's mother runs to where Tricksteris

violating the girl and begins pummeling him with a club. He merely
laughs, proclaimingthat the blows make him thrustinto the girl more
vigorously and that "theplace where you can kill me is in the middle
of my head."The woman strikesthere,breakingthe skull. Nixant runs
off pursued by all the women (Kroeber68-69).
In this single episode, Tricksteraccomplishesthe following:

1. points up the moralthattherearelimitationsto what a particular

person can do and that some behavior isn't appropriatefor a
person (a large person shouldn't stick his head into a small
hole);
2. warns against abusing one's powers for inappropriateand idle
ends;
3. as a buffoon able to wield magic, blurs the boundariesbetween
profane behavior and a shaman's sacred powers (which can be
its own kind of sacredness,as in the behavior of ceremonial
clowns);
4. teaches some naturalhistory regardingwater-loving trees;
5. ridicules human gullibility;
6. but at the same time, by inversion, reminds us that the mythic
world interpenetratesthe world of human experience;
7. while also burlesquing stories of sexual union between mythic
creaturesand humans;
8. parodies ritualistic and other restrictions placed on human
contactwith spirits;
9. takes advantage of human belief to indulge his inordinate
sexuality;
10. and, of course, amuses us.

Experience,indeed, has many-sides and is a mosaic of values, not all of

which fit the others quite neatly enough to satisfy the Euro-American
thrust to certainty.
An essential difference, then, between the Euro-Americanpicaro
and the Native Americantricksterseems to be that the lattersuggests
a higher tolerance for the indeterminate character of multi-valent
reality, as representedby Trickster'sambiguity,that is, wandering.
Babcock-Abrahamsargues that Tricksterderives his power from
his "ability to live interstitially"(Tolerated148). Such a description
reminds us, of course, that Tricksteris the derelict of codified and
conventionalized experience. But it may be closer to the truth to say
thathe derives his power fromwandering in paradoxicalrealityrather
than from living in the cracksof classificationwhere all the life can be
squeezed from him. Saying that he lives interstitiallygives too much
34 FRANCHOT BALLINGER

to the classifications, for Trickster, like the picaro, is still at the mercy
of moral parsings. Rather, say that, as he travels defying the norms,
Trickster swallows all, classifications and cracks, in his ravenous and
extravagant appetite for life. What makes Trickstermythically powerful
is that he embodies all, reveals all raw reality. He has the power of
reality in his hands, prodigal though he is, for like the sacred center, all
flows into him and in his travels he touches all directions.
Like any traveller, Trickster crosses boundaries, in his case from
sheer self-indulgence. Often, he also wanders in an attempt to escape
the consequences of that self-indulgence and the transgressions it
leads to. And thus he often finds himself in circumstances ripe for new
transgressions. His rule-breaking and common-sense-defying antics
on his journeys keep him beyond the pale of conventional social and
even natural order, and so his wandering confirms his marginality.
Laura Makarius argues that Trickster's mythic power derives from
such transgressions: he is the "magician violator of taboos," the
"transgressor for the good of all," for his violations shape the world
and bring power to man (Crime 671).
As in the picaresque novels, Trickster's transgressions involve the
inversion of accepted codes and categories, but in the trickster tales the
inversions are often crucial to his shaping the worlds we live in, both
natural and social. Repeatedly, Trickster's whims and caprices, his
ungoverned appetites, his psychic disorder, lead to power, control
and order regardless of his motive. His higgledy-piggledy way of
going about things leads Ramsey (following Levi-Strauss) to call
Trickster bricoleur,and his creation a bricolage,a piece of do-it-yourself
work (Reading 41). Not a skilled craftsman, Trickster inverts all the
customary rules in his haste to realize his designs, or simply on an
improvisatory whim, and ends up with a new scheme of things.
Hence, the scatalogical becomes the creative in one version of
Nanibozhu's creation of the earth, for he makes earth to escape his
own feces floating in the Deluge. In a Wasco tale, Trickster betrays his
hunting partners, the wolves, by stranding them in the sky where they
become part of the constellation we call the Big Dipper. Treachery,
always a threat of disorder, ends in natural order. In a Navaho story
(with variations in other tribes), the First People throw a hide scraper
into the water, saying that if it floats people will not die. Coyote
capriciously throws a stone which, sinking, negates the first act and
guarantees that there will be death. In response to the People's anger,
he rationalizes that the world would get too crowded without death,
and a caprice rationalized becomes part of the natural order.
But Trickster does more. As he violates the rules, as he gives free
rein to his multifarious personality, and as he thus shapes the world,
he also shapes human perception. The most significant creative power
THEPICAROAND THETRICKSTLER5 35

he brings to humanityis vision, of the world and of self. His inversions

realize the world and then establish the rich potential for human
action in that world. Tricksterbecomes a model of human possibility:
"If[Ma'i]did not do all those things [thegood, the foolish, the terrible],
then those things would not be possible in the world,"Yellowmantold
Toelken (8). Trickster frees man from the imaginative and moral
impoverishment attending enslavement to codified and solidified
thinking. Moreover,what is most significant about Coyote, Blue Jay,
Raven, Wakdjunkaga,et al. in their trickster (as opposed to their
transformer and social marauder) roles is that they manifest the
trickinessof reality, whether naturalor social, and demonstratehow
easily we aretakenin by our perceptions.In "TheCrimeof Manabozo,"
Laura Makarius states that the characteris rightly called Trickster
because he "practicesthe essential trickof magical violation of taboo"
(669). In this present context, I might also add that he practices the
essential trickof violation of what appears-to-be.
In this respect,Tricksteris the fictionalcounterpartof the ceremonial
sacredclowns.8BarbaraTedlockshows that in theircontraryand rule-
breaking antics Native Americanclowns open people to "immediate
experienceand so liberatehumans from conventionalnotions of what
is sacred and dangerous in the religious ceremonies of men." They
reveal creative variationsby transcendingconventional categories of
thinking and morality.In their trickster-likebuffoonery,for instance,
Navaho and Pueblo clowns defy the formal outlines of ritualism and
contributeto the creative power of the ceremony (105-11and Gill 73-
78). Further,their ugly, poor, bedraggled appearancebelies the terri-
fying power they possess.
Similarly, the contrary behavior of the Heyoka, behavior which
defies all definitions of "commonsense," conceals the fatal courage
they possess. Finally,because the first koshariof Acoma was afraidof
nothing and accepted nothing as sacred,he was allowed to be every-
where (Tedlock 110). Like these clowns, ubiquitous, traveling Trick-
sterbreaksthe rulesthroughcontrarybehavior-his foolishnessinitially
masking his power-and discloses for us the limits of perceived cat-
egories and the possibility of creative action even in a sometimes
threateningworld.
By contrast,because marginalityis not his but ratheris assigned to
him and is of a different sort from Trickster's,the Euro-American
picarocan never be truly mythic,if we mean by mythic that which is a
creativemodel of the world and of value (as Trickstermost assuredly
is in many ways). Thepicarochallengessocietyand offersthe possibility
of satiric correction,but beyond that he doesn't matter.He embodies
no statementsaboutthe people's physicalor psychic origins.He reacts
to social reality but creates nothing. He doesn't define limits, but is
36 FRANCHOT BALLINGER

ratherdefined and perceivedthroughthe limits his society has already

established. He can't be said to be a negative illustration of proper
value or behavior, for the point of his story is that the society he
challenges already provides its own negative examples. Ratherthan
mediating, the power that Levi-Straussclaims for Trickster,the picaro
himself is caught in a dualisticconfrontationbetween what may be his
authenticvalues and those of the hypocriticalsociety that judges him.
He provides no undeniable vision of things as they are. And finally,
while his freedom may be tempting, it serves no power, no ends but
his own; nothing changes because of that freedom.
It is interesting that while the European folk tradition contains
trickstersand stories aboutthem, none in the modem era achieved the
popularity and promise of the Native American trickster.Certainly,
none has the mythic significance of the North American character.
None even exists with culturally specific identities as do Native
American tricksters(and many other world tribal tricksters).To be
sure, the picaro may he the literarydescendent of the folk tradition's
tricksters,but he is no chip off the old block;the blood line has thinned
considerably. He is the victim of the selective moral-ontological
breeding attending the Western Judaeo-Christiansearch for moral
certitude noted earlier in this paper. On the other hand, Trickster's
blood is thick and vigorous yet, not only in himself, it would seem, but
perhaps in other charactersin the Native American oral heritage.
JaroldRamsey sees Tricksteras "conceptuallycentral"to native lit-
erature,as "the one native type whose protean nature seems capable
of subsuming all other possible types sooner or later"(Reading25). It
is possible one can see the family resemblancein such personages of
the Native American oral tradition as the Navaho chantway heroes,
the various Twin Heroes (the Zuni Ahayutta, the Kiowa Half-Boys,
and Lodge-Boyand Thrown-Away)and others.But even without his
relatives,Tricksterstands as powerful mythic testimony to the Native
American's acknowledgment of the many-sidedness of human expe-
rience.

Notes
1. Some of the points I make about the Native American trickster in this paper
could be made as well for tricksters of other oral traditions. I have tried,
however, to emphasize those qualities which I believe to be unique to the
American trickster. At this point, I should also note that throughout this paper I
refer to Trickster in the masculine. There are relatively few female tricksters in
the Native American oral tradition, just as there are relatively few female
picaros in the Western tradition. For this reason, I have chosen masculine
references over more awkward constructions.
2. The relationship between the picaro's character and social status is often part of
THEPICAROAND THETRICKSI'ER 37

the author's judgement of society. For complete treatments of such issues and
the conventions of the picaresque novel see Christine Whitbourne's Knavesand
Swindlers:Essays on the PicaresqueNovel in Europewhich has directed much that
I say about the picaro in this paper.
3. Speaking of humor in Nez Perce mythology, Dell Skeels makes a point that may
be true of most trickster tales as well. Conscious satire is unusual, he says, no
doubt because the "timeless quality" of mythology obviates its use for satirizing
a present person, group or situation (62).
4. In Zuni Mythology, Ruth Benedict refers to a Bungling Host tale which makes
this point quite explicitly. Coyote tries to imitate Badger's sword swallowing
trick. (The Badger clan was associated with the Lewekwe medicine society
which practiced this trick.) When Coyote fails, cutting himself and bleeding,
Badger says, "you don't belong to Lewekwe and you can't do that" (307-8).
5. In the following discussion of the picaro, space requires that I focus on the
tradition as a whole. I cannot treat variations or exceptions to my main points. In
any event, it appears that most of the possible exceptions are contemporary
works which might be only picaresque influenced and not strictly speaking part
of the tradition. Parts of the following paragraph are based on Parker (121-22)
and Christine Whitbourne, "Moral Ambiguity in the Spanish Tradition" (2-5).
6. A possible exception might be Blowsnake's Trickster cycle as recorded by
Radin, but as in other respects, here too the cycle is suspect.
7. Robert Pelton has preceded me in using the term "multivalence" to express the
concept of reality's many-sidedness which a trickster embodies, in The Trickster
in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Luckert expresses
something of the same idea in saying that the Navaho Coyote roams across
many status levels (10).
8. Makarius calls the sacred clown the "earthly counterpart" of Trickster ("Ritual
Clowns and Symbolic Behavior" (46-47).

Theearlyresearch for thisarticleandtheoriginalpresentation

fromwhich
thearticlewas developedwereundertaken in theSummerof 1983 duringA.
LaVonneRuoffsNEH Seminaron AmericanIndianLiteratures. My thanks
to the National Endowmentfor the Humanitiesfor its supportand to
ProfessorRuofffor hergenerousandhelpfuldirection.
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