Scan barcode
A review by hilaritas
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde
5.0
This is the kind of book I could live in forever. Hyde is playful, erudite, witty, and warm. While this type of comparative mythology may be out of style, it really serves as a jumping-off point for his wide-ranging musings on philosophy, theology, literary analysis, depth psychology, and the boundary-erasing exuberance of immersing oneself in the riotous plenitude of life and nature. Hyde weaves several threads throughout the text, primarily explicating Hermes, Eshu, Legba, the Monkey King, Coyote, Krishna, and more modern trickster-adjacent figures like John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Andres Serrano, and Picasso.
Hyde peppers his work with charming and interesting etymological asides. One of the best is on the relation of trickster to the complex of meanings from ars/artus-- jointing or joint-work, including joining things together (as an artisan or artificer), disarticulating things (separating the earth from the order of heaven), and making flexible or testing connections (acting as god of the hinge, a liminal figure belonging neither to above or below but between). It is trickster as artus-worker that makes a space for art to exist: to find a beauty that is neither purely functional nor purely decorative, but rides a giddy edge where both aspects point back at each other in a funhouse mirror. Think Duchamp's readymades. Art is everywhere if you have the eyes for it.
Hyde lovingly celebrates the humorous and scatological aspects of trickster stories. He ties together the rude creativity of the farting Hermes, Jung's youthful vision of God's turd falling on a cathedral, and Coyote's grunting birthing of his feces as parody of shamanic prophesying. As a bonus, Hyde includes in the appendices his own fun translation of the Hymn to Hermes and a short essay on gender and the trickster figure.
Above all, the book is suffused with joy: the joyful creation of stories and the unexpected delight of combining motley things to fashion something new. Hyde celebrates the thief and the plagiarist, who, like Raven, collects shiny things and assembles it into an object of true novelty. Through the trickster, we can steal fire from heaven and participate in the divine act of creation. What could be more fascinating? This book is lovely and everyone should read it.
Hyde peppers his work with charming and interesting etymological asides. One of the best is on the relation of trickster to the complex of meanings from ars/artus-- jointing or joint-work, including joining things together (as an artisan or artificer), disarticulating things (separating the earth from the order of heaven), and making flexible or testing connections (acting as god of the hinge, a liminal figure belonging neither to above or below but between). It is trickster as artus-worker that makes a space for art to exist: to find a beauty that is neither purely functional nor purely decorative, but rides a giddy edge where both aspects point back at each other in a funhouse mirror. Think Duchamp's readymades. Art is everywhere if you have the eyes for it.
Hyde lovingly celebrates the humorous and scatological aspects of trickster stories. He ties together the rude creativity of the farting Hermes, Jung's youthful vision of God's turd falling on a cathedral, and Coyote's grunting birthing of his feces as parody of shamanic prophesying. As a bonus, Hyde includes in the appendices his own fun translation of the Hymn to Hermes and a short essay on gender and the trickster figure.
Above all, the book is suffused with joy: the joyful creation of stories and the unexpected delight of combining motley things to fashion something new. Hyde celebrates the thief and the plagiarist, who, like Raven, collects shiny things and assembles it into an object of true novelty. Through the trickster, we can steal fire from heaven and participate in the divine act of creation. What could be more fascinating? This book is lovely and everyone should read it.