View of the Loki Model, I Would Like to Explain Why Wagner’S Logi-Loki Combination, Loge, Does Not Fit Into the Loki Model

Home , Athena (Marvel Comics), Hermes (Marvel Comics), Logi

Florida State University Libraries

2016 The Loki Model: Transcending the Trickster Arianne Marie Howard

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

THE LOK I MODEL:

TRANSCENDING THE TRICKSTER

ARIANNE MARIE HOWARD

A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

2016 Arianne Marie Howard defended this thesis on April 8, 2016. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Alina Dana Weber Professor Directing Thesis

Birgit Maier-K atkin Committee Member

Christian Weber Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude towards Dr. Alina Dana Weber for her guidance and unending support throughout this project. Without her patience and insight, this thesis would not have been possible. Thank you for always encouraging me and pushing me to write my ideas.

I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Birgit Maier-K atkin and Dr.

Christian Weber. Thank you for your encouragement and kindness during this project and throughout my academic career at FSU.

Finally, a thanks to my family and friends who were with me from the beginning of this process. To my parents, Brett and Mirtha, my brother Albert, my sister-in-law Theresa, and my dear friends K erstin and Stephanie, I thank you for your continued optimism and reassurance. To my fiancé, Ben, thank you for giving me confidence when I needed it most and encouraging me every step of the way.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1: THE LOK I MODEL ...... 4

CHAPTER 2: RE-STRUCTURING BY WAY OF CHAOS ...... 19

CHAPTER 3: REFLECTING BY WAY OF LA NGUAGE ...... 35

CONCLUSION ...... 46

WORK S CITED ...... 49

BIOGRAPHICA L SK ETCH ...... 51

ABSTRACT

The trickster is a well-known and thoroughly studied mythological figure. Therefore, this thesis will not seek to further define the trickster figure, but rather take the trickster figure of

Norse mythology, Loki, and uncover his unique qualities which can then be translated into abstract features used in what I call, the “Loki model.” The Loki model provides a means of interpretation through which one can analyze a text or other work. In the case of this thesis, I will analyze three German texts and one American film to demonstrate the Loki model. The abstractions of the Loki model include: chaos, abstemiousness, cunning, and destruction. These qualities are ways of abolishing an order or breaking the status quo to undermine systems and create new worlds. The structures that are reshaped through chaos and language destruction are those of human nature and society.

INTRODUCTION

This thesis traces Loki, a mythological figure of Norse lore, from his origin in the northernmost extension of Germanic mythology to the present day to uncover the influence that such a mythological figure continues to have to this day. I find it true that “mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to go beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core reality” (Armstrong 7). This idea explains precisely why I am choosing to analyze Loki. Loki is a representation of something primal, and thus, so human, meaning that this character can be treated as an abstraction more than a mere fictional character. In this argument, I will therefore define Loki as a model of thought, a way to describe human existence, which can be found so often in storytelling. As a model, Loki is unique and goes beyond the trickster archetype within which he is often described. What makes him worthy of a model is that he is a mythological character that “pushes back the frontiers of human nature” (Scheub 12). With that in mind, this thesis will forage further into Loki’s persona.

Before beginning, I would like to state that certainly Loki is not unique in all of his qualities. This is why it is important to note that this is not an uncovering of Loki as a figure, but rather, as an abstract model that can be applied to western literature and film in character analysis. The Greek god Hermes, or Latin Mercury, demonstrates that Loki is not completely unique. For example, two traits of Hermes that stand out are “his guiding function, linked to his extreme mobility” and “his mastery of speech and interpretation” (Faivre 13). Loki, too, is a master of language; and Mercury’s extreme mobility can be compared to Loki’s fluidity as a shape-shifter. Moreover, Hermes, like Loki and most tricksters, is cunning. Hermes steals Zeus’s cattle that he had said he would not steal, so that the trickster may later “enjoy the fruits of

sacrifice and prayer” (Hyde 38) meant for the father of the gods. In stealing the cattle, Hermes

appropriates what was meant for a sacrificial ritual to himself and eats “only the portion that will not harm him” (38), i.e., the best pieces of meat. To appease Zeus, he leaves him the larger but inferior part of the sacrificed cattle in the form of a pile of bones and fat hidden under skins.

Zeus recognizes the sham but does not punish Hermes because his trick amuses him. More

importantly for my argument, however, is that while this demonstrates Hermes’s cunning, the act

is also greedy and selfish. This is where Hermes differs from Loki. I am noting these similarities

between Hermes/Mercury and Loki to make the point that I am not analyzing the Greek and

Roman trickster gods and their implications for their mythologies in this thesis because they are

driven by greed, a typical trickster trait that Loki lacks and that has relevant consequences, as I

will show later. Instead, the interpretations I wish to offer will be derived entirely from “Loki”

whom I regard primarily as the basis of an interpretation model here and only secondarily as a

fictional figure.

Chapter 1 discusses a few of the major points of trickster qualifications, so that I may

more precisely contrast Loki with the trickster archetype to form the abstract model. Once the

trickster definitions have been given, some of Loki’s largest roles in the mythology will be

recounted and analyzed to show how he differs from them. This manner of recounting Loki-tales

will be the grounds for the Loki model. With the Loki model, I will then provide two separate

modes of analysis: literary analysis and linguistic analysis that I apply to German and American

texts and films.

In Chapter 2, I will present an analysis of Wagner’s Ring (1848) and Christopher Nolan’s

The Dark Knight (2008). I have chosen to interpret these two works as an example of the

transcontinental reach of the “Loki” figure in light of the character’s influence in western culture.

These interpretations will show that the Loki model is highly applicable to cultural and film

analysis. To clarify my point about the Loki model, I will use a comparison of two figures: one

who does not fit in under the abstract qualities of this model and one who does. This comparison

shows how chaotic acts are used to undermine the authority of systems and create something

new for both regular tricksters and the Loki model. However, while regular tricksters are often

driven by greed and merely stand in the service of a higher authority, characters that follow the

Loki model act independently and are therefore the creators of new worlds.

The third and final chapter will utilize linguistic analysis to take a closer look at literary

characters in order to prove how the Loki model can be applied in the destruction of language.

Such destruction by the figures of Eulenspiegel and Münchhausen demonstrate the arbitrariness

behind a person’s language, and thus, their own society. Eulenspiegel and Münchhausen will prove to apply inverse tactics to their use of language – one adds superfluous meaning and the other takes it away. Through this undoing or overdoing of language, the two figures cause reflection on one’s culture and opens up doors to re-evaluation of the society, illuminating the possibility of something new.

Overall, in this thesis I will go beyond Loki’s trickster qualifications to delve deeper into

the unique qualities that he possesses to describe him as a model or pattern of interpretation

based on evidence from the stories where he can be found. By “stories,” I mean not only the lore

that features Loki but also the German literary texts and the American film that I explore in this

thesis. Before bypassing Loki’s trickster roots, however, I should define more broadly what it

means to be a trickster.

CHAPTER 1

THE LOK I MODEL

The trickster has a certain “opportunistic craft” (Hyde 46). This means that the trickster creates opportunity for itself1 when there is no naturally occurring opportunity; the trickster can also

block the opportunities of others by playing with the “porous” and “non-porous” nature of

situations (Hyde 47). In short, the trickster specializes in “aporia,” or the inherent contradictions

of a situation (49). For the trickster this means that it has an affinity to deal in checkmates; no

matter which way the opponents move, they are trapped by the trickster. Moreover, the trickster

is cunning and ingenious (Hyde 47; Davidson 178); this is especially important to its

opportunistic ways. At the same time, the trickster’s vast intelligence makes it deeply self-aware,

which reflects itself, among others, in the trickster’s propensity to disguise itself (Hyde 51).

This intelligent flexibility forms the basis for another characteristic, for which the

trickster is most commonly known: that of a shape-shifter. The trickster can alter its appearance

to become a different person of any sex or even various animals and objects (Bassil-Morozow,

Trickster and System 17). Helena Bassil-Morozow attempts to determine the reasons behind

shape-shifting in The Trickster and the System (2015). She suggests that the shape-shifting is not

arbitrary but a result of the need to survive while having issues of shame and identity (19). In

Trickster Makes This World (1998), Lewis Hyde also agrees with this insight as he states that the

ability to change skin raises questions of identity (53). He also hypothesizes that there exists a

1 I am using “it” to refer to the trickster because of the gender ambiguity of such figures. Although there are mainly male tricksters, a few females also exist. It is also difficult to truly define tricksters by gender or sex because of their innate gender fluidity and sexual indeterminacy.

possibility that there are beings “with no way of their own, only the many ways of their shifting

skins and changing contexts” (54). Therefore, the trickster’s physical transformations seem to be

due to an inner struggle, which requires survival tactics and unfolds in conjunction with opportunity and cunning as key features to the trickster’s core being.

However, it is not only the inner being and its negotiations with impulses from the inside that define tricksters. They are also largely influenced by their surroundings and the system that they live in, according to Bassil-Morozow. Thus, tricksters are often met with physical entrapment or restraint, which cause “suffering and heroic” reactions from tricksters or provoke their “destructive potential,” due to the fact that tricksters grow stronger the longer they are trapped (Bassil-Morozow, Trickster and System 13): “Being trapped is an important structural element that embodies psycho-anthropological counterweight to the system’s authoritativeness and exactitude” (15). Tricksters seek to not be trapped within the system, which leads them to be figures of “boundary-breaking” (15). The trickster does not respect limits and as it crosses them by performing “map-redrawing[s]” through acts of maliciousness, playfulness, or heroicness

(15).

Then there is the “problem of the name.” It means that tricksters are often preoccupied with their name or status in their world (19). Bassil-Morozow states that “the impulse ‘to be someone’, to be visible, to have an impact on the world is a big part of the trickster impulse”

(Trickster and System 20). As a result, tricksters have a tendency to strive to make themselves known one way or another. Their positive or negative impact on the world is part of this impulse.

In other words, the trickster strives to be an individual or to be remarkable somehow, but does so with conflicting effects both on itself and the outside.

Contrariwise, however, animals are also related to the trickster figure, and these animals serve to symbolize the trickster’s connection with the underworld and animal instincts (29). This idea connects also with the trickster’s licentiousness (24). Bassil-Morozow explains that the

trickster is “capable of having sex with virtually any object” because, in its drive to become

known, to acquire an identity (which never becomes fixed, however), the trickster is

paradoxically capable to destroy the system and dispel taboos (24). These opportunistic ways

indicate that “the trickster clearly embodies [… both] chaos and order” (Scheub 12).

These “trickster” traits are also Loki’s, a figure whose historical roots I will comment on

in the following. To present-day knowledge, Loki is a pre-Christian god of Germanic cultures who was not consistently present in the Germanic world, however (Lindow 5508). It even appears that he belonged only to the Northern Germanic mythology (K rause 161).

The Norse-Icelandic Prose Edda was written in the thirteenth century, most likely by the

Icelandic chieftain, Snorri Sturluson (Byok x, xii). The Prose Edda is the “most accessible native source for pre-Christian Norse religion” (Wanner 214). In it, Sturluson writes that Loki is the son

of the giant, Farbauti, and, interestingly, also “counted among the Æ sir” [sing. áss; the principal

‘tribe’ of Norse gods]” (Wanner 214; Sturluson 38). He is also the father to three monstrous

children. Among a few larger roles, Loki can otherwise be found in a handful of seemingly small

roles throughout The Prose Edda; upon closer scrutiny, however, these roles are anything but

small. Sturluson even notes that Loki is “the one who councils badly in most matters” (51). So,

with only words he usually causes disaster or trouble among the gods. His involvement with the

gods may appear brief and insignificant at times, but its consequences are far-reaching.

Therefore, even when he is not present, Loki serves as a catalyst to larger events that shake the

world of the gods (for example, the death of Baldr, the most beloved god, that I discuss later; or the creation of conflict, but counter-intuitively, also peace).

Being the “enigmatic” figure that Loki is (Lindow 5507), it comes to no surprise that the scholarship involving Loki is vast. Already in 1933 with J an de V ries’ The Problem of Loki, we find a scholar connecting Loki to the trickster figure (Lindow 5509). This thesis will therefore not seek to theorize Loki’s origins nor define the mythological figure of Loki, because due to the very nature of his being as I outlined it, it cannot be completely defined. Loki means first and foremost an enigma, a paradox, an entity that cannot be captured. This thesis will instead analyze the stories in which Loki can be found in order to formulate a universally applicable model of textual and cultural analysis based on this indeterminacy. The goal will be to demonstrate that, just as Loki, the archetypal trickster, can adopt many shapes from Nordic to contemporary popular mythologies, and from the past to the present, the “Loki model” can suit several fictional characters or situations at once (or only one) and still be incomplete. As we can see from “hero cycle” models, it is not necessary for a figure to fulfill every point in a model in order to fall into it (Garry and El-Shamy 11-12).2 In other words, my argument disperses the trickster-dom of the

Loki figure into distinct parameters and traces it in various thematic and aesthetic features throughout stories. This thesis identifies the most prominent qualities of the Loki model as chaos, abstemiousness, cunning, and destruction and uses them as tools for the narrative analysis of specific examples of twentieth and twenty-first-century figures of German literature and North

American film.

2 In this thesis I strive to create a model separate of the trickster archetype, which is not to say Loki is not a trickster. This approach is inspired by Alan Dundes’ work in which he shows that “a very special version of the standard [… ] hero pattern,” in his case the biography of J esus, (215) is possible. Accordingly, while the Loki model remains a trickster pattern, it also goes beyond it in terms of abstraction and analytical applicability.

Undermining Authority and the System – K eeping a Natural Order through Chaos

To begin to form a paradigm of Loki, I will start with what the Nordic god may have sought to

achieve in the myths. We will look at Loki in both The Poetic Edda, which was written down

from 1000-1200 C.E. as a collection of oral lore from Iceland, and The Prose Edda written by

Snorri Sturluson. In these tales, Loki uses his cunning and ingenious ways at every turn, but it would seem that Loki is seeking to achieve goals that ultimately exceed pure self-satisfaction.

This is a deviation from the trickster archetype. Earlier, it was mentioned that the trickster acts in order to survive or become well-known. On the contrary, Loki is not a figure who is controlled by personal greed or the need to survive. The two following examples of this selfless fact also comment on Loki’s take on nature and society. In Sturluson’s story of Baldr, “The Death of

Baldr and Hermod’s Ride to Hel,” Loki used his cunning to kill Baldr and, later, to prevent Baldr from resurrecting (65). In the chapter titled, “Baldr,” it is said that “there is much good to tell about [Baldr]. He is the best, and all praise him. He is so beautiful and bright that all shines from him. [… ] He is the wisest of the gods” (Sturluson 33). It may come as no wonder then that Loki would want to bring down Baldr, the most revered and esteemed of the gods, because killing

Baldr would undermine the role of the gods.

Loki creates an opportunity (recall the aforementioned trickster trait, ‘aporia’) to kill

Baldr when he sees an opening at a certain celebration, in which beings everywhere were called upon to throw any weapon at this god because he could not die, due to an oath that all beings made, which stated that Baldr could never come to harm. However, Loki may have found this cosmologically unfair that Baldr should not die and therefore uncovered a way to kill the light god by using a young mistletoe tree, which had not made the aforementioned oath, as all other living things had. He fashioned an arrow of its wood and instructed blind Hod to shoot Baldr

with the arrow, telling Hod that shooting him was a show of “honouring Baldr” (Sturluson 66).

The arrow, as expected, killed Baldr on the spot. The gods were in utter shock and sent Hermod to the underworld to get Baldr back from Hel, Loki’s daughter and the keeper of the underworld.

Hel agreed to set Baldr free if all creatures cried for him. Sturluson writes that the trickster Loki disguised himself as a female giant named Thokk, meaning “gratitude.” This giant in particular refused to cry at the funeral, preventing Baldr from returning from the underworld. This story from The Prose Edda shows how Loki uses his shifting abilities in an ingenious plan not only to kill the best liked of gods but also to stop his resurrection. Moreover, he does so without cluing in the other gods that the failed resurrection was his doing. The fact that he does not clue in the other gods shows the contradiction to the trickster archetype of a trickster wanting to be known through their deeds. This cunning act of Loki’s could be seen on the surface as a purely an evil and selfish act, however, I maintain that it holds a deeper motivation than this (later we will discuss why Loki is not rooted in evil). The act of stopping Baldr from resurrecting, in fact, humanizes the god by making him mortal and thus undermines his authoritative figure. While

Loki’s humanization of Baldr diminishes the god’s status by taking eternity away from him, it also gives him the gift of humanity. Furthermore, Loki’s successful plot undermines Baldr in order to maintain the most basic principle of nature: that of life’s temporal limitation. Thanks to

Loki, there is no deviation from the truth that all living beings must die eventually, and not be wondrously resurrected. Humanity also means eventual death and seeking eternal life contravenes the laws of nature. As previously stated, Loki’s selfless act points to a deeper goal of disrupting the society to bring a more natural form.

Baldr’s death by Loki is not the only instance in which the trickster causes extreme tension among the gods. Another example is the scene in which he insults the gods. Loki

9 attempts to undermine the authority of the gods by mocking them in a story called “Loki’s

Quarrel” in The Poetic Edda. In this tale, Loki comes to a dinner party of the gods while Thor is away. Thor is the god of the sky and widely considered champion of the Æ sir, a martial hero who defends Asgard, the realm of the Norse deities (Davidson 73). Thor wields the hammer,

Mjollnir, which Loki fears. Thus, Loki sees opportunity in Thor’s absence and orders Odin to give him a seat at the table where the Æ sir are dining. Odin grants him his request because of the blood oath that they share. Loki takes his seat only to denigrate each and every god at the table highlighting his or her faults and airing their dirty laundry. The gods hold together, however, and refute everything Loki says. An important reason why he dares to taunt the gods so intensely is that Odin’s and Loki’s blood oath obliges them to protect each other. By his insults in the absence of his guardian, Loki “puts [Odin’s] oath to the test and indicates its failure” (Lindow

5509). Once Thor returns with his hammer in hand, Loki quickly quiets himself and is kicked out of the hall without contest from Odin. (I will return to this story in Chapter 3 because it will help me demonstrate that the tactical use of language is a component of the Loki model.)

This story is of importance because, not only does Loki prove the falsehood of the blood oath, but he is also attempting to undermine the gods’ social order. What he says cannot be determined to be either true or false, but the gods are nonetheless angered by the words he directs at them. Loki is also questioning Odin’s loyalty by testing the limits to which he can go within the blood oath. It is not until Thor appears in the dining hall that Loki stops his quarreling due to the threats of Thor. If the blood oath were true, however, Loki would have no reason to fear persisting in his insults because he would have the protection of Odin. But in this case, he knows he has reached his limit and must succumb to the pressures that society does not always honor personal loyalties and individualism is steadfastly stifled. This event, however, begins a change

in the gods and their relationship with Loki. This is the catalyst to the rest of the problems of

Loki to follow.

In The Prose Edda, Loki creates problems for the gods only to then solve them “with

guile” (Sturluson 39). As stated earlier, Bassil-Morozow says that the trickster undermines

authority in order to disrupt the system. I will go just one step further to say that Loki does not

just disrupt the system, but rather rattles it so that it may be rearranged. His disruption of the system brings out the flaws within the system. As the examples above illustrate, no resurrections should happen in nature and all agreements should be honored in society.

The act of upsetting the resurrection of Baldr is what ultimately leads to Loki’s demise because he finally overstrains the tolerance that the Æ sir once had of him, likely because the gods know that “the first death of a god, as Baldr’s is, must lead to Ragnarók, the end of the world” (Lindow 5509). The gods took vengeance on Loki for undermining their literally un-

natural status (eternal life) by confronting it with the truth of nature (limited life). They turned

his son, V ali, into a wolf so that he may attack and rip apart his other son Nari (or Narfi). They

tied up Loki in a cave using his son’s guts and rocks. A poisonous snake was tied above Loki to

drip on him eternally but his wife, Sigyn, sat with him with a bucket to catch the dripping poison.

Every time that the bucket filled up and she went to empty it, the poison would drip on Loki. His

writhing is what caused earthquakes on Earth. Loki remained tied there until Ragnarók. This

conclusion to Loki’s challenge of the gods highlights the tension between eternity and temporal

limitation, between nature and transcendence. All means by which Loki is confined and tortured

are organic and animal (sinews, snake poison) and therefore impermanent, yet the duration of the

confinement is eternal. However, the coming of Ragnarók undermines this eternity, since it

marks the end of the gods, revealing once more that Loki was correct, that there is no eternity

and, inversely, that the gods are also mortal, i.e., just like nature.

Not Evil, Not Benevolent

The trickster is not necessarily “evil”. Likewise, Loki is not often described as being evil. It is said that the figure of Loki only turned to a figure representative of evil through the late influences of Christianity; “by the late V iking age the wicked and dangerous side of his character seems to have been strengthened by comparison with the Christian Devil” (Davidson 176).

Therefore, only towards the end of Germanic mythology is Loki being perceived as a wholly evil figure. This is even more evident when knowing that “at the close of the heathen period it was

[Thor] who was thought of as the principle adversary of Christ” (73). In spite of this ambiguity of the two figures relative to Christian faith, Thor and Loki are eventually re-evaluated as Christ and Lucifer figures that reflect Christianity’s major ambivalence. However, it is not a goal of the

Loki figure to be nor do evil in the eyes of a society. If the figure appears as malicious, that has to do with the moral judgment of those assessing it, and not with its inherent nature. Loki’s transformation into a one-sided figure has happened solely through Christian doctrine. Because we are looking at the oldest versions of the mythology, however, Loki will not be deemed as wicked or bad in any moral or Christian way here, since this is not his original character.

For Loki – or any trickster for that matter – to attempt to abide by any specific moral judgment, would be too one-sided and too trivial. The complex constitution of the figure does not render itself to specific assessments anyway, since it is “partly divine, partly human, partly animal, partly devil, and is, therefore, an amoral and comic troublemaker” (Harris 57). Not only

are characters in the Loki model too multi-faceted for one-sided interpretations, but evil as a moral judgment is an abstract idea, and Loki is not interested in the abstract. Loki is interested – as we saw earlier – in redressing practical (natural or social) states of affairs, rather than in the good or bad (i.e., morally assessed) consequences of his deeds. The Loki figure therefore stands outside of such configurations and allows us to reflect on them. Its sole purpose is looking for a way to unmask the injustices hidden behind moral or social conformity, and to provoke reflection about and even the re-evaluation of natural and social control mechanisms.

Disguises of Fluidity and Identity

Another principle of the model is its formal fluidity. Trickster figures disguise themselves frequently, showing a fluidity in their natural, social or gender form. For example, Loki is also known as a shape-shifter and can appear as human, giant, or animal, male or female, or several of these at once. The Prose Edda shows Loki as a giant woman in the aforementioned story of

Baldr’s failed resurrection. Then, there is the Eddic poem “Thrym’s Poem” or “Thrymskvida,” in which even Thor is seen to be disguising as a woman. The reason for this disguise is Thor’s loss of his hammer, Mjollnir. In female form, Loki helps Thor retrieve it from Thrym, lord of ogres, who took possession of it. Thrym’s weakness is that he desires the beautiful Freyia as a wife.

Although both gods disguise themselves as women in this poem, it is important to note that

Thor’s change is only one of clothes, not of a core personality or corporeal being. Thor does not gender-bend, as this is not a part of his nature. When Heimdall, a wise but mostly enigmatic god, proposes that Thor should pretend to be the beautiful Freyia by wearing a wedding dress and

Freyia’s necklace of Brisings to get his hammer, the god of the sky is quick to oppose the idea.

In “Thrym’s Poem,” he declares: “the Æ sir will call me a pervert, if I let you put a bride’s veil on

me” (The Poetic Edda 99). Instead of Thor acting convincingly, Loki must convince the giant

that the veiled creature that eats and drinks immensely and does not act femininely at all is his

bride-to-be, Freyia. This illustrates Thor’s signature masculinity (97). Thor is embarrassed and

ashamed of cross-dressing although it would spare Freyia from being married to an ogre and is

obviously the quickest and most conflict-free way of getting Mjollnir back. On top of his personal shame, Thor does not change his personality or his being in any way once he wears the wedding dress in the land of the giants. He simply puts the clothes on but does not act the part.

He does not once speak while in costume. Loki is the one doing the gender-bending and speaking in this story. He does so in the role of the maid – for which he readily volunteers – and completely enters the part becoming unrecognizable as Loki. Moreover, as the maid, he speaks for “Freyia” which may have been a huge breach of protocol in the hierarchical pre-Christian society, in which the story is set.3 The poem even refers to Loki in the maid’s role as “she”

throughout, identifying the gender’s role with that of the player. Given Loki’s gender fluidity,

however, it is not too far-fetched to understand this as an actual transformation into a woman.

Not only Loki, but also other characters that are able to disguise so fully may be seen

changing themselves physically or emotionally in other narratives, in order to fully adapt to

different situations. To reiterate, Loki’s gender switch is not simply cross-dressing, but entering

into the role completely to the point of transformation. J ust as Bassil-Morozow notes, the

trickster is a shape-changer in order to survive, and thus this trait is deeply ingrained in the

character (Trickster and System 19). This applies to Loki as well. If cross-dressing is

3 This breach in hierarchal order references, once again, the undermining of authority. Loki, the servant, is speaking for “Freyia”, the master.

transformation, then any figure who performs it partakes in the Loki model with varying

implications for its own narrative.

Thus far we have seen Loki taking on gender transformations and a transformation as a

giant, but, as mentioned before, he can also change into animals. In one text from Sturluson’s

prose, “The Master Builder from Giant Land,” Loki transforms into a horse. He does this as an

act of survival among the gods. The gods had threated his life, should he not stop a certain

builder. So Loki transformed into a mare and went up to the one stallion that the builder was

using to work. The mare (Loki) distracted the stallion and it raced into the forest after her. The

builder tried to stop the horse but the stallion was gone and no work was done that night. Loki

had succeeded in his task of stopping the builder but he was also impregnated by the stallion.4 He

later gave birth to an eight-legged, grey colt that became Thor’s horse. In this story, gender

transformation crosses with animal shape-shifting. The substantiality of this change is indicated

by the fact that the new creature is able to have offspring, thus bringing a new physical entity and

its own reality into the world.

A Father to Monsters and New Realities

Loki’s ability to create new forms of life manifest also in his actual children. We now know that

he can give birth to unusual beings. In The Prose Edda, Loki is said to have fathered three

monstrous children. Along with the son he has with his wife, Sigyn, he has three other children

with the ogress Angrboda: Fenriswolf, the Midgard Serpent, and Hel. Taking this story in a

4 Interestingly, there is a similar story in Gottfried August Bürger’s Wunderbare Reisen zu Wasser und Lande, Feldzüge und lustige Abenteuer des Freiherrn von Münchhausen in which Münchhausen’s horse becomes split in two with the back half running off to copulate.

15 figurative sense illustrates the next point in the Loki model. Instead of creating children with another being of their kind, those who fall under the Loki model create monstrous, deviant, or simply hitherto non-existing beings through their acts of chaos, not of procreation.

J ust as he fathers a variety of offspring, Loki creates his own realities in the way in which he wants to see them. No mysterious, outside force or authority controls his fate. Loki’s halting of the resurrection of the god Baldr shows that Loki chooses to create the reality as he deems it should be. The reality he envisages here is one of (temporal) balance between man, gods, and nature. There should be no resurrection, no mysterious, other-worldly events. As aforementioned, this leads to Ragnarók, which brings about the fall of the gods. By causing the fall of these authoritative figures, Loki disrupts the system just as he wants. This is the reality that he brings to fruition. Loki is, at times, intimidated by the gods, especially by Thor. However, intimidation does not equal control. Loki will ultimately not be controlled by the other gods, not even Thor, nor will those who fall under the Loki model be controlled by any authority.

Ultimately, we must ask exactly how Loki warps others’ realities and creates his own in order to maintain control of his surroundings. For this, I will reference once more the story in which Loki changes himself into the female servant of “Freyia” to help Thor (who is disguised as

Freyia) get his hammer back. On this occasion, Loki spins tales to convince the ogres why this

“Freyia” has eyes that seem to have fire “burning from them” and why she was so “shrewd” (The

Poetic Edda 100). Loki, the servant, thus creates a new reality for the ogres in the room in which

Thor is “Freyia”. To Loki, words are just words that he will manipulate as he needs. Therefore, the manipulation of the semantics of a language is an important linguistic property of Loki. Loki does not ignore semantics; quite the contrary, he pays close attention to semantics as this is his source of control over words, and through them, of others’ realities and his own.

When verbally abusing the gods at the dinner party, Loki uses the tool of storytelling

once more. Here he creates a situation which puts the gods into stories that he has weaved,

whether they are true or false. There is no way of telling if what he says is really true, aside from noting the clear anger and frustration which marks the gods’ reactions. This response may be one

of pure offense at false accusations but also recognizing the core truth of Loki’s accusations. The

poem does not settle on one or the other. However, Loki’s storytelling is crucial in this scene for

two reasons: it disrupts the gods and it remains undecided whether or not he is lying. It is

important for a speaker to be trustworthy. Trustworthiness falls under the linguistic “maxim of quality”, which I will elaborate further in Chapter 3. It implies that, when a speaker cannot be trusted, this maxim is violated which, in turn, violates the three other linguistic maxims which constitute the “cooperative principles”. When Loki creates untrustworthy statements, he chooses to not cooperate in communication. He makes himself out to be devious to the gods, but in this way he can also manipulate his own language or the language of others. Through this manipulation, he can weave tales and the listener does not know if they are the truth or not, but when said convincingly, the gods – and the listener or reader – may take them as truth, even if it is only an imaginary or poetic truth. In this way, Loki de-structuralizes language but also creates new realities. He does this because language is communication and all living beings have the most basic need for communication. If he manipulates language, Loki is therefore undermining

yet another core element of all living beings – communication. By the same token, however, he

creates new statements, which may not factually be true but which constitute new worlds of

meaning.

In the following two chapters, I will take these abstract features provided through Loki’s

stories and apply them to the aforementioned works of literature and film. As mentioned earlier,

17 it is not required of the Loki model to exhaustively apply each abstract notion of the model to each figure. That being said, the figures that I analyze in this thesis do capture the essence of the

Loki model in order to be considered a part of it. That is to say that they will display a sense of selflessness and an utter lack of greed while destroying varying kinds of systems (society, language) through pure chaos or language play. The Loki model has a keen focus on nature and society in the sense that the destruction of a system leads to a ground zero from which something new and natural will be created. Creation for the Loki model also consists of the creation of

‘monsters’, which signify new beginnings. This creation is also a creation of new realities as those in the Loki model see fit. Finally, figures in the Loki model adhere to the model through acting alone and never for or under any established authorities but their own. In this way, the model is ‘anti-establishment’ in all senses of the word.

CHAPTER 2

RE-STRUCTURING BY WAY OF CHAOS

In this chapter, I will explore the literary and cinematic figures, which adhere to the “Loki” model in light of any chaotic acts they perform to undermine authority, and as a paradoxical result, create or restore natural or human order. At this point, I would like to reiterate what I stated at the start of this thesis: “Loki” is my candidate of choice for this model of analysis because his features stretch beyond Nordic mythology and his identity as a trickster into more recent works of German and American literature and film. The Loki theme has made its way across the Atlantic and into even the biggest Hollywood feature films. I find it worth talking about a figure whose presence is transcontinental and in no small way, because such a figure demonstrates the continuing relevance of certain themes and models of behavior, narrative, and thought in related western cultures. Speaking of film is also of importance because as Bassil-

Morozow states “cinema tends to be a psychological mirror of society” (Trickster in Film 2)

Loge vs. Logi and Loki

To exemplify how trickster narratives can adopt the Loki model when they are adapted across the Atlantic, I will interpret parts of Richard Wagner’s Ring (1848) and Christopher Nolan’s film

The Dark Knight (2008) comparatively in this chapter. In Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the first part of the Ring, appears a trickster figure, Loge. Wagner is famous for employing a plethora or sources – The Poetic Edda and The Prose Edda among them – in his Ring (Weiner

93); therefore, Wagner’s Loge may seem to fit the Loki model. However, this is only on the surface because Loge is simply a trickster. One of the more obvious ways that Loge diverges

19 from the Loki model is that he is a fire god. A similarly named Logi was a figure from

Sturluson’s The Prose Edda. Almost a century ago, he was said to be synonymous with Loki. In his seminal analysis of Wagner’s “Ring,” Marc Weiner, for example, does not distinguish between the two (95). However, other research has shown that Loge is, in fact, his own figure. In

The Problem of Loki (1933), J an de V ries discusses the etymology of Loki’s name and points out that “the resemblance of the name Loki and the Old-Norse word logi ‘fire’ has induced many scholars to consider him a fire-demon, an opinion which is even now still generally accepted”

(de V ries 4). However, if we read Sturluson’s The Prose Edda, we see that Loki is actually pitted against Logi who is the embodiment of “wildfire itself” (Sturluson 62). Loki is defeated by Logi in an eating contest because Logi “burned through” the feast on the table (62). Thus, Logi is a symbol of greed. Aside from Sturluson’s tale, it should also be noted that Loki also goes by the names of Loptr or Lopt in The Prose Edda and The Poetic Edda, respectively, but never goes by the name of Logi. In light of this, Wagner seems to have taken the liberty of combining

Sturluson’s Logi and Loki together to make a single figure. Thus, in order to obtain a clearer view of the Loki model, I would like to explain why Wagner’s Logi-Loki combination, Loge, does not fit into the Loki model.

In Wagner’s tale, Loge plays the role of the god of fire, displaying similarity to the role of Logi in The Prose Edda. I would now like to point out that it is not only because they are originally separate figures that Logi cannot be considered a part of the Loki model; it is Logi’s hunger that makes him unsuitable for this model. Appetite, or hunger, is a typical trickster trait.

As Hyde points out, “trickster tales in most traditions are filled with examples of trickster’s hunger and its consequences” (Hyde 28). But hunger is not an aspect in the Loki model whose figures are not controlled by the greed associated with the trickster’s hunger. Nevertheless, Loge,

the fire god, bears an elemental similarity to the cunning of Loki. Although in Das Rheingold,

Loge does not seem a catalytic figure by what he says, his actions prove to be the beginning of the end for the gods, just as is the case in the story of Baldr’s death; but, there is a large difference here. As explained, Loki works to keep Baldr in the underworld and by doing so undermines the gods, although the text does not disclose explicitly whether he undermines them intentionally. Nevertheless, this is an action by which he asserts his own free will and ability of decision-making, and so, one can infer that Loki acts with deliberation. Loge, instead, does not prove initiative but merely follows the orders of Wotan in Wotan’s quest for the ring, which will save Freia from the giants. (Likewise, Hermes only succeeds in cheating Zeus because Zeus himself allows him to when he turns a blind eye and pretends not to notice his deceit.)

Wotan had promised them Freia, the younger sister to his wife Fricka, when he hired the giants to build a wall. The opening of Das Rheingold (I/2) finds Fricka and Wotan having a discussion after the giants have just finished building the wall. Fricka is losing her composure as she worries about her sister being taken by the giants. She begs Wotan relentlessly to find another form of payment. Y et, the giants are accepting nothing else that Wotan has to offer.

Wotan then calls in Loge to council him in the matter and the trickster informs Wotan of the

Rheingold. Loge says that this is the only higher desire that can be had beyond the love of a woman because the owner, Alberich, had to forfeit love in order to own the gold. Because

Alberich stole the gold and forfeited love, he can have the ring forged by the Nibelungs. Also,

Alberich uses a spell only he knows to make the ring into an all-powerful tool. The forging of the ring by the Nibelungs is, in fact, a metaphor for greed and competition and it is the object that brings about the fall of the gods.5

5 Wagner criticizes capitalism here. The ring makes characters want to possess it, i.e. it is a materialization of their greedy impulses.

The symbol of greed reinforces the notion that Loge is not a part of the Loki model. The

theft of the ring was something that he merely aided Wotan with upon his command, not an action he took out of his own initiative. Following Wotan’s orders is an act out of self-

preservation and to show the trickster’s continuing loyalty to Wotan. Loge ultimately did not create the greed, Wotan did, but Loge’s “hunger” comes from his need to be a part of the gods.

This is why he complies with Wotan when Wotan reminds Loge that he is the reason Loge is

even among the gods in the first place in Das Rheingold (I/2). Returning to the story, the giants are interested in the ring; they demand it and take Freia only as collateral until they would

receive it. They also put Wotan under pressure telling him that he has until the evening to obtain

the ring for them. Only as a result does Wotan enlist Loge to take the ring from Alberich and

Loge accepts the quest to aide Wotan.

Cunningly, Loge deems that the only way to own the fated ring of the Nibelungs is

through thieving since the ring was initially stolen by Alberich. To Wotan’s question of how to

proceed, Loge sings, “ durch Raub! Was ein Dieb stahl, das stiehl’st du dem Dieb” (Wagner

Rheingold 95). This logic shows that Loge demands a sort of natural order, a law of retribution.

Loge’s eye-for-an-eye mentality is perfectly within society’s current balance, not a creative

disruption. The difference between Loge and Loki is that Loge’s natural order, or need for

retribution, does not come through a chaotic act that upsets a balance of the world to create

something new. Instead, the act that upsets the status quo actually comes from Alberich.

According to Weiner, “it is the entrance of the foreign, toadlike Alberich into the golden and

virginal waters of the fish-filled Rhine that brings about the demise of the purely natural state”

(92). To this, I only contest that the demise is not of a “natural” state, but rather that of an

undisturbed one; Alberich causes disruption within an untouched, eternal place when he takes

the Rheingold, and it is of secondary relevance that this place is in nature. Furthermore, it demonstrates that it is not the trickster figure that brings about destruction and thus change in

Wagner’s Ring cycle. Loge, on the other hand, is a character who is merely following Wotan’s orders. Simone Fohr-Manthey describes him as “favorite Wotan’s” and “in erster Linie eine

V ision des Götterboten” (Fohr-Manthey 5).6 What Loge’s character thus offers in Rheingold is

shrewdness, rather than destruction and the changes that come with it.

In Wagner’s story, for example, he knows that he can outwit Alberich in order to steal the

ring. Loge charms Alberich by flattery saying, “wen doch fasste nicht Wunder, erfährt er

Alberichs Werk?“ (144). However, a few lines later he begins to challenge Alberich’s power:

“doch, wenn im Schlaf ein Dieb dich beschlich, den Ring schlau dir entriss’ – wie wahrest du

Weiser dich dann?” (146). Alberich hears this challenge and goes on to explain that such a case

would be impossible because of his magic helmet. Once he puts on said helmet he can be

invisible or transform into any shape he pleases. Loge pretends to not believe the dwarf; so, as

most foolish figures with an ego, Alberich wishes to prove himself. He puts on the helmet and

transforms into a “Riesenwurm,” a dragon. Loge cries, “schreckliche Schlange, verschlinge mich

nicht!” (151). Once he finishes his flattery, however, the trickster proceeds to further challenge

Alberich by asking “doch, wie du wuchsest, kannst du auch winzig und klein dich schaffen? Das

K lügste schien mir das, Gefahren schlau zu entfliehen” (152). Loge suggests that Alberich turn

himself into a toad because that would surely be too difficult for him. Lo and behold, Alberich

turns himself into a toad and in doing so makes possible the theft of his precious ring and his

own capture. Once Wotan allows the release of Alberich, the dwarf curses the ring and the

treasure, so that any being who possesses the ring will be a slave to it while all other beings will

6 She references Jean Shinoda Bolens to make this point.

also covet the ring. As a result, after the gods give the treasures to the giants and free Freia, they witness how the giants are torn apart by greed and lust for the treasure and the ring as a result of the curse.

His crucial involvement completed, Loge actively watches from the sidelines as

everything comes to pass. At the same time, he is deeply involved in everything that happens only because he had willingly followed the commands of Wotan. At the end of Das Rheingold,

Loge expresses his wish to return to fire and he desires the end of the gods, which eventually

arrives at the end of Götterdämmerung, the last of the Ring’s parts. The fall of the gods signifies

the ultimate undermining of authority. However, as the above interpretation of this character shows, Loge did not cause it as directly as Loki did in the story of Baldr or in “Loki’s Quarrel.”

On the contrary, Alberich causes the original disruption of the god’s world; and Wotan is the one who sets Walhalla on fire himself, bringing about its advent. Still, Loge causes the friction from

his inserted trickster ‘aporia’ both when he serves the gods’ own wishes that bring the gods

down, and when he makes Alberich lose power because of his own vanity. When Wotan asked

Loge to venture with him to obtain the ring and the treasure, Loge only followed orders by

utilizing his trickster prowess. Likewise, when he tricks Alberich, he does not interfere with him

but only reaps the results of the dwarf’s own wishes to prove himself. In both cases, however,

authority and power ultimately destroy themselves owing to Loge’s intervention, but not because

Loge is their cognizant destroyer.

The “Dark K night’s” J oker

A character from American film that – unlike Loge – adheres to the Loki model is the J oker as

portrayed by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight,7 the second of a three-part Batman movie series

from director Christopher Nolan. This second installment introduces the character of the J oker.

The J oker attempts to bring down, but not necessarily kill, Batman through acts of terror on his

city of Gotham and scheming against him. “Nolan’s Joker illustrates his commitment to his own

principles – destroy the world, and liberate yourself from it, to illustrate how rotten society truly

is” (Fhlainn 83). The J oker is a completely ambiguous character. Throughout the film he displays

mental instability and physically he has deep scars that stretch from each corner of his mouth

across his cheeks.8 The audience never learns the J oker’s real origin story; instead, he makes up

stories about where the scars on his face came from. Unlike the greedy Loge, this character does

not seek any kind of personal gain; he seeks instead to restore a natural and social

balance. Batman represents an ultimate authority figure, like a god. He could be even compared

to Thor. In the eyes of the J oker, therefore, Batman’s power is too far-reaching. To upset

Batman’s order, the J oker creates chaos in Gotham City. At the surface, the J oker is much like

what Bassil-Morozow says of the trickster in contemporary film, “[he] infiltrates the hyper-

serious, persona-dominated professional culture and reminds its representatives that even the

most successful businesspeople are never protected from failure” (Trickster in Film 3).

7 This film was inspired by several different comics including the 1988 graphic novel The Killing J oke (widely considered to be the definitive J oker story) and the 1996 series The Long Halloween (a retelling of the origin of the villain “Two-Face”). The nickname “The Dark K night” comes from the comic book Batman #1 (1940) as the nickname for Batman. 8 In Paul Leni’s horror film The Man Who Laughs (1928), a German Expressionist film that adapts V ictor Hugo’s homonymous novel, the protagonist has had a grin carved upon his face “so that he may laugh at his fool of a father”(Leni, Man Who Laughs). This story inspired the single-release comic book, Batman: The Man Who Laughs (2005), which also served as inspiration for Nolan’s Joker.

To bring more clarity to J oker’s chaotic and disruptive albeit disinterested qualities, I will analyze the dialogue within a scene in which the audience begins to find out why the J oker is doing acts of chaos. Because the dialogue is of the utmost importance in this scene, I do not

focus on its visual features or direction in the following. It shows J oker is in a police interrogation room where he is confronted by Batman:

J OK ER: Those mob fools want you gone so they can get back to the way things were.

But I know the truth, there’s no going back. Y ou’ve changed things, forever.

BATMAN: Then why do you wanna kill me?

J OK ER: (laughs) I don’t want to kill you. What would I do without you? Go back to

rippin’ off mob dealers? No, no, no. No, you … you complete me.

BATMAN: Y ou’re garbage who kills for money.

J OK ER: Don’t talk like one of them. Y ou’re not! Even if you’d like to be. To them,

you’re just a freak, like me. They need you right now. When they don’t, they’ll cast you

out. Like a leper. See, their morals, their code – it’s a bad joke – dropped at the first sign

of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the

chips are down, these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m

just ahead of the curve. Y ou have all these rules and you think they’ll save you. [… ] The

only sensible way to live in this world is without rules and tonight you’re gonna break

your one rule.9

In this scene, the J oker makes it clear that he believes he and Batman are just two sides of the same coin. They co-exist and are needed by Gotham when it is most convenient for its citizens.

Thus, the J oker is not a traditional villain who is trying to kill the hero; he is there to complement

9 Citation based on my own transcription.

the hero, but to do so he must create holes in the system, or ‘aporias’ In other words, he must

undermine the authority of Batman – a character who maintains the system without holes or

weaknesses. To accomplish this, he must first make Batman realize that he himself is not a hero;

he is simply a pawn in the system. Although Batman claims to have only one rule – not killing

people – the J oker thinks that is one rule too many. The J oker tells Batman that he must choose

between the characters Harvey (the newly elected district attorney of Gotham City played by

Aaron Eckhart) and Rachel (Batman’s love interest played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) because both

are tied up in different locations with explosives and timers set to detonate simultaneously.

Batman saves Harvey but the J oker tricks him into thinking that Rachel is at the same location.

Since she is not, the explosives go off, Rachel loses her life, and Harvey blames Batman – a

figure Harvey once revered – for his loss of Rachel. This situation is a perfect example of the

J oker utilizing ‘aporia’, described in the first chapter as the trickster identifying, creating, and

dealing in checkmates. J oker thus traps Batman and causes him to break his rule: because

Batman inadvertently chooses one life over the other, he causes a person to die. (The fact that

this person bears an affective charge for both Batman and the audience only highlights the

seriousness of this transgression.) In turn, this stresses the J oker’s belief in a world without rules, a world in pure chaos. But this is only the beginning. The world is not only to remain in chaos, according to the J oker, but in a chaos in which people will have to make decisions for their own survival. A paradoxical order therefore will emerge from within this chaos.

Destroy the Currency – Destroy the System

The J oker also puts himself above the law in order to “stir the pot,” so to say. However, this does not make him an authority of the system in place. The scene leading up to the call to kill

Coleman Reese (which will be explained further momentarily) shows the J oker standing in front

of a mountain of cash. In the room are a handful of henchmen, a man tied up on top of the

stacked cash, and a mobster who walks in and soon asks the J oker what he will do with this

money. The J oker has his men pour gasoline on it and, to the mobsters’ shock and dismay, the

J oker sets it ablaze with the mobster’s cigar. As he stands in front of the mountain of burning

cash, he states, “it’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message. Everything burns.”10 By

burning the money, the J oker makes a statement against Batman, the god-like authority. Batman

has power because he has money, a sign of purported order, and the J oker has power because he

creates chaos by destroying this order. Therefore, in burning the money11 he could essentially be

said to be burning the essence of Batman and his system – a Batman who only has power due to

his personal fortune. In this act, the J oker repeats the regenerative burning of the world at the end

of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, implicitly prompting contemporary audiences to imagine the

possibility of a society not based on a monetary economy.

Chaos Upsets the System

Following shortly after, the J oker further explains his true motivations in a crucial scene. Here,

the J oker is in the hospital disguised as a nurse. He is wearing a professional medical outfit and a

short wig, yet we see him still wearing his signature makeup, that of a distorted, uncanny clown.

This is just as the J oker has set a panic in Gotham city that is causing all hospitals to be

evacuated. The J oker promises that if the Wayne Enterprises employee Coleman Reese

(portrayed by J oshua Harto), would not be killed in sixty minutes, he would blow up an

10 As in footnote 7. 11 Although here the element of fire – an element which belongs to Wagner’s Loge and Sturluson’s Logi – is connected with the J oker, fire does not represent greed for the J oker because it is the fire which eliminates the object of greed.

unspecified hospital. However, this is his distraction so that he can get to Harvey Dent. An

officer who sees only the back of J oker’s head urges the female nurse, ‘her,’ to evacuate the

hospital, at which point the J oker turns around and shoots him in cold blood. Here we can note

the shape-shifting, or rather transformation, typical of the Loki model. The J oker proceeds to talk to a livid Harvey Dent and explain to him his motives. The J oker starts off by making clear to

Harvey that (indirectly) killing Rachel, Harvey’s fiancé, was nothing personal. He continues:

Do I really look like a guy with a plan? Y ou know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I

wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it [… ] I just do things. The mob has plans,

the cops have plans, Gordon’s got plans. [… ] They’re schemers. Schemers trying to

control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic

their attempts to control things really are.12

The J oker’s motive is neither power, nor wealth, nor any personal grudge or gain. His motive is

to disrupt the current order established by various authorities, in which Batman could be seen as

the ultimate authority figure. Throughout the film, Batman often puts himself above the police,

mobsters, and Commissioner Gordon (mentioned in the quote above), because Batman is a

vigilante. This further reinforces his high authority image. Therefore, I find it important to note

in the above quote the J oker’s way of describing these peoples’ mindsets as “little worlds”. The

J oker sees the large scope of the world, which, to him, is a world of chaos and anarchy.

The scene continues with the J oker stating: “You know what I noticed? Nobody panics

when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying.” However, even one little

change in the status quo and “everyone loses their minds,” he adds. The J oker then gives Dent a

revolver and has him aim the revolver at the J oker’s forehead demanding: “introduce a little

12 As is footnote 7.

anarchy. Upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos: it’s fear.”13

Earlier I mentioned that Joker killed the officer in cold blood, but now J oker is begging

Dent to just pull the trigger so that his own “plan” (i.e., sheer chaos and randomness) is (perhaps)

turned on its head. Dent agrees to flip a coin to decide whether J oker lives or dies, to which J oker

says approvingly, “now we’re talkin’.” The J oker does not value human life, even his own. What

he values most is disrupting the system and to do that he creates aporia to create chaos. As

mentioned, J oker’s goal is to bring down Batman as an ultimate disruption of the system. He

wants to bring down the god-like figure to leave the rest of society to themselves. This could be

seen as a possible resetting of the order. He disrupts a fossilized order so that a new and natural

order can arise in its place. Those following the Loki model are figures of nature and eventually

want to restore the world to a natural state from where new order can arise. In the case of a

natural state of society that we have here, this original situation is one of anarchy, from where

humans have to emancipate themselves on their own.

The Monsters

In this hospital scene, we also notice the creation of a monster. As stated in Chapter 1, Loki is a

father to monsters and in the context of the Loki model this translates to a character that, in turn,

creates a “monster”. We know that Harvey is rescued while Rachel is the one killed, a plan

which the J oker created knowing full well that one person would die while the other lives.

Although Harvey was not killed, he was severely burned, leaving the left half of his face charred

off down to muscle and bone. He is now permanently disfigured. Not only is he permanently

13 As is footnote 7.

changed physically after the horrible ordeal, his personality, the core of who he was, is also

changed. Rachel’s death at the hands of Batman causes Harvey to change character completely.

He was once the man who cared more about Gotham City than anyone else and believed that

there was good in all people. Once he lost Rachel, he turned cold and ruthless, deciding that from

now on he would leave everything to chance through the flip of a coin. This is what the

conversation that he has with the J oker in the hospital implies and the J oker revels in this.

Through the staged death of Rachel, the J oker created (‘fathered,’ in a sense) Harvey as a literal

– social and emotional – monstrosity. Although it is not explicitly said in the movie, the general audience knows that Harvey has now become the infamous Batman comic book villain, Two-

Face.

Interestingly, the J oker himself could also be seen as a monster of nature. We know not

his origin story and he is, therefore, a complete enigma. The J oker is unlike any other being in

Gotham City. Because the Loki model is based in nature, it is not difficult to postulate that nature itself can act in the Loki model as well. The creation of “monsters” generates deviants, but most importantly something new. Monsters also call into question the established order. Harvey, who once steadfastly believed in Batman, turned in an instant. He was suddenly given a different perspective on Batman (keeping in mind that this is when Batman’s one rule of preserving life was also broken). Finally, more and more people of Gotham began to question the established order once the J oker appeared and created chaos. The film thus presents its audience with a situation of complete social newness, which also means deviation or monstrosity, whose future development and stabilization have yet to be accomplished.

The Social Experiment

The J oker yearns for a more natural order, albeit one growing out of chaos he has to first create.

This order will be implemented by people making decisions for their own self-preservation and

not counting on a god-like figure to save them. In short, the J oker wishes to promote human emancipation. This would explain the final trick he pulls as he tries to get the people on the boat

to turn against each other. In this scene, there are two ships. One ship holds the city’s prisoners

and the other holds civilians of every age high-jacked by the J oker. The J oker places a detonator

on each ship and announces to both ships that the other vessel has the detonator to the bombs on

their own ship. At midnight, both ships will explode should not one ship choose to detonate the

bombs on the other, which would allow that ship to survive. The J oker calls this situation his

“social experiment.”

Through this chaotic act there is a message, however: the outcome is in the hands of the

people – not Batman’s or the J oker’s. Y et, the J oker forces them to decide what they will do for

themselves. “See I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve,” the J oker declares in an interrogation room where he explains this whole plan. He anticipates that the people will drop all of their morals when the “chips are down” and that they’ll “eat each other.” The passengers on each ship are shown debating and casting votes to come to a decision as to whether or not the bombs on the other ship should be detonated. In the end, neither boat decided to blow up the other. The boat full of civilians voted against setting off the explosives on the boat full of prisoners, and one of the inmates on the boat full of prisoners coolly took the detonator and threw it into the water (a move which I believe to be a Hollywood happy ending, rather than what may have actually happened according to the script). In this case, the J oker’s game did not fully play out as viewers (or he) may have thought it would. However, this outcome is still

32 acceptable because this still perpetuates the ideas of uncertainty and chaos since the J oker’s plan did not go the way he had hoped. The fact that there were many people on each ship who were willing to detonate the other ship also proves the J oker’s point that people will turn on each other for survival.

The J oker’s social experiment and undermining of authority conclude at the end of the film when Batman makes it seem as if he committed the five murders which were, in actuality, committed by Two-Face (Harvey Dent). With this, Batman must flee the city to escape Gotham’s authorities because Gotham has now turned on their hero. With Batman seemingly gone, the city is left to its own devices. The J oker wanted the people to learn that the city’s social systems needed to balance themselves out naturally by going through pure chaos and, in turn, to not be ruled and protected by one wealthy leader. Out of extreme chaos thus came a natural balance for the city; an outcome as paradoxical as J oker and Loki themselves, and one that is also found at the end of both the Nordic and Wagner’s versions of the fall of the gods.

In this chapter, I have outlined a key feature to the Loki model: the disinterested undermining of authority in the service of creating a fresh societal order. I have demonstrated that greed does not fuel the trickster’s agenda while chaos is his number one goal in order to undermine power and create new openings for new worlds. This feature of the Loki-model character is most explicitly illustrated by the burning of money that opens the perspective to possible societies not based on capitalist economies. Both Loge and J oker use their cunning and shape-shifting trickster traits, but only one of them has the characteristics that belong exclusively to the Loki model: the J oker. Loge is not a part of the Loki model because he is a follower without initiative and a fire god, a symbol of hunger, appetite, and greed. While Loge’s actions do eventually contribute to the fall of the gods, i.e., of authority, by the incineration of their

33 world, this is not an outcome he intentionally created. Wotan’s decisions are the ones that ultimately lead to the gods’ end and Loge is merely a pawn in the system. We know that Loge is a pawn to Wotan when Wotan throws in his face that he brought Loki to the world of the gods although no one else wanted him there in Das Rheingold (I/2). This way, a new element is introduced, Loki, but one whose presence does not (yet) have any consequences in Wagner’s open-ended Ring.

In comparison, J oker’s own mind-set is outside of the system. He is so far removed from the system that we do not even know how he got the scars on his face because he tells a different, equally unreliable or equally true, story each time. This means, his origin is of no real importance. At least in the world he operates in, the J oker is a blank slate and a disinterested

“agent of chaos,” as he says. He works from the outside of the system in and attempts to disrupt the many rules of the current system. The J oker is fully self-aware of the fact that he is a representative of pure chaos. His ultimate goal is to undermine god-like authority by forcing

Batman to act against his own principles (i.e., he forces the system to turn against itself) and he does this by using his cunning and shape-shifting abilities. Notably, where it really matters, the

J oker does not meddle in life and death: he does not wish to kill Batman, only to find his ‘cracks’ and break them open – he applies the concept of aporia to Batman as representative and pivot of the system. ‘Breaking’ Batman, the rich man behind a mask, means breaking the obsolete system and creating the possibility of a fresh start.

CHAPTER 3

REFLECTING BY WAY OF LANGUAGE

In this final chapter, I will introduce two new characters, both of German literature tradition: Till

Eulenspiegel and the Baron of Münchhausen. These two characters demonstrate the fluidity of the Loki model through language and, as such, I analyze these two characters from a semantics standpoint, the study in the field of linguistics that studies “the systematic ways in which languages structure meaning, especially in words or sentences” (Finegan 173). These two characters use language to unveil the true meaninglessness of words, revealing that language is, for the most part, a reflection of the culture, not an expression of objective truth. Eulenspiegel and Münchhausen de-structuralize language down to one of its most basic aspects: words. This is relevant, considering that “the most tangible elements of a language are its words” (35).

Eulenspiegel and Münchhausen both seem to understand this and they play with this tangible element of language. As figures in the Loki model, they add another layer to this model: the manipulation of language in order to create their own realities again in order to undermine social

(in their case, verbal) constructs. Recall that the Loki model is about nature; although communication through language is a part of the human existence, and as such is seemingly natural, it is still a system built atop layers of arbitrary signals. Referencing Ferdinand de

Saussure’s semiotic theory, J onathan Culler writes that “language is a system of signs” and what

Saussure means by the arbitrary nature of signs is that “there is no natural or inevitable link between the signifier and the signified” (Culler 28-29).14 Eulenspiegel and Münchhausen use words as they see fit by manipulating the semantics and linguistic conventions of language

14 A sign is made up of the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié). An idea is signified by a form which is the signifier (Culler 28).

owing to this disjunction between the meaning and its sign. It allows them to play with the

signifiers and their intended meanings. This play calls into question authoritative statements and

it creates new realities in the spirit of breaking the “morsche Schranken der eigenen Sprache”

that Walter Benjamin sees at work in translation, which strives for the creation of an ideal

language of pure communication (19). While Eulenspiegel and Münchhausen create chaos rather

than communication, they undo the parameters of worn-out language in the service of opening it

up to a fresh semiotic future of communication that integrates the sign with its meaning more

productively.

Till Eulenspiegel

Till Eulenspiegel is a popular German figure of German folklore whose stories first appeared in written text in the 16th century which was a bestseller of its time (Wunderlich 38). The author of the Eulenspiegel story collection was unknown until the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, it has been widely accepted that the original author was Herman Bote (1467-1520) who published Die kurzweilige Geschichte von Till Eulenspiegel anonymously. Bote was a customs worker and a Middle Low German chronicler. Bote reported that his character, Till Eulenspiegel, is based off of a real life person from Mölln who is said to have died in 1350 (Tenberg 38). The book is split up into ninety-six short stories of Eulenspiegel’s adventures. Till

Eulenspiegel notoriously twists words and acts on people’s statements quite literally. In doing so he creates distorted truths which are also new realities. He molds truth by taking the words at their face value, thus depreciating the metaphorical value of the words themselves, which, in fact, accounts for what they are supposed to mean in the first place. These made-up truths can, in

turn, cause actual trouble. Eulenspiegel’s reinterpretation of words according to their surface meaning thus creates practical consequences in reality.

Therefore, I find it only suiting to take a linguistic approach to him. I will analyze

Eulenspiegel’s 13th story, “Die 13. Historie, wie sich Eulenspiegel bei einem Pfarrer verdingte und wie er ihm die gebratenen Hühner vom Spieß aß” (Bote 19). In this tale, Eulenspiegel goes to the town of Büddenstedt, Braunschweig. There, he is hired by a clergyman to be his house servant. Bote writes that the clergyman instructed Eulenspiegel that he would eat just as well as he and his housekeeper, yet “alles, was er [Eulenspiegel] tun müsse, könne er mit halber Arbeit tun” (19). Of course, Eulenspiegel goes on to take these words quite literally. The housekeeper tells him to roast two chickens on a skewer over the stove. Instead of leaving two, he eats a whole chicken off of the skewer. When asked by the minister what happened to the second chicken, Eulenspiegel says,

„Ich habe das eine gegessen, das Ihr gesagt hattet, ich sollte ebenso gut essen und

trinken wir Ihr und Eure Magd. Es tat mir leid, daß Ihr gelogen haben würdet,

wenn Ihr die beiden Hühner miteinander gegessen hättet und ich nichts davon

bekommen hätte. Damit Ihr an Euren Worten nicht zum Lügner würdet, aß ich

das eine Huhn auf“ (20).

Eulenspiegel is saying that he only ate the whole chicken so as to not make the clergyman a liar, knowing that the clergyman would have not stuck to his words and left him enough of the meal.

After all, Eulenspiegel is supposed to eat just as well as the other two members of the house.

Here, we see the essence of Eulenspiegel. The clergyman’s statement that Eulenspiegel will be treated just like he and his housemaid makes sense figuratively, but is not what the clergyman

37 truly means when taken literally. Eulenspiegel constantly plays with the literal meanings of sentences to show the emptiness of words themselves.

Only in a societal context can words be understood figuratively. The same is true today with various cultures’ metaphors and sayings. Much of human language is, according to Edward

Finegan, “essentially arbitrary” and “because the relationship between linguistic signs and what they represent is arbitrary, the meaning of any given sign may differ from culture to culture” (8).

This connects with the aforementioned signifier and signified from Cullen’s text on Saussure.

From these findings we know that language is mostly understood through a cultural context. “It’s raining cats and dogs” makes no literal sense, but in the culture in which it is used, it is understood that it is raining heavily. A person who has not learned this about the culture might be scratching their head wondering what it could mean because the literal sentence makes no sense. Thus, “it is likely that some of these principles reflect different cultures’ views of the world” (190). This is an interesting point to note because this is precisely what Eulenspiegel is doing through his language playfulness. He makes people see that their language, which is so deeply connected to the culture, is arbitrary.

His name may also play a role is this message. “Eulenspiegel” consists of the words for

‘owl’ and ‘mirror’. Owls are seen as a symbol of intelligence in western thought, so this comparison to Eulenspiegel is easily perceived. The idea of owls representing intelligence stems from Greek antiquity with the goddess Athena as the virgin goddess of wisdom. The city of

Athens adopted the symbol of the owl to show allegiance to her and has signified intelligence and wisdom across European cultures ever since. The mirror in Eulenspiegel’s name is present because he shows people a reflection of their society. “Laughing about all others and himself at times as well, Eulenspiegel reveals that laughter is a fundamental epistemological tool, shedding

38 light on man’s true character, attitudes, and concepts” (Classen 473). Classen discusses how

Eulenspiegel creates laughter, but I contest that this is only the surface of his actions. Beneath the laughter, Eulenspiegel is playing tricks on the most basic human function – communication – as he erodes the base of language, which is meaning. Successful communication is all about meaning. By twisting communication, Eulenspiegel strikingly shows that the words, which humans use to create meaning are completely arbitrary and might as well be used to construct different, new realities.

In the aforementioned story, Eulenspiegel continues to frustrate the housekeeper because of his laziness and consumption of food. At the same time, however, his cleverness amuses the clergyman. Once Eulenspiegel admitted to eating the chicken and had provided a reasonable explanation (i.e., one that destructed the clergyman’s own meaning), his master replied by telling

Eulenspiegel to just do as the housekeeper “sees” fit in the future; important here is that he specifically says, “wie sie es gern sieht” (20). As I stressed in the previous chapter, the Loki model does not imply appetite, which I read to mean greed. During this entire story, Eulenspiegel never speaks of an appetite, or hunger, as the reason for eating a whole chicken. He is not hungry, he is simply holding the clergyman to his exact words. The reason he gives is a logical, non-self-interested reason for eating the chicken and the clergyman accepts this reason although it is not the meaning which he had intended. The clergyman tells him how he would be treated working as a servant and Eulenspiegel holds him to his exact words, but not their implied meaning. Thus, Eulenspiegel is questioning the truth of the clergyman’s words in a literal and logical manner in this tale. As he understands them ‘by the letter,’ so to speak, he shows that the words of the clergyman, when understood at this most basic level, are meaningless.

Going back to the most recent quote, Eulenspiegel continues to use the clergyman’s words further by playing on the housekeeper’s blindness in one eye. The clergyman says to do as the housekeeper “sees” fit, but Eulenspiegel knows that the housekeeper only has one eye. So, whenever the housekeeper asks Eulenspiegel to do anything, he does it only half way, just as the housekeeper sees the world – as only half. For example, he fills a bucket only halfway when the housekeeper asks for a full bucket of water.

This twisting of language makes it appear as if Eulenspiegel has a total disregard for semantics. However, Eulenspiegel is strongly and consciously aware of language meaning. He manipulates the semantics of words; he takes them at their face value and ignores their implied meaning. Syntax and morphology are more important to him than linguistic semantics. There are several types of meaning when talking about semantics, including referential or linguistic, affective, and social. The most relevant to Eulenspiegel is the referential meaning. This part of semantics he does not ignore, but rather clings to and uses in his interpretations of other people’s statements. Referential meaning occurs when “the meaning of the word or sentence is the actual person, object, abstract notion, event, or state to which the word or sentence makes reference”

(Finegan 174). The story in which Eulenspiegel bakes “owls” and “monkeys” is an example of this practical use of referential meaning. In this story titled “Die 61. Historie sagt, wie sich

Eulenspiegel in Braunschweig bei einem Brotbäcker als Bäckergeselle verdingte und wie er

Eulen und Meerkatzen backte”, the baker asks him to bake overnight while he is out oft he bakery. Because the baker is frustrated at Eulenspiegel’s question of what he should bake, the baker shouts “bist du ein Bäckergeselle und fragst erst, was du backen sollst? Was pflegt man denn zu backen? Eulen oder Meerkatzen!” (Bürger 169). The next morning the baker comes in early so as to help Eulenspiegel finish the bread order and when he enters he sees the room filled

with owl- and monkey-shaped bread. Eulenspiegel was supposed to have baked rolls and loaves

of bread. Instead of understanding any implied meaning, Eulenspiegel abides by the referential

meaning. He bakes exactly what the baker shouts at him to bake – owls and monkeys. Because

Eulenspiegel claimed to be a trained baker’s assistant, the contextual meaning should have been

obvious that the baker wanted bread rolls and loaves, but Eulenspiegel chooses to ignore this. In this way, he is again showing the meaninglessness of language as a means to reveal the meaninglessness of social interactions. Social interactions are reliant upon implications, including linguistic ones. In this story, Eulenspiegel’s new creations prove quite successful. The baker kicks him out with what he has baked, so Eulenspiegel sells his creations with profit on the market – even saying that he made more than the baker would have made selling them as breads and rolls in the shop. The story not only allows Eulenspiegel to punish the baker for his unreasonably rude outburst, but it also paints the possibility of rethinking negative language in a positive, productive light. Classen maintains that the laughter Eulenspiegel produces “is not a vicious, mean-spirited laughter” (485); furthermore, this laughter aims “to teach people a lesson about themselves, which some of them actually accept because it was brought home to them by way of a humorous strategy” (480). However, as my readings of the referenced Eulenspiegel- tales reveal, I assert that laughter and humor are only the surface of his full play on the semantics of a language in order to destruct cultural meanings that are fundamentally arbitrary.

Münchhausen

Where Eulenspiegel detracts meaning from the utterances of others, Münchhausen adds his own meaning. His meaning, however, is not truthful as it refers to acts that, unlike Eulenspiegel’s semantic re-creations, can not occur in nature. Furthermore, he is himself the unreliable source of

the new language, he does not modify external statements. Münchhausen, much like

Eulenspiegel, is based on an historical figure. The literary character derives from a man named

Hieronymus K arl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen of the house Bodenwerder-Rinteln. He

was born in 1720 and known world-wide as the “Lügenbaron” (Ruttmann 157). He grew up as a

page in Braunschweig and at the age of eighteen he followed the duke’s brother, Prince Anton

Ulrich, to Russia where he served as a cadet and later was promoted to lieutenant. It remains uncertain whether or not the historical Münchhausen served in any of the Russo-Turkish Wars of the eighteenth century, the conflicts which play a large role in the tales of our literary figure,

Münchhausen (157).

The Cooperative Principles

Stepping away from semantics for a moment, one may claim that Münchhausen violates one of the “cooperative principles” of language, i.e., “the principles that govern the interpretation of utterances.” There are four such principles or areas of communication called “maxims:” the maxim of quantity, of relevance, of manner, and of quality (Finegan 289). Münchhausen mostly violates the “maxim of quality,” and when this particular maxim is violated, “all other maxims are of little value or interest” (289).

To demonstrate this violation of the “maxim of quality,” I will summarize the story of the

axe on the moon. Münchhausen was sold into Turkish slavery after he unwillingly had become

involved in the war and captured. As a slave, he worked in the fields doing the banal task of

tending to the sultan’s beans. One day, Münchhausen encountered two bears while out in the

field and he had intentions of throwing his silver axe at them so as to scare them off. But with an

“allzu starken Schwung” of his arm, the axe flew up to the moon15 (Bürger 38). To retrieve the axe, Münchhausen claimed that he grew his master’s beans and rode them up to the moon. Once he found his axe, however, the beans had dried up from the sun and he had to find another way down. Münchhausen used the hay that he found on the moon and tied enough of it together to create a long rope. On the way down, this ‘rope’ broke and he fell so hard to the earth that he created a crater that was “wenigstens neun K lafter tief” (40). Münchhausen used his fourteen- year-old-long nails that he had grown as a slave to use as “eine Art Treppe” and this way got out of the hole with ease (40).

This tale, like all of Münchhausen’s tales, contains a logical chain of causality. He gets into a situation and finds a solution that, while logical on paper, is irrational in the real world.

This way, Münchhausen is debasing reason, a form of thought that was popular among the humanists of the era of Enlightenment in which this book was written. The play with rationality locates the Baron close to a trickster. Hyde states the following in this regard: “[The first lie] upsets the polarity between truth and falsity to emerge later with a new polarity, perhaps, but one set up with different boundary markers” (Hyde 74). The lie upsets a “status quo” because telling the truth would “lock [one] in it forever” (74). Therefore, through Münchhausen’s violation of the maxim of quality, he opens himself up to all of the possibilities of language without the worry of the fixations of truthfulness. The listener of a story cannot trust what he says because it is beyond reason. This is a destruction of an implicit rule of language. It is something that speakers are supposed to do in order to have cooperation amongst each other, hence the

“cooperative principles”. This notion of cooperation is not present in Münchhausen. However, as

15 The moon is a political symbol, as it is the symbol on the Turkish flag. Historically, the Ottoman Empire and Europe were at odds since about the sixteenth century until the second half of the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century alone saw at least four military conflicts between the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and their allies.

a work of fiction, the stories about the Baron are not meant to render facts and this is clear

enough to their audiences. Free of the obligations of truthful communication, the stories allow the destruction of rationality through language, and thus the creation of something new out of the same language that is now unencumbered by factualness.

Eulenspiegel plays off of others’ words, while Münchhausen uses his own language to produce tall tales that are practically impossible but, linguistically and logically, plausible.

“Affective meaning” in linguistics is the impression that a speaker gives to listener or reader

(Finegan 176). This “affective meaning” is crucial for the stories of Münchhausen. Bürger writes the character of the Baron as a bold, self-confident man. The reader knows that these situations are impossible, but the nonchalant way that Münchhausen goes about telling his stories can make a reader believe in other, non-factual truths. In the referenced story, for example, Münchhausen talks about throwing his axe too hard and the reader perceives almost a sense of pride in that, i.e.,

a real emotional experience. And again, in a story about his sleeping through melting snow and waking up in a city that had been buried under this snow, Münchhausen is totally unfazed and touts the fact that he slept so healthily during a nap when he says, “und [ich] tat ein so gesundes

Schläfchen” (11). As I stated before, Münchhausen adds meaning to his words through this

“affective meaning” because his self-assuredness is so convincing. This self-confidence can

potentially give readers a feeling of security, amusement, or satisfaction that are real and

meaningful beyond the factual and rational content of statements. In regards to Münchhausen,

Albert Rapp states that Münchhausen’s “impossible” and “extravagant” exaggerations “should be ‘palmed off’ as actual truth, or much of the effect will be lost” (347).

As this chapter reveals, those in the Loki model play with language, in order to manipulate their realities and create new ones. In Chapter 1, I explained that Loki is a tactical

user of language using the examples of “Loki’s Quarrel” and “Thrym’s Poem”. Likewise,

Eulenspiegel creates his own reality out of the words of others, surprising those whose words he twists. Münchhausen uses his own language to create his reality, which is an affective reality of

unreal situations. Both characters undermine language not out of self-interest, but rather to break the status quos of both languages themselves and, through them, the societies and cultures tied to them. As mentioned in Chapter 1, it is because language is so deeply connected to the basics of

human necessity that its repurposing demonstrates the meaninglessness of verbal human

interaction. Eulenspiegel and Münchhausen thus add an additional layer to the Loki model. As

stated previously, those in the Loki model offer reflection and re-evaluation of moral and social

conformity within their societies and the use of language adds to these dimensions appropriately.

The creation of new world views through clever word use unveils the arbitrariness of mundane

social conventions that are, at their core, meaningless outside of the context of a society. This

meaninglessness shows that human minds can open up language to see new perspectives through

a simple manipulation of words. These characters focus on the transcendence from the social norms and expectations and thus undermine the authoritarian and socially constrictive rules of

communication.

CONCLUSION

In summary, the Loki model is an abstract method of analyzing common characters and their narrative effects throughout western literature and film. The Loki model stresses several existential and aesthetic parameters. First of all, it regards nature as being a basic principle that represents life’s temporal limitations. Immortality is seen as unnatural and therefore Baldr’s mortality is viewed by Loki as the gift of humanity rather than the curse of impermanence.

Dying is a part of the natural cycle of life and being above death is therefore unnatural and rigid.

There is a polarity between nature and culture in this that the Loki model wishes to break by calling into question cultural norms, such as accepting gods as immortal. Moreover, nature is often masked by society and the Loki model strives to strip society back to the basics of human nature. In narratives of the Loki model, such as in The Dark Knight, society is given the opportunity to rid itself of its many empty conventions and re-create itself.

In Nordic mythology, Loki is a figure who causes just that. Through chaos, it undermines the system in place. One example for this is the tale “The Death of Baldr and Hermod’s Ride to

Hel”. Loki also questions social norms when he prods at loyalties and truths in “Loki’s Quarrel”.

In all this, Loki, is neither evil, nor benevolent but a fluid being. This fluidity also allows Loki to easily shift in and out of any form, animal or human (of any gender) and to play with the form and meaning of language in storytelling.

Wagner’s Loge does not directly create situations of chaos that undermine authority.

Although Loge is a master of language, he does not offer societal reflection nor demonstrate the arbitrariness of culture through de-structuralizing language. Loge is an example of a trickster who serves the system whereas figures under the Loki model abstraction strive to create new

worlds. This is obvious in Christopher Nolan’s J oker who creates pure chaos and even calls himself “an agent of chaos.” However, out of his own free will, he creates situations of chaos in

Gotham City to break the system in which one man holds an unjustified god-like power over society. The J oker also intentionally creates a monster in Harvey Dent and is himself a monster of nature. The J oker, Eulenspiegel, and Münchhausen create things that are deviant and monstrous – be they self-alienated individuals like Dent, aberrant objects like Eulenspiegel’s animal breads, or impossible Enlightened rationalizations – but at the same time, also new. All of these new “monsters” call into question the established order, be it ethic, societal, intellectual or linguistic. The Loki model, thus, thrives on the fluidity of situations and identities to create productive chaos. Chaotic acts undermine the authority that is in place in order to destabilize its systems. This, paradoxically allows for new systems to emerge in which people must emancipate themselves as individuals, rather than remaining subjects to a singular power who, as they

imagine, watches over them all.

As shown, the destruction of language is also a form of societal reflection and re-

evaluation. Till Eulenspiegel and the Baron of Münchhausen manipulate the semantics of a language in order to demonstrate the meaninglessness of language, and thus, of society itself.

Eulenspiegel twists the true words of others to subvert them while Münchhausen transforms

language to tell tall tales truthfully. Münchhausen also violates the cooperative principles of

language. This undermines culture because each culture has rules for cooperation in speech and

Münchhausen violates the most important one: trustworthiness.

Nature, society, and language are the three main abstracts to the Loki model. All are

systems in place and have to break down every now and then in order to bring about a new order.

To re-create natural, social, or semantic order, chaos must be implemented in the purest sense of

the word. Finally, to fully undermine a human-created system, one of the most basic human needs – language – must be shamelessly put on display for society to see itself reflected in it as it truly is – arbitrary. The Loki model and its narratives that this thesis has discussed does just that.

WORK S CITED

Armstrong, K aren. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd., 2005. Print. Bassil-Morozow, Helena V ictor. The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency in Contemporary Society. New Y ork, NY : Routledge, 2015. Print. Bassil-Morozow, Helena V ictor. The Trickster in Contemporary Film. London: Routledge, 2012. Print. Benjamin, Walter. "Die Aufgabe des Ü bersetzers." Gesammelte Schriften 4.1. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1972. 9-21. Print. Bote, Hermann. Till Eulenspiegel: Ein kurzweiliges Buch von Till Eulenspiegel aus dem Lande Braunschweig. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel V erlag, 2012. Print. Bürger, Gottfried August. Wunderbare Reisen zu Wasser und Lande, Feldzüge und lustige Abenteuer des Freiherrn von Münchhausen. Ed. Irene Ruttmann. Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1980. Print. Byok, J esse L. Introduction. The Prose Edda. By Snorri Sturluson. London: Penguin Books, 2005. ix-xxx. Print. Classen, Albrecht. "Laughter as the Ultimate Epistemological V ehicle in the Hands of Till Eulenspiegel." Neophilologus 92.3 (2008): 471-89. Web. Culler, J onathan D. Ferdinand de Saussure. Ithaca, N.Y .: Cornell University Press, 1986. Print. de V ries, J an. The Problem of Loki. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1933. Print. Dundes, Alan. "The Hero Pattern and the Life of J esus." In Quest of the Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 179-223. Print. Faivre, Antione. The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus. Trans. J oscelyn Godwin. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1995. Print. Finegan, Edward. Language: It's Structure and Use. 5th ed. Boston: Thomas Wadsworth, 2007. Print. Fhlainn, Sorcha Ni. "'Wait til they get a load of me!': The J oker from Modern to Postmodern V illainous S/laughter." Villains and Villany: Embodiments of Evil in Literature, Popular Culture and Media. Ed. Anna Fahraeus and Dikmen Y akalı Çamoğlu. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2011. 71-92. Print. Fohr-Manthey, Simone. "Die Doppelte Triade: Wotan - Loge - Erde/Wagern - Freud - Butler." Act: Zeitschrift für Musik & Performance 3.3 (2012): 1-18. Print.

Garry, J ane, Hasan M. El-Shamy. Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature: A Handbook. Armonk, N.Y .: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. Print. Harris, Alan C. "Trickster in American Pop Culture: A Semio-Discursive Analysis of Batman and the J oker in the Hollywood Batman Film." The American J ournal of Semiotics 14.1 (1997): 57-78. Print. Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New Y ork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print. Lindow, J ohn. "LOK I." Encyclopedia of Relgion. Ed. Lindsay J ones. 2nd ed. V ol. 8. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. 5507-5510. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Print. Rapp, Albert. "The Genealogy of Baron Munchausen." The Classical J ournal 32.6 (1937): 347-51. Print. Ruttmann, Irene. Afterword. Wunderbare Reisen zu Wasser und Lande, Feldzüge und lustige Abenteuer des Freiherrn von Münchhausen. By Gottfried August Bürger. Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1980. Print. Scheub, Harold. Trickster and Hero: Two Characters in the Oral and Written Traditions of the World. Madison, Wis: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Print. Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Print. Tenberg, Reinhard. Die deutsche Till Eulenspiegel Rezeption bis zum Ende des 16. J ahrhunderts. Würzburg: K önigshausen und Neumann, 1996. Print. The Man Who Laughs. Dir. Paul Leni. 1928. K ino V ideo, 2003. DV D. The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perfs. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Gary Oldman. Warner Home V ideo, 2008. DV D. The Poetic Edda. New Y ork: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1996. Print. Wagner, Richard. Das Rheingold. Trans. Frederick J ameson. Mainz: B. Schott's Söhne, 1899. Print. Wanner, K evin J . "Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth: Loki, Óðinn, and the Limits of Sovereignty." History of Religions 48.3 (2009): 211-246. Print. Weiner, Marc A. Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Print. Wunderlich, Werner. "Till Eulenspiegel: Zur K arriere Eines Schalksnarren in Geschichte Und Gegenwart." Monatshefte 78.1 (1986): 38-47. Print.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Arianne Howard was raised in Titusville, Florida on Florida’s Space Coast. She was

raised speaking both English and Spanish at home, but it was not until taking Latin in high

school that she realized her passion for languages. In 2014, she received her Bachelor of Arts

degree with a co-major in Spanish and German at Florida State University. After receiving her

Bachelor’s degree, Arianne was accepted to the master’s program at Florida State University to earn a Master of Arts in German.