Originally appeared in the Boston Book
Review.
The high gods set guard dogs around their sacred meadows. If there is to be a change, its agent will have to hypnotize those dogs and slip in from the shadows, like an
embarrassing impulse, a cunning pathogen,
a love affair, a shameless thief taking a chance.
"Trickster Makes
This World: Mischief, Myth and Art " (1998)
HB: How do the
ancient myths you discuss in "Trickster" take hold in modern urban
societies?
LH: The figure of
the boundary crosser can operate in any number of contexts. The earliest
stories are from hunting and gathering societies, so the cunning is the cunning
of the hunt. When the boundary crosser gets placed in an emerging commercial
society, the cunning has to do with money and language.
HB: You say that
in the stories, coyote, a trickster figure par excellence, has no nature. He's not defined by a
set of given properties; he's a process of invention
LH: There are a
lot of stories in which other animals are fishing or hunting, and coyote tries
to imitate them and fails. The bear or the kingfisher will say, that's my way;
it's not your way. He can imitate but he doesn't have a way of his own. The
stories imply an animal that has lost its instinctual knowledge and has to find
some other way.
