The Trickster Figure in American Literature

259 Pages·2013·2.184 MB·English

by  Winifred Morgan (auth.)

The Trickster Figure in
American Literature
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The Trickster Figure in
American Literature
Winifred Morgan
THE TRICKSTER FIGURE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Copyright © Winifred Morgan, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-34471-7
All rights reserved.
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Touch-up Man,” and “False Leads” from Pleasure Dome:
New and Collected Poems © 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Reprinted
by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, “ ‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster
and His Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11 (1974):
159–160. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-46615-3 ISBN 978-1-137-34472-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137344724
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morgan, Winifred, 1938–
The trickster figure in American literature / by Winifred Morgan.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. American literature—History and literature.
2. National characteristics, American, in literature.
3. Tricksters in literature. 4. Self-knowledge in literature. I. Title.
PS169.N35M67 2013
810.9(cid:2)355—dc23 2013018071
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments v ii
1 Introduction 1
2 African Americans and an Enduring Tradition 15
3 Coyotes and Others Striving for Balance 47
4 Trickster Seeking His Fortune 73
5 Heirs of the Monkey King 103
6 Rough Mischief, Irreverence, and the Fantastic 131
Conclusion 1 67
Appendix I: The Monkey King 171
Notes 175
Bibliography 229
Index 2 49
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Acknowledgments
I
thank the gracious library staff at Edgewood College who tracked
down everything I asked of them. I also am indebted to many friends
and colleagues, who have read, commented on, and criticized parts
or all of this text. I want to especially thank Andrea Byrum, Ashley
Byock, Binbin Fu, Lisa King, Jill Kirby, Lauren Lacey, Mary Paynter
and Larry Shanahan. The flaws are still mine, but due to my percep-
tive readers, they are fewer. I also thank Lisa Rivero for compiling the
index when I was too sick for the task.
C h a p t e r 1
Introduction
America is woven of many strands.
I would recognize and let them so remain.
Our fate is to become one and yet many.
This is not prophecy but description.
— Ralph Ellison 1
The Challenge
In 1952, before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, even before
Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954, a far-seeing Ralph
Ellison envisioned a United States of America where despite its flaws
and limitations, its all-too-different citizens worked to understand and
work with one another for the common good. His great novel, T he
Invisible Man , moved the nation closer to the future he predicted.2
Today, for all the dissonance surrounding the fact, the United States
of America is a multicultural, multiethnic nation. 3 Groups that were
once hidden or ignored minorities populate swathes of mid-American
small towns as well as large coastal cities, the traditional entry immi-
grant points into the country. Latinos live in Iowa and Georgia; sec-
ond-generation Vietnamese have settled into large areas of the Gulf
Coast; and Hmong and Somali immigrants have found a home in
Minneapolis. Most American Indians have at least some European-
American or African-American ancestors. A biracial man has been
elected president. Yet, since the United States is a nation made up of
many nations, the heterogeneous composition of its population as well
as its contradictory values inevitably still produce conflicts among its
citizens. Americans belong to the United States by right of citizenship,
2 Trickster Figure in American Literature
yet that is only the legal tie. At a deeper, more emotional level, they
belong by virtue of subscribing to a common set of principles. In the
United States, the citizenry is bound to the nation primarily by its
promise of an equal chance to succeed and equality before the law—
the Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness” and the Preamble to the Constitution’s promise of “jus-
tice, . . . domestic tranquility, . . . common defense, . . . general welfare,
and . . . blessings of liberty.” The United States is unique among mod-
ern nations in that it has chosen both to define itself in terms of its
ideals and to become a country of dissimilar peoples bound primarily
by those ideals. If a case can be made for American exceptionalism,
this is it. 4 From time to time—after an election where the other side
has won, when someone from an untraditional background or eth-
nicity takes over leadership in business or public life, being part of a
neighborhood or crowd where no one seems familiar—this situation
leads to every American feeling like an outsider, a member of the
minority.
Furthermore, the United States of America is a nation of individual-
ists professing egalitarian ideals. Even those who vehemently espouse
the concept of equality tend to think they want to be equal with those
who are “ahead” or “above” them in society, rather than those whose
status is “beneath” or “behind” them. Reality is far messier than the
intellectual principles. Most Americans are more enamored with the
idea than the reality of equity. As the speaker in Langston Hughes’s
“Theme for English B” says, “Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to
be a part of me. / Nor do I often want to be a part of you, / But we
are” and a few lines earlier, “That’s American.” 5 Every day, Americans
deal with the contradiction between the idea that everyone is equal
and a common yen to get ahead regardless of the means. So what or
who gives hope to disparate groups faced with this impasse?
In 2011, William T. May, a leading ethicist, weighed in on the tug-
of-war between the desire for personal gain in American life and the
ideals offered in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble
to the Constitution. T esting the National Covenant calls readers to
consider the covenantal biblical origins of both documents as well
as their Lockean origins and that the country thus has an ongoing
covenantal responsibility to complete what has been “projected” by
the two documents. May closes by saying that
Of the voiceless there are always plenty—the repressed in hierarchical
societies, the excluded in communitarian societies, and those hobbled
at the gate in competitive, egalitarian societies. In its imperfection a