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Comment
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(11/21/05 11:10 am)
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contemporary Trickster fiction
I'm making a list of contemporary fiction (for either adults or young adults) inspired in some way by Trickster myths and folk tales. Does anyone here know of other titles to add...?
I'm looking for novels, novellas, and short story collections (but not individual short stories)...
Here's the list so far:
Adolph F. Badelier, The Delight Makers
J.P. Briggs, Trickster Tales
Emma Bull, War for the Oaks
Charles de Lint, Someplace to Be Flying
Charles de Lint, Medicine Road
Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, The Trickster and the Troll
Muriel Gray, The Trickster
Zora Greenhalgh, Contrarywise
Zora Greenhalgh, Trickster’s Touch
Beth Hilgartner, Colors in the Dreamweaver’s Loom
Beth Hilgartner, The Feast of the Trickster
Kij Johnson, Fox Woman
Thomas King, One Good Story, That One
Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water
Margaret Mahey, The Tricksters
Fritz Leiber, Swords in the Mist: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue
Louis Owens, Bone Game
Tamora Pierce, Trickster’s Choice
Tamora Pierce, Trickster’s Queen
Susan Power, The Grass Dancer
Ellen Steiber, The Shadow of the Fox
Ellen Steiber, “The Fox Wife” (novella, published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears)
Midori Snyder, The Flight of Michael McBride
Midori Snyder, Hannah’s Garden
Gerald Vizenor, Chancers
Gerald Vizenor, “Heartlines” (novella, published in Native American Literature, An Anthology)
Terri Windling, The Wood Wife
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(11/21/05 11:44 am)
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Re: contemporary Trickster fiction
Hi Terri,
I'm so glad to see you posting again! Am I stating the obvious in suggesting Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys?
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Helen J Pilinovsky
Registered User
(11/21/05 5:54 pm)
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Re: contemporary Trickster fiction
Jack Vance's Lyonesse series contains very tricksy fairies: also, Patricia McKillips's Brume in In the Forests of Serre.
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Random
Registered User
(11/21/05 7:56 pm)
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Trickster books
Perhaps Diana Wynne Jones' Eight Days of Luke? I picked it up at a booksale recently, but it's been a long time since I read it. I believe it fits the theme, though.
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Erica Carlson
Registered User
(11/22/05 12:37 am)
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Re: Trickster books
I think of Margaret Atwood's Robber Bride as a trickster tale.
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(11/22/05 7:45 am)
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Re: Trickster books
How about Julius Lester's The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, and More Tales of Uncle Remus: Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit, His Friends, Enemies, and Others.
Best,
Alice
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jane
Unregistered User
(11/24/05 10:23 am)
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trickster collection
There is a wonderful collection of retold trickster stories called THE GUIZER and I am blanking on the author, but he is a very well known British children's book writer.
Jane
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Heidi Anne Heiner
ezOP
(11/24/05 10:27 am)
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Re: trickster collection
The Guizer: A book of fools by Alan Garner
Heidi
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darklingthrush
Registered User
(11/25/05 1:36 pm)
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Re: trickster collection
I haven't picked it up yet...but I do think Christopher Moore's Coyote Blue may also be a contemporary trickster tale.
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(11/26/05 2:15 am)
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Re: trickster collection
Coyote Blue is already on the list, but thanks for the other suggestions. (Good lord, how could I forget Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys???)
Here are a few others I've come up with:
Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
Lisa Lenard-Cook, Coyote Morning
Felicity Savage, Ever: Trickster in the Ashes
Stephanie Spinner, Quiver
Ellen Steiber, A Rumor of Gems
Helen, you mentioned McKillip's Brume in The Forests of Serre, who is a Baba Yaga figure. Do you consider Baba Yaga a trickster? That one is a tough call for me, so I'm curious what your opinion is.
Edited by: Terri Windling at: 11/26/05 2:19 am
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Helen J Pilinovsky
Registered User
(11/26/05 9:01 am)
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Re: trickster collection
Baba Yaga is ambiguous enough that she fits pretty much all of the functions of the fairy tale at one point or another ... but, that said, I'd put "trickster" at the forefront of her character, even before "villain". In so many of the tales which concern her, she presents the protagonist with challenges which them dictate the form her actions will take for the rest of the story ... a textbook example of trickster behavior to my mind.
As I was thinking about this, it occured to me that the same is true of the majority of Russian folk characters - the leshii, the vodanoi, the domovik, all possess reputations for playing pranks. The ones who don't - Koschei the Deathless, the Firebird, etc. - are the ones who aren't associated with nature. Thinking over tales from other cultures, the same holds true. I mean, certainly, the "nobility" of fairy are just as likely to take their amusement from mortal discomfort, but in their cases it seems as much or more either the demands of honor or, well ... sadism ... as it is humor. With more "conventional" tricksters, the potential death or damage to the mortal victim (or the potential success of the mortal, for that matter) is a kind of a fringe benefit to the amusement that they derive. The best way that I can find to put it right now, I think, would be that the fairy tales creatures most aligned with nature and the folk are also those most aligned with "low culture" and crude humor. There's a paper in there, somewhere ...
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jane
Unregistered User
(11/27/05 6:59 am)
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Mood
Are you looking at tricksters who do tricks that SOMETIMES go awry and kill people or maim them or seaprate them from their property--Anansi, Br'er Rabbit, Loki, Raven etc. Or villains/devils who use trickery in order to ALWAYS kill people (like the Scottish water horse who stands around looking like a beautiful ownerless horse until you get on its back and it takes you into the nearest loch and drowns you.)
That's a huge difference.
Jane
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midori
snyder
Registered User
(11/27/05 7:20 pm)
ezSupporter
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Tricks versus tricksters
I'm with Jane on this question...I find it hard to think of Baba Yaga as a trickster...she presents challenges yes, but she duly bows to the hero or heroine when they succeed. Her role in the story is more about facilitating (or preventing!) a moment of transformation for the protagonists--which I think is why she must be ambigious to allow for such dialectical maneuvering.
But Trickster is so much more selfish, self absorbed...and functions much more to satisfy his immediate appetites--even when those appetites may temporarily kill him. I know we have culture hero tricksters...whose very acts seems to order and structure the world...but those events happen almost as a by product and rarely I think is an act that Trickster really thinks about before hand...he's usually after some sort of personal gain (the chief's daughter, an exceptional meal,) when he inadvertantly makes cosmic history.
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(11/28/05 7:16 am)
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Re: Tricks versus tricksters
I'm not going to try to put an absolute defintion on what is and isn't a Trickster -- not only because that's much too large a subject to tackle in a bulletin board post (or because better minds than mine have tried and failed!), but also because it's the nature of Trickster to break through boundaries and overturn definitions.
That said, I don't personally think that villainous characters who happen to be tricky are necessarily Trickster figures. A classic Trickster figure is a creature of paradox and duality, prone to causing harm with seemginly harmless tricks and, conversely, provoking acts of healing, salvation, or necessary transformation through tricks that seem initially destructive. Trickster is the holy fool, the sacred clown, the liar whose words uncover profound truth, "the darkness that shapes the light" as someone or another said (Lewis Hyde or Alan Garner, I think).
I'm not prone to putting Baba Yaga in that catagory myself, and none of the many books and papers I've read on Trickster have mentioned her in that context. She seems too self-aware, too deliberate in her actions, whereas Trickster tends to destroy things (or, conversely, save them) almost by accident; the outcome of the situation is usually the opposite of what he intended. He is a transgressor, rule-breaker, boundary-crosser, whereas Baba Yaga seems to operate very firmly within the rules, albeit rules of her own making...and to require that those who deal with her operate within those rules too.
Baba Yaga is certainly a dualistic character, however, and it would be interesting to read a paper that made a case for viewing her as a Trickster ... particularly since female Tricksters are few and far between.
Edited by: Terri Windling at: 11/28/05 7:24 am
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Helen J Pilinovsky
Registered User
(11/28/05 7:17 am)
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Re: Tricks versus tricksters
Very good points! Tricksters aren't my area, generally, so I may well have been presenting a surface reading (I'm also short on sleep and a bit punchy, unfotunately). The majority of the figures who I was thinking about *do* generally seem to be aiming for death in the course of their "tricks". Baba Yaga seems like a case apart, though (to me, anyway), simply because she is so ambiguous, occupying numerous positions on the continuum simultaneously: villain, helper, and occasionally, trickster; perhaps it's the interplay between the first two which makes the third into an inadvertant facet of her character. In McKillip's retelling, at least, that seems the element which is most heightened ...
... but I could be wrong. :)
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(11/28/05 10:56 am)
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Re: Tricks versus tricksters
Don't know anything about tricksters really, but thinking about this thread... do they have something to do with the place of the individual within the play of more powerful forces (of social rules etc.)?
I was thinking particularly of the (as far as I know) 20th century subgenre of war fiction in which little people made powerless/confused by vast global forces are able (or try) to claw back some sort of personal power through whatever means available. Good Soldier Sveik, Yossarian in Catch-22, Hawkeye in Mash.
I think Hunter S. Thompson (with different sorts of forces) is also kind of in this tradition.
Do these count as tricksters?
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catja1
Registered User
(11/28/05 3:43 pm)
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Re: contemporary Trickster fiction
There's also Canadian author Gail Anderson-Dargatz's wonderful The Cure for Death by Lightning, which features the darker side of Coyote.
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(11/29/05 12:25 am)
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Re: contemporary Trickster fiction
Divided Self: Tricksters are more ambiguous characters than the ones you've mentioned. Hawkeye, for instance, is a bit of a rascal but he's definitely one of the good guys, whereas Trickster is neither good nor bad, he falls outside the boundaries of morality. But certainly all comedians and jokesters have a touch of the trickster in them. And I could see a case being made for Hunter S. Thompson as a trickster of sorts...
I recommend Lewis Hyde's brilliant, entertaining book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art if you'd like to know more about tricksters.
Catja, thanks for reminding of The Cure for Death By Lightning -- a wonderful book, and I'd forgotten it entirely!
Edited by: Terri Windling at: 11/29/05 12:32 am
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(11/29/05 4:50 am)
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Re: contemporary Trickster fiction
Thanks very much for that.
I suppose part of what made me think of these is that if tricksters are morally ambiguous it begs the question of what moral lens we're looking through - and a lot of 20th century fiction employs lenses that are pretty ambiguous themselves, so what is amoral in one direction is moral/immoral in another.
Anyway, it just occurred to me, Blackadder is probably a better example of what I was trying to describe.
I'll shut up now, till I've read the book!
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(11/29/05 11:44 am)
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Re: contemporary Trickster fiction
'Just came across an interesting article looking at the Trickster
motifs in Christopher Moore's Coyote Blue. Here's the url
for anyone interested: www.trinity.edu/org/tricksters/TrixWay/current/Vol%202/Vol2_1/Ccreshaw.html
Does anyone know of any poetry collections that make use of Trickster myths in addition to the following?
Carolyn Dunn, Outfoxing Coyote
Peter Blue Cloud, Elderberry Flute Song
William Brandon, The Magic World: American Indian Songs and Poems
Ted Hughes, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow
Edited by: Terri Windling at: 11/29/05 11:53 am
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(11/29/05 11:52 am)
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Re: contemporary Trickster fiction
I also just discovered that Native American writer Gerald Vizenor (who works with Trickster imagery a lot) wrote a book called Griever: An American Monkey King in China, mixing Native American and Chinese mythology. Has anyone here read it? I'm going to track down a copy. I like Vizenor. His story "Oshkiwiinag: Heartlines on the Trickster Express,” which we reprinted in Year's Best Fantasy & Horror #10, is one of the best Trickster stories ever.
Here's a very Trickster-ish quote from Vizenor on the subject of Tricksters:
"Tricksters are real in stories but not in the flesh. Tricksters are not blood or material, but imagination. Tricksters are the kind of thought that raises hope, that heals, that cures, that cannot be traced. The power of a trickster would be diminished, even abolished, by human representations. Humans are not tricksters, but tricksters can be human. Tricksters are not moral but live forever in imagination. And the trickster is not immortal either. Tricksters liberate the mind, and they do so in a language game. Tricksters do not represent the real or the material. Tricksters are not alive in tribal imagination to prove theories of the social scientists. Tricksters have become anthropologists, but no anthropologist has ever understood a trickster. Tricksters have become anthropologists if only long enough to overturn their theories and turn them into cold @#%$. But tricksters are not moral or functional. Tricksters are not artifacts. Tricksters never prove culture or the absence of culture. Tricksters do not prove the values that we live by, nor do they prove or demonstrate the responses to domination by colonial democracies. Tricksters are not comsumables. Tricksters are not breakfast cereal. Tricksters are ethereal. Tricksters only exist in a comic sense between two people who take pleasure in a language game and imagination, a noetic liberation of the mind. . . ."
(from Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds: The Survival of American Indian Life in Story, History, and Spirit, ed. Mark A. Lindquist and Martin Zanger)
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