$l1I' THI YOU
217
Although the figure in black face looks suspiciously homegrown,
Western, and Calvinist to me, Hyman identifies it as being related
to an archtypical trickster figure, originating in Mrica. Without argu–
ing the point I shall say only that it
is
a trickster; its adjustment
to the contours of "white" symbolic needs is far more intriguing
than its alleged origins, for it tells us something of the operation of
American values as modulated by folklore and literature. Weare
back once more to questions of order and chaos; illusion and reality,
nonentity and identity.
The trickster, according to Karl Kerenyi (in a commentary in–
cluded in Paul Radin's study,
The Trickster),
represents a personi–
fication of the body
"which is . . . never wholly subdued, ruled by lust and hunger, forever
running into pain and injury, cunning and stupid
in
action. Disorder be–
longing to the totality of life ... the spirit of this disorder is the trickster.
His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his myth–
ology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and to
make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is
permitted, an experience of what is not permitted...."
But ours
is
no archaic society (although its archaic elements
exert far more influence in our lives than we care to admit), and it
is
an ironic reversal that, in what
is
regarded as the most "open"
society in the world, the license of the black trickster figure is lim–
ited by the rigidities of racial attitudes, by political expediencies, and
by the guilt bound up with the white compulsion to identify with the
ever present man of flesh and blood whose irremediable features have
been expropriated for "immoral" purposes. Hyman, incidentally,
would have found in Louis Armstrong a much better example of the
trickster, his medium being music rather than words and pantomime.
Armstrong's clownish license and intoxicating powers are almost
Elizabethan; he takes liberties with kings, queens, and presidents;
emphasizes the physicality of his music with sweat, spittle, and facial
contortions; he performs the magical feat of making romantic melody
issue from a throat of gravel; and some few years ago was recom–
mending to all and sundry his personal physic, "Pluto Water," as a
purging way to health, happiness, and international peace.
When the white man steps behind the mask of the trickster his
freedom
is
circumscribed by the fear that he
is
not simply miming a
