Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Bc. Anna Mária Pisoňová
Representation of the Trickster Figure in Selected Works Written by African American Authors Master’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Jeffrey A. Vanderziel, B.A.
2019
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
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Author’s signature
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my supervisor, Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A. for setting me on the right path when I was stuck and for his valuable advice and guidance throughout writing this thesis. I would also like to thank my Juniatan mentor, Amanda Page, PhD. for going with me through the tough beginnings. Finally, this thesis would have never happened without those who understand the sacred chant of “egg, egg,” those special ones, who always listened to my thesis ideas although they did not understand a word of what I was saying, and the one who spent the last, most painful days, struggling with me and her own thesis. The Lord of the Rings marathon, here I come!
Table of Contents 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………….……………1
1.1. Am I a trickster? – Definition of the archetype………………………………………...5
1.2. Origins of African American Trickster…………………………………….…………7
2. Boundaries, margins, and the American Society………………………………….……12
3. Conquering the Binary Opposition……………………………………………………..25
4. Appetite as a Driving Force of Trickster’s Actions…………………………………..36
5. Sacrifice……………………….………………………………………………………….48
6. Conclusion………………………………………………...... ……………………………59
7. Works Cited and Consulted…………………………………………………………….62
1. Introduction
Looking from the doorsteps of a society, never truly entering our world, but always ready to deceive and fool, to entertain and to point out the absurdity of our own world order, there is a mythical, ambiguous character as old as the humans themselves – a trickster. Because of the important role that the trickster has had in African and subsequently African American folklore, he is allowed to cross the doorsteps and enter to the centre of their oral and literary traditions, unlike those who bear it, African Americans, whose marginal status within the American society has, arguably, lasted until today.
Therefore the trickster has, throughout history, served as their expression of revolt and as a criticism of the oppressive society, but, with the oppositeness of its definition, also as a reason for laughter and entertainment.
This diploma thesis explores what trickster traits are represented the most in the selected works of African American literary canon and what functions these traits serve.
It tries to examine the trickster characteristics and their possible change throughout history. The primary sources used for this examination are the following: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself by Frederick
Douglass, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Sula by Toni Morrison. Each of these authors operated under different conditions, which, subsequently, impacted their perception of trickster’s functions and representation. First, Frederick Douglass was born approximately in February 1818 as a slave on a plantation in Maryland, escaped at the age of twenty and joined the abolitionist movement in New York. He wrote his memoir to point out the inhuman conditions that the slaves lived under, which eventually became a canonical work of the slave narrative genre. Ralph Ellison, born in 1914 in Oklahoma, worked on Invisible Man during the times of segregation and Jim Crow laws, publishing
1 the book in 1952, shortly before the Civil Rights Movement broke forth in the United
States three years later with Montgomery Bus Boycott. Similarly to Douglass’s memoir,
Invisible Man has some autobiographical traits, too. Ellison, for example, similarly to the narrator of Invisible Man, attended an all-black university, ended up disillusioned about its class-oriented functioning, moved to Harlem, and became associated with Communist ideas presented in the book by the Brotherhood. Finally, Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Ohio. She published her first book Song of Solomon in 1970 and did not stop writing until her death earlier this year. Her works often centre around strong African American women and their roles in society, Sula not being an exception. She is perceived as one of the most prominent contemporary female African American writers.
The differences between three American societies, each different, nevertheless each a reality for one of the authors discussed in this thesis, led to my hypothesis that the exploration of trickster figure in each of their works would be different too, and would be influenced by the social and political background of each time period – slavery, pre-Civil
Rights Movement, and post-Civil Rights Movement. Using Andrew Williams’s concept that in the times of slavery “African American folk tales […] were modified to meet the conditions of slavery […with the trickster] represent[ing] a revolutionary stance against oppression” (n.p.), I assumed that different time periods, placing African Americans under different conditions, would also need different representations of trickster figures.
First, this diploma thesis tries to define a trickster and introduce the origins of
African American trickster folk tales that create a model for the trickster representation in African American literary canon following the oral tradition. Afterwards, it is divided into four chapters, each analysing an individual trickster trait in the above-mentioned works. To be able to evaluate the trickster’s representation, the thesis is meant to closely
2 analyse some of the trickster characteristics that all the above-mentioned books include, namely boundary-crossing, defying binary opposition, appetites, and sacrifice. While doing so, it leans against Lewis Hyde’s comprehensive study of the trickster archetype in his work Trickster Makes this World and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s book The Signifying
Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Using close reading and comparative analysis as the main methods, this thesis focuses on each trait, supporting it with secondary sources and criticism of each work.
The first chapter discusses the instances of boundary crossing, both physical and psychological. It demonstrates how Frederick Douglass becomes a boundary-crosser by the act of writing a memoir which becomes a central work of the slave narrative genre and how the slave characters present in the Narrative are put at the same time on the margins and in the centre of the book. Further, it argues that Douglass represents an oxymoron of a free slave and describes his opposition to the racist social hierarchy. Tying
Douglass’s portrayal of boundary-crossing to Ellison’s balancing at the margins of society, it further examines the means that Ellison’s narrator uses to discover his identity and his position in society, drawing a distinction between different perceptions of a trickster figure. Finally, it analyses Morrison’s depiction of Sula as a perpetrator of the social norms dictated by her community by violating the rule designated for an African
American woman in the first half of the 20th century.
The second chapter analyses the portrayal of the binary opposition, mainly its criticism, in all books chosen for this research. It is usually portrayed through the individual’s perception of the world. In Frederick Douglass’s Narrative it is present in his biracial background and subsequent status of a free slave, in Ellison’s Invisible Man it is depicted in the narrator’s struggle for his identity, and in Morrison’s Sula it is
3 demonstrated in the presumable oppositions embodied in Sula and Nel. The chapter examines the trickster’s ability to reject the world working in black-and-white mode and explains how this concept is used in the selected literary works.
The third chapter explores the trickster’s appetites and their portrayal in each book and ties it to the question of morality that often stands in the way of fulfilling these appetites. Douglass’s appetites are most visible in the form of hunger and pursuit of literacy, in Invisible Man they are present in the form of sexual desire of Jim Trueblood and the boys fighting in Battle royal, and in the narrator’s dedication to revenge.
Furthermore, in Sula, similarly to Ellison’s book, they are represented in the form of sexual freedom of the main character. The chapter discusses multiple readings of appetites depicted in the books and examines their literal, as well as metaphorical, meanings.
Finally, the fourth chapter pursues the depiction of sacrifice, more specifically the motivation of tricksters to bring a sacrifice and the consequences it has on the trickster characters in each book. It also discusses the various positions that the tricksters find themselves in relation to sacrifice. Not always they take the role of a sacrificer, but at times also find themselves to be the sacrifice or the entity that the sacrifice is meant for.
The chapter examines sacrifice present in Douglass’s struggle with intemperance and his decision to pursue higher goals. Further, it analyses Ellison’s narrator and the various roles that he inhabits within the sacrificial ritual. Finally, it focuses on the depiction of sacrifice in Sula, impersonated in the character of Eva Peace. It is intertwined with the previous chapter, as the trickster’s sacrifice is usually closely associated with his appetites.
Although working with a hypothesis that the depiction of the trickster figure would differ in each work based on the time period and social background of each author,
4 in conclusion, these traits seem to follow the same central function – to resist the oppression of the society they are set into. However, the traits themselves are portrayed differently in each work, drawing from not only the historical options for African
Americans in the United States, but also from the authors’ backgrounds and the central themes of the books.
1.1 Am I a Trickster? – Definition of the Archetype
Trickster figures are not exclusive to a single culture. On the contrary, they appear in countless mythologies throughout the world, generating unexpected situations, inventing new objects, explaining natural phenomena, and even creating the world as we know it. Hermes in Greek mythology invents a harp, Loki in Norse mythology indirectly gives the unbreakable hammer to Thor, and Coyote in Native American mythology presents people with tobacco. It is the Polynesian trickster Maui, Indian Krishna, and
African Anansi, who shape the world as we know it in other cultures. Wherever a trickster appears, the order changes to chaos, the social and physical boundaries become hazy, and the hierarchy reverses. And he appears everywhere.
Trying to define a trickster figure is a complex task, as the trickster himself is a complex character. David Leeming in his book The World of Myth: An Anthology, defines trickster as
at once wise and foolish, the perpetrator of tricks, and the butt of his own
jokes. Always male, he is promiscuous and amoral; he is outrageous in
his actions; he emphasizes the “lower” bodily functions; he often takes
animal form. Yet the trickster is profoundly inventive, creative by nature,
and in some ways helper to humanity (163).
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Yet another definition of a trickster by Paul Radin, cited in Lewis Hyde’s book
Trickster Makes the World, identifies trickster as
at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who
dupes others and who is always duped himself… He knows neither good
nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or
social … yet through his actions all values come into being (Hyde 10).
Lewis Hyde himself characterizes trickster as “the archetype who attacks all archetypes and “an ‘eternal state of mind’ that is suspicious of all eternals” (14).
All these definitions working together create an image of a very complicated figure who appears throughout mythologies shaping the reality that we live in. They emphasize the trickster’s ambiguity and complexness, creating an archetype that draws from all archetypes and fits the reality of a world that is not definable itself.
Considering trickster’s characteristics, such as his amorality, persisting appetites, and actions resulting in unintended creations, this mythical figure resembles in many ways the human character stripped from the norms and laws that people cast upon themselves. This might be the reason why people are so willing to accept the trickster as a hero despite his dubious nature. We condemn his actions but at the same time acknowledge the similarities between the trickster figure and humans. As Harol Scheub writes, “as we curse him and revile him, we understand that he is a representative of us
[…] We never give him up because he represents something within us. We can laugh at him because he is, we insist, so inane, so unlike us, at the same time that we understand his likeness to us” (6-7). Thus, it is possible to state that trickster is, to a great extent, human.
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It is the human form that the trickster appears in the literary works selected for this thesis. None of the characters, perceived as a trickster, fully comply with the trickster’s definition, because, as Hydes states, “actual individuals are always more complicated than the archetype” (14). Nevertheless, it is beyond question that the main protagonists and other characters in these books show some of the trickster characteristics, as this thesis demonstrates.
1.2 Origins of African American Trickster
Deep down in the jungle, so they say
There’s a Signifying Monkey down the way
There hadn’t been no disturbin’ in the jungle for quite a bit,
For up jumped the monkey in the tree one day and laughed
“I guess I’ll start some sh*t.”
(“Signifying Monkey”)
When thinking about the African American trickster figures, it seems natural to attribute their origins to the trickster occurring in the African folklore that was displaced with the first captured Africans and modified to fit the reality of the slave system in what was to become the United States of America. In reality, however, the topic of the origins of the African American trickster tales is more controversial and throughout history sparked a debate about where the animal tales of the slaves brought to the New World originate.
African American trickster folk tales had been widely accepted by scholars as the descendants of African trickster folk tales throughout the 19th and the early 20th century until Richard Dorson “challenged the African origins thesis as unsupportable by strict
7 folkloristic standards” (Roberts 20). He argued that not only the trickster tales, but many other African American folk tales also find their origin in Europe rather than Africa
(Dorson 15). However, William Piersen opposed Dorson some twenty years later and pointed out the limitations of his analysis and his strong European bias, originating in
“Africa […] not be[ing] examined with the same thoroughness as other areas” (Piersen
204), such as Europe. Further, he expressed a belief that as the studies of African continent advance, the African origin of African American trickster tales will become more prevalent (204). Other scholars debated the anthropological origins of African
American tricksters throughout the 20th century, yet never coming to a single consensus.
There were many factors that have made the searching for the origin of the African
American trickster difficult, such as the very definition of a trickster, or the lack of written sources from the earliest slaves, as the slaves born in America later in history were influenced by the European culture more than their predecessors.
Reacting to the inconsistent representation of the African American trickster throughout history, Henry Louis Gates published his ground-breaking work: The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism in 1988. It discusses the origins of the Signifying Monkey, a well-known African-American trickster, and its relationship to Esu-Elegbara, a trickster appearing throughout the African continent.
Although Gates admits that “the degree to which the figure of the Monkey is anthropologically related to the figure of the Pan-African trickster, Esu-Elegbara, shall most probably remain a matter of speculation” (Gates 88), he argues that these two figures work as “functional equivalents” in rhetoric and interpretation (88). For example, in the
Yoruba myth of interpretation, it is Esu with the help of the monkeys who enable the gods to inform people about their needs (14). In this manner, they both become interpreters,
8 crossing the boundary between the gods and the people to translate the wishes of one to the other. However, while in the African mythology Esu plays the major role, it is the
Monkey who is central for the African American oral tradition, creating the language of
Signifyin(g) that enables the African Americans to connect to their white counterparts, while preserving their distinct identity. Why this replacement took place is “extremely difficult to reconstruct” (15). Hence, although Esu and the Monkey share functional characteristics and even occur side by side in myths, their direct anthropological relationship has not been satisfactorily proven, yet.
The trickster figures in African and African American folklore are usually positioned in the place of a hero, albeit sometimes foolish, whose actions are necessary for survival. John Roberts argues that “despite of the apparent rebelliousness of animal tricksters or even the brutality of their behaviour in some tales, Africans had historically accepted the animal tricksters’ characteristic actions as protecting their identity and values under certain types of situations” (21). These situations usually include those, where the way of life and life itself is threatened by outside sources. In Africa, this threat often comes from nature, especially concerning providing material resources, such as food.
Thus, for the African trickster, the reward that satisfies his appetite is frequently food
(Roberts 23). Moreover, he often does not get food solely for himself, but shares the food with others, helping the community. The limitation of resources, caused by the natural environment in Africa, changed after arriving in the New World, where it was a result of the social system, which enslaved the Africans and in itself represented the oppression of every aspect of their lives. Hence, the protecting function of a trickster in Africa could be applied to the population of African Americans, violently brought to the American continent. By bending the morality, tricking the masters, and Signifyin(g), the African
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American trickster tales helped the slaves to preserve their culture in a situation of extreme oppression that had not been encountered before.
Linking Roberts’ argument that the trickster stories originate in the situations with limited resources with Gates’s representation of Signifying Monkey being directly related to Esu-Elegbara through its function might suggest that the origins of African-American trickster do not necessarily have to belong to solely European or African tradition, but rather to both. As the Africans were transferred to the New World, the trickster folk tales were brought with them through the oral tradition. However, encountering new form of oppression, originating in the social system rather than nature, the tricksters were adapted to fit the environment. So, from both, the European and the African origins a new symbol was created. As Bernard W. Bell proclaims, “residual elements of the oral tradition of
Africa […] fused with white American culture and created a new system of shared symbols that […] was different in pattern and emphases from both its European and
African antecedents” (Bell 17). The enslaved Africans, hence, created a folklore distinct to their culture, modifying and adjusting both, African and European, elements into what eventually became a unique African American folklore tradition. “African American trickster tales, while preserving the humour and vitality of the African tales, were modified to meet the conditions of slavery and therefore emphasize the trickster’s subversive masking and signifying skills” (Andrews n.p.). Examples of this fusion and customization are African American tricksters, such as the Signifying Monkey, John
(from the series of tales about John and the Old Master) and Bre’r Rabbit, figures of oral folk tradition that is present in African American written tradition, too.
The following chapters look closely at the individual characteristics of such folk tricksters, further transformed in the complexity of the literary characters and demonstrate
10 how the authors draw inspiration from their folk roots, making them, to a certain extent, tricksters, too.
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2. Boundaries, Margins, and the American society
Boundaries, their blurring, and crossing are an unthinkable part of a trickster definition. Whether talking about a moral boundary, physical boundary, or just a state of one’s mind, a trickster is sure to cross or ignore or corrupt it in a way that suits his purpose.
Other times, the trickster appears without the boundaries unwillingly, being pushed there by the society that he does not fit into. He stands in the periphery, occasionally entering the community only to return to its borders. As Lewis Hyde puts it, “trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life” (7).
The very notion of African American trickster was created by crossing a boundary. First, the African trickster intersected the psychological boundary between freedom and enslavement, and the physical boundary embodied in the Atlantic Ocean, between the African and American continents. Second, he crossed a boundary between two societies, African and American, being taken from the centre of one and put to the outskirts of the other. Surviving in the minds of its bearers, he has been transformed into a new, unique, African American tradition through oppression and “slavery, […] the birthplace of African American culture” (Davis 46-47). There, in the form of stories and songs, he survived as a symbol of slave identity in the social system that tried to reduce a slave to an unconscious property.
Boundaries and their manipulation are among the elements in African American literature since slavery times, too. The centuries-long exclusion of African Americans from the mainstream society might be the reason why this particular trickster characteristic forms an important part of trickster representation, as the African
Americans have slowly been fighting their way into the American society. Although portrayed differently, it is present in all three works discussed in this diploma thesis. 12
Where Frederick Douglass crosses the boundary between slavery and freedom, Ralph
Ellison’s narrator crosses the boundary of one’s identity, and Toni Morrison’s main protagonist Sula crosses the boundaries designed for women within her own hometown community.
In the work of Frederick Douglass, boundary-crossing is depicted in several ways.
The author becomes a boundary-crossing trickster by the very act of writing a memoir.
He “writes[s] himself into the human community through the action of first-person narration” (Davis and Gates xiii), crossing the boundary between ignorance and education, which is “incompatible with [slavery]” (Douglass 33). By writing the memoir, he takes himself from the anonymity of a fugitive slave and puts himself to the centre of the northern abolitionist movement, eventually dying as a well-recognized orator and anti-slavery activist. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a human rights activist and Douglass’s friend wrote the following in her diary after his death: “He stood there [in front of the
Boston audience] like an African prince, majestic in his wrath” (Douglass 128), associating him with very different characteristics than those that Douglass grew up knowing during slavery. He turned from being an outcast slave boy into a respected individual, whose obituary got to be published in The New York Times, describing him as
“an adviser to President Lincoln, a skilful writer and orator and an activist for abolition and women’s suffrage” (no author n.p.).
Douglass’s memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave, Written by Himself also crossed the boundary between the margins and the centre, becoming “ a ‘central text’ in the genre [of slave narratives], so critical archetypes were formed around his heroic individual who ‘discovers the links among freedom, literacy, and struggle’ “ (Drake xxiv). Hence, not only Douglass becomes a part of the community as a persona, his Narrative assures him the place in history by becoming a canonical and
13 standardized work of a developing genre. Thus, the narrative becomes a trickster’s tool that enables the trickster (Douglass) to enter the society which would have otherwise rejected his presence in it. Moreover, “by (re-)writing him[self] and thus placing that self into the tradition of American autobiography, [Douglass] provides proof of ‘American’ identity” (Drake 44). At the beginning of his life, Douglass’s identity is limited to that of a slave, which is radically different from the American identity. A slave lacks the knowledge of such basic facts, such as “age, never having seen any authentic record containing it,” (Douglass 13) or one’s father’s name. The self-identification with
American history, principles, or religion is impossible, because the slaves were denied any opportunities to build such awareness. Moreover, the community Douglass grew up within was deprived of the basic source of this information – books and newspapers.
Because most slaves were forbidden to read and write, they were often limited to their masters as their only sources of knowledge. Therefore, “through access to books,
[Douglass] became a child of two cultures” (Hyde). They gave him the opportunity to peek into the white man’s world and to become a part of it (to a certain extent). Hence, by crossing the boundary of literacy, he crosses the boundary between societies, too, which eventually results in Douglass’s memoir becoming a canonical work of the slave narrative genre, a genre associated with the American and African American history.
Another manner in which Douglass is a boundary-crosser is his depiction of the fellow slaves. Douglass often refers to the lives of other slaves, describing their everyday activities and emphasizing the negative impact of slavery on their lives. These figures, often without an individual identity, stand on the margin and in the centre of Douglass’ memoir at the same time. They are in the background of a story that is solemnly focused on the life of one individual – Frederick Douglass himself. Staying nameless and ageless helps an individual hero, Douglass, to stand out from the anonymous mass of slaves. On
14 the other hand, however, they are at the centre of the book, as its main goal is to ensure that they all are granted freedom. Hence, although meant to be read by the Northern abolitionist audience, the book itself is written for the slaves whose freedom was yet to be acquired. By this, Douglass achieves two things. First, it makes him a Signifyin(g) trickster who uses his intended audience to signify that the book was not actually written for them but for the very subjects of the book – the slaves themselves. Second, it places the slaves at the same time at the centre and at the margins of events, and so it makes them cross an imaginary boundary between themselves and the society which they were not meant to be a part of. Therefore, not only is Douglass a trickster, but he also gives the trickster’s quality of boundary-crossing to slaves who are still in the bondage.
While Douglass crosses a social boundary by writing a book and also crosses a physical boundary by escaping North, he also crosses and bends interpersonal boundaries, especially between himself and his masters. Douglass, sometimes driven by his vision of freedom, other times by cheer impulse, demonstrates a lack of respect towards his masters multiple times throughout the book, reversing the hierarchy of the slave system. One such instance appears when Mr. Covey wants Douglass to sing a hymn during family devotions:
I would at times do so; at others, I would not. My non-compliance would
almost always produce much confusion. To show himself independent of
me, he would start and stagger through with his hymn in the most
discordant manner” (Douglass 47).
In such situations, it is Douglass, who is in charge and the master, who follows the orders. By not obeying the command given by his master, Douglass is subtly projecting a new command and Mr. Covey, resolving to sing the hymn without
Douglass’s help, unconsciously complies with this switched hierarchy. Moreover, as Mr. 15
Covey “was a very poor singer himself” (Douglass 47), it puts Douglass in a superior position of a slave man who possesses qualities that his white master does not.
Not only does Douglass prove himself more skilful than his master, but also physically superior, when at one occasion Douglass gets involved in a fight with Mr.
Covey, which, surprisingly, does not result in any punishment, although Mr. Covey talks about whipping Douglass (Douglass 52-53). If learning to read and write makes Douglass free in mind, winning a fight over a white man makes him free in the body. Douglass, afterwards, calls it
the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring
embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood
[…] and now I resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in
form, the day has passed forever when I could be a slave in fact” (53).
Hence, Douglass raises himself above the slave-breaker and breaks him in return.
His “actions are a vocabulary through which he pronounces a more fundamental mastery over Covey and a concomitant possession of his own identity as a man. A balance of power has shifted” (Bentley 518). Thus, by violating a rule that might have cost his life,
Douglass accidentally also crosses an invisible boundary within himself, embracing his masculinity as a virtue that gives him power over his enslavers.
Where Douglass was crossing the boundaries from the very beginning in order to be able to enter the American society, Ralph Ellison’s unnamed narrator has to realize that he does not belong to the mainstream society in the first place. Douglass’s journey throughout his Narrative is more about physically getting from slavery to freedom.
Although he comes through a mental development throughout the book, the purpose of it is clear from the start. This contrasts to the depiction of boundary-crossing in Ellison’s
16 book. His narrator, who, at the beginning, blindly follows the rules presented to him with the vision of a successful future, only gradually comes to awareness of his exclusion and inferiority in a society ruled by the whites. Thus, he crosses an imaginary boundary within himself, changing the way he looks at himself and the way he perceives the outer world.
It is possible to argue that while Douglass is a trickster from the beginning of his
Narrative, Ellison’s narrator has to discover the trickster within him, gradually turning into one himself. At the beginning, however, he is, in fact, the only African American character, who is not a trickster, but rather a fool, a butt of jokes of tricksters around him.
Other characters, such as the trickery sharecropper Trueblood and the director of the
African American college Bledsoe, benefit from the narrator’s mistakes and use deception to manipulate the white authorities around them. Trueblood, describing his incest relationship with his daughter, manages to get money from the white college trustee, Mr
Norton (Ellison 69). He “succeeds in gaining the sympathies of [Mr Norton] because he tells his story as an implicit psycho-semantic dialogue with a wide range of white and black signifying systems, strategically dislodging ‘white’ fears and desires within ‘black’ images and projections” (Shinn 245). Bledsoe, similarly, signifies inferiority to get white people to do what he desires them to do. In other words, he knows that “the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie” (Ellison 139) and to act the way they expect an
African American to act, just to make them unconsciously follow the path that the African
American trickster creates for them. He uses the strategy of “say[ing] ‘yes, suh’ as loudly as any burrhead when it’s convenient” (Ellison 142), to gain powerful and prestigious position. Trueblood and Bledsoe both use the image that the white people have of African
Americans and then twist it to reverse the hierarchy and get what they aim for.
The narrator, on the other hand, in his naivety unconsciously supports the white supremacist society. He is constantly used by white men in power, such as Mr Norton,
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Mr Emerson, and later Brother Jack. I would argue that because of the narrator’s constant need to please the authorities (especially white authorities) around him, he “flirt[s], however unconsciously, with minstrelsy […], unconsciously enacting the basest racial stereotypes” (Lee 462). Hence, he starts off with the identity that flattens his culture and himself into a racist slur and only eventually shifts closer to the mythical trickster archetype. And as Julia Sun-Joo Lee writes in her essay “Knucklebones and Knocking-
Bones: The Accidental Trickster in Ellison's ‘Invisible Man,’” “the minstrel […] is no trickster. Rather than Signifyin(g) blackness, he signifies white perception of blackness”
(462), much like the main protagonist. His actions, always modified to fit an image a white authority has about him, make him a mocking image of blackness, transforming him into a Sambo figure who is being used to satisfy the whites.
Such instance occurs at the event of Battle Royal, where the narrator is forced to fight half-naked with his fellow schoolmates in front of “the town’s leading white citizens” (Ellison 17), before delivering a speech “in which I showed that humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress” (17). When, after the battle, the boys are told to pick up the money thrown to an electrified rug, one of them “literally dance[d] upon his back” and afterwards “ran from the floor amid booming laughter” (27).
The white spectators, by activating the electric current, successfully
override Invisible Man his physical impulses and force him to respond as
a puppet, his body jerking and shaking uncontrollably. Indeed, the
Invisible Man reacts like someone possessed. Deprived of volition, he
enacts the whims of his audience and performs, however unwillingly, the
physical burlesque of blackness (Lee 466).
Although, the white audience forces a Sambo character upon the narrator by making him fight in the Battle Royal, he confirms their perception of him afterwards,
18 when he nevertheless delivers his speech in spite of his poor physical condition. He acts inferior to whites, however with no higher intention behind his actions, such as Bledsoe and Trueblood. Instead, he “was so moved that [he] could hardly express [his] thanks”
(Ellison 32) when he is given a briefcase and a scholarship. He is presented these things because the school superintendent and other white authorities perceive him as a representative of what they consider to be “blackness” and what they want it to be and the narrator, unconsciously, confirms their beliefs. He sees himself successful, using the eyes of the white authorities to evaluate himself.
In the course of the book, however, the narrator gradually gets to detest the world order that he is trying to fit in at the beginning, starting to develop self-awareness and self-identity, ceasing to be a Sambo reflecting a white face behind a black mask, and becoming a trickster, conscious of his position at the margins of the American society and ready to use the knowledge for his benefit.
Therefore, Invisible Man as a whole works as an analogy of an example of boundary-crossing, where the narrator crosses the colour line, both physically and mentally, to discover and understand his humanity and individuality. The metaphor that
Ellison uses to express the narrator’s growing self-consciousness that eventually makes him into a trickster, is (in)visibility.
‘Invisibility’ suggests the situation of a group stripped of its native culture
and forced to adhere to alien standards and values while its own cultural
qualities were ignored; socially it reflects the conditions of a group whose
basic plight was long overlooked or pushed into obscure shadows; perhaps
most significantly it embodies the complex psychological dilemmas of
men without a sense of vital group identity, whose sense of individual
human identity is often denied by the dominant society (Lieber 86).
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Todd M. Lieber in his article further states that there are two kinds of invisibility in Invisible Man. The first one, “innate or inherent invisibility […] is involuntary, a result of the fact that the black man in America has lived in the midst of a society which has refused to recognize his humanity” (Lieber 86). Linked to the book, this is the kind of invisibility that Ellison’s narrator experiences at the beginning, however, is not aware of it. When one of the vets in Golden Day accuses him of “learn[ing] to repress not only his emotions but his humanity, [being] invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of [Mr Norton’s] dreams” (Ellison 94), the narrator does not understand what he means and is unable to reproduce the meaning of the words to
Mr. Bledsoe (Ellison 140). Moreover, the narrator himself does not associate invisibility with himself throughout the book. It is only when he becomes aware of it that he begins referring to himself as the invisible man.
I was and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was
and yet I was unseen. It was frightening and as I sat there, I sensed another
frightening world of possibilities. For now, I saw that I could agree with
Jack without agreeing. And I could tell Harlem to have hope when there
was no hope. Perhaps I could tell them to hope until I found the basis of
something real, some firm ground for action that would lead them onto the
plane of history. But until then I would have to move them without myself
being moved ... I'd have to do a Rinehart (Ellison 507).
The narrator reflects on and owns his innate invisibility in society, recognizing his humanity. At the same time, too, he adopts the second type of invisibility which Lieber calls “mask-wearing [that] is not necessarily inherent in one’s relationship to society, but rather is produced by the conscious adoption of a false identity” (87). He realizes that because his humanity is invisible to the mainstream society, he does not have to try to fit
20 into it, but rather manipulate it, wearing a mask, maybe multiple, drawing inspiration from Rinehart’s numerous identities. It appears that now the narrator understands the legacy of his grandfather that has been following him throughout the story: “I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (Ellison 16). He is determined to follow his grandfather’s (and Bledsoe’s) tactics of wearing the mask of a
Sambo for white people to see, being a trickster underneath it.
In contrast to Frederick Douglass and Ellison’s narrator as male boundary-crossers fighting the rules of the mainstream society ruled by the whites, Toni Morrison’s Sula breaks the conventions of her own African American community. Both, Douglass and
Ellison’s narrator, cross the boundaries set by the privileged whites, being engaged in the political struggle for equality between races. Sula, on the other hand, does deal with gender just as much as she deals with race and examines “choice[s] for characters bound by [both]” (Sula xiv). The constraints that the gender imposes on women in the small black community lead to Morrison’s exploration of “what choices are available to black women outside their own society’s approval” (Sula xiii), demonstrating the answer in the female tricksters’ (Eva, Hannah, and Sula) behaviours outside of the norms. In this manner, Morrison violates the general consideration of trickster as male, “exploring the somewhat different social implications when the trickster is a female, for whom nurturing rather than adventure is the norm” (Ashley 274). Indeed, Morrison twists the tradition and creates the adventure within a known, home-like environment. Thus, while
Douglass’s Narrative and Ellison’s Invisible Man feature travelling and violence, sticking to the gender stereotypes, as the means of crossing a boundary, Morrison places Sula at home, in a community and family environment that none of the male authors involved in their works. Where Douglass and Ellison’s narrator break the norms by extraordinary
21 actions, such as escaping slavery and involving oneself in a political organization, Sula, the heroine of Morrison’s novel, does it by using common everyday actions, mostly sexual appetite, to violate the rules.
Reacting to the topic of race present in the book, the author herself achieves a boundary-crossing quality of a trickster, too, although involuntarily. Morrison opens the book with a few introductory pages, where she is “introducing an outside-of-the-circle reader into the circle. […] translating the anonymous into the specific, a ‘place’ into a
‘neighbourhood,’ and letting a stranger in through whose eyes it can be viewed”
(“Unspeakable Things” 152). Thus, she becomes a messenger, a transporter of the reader into the story, such as Esu is a messenger of the gods. Moreover, Morrison is a translator, decoding and blurring the boundary between the reader and the book, creating a “door”
(“Unspeakable Things” 151) through which the reader gets to understand the “black-topic text” (151). It is possible to say, however, that she becomes a trickster involuntarily, as she later regrets her decision to build the threshold to the novel for the readers, becoming a victim of her own actions. Such threshold, as a matter of fact, signifies that the reader is supposed to be a white person, an outsider, who needs an introduction to a novel with
African American themes. Although, as Morrison herself states, she is “writing about, for, and out of black culture, [nevertheless] accommodating and responding to the
‘mainstream’ white culture” (“Unspeakable Things” 154). Because of this, she is joining another trickster writer, Douglass, who also crosses the boundary to the white audience but at the same time writes for the black community. Although where he does it on purpose, playing a trick on the white audience of his Narrative, Morrison creates a path for a white reader by mistake, regretting her role of a transferrer afterwards. In other words, Morrison unconsciously confirms to the conventions of her time, doing an opposite of what the main character, Sula, does in the novel.
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Sula, too, is a boundary-crosser and an outsider in society, born in an unorthodox home, a “woolly house, where a pot of something way always cooking on the stove; […] where all sorts of people dropped in; where newspapers were stacked in the hallway, and dirty dishes left for hours at a time in the sink” (Sula 29). Just the description of the house where Sula grows up violates the conventional rules that women are supposed to abide, suggesting that Hannah and Eva do not take enough care of the home, leaving dirty dishes in the sink and not cleaning the old newspapers. Moreover, Sula grows up outside of the nuclear family, as none of her female relatives is married, although, as Eva points out to
Sula, “not by choice” (Sula 92). This, however, does not mean the absence of men in the household, because “the Peace women loved maleness for its own sake” (Sula 41) and both, Eva and Hannah, have a number of male visitors. Such example gives Sula the impression “that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable” (Sula 44), receiving a message about sexual freedom that differs considerably from the norm that women in the early 20th century are supposed to adhere to. This leads to her ignorance of sexual rules in adulthood. She is even accused of sleeping with white men, which is “the ultimate imaginable violation of the Black community’s oral boundaries” (Ashley 281).
Crossing the colour line is in this case seen as an expression of pure evil that Sula gets to be associated with, leading to her expulsion to the margins of society.
Similar to any amoral trickster, Sula, too, is incapable of obeying the rules established by the community, because she does not even understand them in the first place. When on the deathbed, Nel finally questions Sula about her affair with Nel’s husband and “Sula couldn’t give her a sensible answer because she [Sula] didn’t know.
Would be, in fact, the last to know. Talking to her about right and wrong was like talking to the deweys” (Sula 145). Closer to the traditional trickster tales, Sula is presented as an amoral trickster with no understanding for the moral boundaries of the community; the
23 trickster just accidentally breaks the rules for his/her own pleasure. Such lack of awareness is missing in Douglass’ and Ellison’s tricksters who cross the boundaries because of a reason, be it their race, their identity, or their longing for equality. What connects the three novels, however, is the reason for boundary-crossing, which might be read in all of them as a way of protest against the racist (and in Morrison’s case also patriarchal) society. Moreover, they share some parts of the portrayal of the tricksters’ boundary crossing. All three works work with the issue of an individual’s identity and their position within society regardless of the differences between the societies the three authors place their characters into. Also, by the tricksters’ ignorance of the social order, all three tricksters reverse the hierarchies of their societies – Douglass by becoming a leading abolitionist figure, Ellison by accepting himself as a complete human being, and
Sula by refusing submitting to the norms of her community.
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3. Conquering the Binary Opposition
Boundaries usually imply binary opposition. If someone is inside, they are not outside; if someone is black, they are not white. Tricksters, however, work outside of this opposition, sometimes adopting both options of the binary, other times refusing them, always creating a new, third option outside of the anticipated. They stand for doubleness, or wholeness, where society sees contradictory opposites. As Tru Leverette writes in The
Search for Wholeness and Diaspora in Contemporary African American Writing, the notion of “wholeness necessitates the integration of characteristics that are often deemed opposite (45).
This is among the elementary characteristics of tricksters. In African mythology, trickster Esu stands for such doubleness or wholeness. He is often depicted with two faces and two sets of mouths, being “double-voiced” (Gates 7). Moreover, he is portrayed as a genderless figure, or rather “of dual gender” (29). In conclusion, “Esu’s two sides
‘disclose a hidden wholeness’; rather than closing off unity, through the opposition, they signify the passage from one to the other as sections of a subsumed whole. Esu stands as the sign of this wholeness” (30). Applied to the works discussed in this thesis, such wholeness is present in Douglass’s race and his ambiguous status of a free slave, in
Ellison’s narrator’s double-consciousness, and in Sula’s refusal to choose a specific role within a community. They all possess multiple elements, multiple selves, that might be seen as contradictory and opposing, building them into one unit.
The doubleness, or wholeness, that the trickster adopts “becomes both, the source of his transforming power and the reason for his banishment from the community, […] remain[ing] victim of his own violations” (Pelton 245). Indeed, all tricksters in the discussed books draw power from their doubleness. Douglass finds his way to freedom by being a slave with a free man’s abilities, Ellison’s narrator discovers the trickster 25 within himself by accepting his invisibility and discovering his two selves, and Sula unconventionally allows herself to follow a life path that she voluntarily chooses. On the other hand, Douglass who becomes a successful orator and activist being an exception, this quality keeps them on the margins of society. Ellison’s narrator ends up living underground, outcast from both, black and white communities, while Sula dies as a despised, witch-like woman, hated by all.
First of all, as a child of a black woman and a white man, Douglass crosses the boundary of races “in a world where the races were radically separated” (Hyde 227).
Thus, he is placed outside of the binary black and white division of the antebellum society.
What his race further implies is that the concept cannot be divided by a simple line, but works rather as a continuum, where drawing a boundary between the beginning of one race and the ending of another is an impossible task. Without diving further into the problematic of race, it is, however, also important to mention that race has had numerous definitions throughout history and numerous ways of classifying “whiteness” and
“blackness,” before the sociologists finally agreed that rather than a biological feature, race is a social construct (e.g. Winnant).
Tying it to the myth criticism rather than sociological concepts, Douglass is racially identified with the wholeness that Esu represents. He is the embodiment of the unity of two contradictions, two opposites. However, as Pelton argues, merging the binary opposing qualities makes him an outcast in the system, where the skin complexion is the main determinant of social status. This tendency has not yet changed and more and more research is being conducted about the biracial and multiracial people who even today feel excluded from all racial communities with their racial authenticity being questioned
(Campion n.p.).
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Another instance of embracing wholeness where the situation implies binary opposition appears when, during his enslavement, Douglass becomes literate. He realizes that education is “the pathway from slavery to freedom” (Douglass 31) as well as “the white man’s power to enslave the black man” (31). Such realization gives Douglass a kind of freedom that no one could take from him, because it is a freedom of mind. On the other hand, it makes him aware of his “wretched condition, without the remedy” (35). In this manner, Douglass is imprisoned in what seems to be an eternal state of his body, however, with a new state of mind. Albert Camus, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” describes the conditions of a Greek mythological trickster Sisyphus, whose punishment for tricking the gods is to roll a boulder up a hill. Every time he is about to reach the summit, the boulder would roll all the way back down and Sisyphus would be repeating the task for all eternity. Camus recounts that
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. […] I see
that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the
torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-
space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of
consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and
gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He
is stronger than his rock. If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is
conscious (Camus 23).
Similar to Sisyphus, whose torture originates in his awareness of himself repeating a meaningless task stands Douglass with his realization about the origin of slavery. Being conscious of his condition makes the condition even more unbearable than before.
However, as Camus continues,
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Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the
whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his
descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time
crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn
(23).
Douglass also gains strength from this recognition which eventually enables him to “overthrow his boulder.” The answer to the key of slavery, which would be education, makes him at the same time desperate and hopeful that the system might be overthrown.
Moreover, such awareness makes him a “free slave”, an oxymoron with free mind and enslaved body. Nevertheless, Douglass stays a free slave even after crossing the boundary to the free states, this time having his body free, while his mind is burdened by past bondage. During his life in slavery, Douglass’s “hope of being free” (Douglass 35) makes him mentally free from slavery, even though he is still physically a slave. And so, he remains a “free slave” after his escape to the North, too, as slavery is part of his identity when he is about to speak to the white audience for the first time at “an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket” (Douglass 79). “I felt myself a slave,” Douglass writes in his memoir about those moments. Nevertheless, he still manages to speak in front of the white audience. “It is only when he can speak across the colour line, when he can break the rule of silence and contest the white world’s fiction about slavery, that he truly feels himself free” (Hyde 231). Douglass proves that despite his double identity as a slave and as a free man, and as a descendant of both races, he is able to enter the society of those who see such elements as the binary opposite.
Ralph Ellison also rejects binary opposition in Invisible Man, diving into and striving to find harmony in doubleness that African Americans experience in American society. Similar to Douglass, he is struggling with his double identity, however, it is not
28 portrayed through a physical relocation but rather a mental development that enables
Ellison’s narrator to embrace the doubleness that all African Americans have experienced and many still do.
Throughout Invisible Man, there are many examples of binary opposition perceived to be true in the American society of 1950s– being a Negro stands in contrast to being white, American, and human in general. The narrator is rejected the rights that the white citizens have (such as sitting in the front of the bus on his way to New York), is constantly reduced to racist stereotypes (being called Sambo on several occasions), and when talking about the American flag, he recollects “that there was always that sense in me of being apart when the flag went by. It had been a reminder […] that my star was not yet there (Ellison 395). Such alienation from the American flag is a demonstration of marginalizing people of colour in American society and is associated with W.E.B. Du
Bois’s book of essays The Souls of Black Folk, where he expresses a wish “to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face”
(n.p.). What Du Bois seems to be suggesting is that one has to decide whether to be a depiction of African Americans that white people accept, hence a flattened, simple personification of the African American stereotypes, or not be a part of the American society at all.
During Ellison’s narrator’s struggle to discover his identity, there are often two conflicting opinions within himself about what is the right or wrong thing to do, as he tries choosing one aspect of what he perceives a binary. He, too, struggles with the complexity of his identity, where the outside world constantly reflects only the simplified version of him. This demonstrates itself in the narrator’s meeting of Peter Wheatstraw, who, as Ellison describes in a 1988 interview for The Atlantic is “a character born in
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African American mythology” (Ellison qtd in O’Meally). In the same interview, he further explains that the name of Peter Wheatstraw appears in the book “at a point when the narrator is being challenged to draw upon his folk-based background for orientation and survival.” Indeed, when the narrator encounters Wheatstraw in the story, he at the same time encounters memories of his past, folk tales, and African American culture. The narrator, however, refuses to participate in Wheatstraw’s Signifyin(g) game, which results in Wheatstraw asking “Hell, ain’t nobody out here this morning but us colored –
Why are you trying to deny me?” (Ellison 173). The narrator feels uncomfortable around this African American trickster, finding himself unable to connect to his cultural roots.
Moreover, Wheatstraw reminds him of “the vets from the Golden Day” (174), the apparently insane African American veterans, one of whose, however, accuses the narrator of “believe[ing] that white was right” (140). The narrator’s refusal of the veterans at the Golden Day now appears again when the narrator is confronted by Wheatstraw.
The embarrassment and anger that the narrator feels depict his rejection of his culture. He appears to actually be thinking that “white was right” as the vet in Golden Day says and talking to Wheatstraw on the street does not involve any whiteness, hence it does not involve anything right. At the same time that the narrator denies his cultural heritage, however, he also feels “a wave of homesickness, […] [finding] a certain comfort in walking along beside him, as though we’d walked this way before through other mornings, in other places…” (Ellison 174-175). Hence, he is embracing his culture and detesting it at the same time, looking at it from two perspectives – that of a white person and that of a person of African American descent, whereas each is triggering a different reaction to it.
Such concept of double consciousness was first introduced by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, when he describes it as a
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sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder
(Du Bois n.p.).
The narrator serves as an embodiment of this concept when struggling with his identity and his place in society. Following orders of people around him, such as Emerson,
Norton, and Brother Jack, he ends up “bleaching” (Du Bois n.p.) the African American within himself in order to please the white powerful men around him, adapting their perception of himself and his culture. This is the reason why he sees himself only from the outside, from the perspective of mainstream supremacists who push him on the margins of society. It is only in the end that the narrator finally accepts himself as a complete human being, adopting the second of the “warring ideals,” while the white authorities
merge into one single white figure […] each attempting to force his picture
of reality upon me. […] I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of
Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came
out the same – except I now recognized my invisibility” (Ellison 508).
Refusing the hierarchy that the narrator adheres to until this realization, he acknowledges and accepts his “Negro” (Du Bois n.p.) self that he has been running from for most of the book. Moreover, he allows himself humanity that the American society tries to strip him of. Thus, he finally respects Esu’s wholeness and Du Bois’s “twoness” within himself, accepting the complexity of his personality.
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Although Toni Morrison’s Sula seems to be full of binary opposites, the book actually criticizes the simplified view of the world through binary oppositions, “avoiding the false choices they imply and dictate” (McDowell 80). Morrison uses a lot of seemingly contradictory images such as the nightshade and blackberry, the Bottom ironically placed on the top, and adventurous Sula and settled Nel, only to twist them and connect them into one unity.
The narrative insistently blurs and confuses [...] binary oppositions. It
glories in paradox and ambiguity beginning with the prologue that
describes the setting, the Bottom, situated spatially in the top. We enter a
new world here, a world where we never get to the "bottom" of things, a
world that demands a shift from an either/or orientation to one that is
both/and, full of shifts and contradictions (McDowell 80).
In “The Unspeakable Things Unspoken”, Morrison analyses the plants she uses in the opening sentence of the novel: “In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighbourhood” (Sula 3).
Both plants have darkness in them: “black” and “night.” One is unusual
(nightshade) and has two darkness words: “night” and “shade.” The other
(blackberry) is common. A familiar plant and an exotic one. A harmless
one and a dangerous one. One produces a nourishing berry; one delivers
toxic ones, but they both thrived there together, in that place when it was
a neighbourhood (“Unspeakable” 152-153).
Morrison places two plants depicting opposing characteristics in the same location, drawing the same destiny for both, as both, nightshade and blackberry are torn from that place where they “thrived together.” Situating the plants side by side might
32 stand for the complexity of people living in the neighbourhood, as there is no one who is solely “nourishing, harmless,” and “familiar,” nor someone entirely “toxic, dangerous,” and “exotic.” This notion is similar to the one presented by Douglass, who functions as an oxymoron of a free slave and Ellison, whose narrator accepts both black and white perception of himself, Morrison, too, accommodates the binaries in one whole.
Nightshade and blueberry might also serve as a representation of the two main characters – Sula and Nel. At first glance, they could be read as opposites - Sula being the uncommon, dangerous and at times toxic nightshade, standing against Nel, the nourishing and familiar blackberry. Where Sula is raised in “a household of throbbing disorder” (Sula 52), Nel’s mother Helene creates a neat and clean home. Where Sula leaves the town for ten years to set herself free, Nel marries and settles down with a husband and children. Where Sula is unable to decide, Nel keeps her head cool and makes the decision instead. The two of them could not be more different.
Both of them, however, “were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them [with] visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream” (Sula 51). When daydreaming, Nel is accompanied by “some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as herself” (51) and Sula is “in full view of a someone who shared both the taste and the speed” (52) of horses she imagines. This gaze they are both conscious about is Sula watching Nel and vice versa, but the gaze is also their own, watching the self they dream of.
Further in the book, there are more hints of their shared identity. They “had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s” (83) before Sula’s departure and when Sula returns to Medallion after years, Nel recalls that “talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself” (95). Moreover, after Sula sleeps with Nel’s
33 husband, “she didn’t look naked to [Nel], only [he] did” (106), implying that Sula’s body is Nel’s own, so she does not feel inappropriate seeing her friend naked, and similarly
Sula is not ashamed of exposing herself in front of Nel. Kevin Everod Quashie argues that
Morrison […] represent[s] selfhood as the dynamic relationship between
a woman and her other, her girlfriend. […] the boundaries of self,
metaphorically but also literally, disrupted, severed, transcended; the self
and its girlfriend become contiguous and sometimes indistinct subjects
(188).
This argument is metaphorically present in the book when Sula and Nel dig a hole in the ground as children. Having made separate holes in the ground, “[t]ogether they worked until the two holes were one and the same” (Sula 58). Their two selves work in a similar manner, completing each other and forming a whole.
Moreover, there are characteristics that one would associate with Sula, present in
Nel and the other way around. To associate Sula exclusively with the nightshade and Nel solely with the blackberry would make them binary opposite, however, as the two plants co-exist in the same place, Sula and Nel embrace both sides of the binary. When Sula becomes accidentally responsible for Chicken Little’s death, Nel “controlled [her] behaviour when Sula was uncontrollable […]. Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquillity that follows a joyful stimulation” (Sula 170). Such sociopathic thoughts certainly match more the evil that the
Bottom’s inhabitants see in Sula rather than the purity and orderliness that Nel is associated with. It might, however, be understood as Nel’s yearning for adventure and life out of the norm, which Sula embodies. And Sula, too is not a clear example of a spontaneous woman. When she falls in love with Ajax, she “discover[s] what possession
34 was […] wonder[ing] if Ajax would come by that day” (131). In other words, Sula starts confirming to the norms of monogamous love and to the role that a woman should perform in such relationship. Such examples in the text make the reader accept the depth and complexity of the characters, defusing once more the binary opposition that
Morrison’s novel criticizes.
All in all, conquering binary oppositions is represented in all books in question, always reflecting the character’s inner personalities as a reaction to the social circumstances of their times. In The Narrative of Life of Frederic Douglass, An American
Slave, Written by Himself and Invisible Man, the wholeness the main characters achieve mostly interrelates with the racial division of the world and one’s mind. In Sula, it reacts more to the constraints that a woman of African American origin faces in her own community. Nevertheless, they are all representations of criticism of societies that force an individual to choose between two opposing options. It is among the trickster innate characteristics to reject such pressurized choice. Moreover, defying the binaries enables the trickster characters to achieve their full complexity, rather than a simplified, shallow image of them that a binary opposition constitutes not only upon them, but upon the world in general.
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4. Appetite as a Driving Force of Trickster’s Actions
Lewis Hyde begins the chapter on trickster’s appetites in Trickster Makes the
World with a statement that a “trickster starts out hungry” (17) and to overcome the hunger, he is willing to steal, trap, and deceive his dupes. Such a proclamation makes hunger the most important and most basic need of a trickster. In folk tales and myths, this hunger is usually literal. The Raven, Coyote, and Hermes all face actual hunger for food, consequently taking steps to fill their stomachs. In African American folk tales, hunger, too, is usually a driving force that motivates trickster’s actions, strengthened by the fact that the food in sub-Saharan Africa is “strictly limited” (Roberts 23). Therefore, there are several stories that picture a trickster, such as Bre’r Rabbit, as “a figure particularly adept at securing the material means of survival, especially food, under famine-like conditions
[…] through deception and false friendship” (Robert 25). The other type of appetite often depicted in the trickster folk tales is sexual. Many trickster stories feature a trickster unable to control his sexual appetite, consequently breaking the rules of the community that he functions in. For example, in a story from the Southern Ute tribe, Coyote fakes his own death in order to have intercourse with his daughters (Erdoes and Ortiz 58-61).
Because of trickster’s unsatisfied appetite, he is capable of deceiving his own family and committing incest. Trickster’s “extraordinarily vital sexuality” (Gates 27), also leads to the portrayal of tricksters in such ways that emphasize their reproductive organs. A Fa myth cited in Louis Gates Jr.’s Signifying Monkey, tells a story of how Legba is
“ordain[ed] that your penis shall always be erect, and that you may never be appeased”
(27) after seducing his sister.
While the appetite might be read literally, such as in these tales, it might also serve as a metaphor for other kinds of desires and needs. In the books featuring trickster-like characters, there are all kinds of hunger – for knowledge, for freedom, for reconciliation,
36 and others. Hence, where in the folk tales, the trickster usually fights or complies with the appetite for food or sexual pleasure, in the works of literature there are many other representations of this trickster feature. Moreover, the sexual appetite and hunger might also stand as metaphors for other desires. All such appetite readings find their places in the books analysed in this thesis, too.
Starting with Frederick Douglass and proceeding to other two authors, this chapter analyses the trickster’s appetites as a driving force of their actions. Douglass and other slaves are close to the folk tricksters, because in slavery they face the lack of food and other resources that force them to eventually resort to thefts and deception, just like Bre’r
Rabbit and other animals face hunger in the folk tales. Broadening the meaning of appetite to non-material elements, Douglass, too, experiences hunger for knowledge. In Ellison’s
Invisible Man, the tricksters’ appetites are also portrayed in one of their literal meanings of most folktales – sexual desires, however, as well as in the first novel, it also features a number of other cravings, such as Bledsoe’s thirst for power and the narrator’s unsuccessful attempt to deceive the Brotherhood in order to destroy it. In Sula, the element driving Sula’s actions is her chase of freedom from socially determined role, mostly expressed in her sexual promiscuity. To satisfy the appetites, Douglass and Ellison use deception, while Sula resorts to seduction. Nevertheless, all such practices result in bending the culturally defined morality, which makes the tricksters in the novels amoral, driven by the appetites more than by the sense of right and wrong.
Douglass portrays his own and other slaves’ appetites and the means that they use to satisfy them in several instances during the book. In the “famine-like” conditions that the slaves are kept in, they are at the same time witnesses of the enormous wealth of their enslavers. One of the demonstrations of this wealth is Colonel Lloyd’s garden. It
“abounded in fruits of almost every description […and] was not the least source of trouble
37 on the plantation [being] quite a temptation to the hungry swarms of […] slaves, […] few of whom had the virtues or the vice to resist it” (Douglass 21). The slaves, eager to fulfil their appetite for food make the colonel “resort to all kinds of stratagems to keep his slaves out” (21). The fact that the master has to design new traps for slaves to stop stealing the fruit implies that the slaves are coming with new creative ways of stealing every time
Colonel Lloyd builds an obstacle for them, much like the tricksters from African
American folktales. Nevertheless, it also implies that the colonel is learning the slaves’ tricks and consequently makes arrangements that prevent the slaves to use the same trick twice, ultimately winning this competition over his garden’s fruit by “tarring his fence all around” (21) and punishing everybody who would be found with tar on his clothes.
Similarly to tricksters, the slaves, too, ignore morality of the mainstream
(slaveholders’) culture in order to achieve their goals. “Given the desperate and oppressive circumstances under which they lived, enslaved Africans could not be overly concerned with the masters’ definition of the ‘morality’” (Roberts 33). Therefore, in
Douglass’ Narrative, the slaves steal and lie in order to survive and get to the reward, food, ignoring the common guidance of “right” and “wrong” actions.
[The food] was not enough for us to subsist upon. We were therefore
reduced to the wretched necessity of living at the expense of our
neighbours. This we did by begging and stealing, whichever came handy
in the time of need, the one being considered as legitimate as the other
(41).
Legitimizing such practices puts food on a high position in the hierarchy of needs, as the slaves do not use stealing and begging to obtain other means. Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and a philosopher, argues that “questions about values – about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose – are really questions about the well-being of conscious 38 creatures” (1-2). Therefore, as slaves’ well-being in slavery is essentially non-existent, their notion of what is in the Western society commonly known as morally “right” or
“wrong” is twisted to fit the reality of their oppression.
Another scientist dealing with human well-being, whose studies support such a statement, is Abraham Maslow. He is the author of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which divides human needs into five categories based on their importance. He argues that unless the most fundamental needs, such as physiological needs (e.g. sleep, hunger, reproduction) , are fulfilled, a human being is not able to actively pursue the less important needs (e.g. friendships, intimate relationships) (Maslow 370). Slaves, who are perpetually rejected the fulfilment of their most basic needs, therefore focus their actions on satisfying these first before pursuing the goals higher in the hierarchy.
Such argument corresponds with the trickster representing the “lower bodily functions” (Leeming 163), especially, when, as African American trickster, he emerges as a response to the oppressive environment. The trickster might be also interpreted as representing the lower part of the Maslow’s pyramid, being occupied by the most basic human needs (hunger, sex) rather than complex and possibly unnecessary values
(morality). Thus, he uses lies, deception, and thefts to fulfil his basic needs, often in new, creative ways. These, among others form “a conception of behaviours appropriate and beneficial for protecting their […] well-being under the conditions faced in slavery”
(Roberts 33). In other words, the slaves adopt the trickster’s characteristics because they are necessary for them to stay alive.
This tactic is present elsewhere in the Narrative, too, namely in the part, where
Douglass discovers the importance of literacy. Not only it is possible to read this part as
Douglass crossing the boundary from one culture to the other, but also as him, ignoring the crooked morality of the slaveholders and pursuing his appetite for knowledge and 39 freedom. When living in Baltimore, his mistress Mrs Auld “kindly commenced to teach
[him] the A, B, C” (Douglass 30), however, only until her husband discovers what she is doing and lectures her on reading making the slave “unfit to be a slave [and] unmanageable and of no value to his master” (31). Such strong opposition to a possibility that Douglass gains education stirs a strong “desire and determination to learn” (31) in him. Thus, he unearths a new appetite within himself that he feels the urge to satisfy.
Unable to pursue his appetite in a conventional way – going to school, Douglass creates a trickster-like way to receive an education.
When I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I
could write as well as he. The next word would be, ‘I don’t believe you.
Let me see you try it.’ I would then make the letters which I had been so
fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good
many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have
gotten in any other way (Douglass 36).
Thus, by signifying that white boys are less intelligent than a slave, Douglass steals education that is so vital in his further life, eventually helping him to escape slavery.
He also proves his intellectual equality to them. As Gates argues, “without the presence of writing as the visible symbol of reason, the Africans could not demonstrate their
‘innate’ mental equality with the Europeans and hence were doomed to a perpetual sort of slavery until such mastery was demonstrated” (13). Douglass, discovering “the white man’s power to enslave the black man” (Douglass 31) not only finds an unfulfilled appetite within him, but by satisfying it also achieves symbolic equality with the white oppressor. The equality that he keeps in secret to help him satisfy the ultimate appetite of his – freedom.
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As well as Douglass’ Narrative, Ellison’s Invisible Man portrays the trickster’s appetites in both – literal and broader meanings. It includes the sexual appetite of the folk stories in Trueblood’s incestuous intercourse with his daughter and in the biological reactions of boys fighting the Battle Royal to a naked woman dancing in front of them.
However, such as Douglass’s hunger for knowledge, Ellison’s narrator also experiences appetite in its broadened sense when he resorts to destroy the Brotherhood from within only to be “snared in his own devices” (Hyde 19).
Trueblood and the Battle Royal boys work as demonstration of Paul Radin’s depiction of trickster being “at mercy of his passions and appetites” (qtd in Nadelberg 6).
Where Trueblood is not able to suppress his sexual appetite and ends up having incestuous intercourse with his daughter, Battle Royal fighters cannot hide their sexual arousal by the white girl, either. Moreover, because of the dream that precedes Trueblood’s waking up “lookin’ straight in Matty Lou’s face” (Ellison 59) in which he enters a white woman’s bedroom where she “grabs [him] around the neck and holds tight” (58), he might be seen as breaking two taboos at the same time, one in the dream and one in reality, enabling the reading of a dream as an unfulfilled sexual desire for white women. Because of the racist society and the overall perception of black men as “predatory, promiscuous, uncontrolled and dangerous” (Wilkins 168), however, this appetite of his stays only in the dream, keeping him metaphorically impotent in the real world. At the same time, however, the act of impregnating Matty Lou, makes him a creator and life-giver. In the original folktales, the sexual appetite of a trickster often leads to a creation of something new. In a story re-told by Hyde in Trickster Makes This World, “trickster transforms the pieces of his penis into edible plants – potatoes, artichokes, rice, ground beans, and so on” (31).
Thus, the trickster creates conditions suitable for a whole culture to thrive. Trueblood, in a transferred sense, serves also as a creator, or procreator, when he ensures that a lineage
41 of his culture, in mainstream society invisible and oppressed, continues uninterrupted through his own kin.
The boys fighting in Battle Royal are not thus rewarded. The object of their appetite is, similarly to Trueblood, a white woman, however, not being protected by the restrictions of a dream, they are not allowed to satisfy their desires. Instead, they are surrounded by authoritative white men who mock the biological manifestations of their appetites. Houston A. Baker, Jr. argues that “the black phallus [is used] as a symbol of unconstrained force that white men contradictorily envy and seek to destroy” (833). In a society governed by whites, such envy is transformed to a demonstration of power over the sexuality that the white men supposedly do not have.
The boys are threatened both for looking and for not looking, and the
white men smile at their obvious fear and discomfiture. The boys know
the bizarre consequences that accompany the white men's ascription of
an animal-like and voracious sexuality to black males. Hence, they
respond in biologically normal but socially fearful (and justifiably
embarrassed) ways. One boy strives to hide his erection with his boxing
gloves, pleading desperately to go home. In this opening scene, the white
woman as a parodic version of American ideals (“a small American flag
tattooed upon her belly” [19]) is forced into tantalizing interaction with
the mythically potent force of the black phallus (Baker 833-834).
Reading the girl as an analogy for the American society, it is possible to interpret the boys’ expressions as a desire to belong. They know their abilities to co-create a society with the white citizens are equal to those of the whites, however they are not allowed to participate in such creation and are forced to witness this process from its margins as
42 spectators. Their appetite is forbidden to develop into the act of creation that usually closely associates with the trickster’s appetites in folktales.
A similar desire for belonging is also present in the narrator himself, however, demonstrated through different channels. Rather than exhibiting itself through bodily expressions, it is notable in his political and intellectual actions. After Ellison’s narrator realizes that the Brotherhood has never seen his actual self, but rather used him as a puppet with voice, his desire for visibility gives place to a new craving – revenge. He resolves to destroy the Brotherhood from within by overtly agreeing to their ideals while covertly working against them.
I would hide my anger and lull them to sleep; assure them that the
community was in full agreement with their program. And as proof I
would falsify the attendance records by filling out membership cards with
fictitious names. […] it was a dreary prospect but a means of destroying
them, at least in Harlem (Ellison 510).
To satisfy his appetite, the narrator resorts to the common trickster strategies – deception and Signifyin(g). He deceives the Brotherhood to believe that their popularity is rising, while none of his newly recruited members truly exist, and he Signifies his approval with their methods, while each of his “yeses” signifies a “no.” Thus, he sets a trap that would, according to his plan, end in the Brotherhood’s destruction. Tricksters’ traps, however, not always work out as intended. In a story from Norse mythology, Loki, chased by the gods for a previous mischief of his, creates a fish trap to catch a salmon.
After a while, he sees other gods approaching him, so he burns the trap, changes himself to a salmon and jumps to the river. The rest of the gods, however, manage to recreate the trap from the ashes, eventually getting hold of Loki (Hyde 18). What Hyde implies is that a trickster can “imagine the fish trap because he’s been a fish himself” (20). Ellison’s 43 narrator proceeds in similar fashion. As a member of the Brotherhood, he knows how the organization operates and thinks he is able to destroy it from within exactly because of it.
However, same as in other trickster stories, Ellison’s narrator ends up a victim of his own trap. Eventually, just like the gods manage to use Loki’s trap against him, the
Brotherhood, too, uses Ellison’s narrator’s trick for their own goals – the African
American riot in Harlem. Only then the narrator realizes that “the committee had planned it. And I had helped, had been a tool. A tool just at the very moment I had thought myself free. By pretending to agree I had indeed agreed” (Ellison 553). Unconsciously, he has been setting his own trap, ending up being a fool rather than a culture hero, forced to live underground.
The portrayal of appetites in Sula is rather different from the previous two novels.
Showed from a female point of view instead of a male one, not only does race stand in her way to satisfying her appetites, but also her gender. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Sula regards sex as being “pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable”
(Sula 44). Hence, she uses it in her adulthood as a means of getting satisfaction rather than an expression of love or affection. Moreover, she is not jealous and similarly to her mother, Hannah, who has “no passion attached to her relationships […and is] incapable of jealousy” (Sula 44), Sula, too, is not possessive of her sexual partners (with one exception). “She rejects traditional sexual mores […], ignoring the ‘ownership’ principle of marriage and operating on the principle that sex is non-competitive and non- threatening” (Lounsberry and Hovet 128). Such a position to appetites is a representation of the trickster figure that Sula is. She sees sex as a means of satisfying her needs rather than a segment of a more complex relationship that involves intimacy, love, respect, and most importantly, commitment. She feels “no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her [and is] completely free from ambition, with no affection for money,
44 property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments – no ego”
(Sula 118-119). In Jungian psychology, ego represents “the centre of the field of consciousness and the complex entity to which all conscious contents are related” (Masao
62). Sula, missing the “I” consciousness becomes an ultimate trickster, who is “a collective shadow figure, summation of all inferior traits of character in individuals”
(Jung 484). In other words, Sula might be perceived as a representation of collective unconsciousness – a part of psyche that “does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn […] more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals” (Jung 3). Evaluating Sula’s appetites from this point of view leads into a conclusion that her desires are actually shared by everyone else, however, hers are stripped from the responsibilities of social norms that ego enforces on the self. One of the questions that Morrison poses in the foreword to Sula is “What would you be doing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?” (Sula xv). Sula is an exhibition of the answer. Unrestrained by the notion of self, nor by the regulations posed by others, she does not account of any “gaze or hand,” hers or others’, to stop her from pursuing what brings her pleasure.
While Sula’s appetites might be read literally, as pure sexual pleasure, there is another possible reading of her promiscuity as a desperate call for gender equality.
Arguably, Sula does not do anything worse than her male counterparts, being as unfaithful as they are. However, she is punished for her promiscuity while they are not. After sleeping with Jude, it is she who receives the hatred of the community. “[W]hen they saw how she took Jude, then ditched him for others […they] said she was a bitch (Sula 112).
The community does not seem to be taking into account Jude’s participation in the sexual act and the fact that he, too, is trying to satisfy his appetites in the same way Sula does.
On the contrary, he is depicted as Sula’s victim, while she falls in disgrace. As Lise Fortier
45 argues, “[a]dultery by women is punishable (in the past, often by death); but men can escape scot free” (280).
Moreover, because of such a patriarchal perspective, Sula is viewed as possessing a man’s qualities rather than female ones. Linden Peach in her book, Toni Morrison, describes Sula as “giv[ing] expression to her own sexuality in a way in which men have done so for generations” (53) and Toni Morrison herself says about Sula that she “is a masculine character […]. She would do the kinds of things normally only men do […].
She really behaves like a man. She picks up a man, drops a man, the same way a man picks up a woman” (qtd in Peach 53). I argue, however, that such behaviour is perceived male, because it has never been allowed for a woman to act that way. Sula, defying the rules and acting in a way that is designed for men, is a representation of injustice that a patriarchal society throws upon women. By allowing herself a life free of such restrictions, she creates an infinite number of options for women, which her community is not able to accept and results in chaos. It is, after all, among trickster’s characteristics to impose anarchy upon order and Sula does so at least in Nel and Jude’s family and possibly in many more. At the same time, however, Sula’s drive by her appetites creates an exact opposite of chaos. As a reaction to Sula’s apparent evilness, people in Medallion
“began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their homes and in general band together against the devil” (Sula 117). Thus, she becomes a creator of a more protective, cleaner, and in general better world in place of the one, where mothers do not care about their children and married couples lack respect for each other. Similarly to Trueblood,
Sula unintentionally creates new life as a side effect of her original purpose – her own satisfaction.
Considering the change in the depiction of the trickster’s appetites, one might observe that while Frederick Douglass’s desires could be read mostly literally, Ellison
46 and Morrison allow more metaphorical meanings into their portrayals of appetites. In
Douglass’s Narrative, food stands for food and literacy means literacy, however in
Ellison’s and Morrison’s works, the sexual desires depicted in their works might stand for other desires, namely the desire for equality and for freedom. What all the works share, when dealing with the trickster’s appetites, however, is that when looking at them from distance, all seem to address a same, metaphorical desire behind the literal ones. This is an appetite for a society in which these trickster character could be a part of, however, not as inferior members, but rather respected and equal individuals with their differences.
Douglass’ and Ellison’s appetites point to an unsatisfied urge to become a part of the
American society that constantly undermines their contributions to it. Sula’s desires serve as a call for a society where women are free to choose their life path without judgement of their environment.
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5. Sacrifice
Although, as demonstrated above, the trickster is often driven by his appetites, there are also instances, in which he refuses to satisfy his needs in exchange for a superior reward. Thus, the trickster makes a sacrifice. What is more, the trickster is often at the birth of the very first sacrifice. As Hyde states, “it is often said that when Hermes slaughters the cattle [he has stolen from Apollo], he is inventing the art of sacrifice” (34) because Hermes does not eat the meat despite his hunger but burns it for the gods instead.
Hyde further argues that “in deciding not to eat meat, Hermes is preparing himself to be an Olympian, […he] has higher goals” (33). The aspect most represented in the discussed book, however, is that he is able to “restrain one desire in favour of another” (33), better one. Thus, the trickster manages to suppress his initial appetite for the earthly meat and embraces hunger until he is worthy of eating with the gods.
A similar feature could be traced in the trickster novels discussed in this thesis in a sense that the tricksters in them, too, abandon their initial desires or make another form of sacrifice in order to gain something, presumably better than what they previously possessed. Thus, slaves in Douglass’ memoir (and himself) leave the imminent entertainment of drinking during the Christmas holiday in the exchange of the clean mind temperance brings along. Ellison’s narrator sacrifices the contact with Mary and his family to pursue “higher goals” (Hyde 33) in the Brotherhood, however, he also experiences the sacrifice from other angles, taking the function of a sacrifice, a sacrificer, and an entity that the sacrifice is brought for. In Sula, Eva sacrifices her physical well- being for her family and vice versa, sacrificing her family (her son Plum) for her own well-being. Moreover, she stands as an opposite to Sula, who is unable to make an appropriate sacrifice.
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Later in his life, Frederick Douglass becomes a strong opposer of drinking. He delivers multiple speeches in which he stresses the importance of temperance and its ties to the equality of races (such as the one in Paisley, Scotland, 1846). In his Narrative, he presents alcohol as “the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection, [a means that] disgust[s] their slaves with freedom by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation” (54-55). Earlier in his life, however,
Douglass, too, is one of those who “engaged in such sports and merriments as playing ball, wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky” (Douglass
54). In his address in 1846, he states of himself:
I have had some experience of intemperance […]. In the Southern States,
masters induce their slaves to drink whisky, in order to keep them from
devising ways and means by which to obtain their freedom. In order to
make a man a slave, it is necessary to silence or drown his mind. […] I
knew once what it was to drink with all the ardour of old soker. I lived
with a Mr. Freeland who used to give his slaves apple brandy. Some of the
slaves were not able to drink their own share, but I was able to drink my
own and theirs too. I took it because it made me feel I was a great man
(“Temperance and Anti-Slavery” 205).
Using the trickster narrative, one might say that Douglass once was a slave not only to his master, but also to his appetites. As Hyde explains, the alcohol he was drinking stands for the cattle that Hermes stole from Apollo, however, unlike Hermes who has the strength to deny himself the earthly pleasures of filling his stomach, Douglass is not (235-
237). Moreover, although Douglass feels like “a great man” when intoxicated, the effects of alcohol on both, his body and his mind, lead to a contrary aftermath. Instead of getting
49 the recognition and fame that a “great man” deserves, drunken Douglass ends up sleeping among pigs, “demanding order” (“Temperance and Anti-Slavery” 205). Douglass uses this memory as a demonstration of the lowest point one might end up in when a captive of their own earthly desires. He calls the assembly to “abandon your bowl” (“Temperance and Anti-Slavery” 205), using the vocabulary that highlights the appetite going through the body, in exchange for the psychological satisfaction that one finds in temperance.
Douglass recognizes intemperance as one of the causes of the enslavement of black people and one of the arguments of white oppressors for African American inferiority. “For [him…], temperance is a necessary condition for the apprehension of the spiritual” (Levine n.p.). Thus, Douglass praises the sacrifice that the addicted drunkards have to make in order to obtain higher, spiritual freedom, a freedom to see the reality for what it really is instead of looking at it through the eyes intoxicated by alcohol. In his
Narrative, he depicts this twisted view of freedom. “Many of us were led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum” (55). Compared, again, to the Homeric
Myth to Hermes, such a depiction of the worldview equals Hermes’s hunger for the cows.
If he eats it, he would forever be the slave of the earthly appetites, such as people have been, forced to fulfil their stomachs on a regular basis. By refusing to satisfy his lower appetite, however, he is able to acquire a higher form of food – the food of gods in Olymp.
Douglass draws the line between the enslavers and rum in the same fashion. Rum stands for the earthly appetites that is directly associated with slavery, while temperance is the analogy for the godly food. Hence, through the sacrifice of the lower appetites, one might achieve the pleasure of the higher ones that, in the case of Hermes, as well as Douglass, are of much higher value than the small earthly pleasures.
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Sacrifice forms an important aspect of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, too.
Throughout the course of the book, the narrator experiences the sacrificial ritual from all perspectives, that of the sacrificer who gives up something for a higher entity, the sacrificed, and the one for whom the sacrifice is made.
Ellison’s narrator makes a sacrifice when entering the Brotherhood. On his way to becoming a successful orator and political leader, he is asked to move away from his old apartment and cut off contact with his landlady, Mary, as well as to “cease [writing letters to his family] for a while” (Ellison 309). What is more, he is given a new name
“‘That is your new name,’ Brother Jack said. ‘Start thinking of yourself by that name from this moment. Get it down so that even if you are called in the middle of the night you will respond. Very soon you shall be known by it all over the country’” (Ellison 309).
Here, the narrator does not only have to abandon his loved ones, but also his identity, a name that everyone knows him by, and that the narrator uses to identify himself (although the reader never gets to hear it themselves). The narrator hence makes a sacrifice of the whole persona that he has known since forever and adopt a new, artificial one, created by someone else. In the view of higher good, the narrator is willing to make a sacrifice of his actual, “lower” life, once more tying his actions to the ones of a trickster. The “higher good,” or, in other words, “the spiritual” that he exchanges his life for, is the ideology, supposedly leading to the equality of races. As Thomas F. Bertonneau argues in his essay
“The Acts of an Oedipus: Power, Language, and Sacrifice in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man,” “ideology, by its nature, consistently sacrifices the actual to the potential, the existent to the non-existent” (4). Although for the narrator, this sacrifice leads to eventual revolt and disillusionment about the Brotherhood, looking at it through trickery lenses, sacrificing one’s life for the potential that an ideology brings with it might, once again, serve as the analogy of Hermes’s sacrifice. Ellison’s narrator, as well as the Ancient
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Greek trickster, sacrifices the actual, that what is easily grasped and held, in exchange for an abstract future, in which he would be the one that others make sacrifices for.
Unlike Hermes, whose sacrifice leads to his immortal life, however, Ellison’s narrator himself becomes a sacrifice by the higher power he originally makes the sacrifice for. The narrator is sacrificed twice in the course of the book. Even before entering the sacrificial plays of the Brotherhood, he is sacrificed by Dr. Bledsoe who expels him from the university in order to maintain his powerful position. In a sense, he, too, is a Hermes, sacrificing an omittable appetite (education of African American youth) in exchange for lasting and higher desire (prestige and power). Arguably, however, such behaviour also plays along the lines of trickster blindly following his appetites at all costs. Bledsoe’s appetite for power prevents him from pursuing a nobler cause of altruistic education of young people of his own culture. In a sense, he remains a prisoner of his own selfish yearnings.
The second time Ellison’s narrator appears in the role of a sacrifice (and a trap) is when he enters the Brotherhood. The organization uses the narrator as a bait in order to manipulate the public opinion which eventually results in a rebellion in Harlem. Ralph
Ellison writes in his “Notes on Invisible Man” that “the boy [the narrator] would appease the gods; it costs much pain to discover that he can satisfy the gods only by rebelling against them” (292), which might refer to the situation when the narrator decides to oppose the Brotherhood, only to discover that such opposition is exactly what the organization wants from him. He finds himself in the position of a sacrifice together with the whole Harlem population, in order not to “upset the larger plan” (Ellison 501) of the organization. The difference between the sacrifice that the narrator makes and the sacrifices that he is a victim of is that while he has to get rid of things and people that define him and that he is attached to when making a sacrifice, Bledsoe and the 52
Brotherhood consider the sacrifices they makes as necessary means to get to their higher goals, however do not have closer attachments to it. Because of this, one might contemplate to what extent these sacrifices are sacrifices rather than dumping the redundant and to the current world order possibly threatening parts. All in all, it is Dr.
Bledsoe who writes a letter in which he expresses a wish that the narrator “shall never, under any circumstances, be enrolled as a student here again” (Ellison 190) and Brother
Jack who cautions the narrator not to “go too fast […because] this is a white man’s world”
(383).
The final sacrifice of the book, burning the content of the narrator’s briefcase, is made by himself for himself. Thus, he is at the same time the sacrificer, as well as the entity the sacrifice is performed for. After falling through the manhole at the end of the book, Ellison’s narrator finds himself in the darkness and in order to find his way out, he burns everything in his briefcase – his high school diploma, Clifton’s Sambo doll, his
Brotherhood name, and the threatening message from brother Jack (Ellison 567-568).
These objects represent fragments of the identities other people have thrown upon him during his life, feeling “remote irony, even smiling as [he] see[s] the swift but feeble light push back the gloom” (567). Bertonneau calls it an “anti-sacrifice marking the climax of
Invisible Man’s initiation into his own identity” (15). Indeed, it might be seen as the narrator ritually burning the layers of identities that are forced upon him by white men, finding the true self in the centre after all the layers are gone. He is burning the expectations of white society, their simplified and mistaken perception of a black man.
“What’s in that brief case?” (565) a white man asks the narrator after he and a companion of his chase the narrator into the manhole. “‘You,’ [the narrator] said suddenly laughing.
[…] ‘All of you. […] I’ve had you in my brief case all the time’” (Ellison 566). The brief case that he values so much that he is willing to run into a burning building to retreat it
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(548) works as a metaphor of the invisible burden that African Americans bear with them in the oppressive society. Given to Ellison’s narrator by white authorities for convincingly playing the role they want him to play, the brief case is a container for the prejudice, racism, and the omnipresent legacy of slavery that the narrator encounters throughout the course of the book. Now, finally, by burning everything inside, he becomes free from the bigoted society and although still invisible for the world, he can finally be seen at least by himself for who he really is.
In Sula, once again, the same trickster element is perceived from a feminine point of view. Where both previously discussed works centre around the appetites and sacrifices of the main male characters, Morrison gives the issue a female voice and demonstrates, what a sacrifice means for women living in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. She takes the sacrifice and places is in the family environment, illustrated through powerful mother figure – Eva Peace. While Douglass and Ellison concentrate on an individual struggle, Morrison shows how sacrifice is an inseparable element in the community tied with love and mutual interdependence.
In Sula, it is not the main character who demonstrates the art of sacrifice. Indeed, as Morrison writes in the foreword to 2004 edition, Sula resists “either sacrifice or accommodation” (xiii) to the world around her. Who makes the greatest sacrifice in the story is her grandmother – Eva. She, too, could be regarded as a trickster, possessing the characteristics, such as deceiving, boundary-crossing, amorality, and most prevalent sacrifice. She lives on the margins of the community, defying its rules by establishing a matriarchal, albeit chaotic, home for not only Hannah and Sula, but also the Deweys, Tar
Baby, and her son Plum. She looks at society from the outside, being an observer rather than a participant, and she tricks the insurance company, sacrificing her leg “for economic freedom” (Sula xiii). Sacrifice is her most conspicuous trickster’s trait in opposition to 54
Sula, whose tricksterism manifests itself through her selfishness, leading to her incapability to make a sacrifice. If making a sacrifice is considered to be an exchange of one, lesser appetite, for another, higher one, then Eva is sacrificing her well-being, considering it a less important appetite, for her role of a mother, a higher one. Here, unlike
Sula, Eva sees the higher form of meaning in motherhood and matriarchy.
Her initial sacrifice takes place when her husband, Boy, leaves her with “$1.65, five eggs, three beets and no idea of what and how to feel” (Sula 32). She leaves the children with a neighbour for eighteen months and afterwards “swept down from a wagon with two crutches, a new black pocketbook, and one leg” (34). Morrison never fully explains what caused Eva’s physical condition, however, the hints suggests that she put her leg on a railway in order to get the money from the insurance company. This makes her an ultimate sacrificer, giving up her physical body in exchange of her family’s well- being. Such desperate sacrifice paints Eva as a noble mother who unconditionally loves her children.
Nevertheless, as Elizabeth A. Rand argues in her essay “‘We All That’s Left’:
Identity Formation and the Relationship Between Eva and Sula Peace,” Eva’s motives of sacrifice are not always entirely altruistic. On the contrary, she uses her newly acquired power to manipulate and order people’s lives (344). “She becomes both queen and benefactress of the black community, managing her family and ‘empire’ of charitable acts” (Rand 343). Thus, moving along the lines of a trickster, Eva’s sacrifice of her physical health for her family does not serve only as a necessary and unselfish act of love, but also as a sacrifice of the omittable in exchange for power and recognition in the community.
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Her matriarchal role develops into a stage when she assumes a position of a decision-maker that (at least from her point of view) gives her right not only to control the lives around her, but also to destroy them, when necessary. She, symbolically, resides at “the top of the house” (Sula 48), and as Rand further observes, “no one looks down on the woman with one magnificent leg; in her wheelchair ‘contraption,’ she sits as if on a throne” (343). Because of this, she bears no consequences when she sets her son Plum on fire. She performs a blood sacrifice that Plum deserves for dishonouring her care and governance by becoming a heroin-addict who does not bring Eva any sacrifice in return for hers. La Vinia Delois Jennings draws the connection between Plum’s sacrifice and the
Haitian tradition of Voudoun ceremony, where
Ayizan [a spirit of Haitian Voudou]/Eva controls the rites of spiritual
birth, […] exorcis[ing] evil from the innocent who regresses to infancy.
Before setting her only son afire, Eva gathers a chuckling Plum in her
arms, rocking him back and forth and remembering when he dropped
water onto her bosom while she bathed him as a baby. Fire must touch
Plum’s soul, the soul of the initiate in the rite […], before the deceased
descends into the waters of the afterworld. Fire is essential to
regenerating the initiate’s or, in this case, Plum’s life spirit (61).
By performing such ritual, Eva also becomes a boundary-crosses, a messenger and a guide helping the dead cross the boundary between the worlds. She sacrifices Plum in order to alleviate his soul, which could be only done through fire. Such a radical sacrificial ritual, however, stands in contrast to her desperate try to save Hannah from the very same situation. When setting Plum on fire, “quickly, as the whoosh of flames engulfed him, she shut the door and made her slow and painful journey back to the top of the house”
(Sula 48). On the other hand, when Hannah is burning, “Eva knew there was time for 56 nothing in this world other than the time it took to get there and cover her daughter’s body with her own” (Sula 75). At the same time at which Eva sacrifices Plum to herself, she makes a sacrifice for her other child, Hannah. Hence, similarly to the Ellison’s narrator, she can identify herself with more than just one element of the sacrificial ritual, being at the same time the sacrifice, as well as the sacrificed.
The art of sacrifice is a concept that Sula does not fully grasp. The closest she is to making a sacrifice is when she cuts her finger in order to scare the white boys who block Nel’s and hers way home (Sula 54-55). Later, Sula remembers the day as “the one time she tried to protect Nel” (141). Nel, however, remarks that “whatever those hunkies did, it wouldn’t have been as bad as what she did to herself. But Sula was so scared she had mutilated herself, to protect herself” (101) and as Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn
Kubitschek argue, when comparing Eva’s and Sula’s sacrifice, “Eva’s desperate solution is appropriate to desperate circumstances, while Sula’s is wildly disproportionate to the threat” (39). Therefore, Eva’s actions correspond to the standards of a trickster, who sacrifices the worldly for the heavenly, while Sula’s sacrifice lacks the higher goal.
In general, the portrayal of sacrifice is examined from different perspectives in the discussed books. It is set in the world of total oppression in Douglass’s Narrative, when one’s sacrifice represents the boundary between freedom and enslavement. Similarly to
Morrison’s portrayal of sacrifice, it is a means of survival, an inevitable act on the way to a better life. While on Sula and Narrative, the sacrifice stands on an individual level in a sense that it can directly influences an individual’s life, in Ellison’s Invisible Man, the portrayal of sacrifice is tied with the whole community’s well-being and higher political goals.
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6. Conclusion
The portrayals of trickster figures in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man, and Toni Morrison’s Sula demonstrate different perceptions of the same archetype by each author. This diploma thesis focuses on the trickster traits that all these literary works have in common, these are, nevertheless, represented in various manners corresponding with each individual author’s perception of the archetype and the world.
Thus, the trickster characters, in spite of possessing the same archetypal features, might be depicted in a number of different ways, twisting the individual features to various angles. Other times, however, the portrayals of these features share similarities and seem to form a pattern in their interpretation.
Among the characteristics that are portrayed in a similar fashion in all discussed works are boundary-crossing and conquering binary opposition. Although crossing different kinds of boundaries, both physically and mentally, all three authors express it through similar images, such as crossing the colour line. Hence, when Douglass writes the Narrative, and when Ellison’s narrator struggles with defining his identity, or when
Sula is accused of having intercourse with white men, they all cross the boundary between races. Moreover, they all depict a shift in the hierarchy, namely in the parts where
Douglass fights Mr Covey, where Trueblood manages to get money from Mr Norton, and where Sula rejects the traditional role reserved for women. Looking at the depiction of boundary-crossing from distance, one might argue that the reason why this particular trickster trait goes without a change is that, although facing different kinds of social injustice, the tricksters in all three works are living in an unjust world where there are boundaries between various ethnic and racial groups that one has to cross in order to
58 change status quo. Each trickster struggles with his/her position on the margins of society and only by crossing the boundary of it, they might express their dissatisfaction with it.
The marginal status of the trickster character is associated with another one of his traits, too – conquering the binary opposition. Similarly to boundary-crossing, binary opposition also serves as a means of questioning the current social hierarchy. In all three books, it demonstrates the complexity of an individual and puts it in contrast to how simplified the outside world might perceive them to be. Moreover, it illustrates how such an individual might perceive themselves and their own opposing characteristics. This phenomenon is most visible in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; depicting the young narrator struggling with fully understanding his own identity, however, it is also present in Douglass’s Narrative through his biracial status and in Sula through Sula’s feelings towards Ajax, which stand in contrast to her initial understanding of the world.
An example of such a depiction of tricksters changing in time is demonstrated in the chapter on the trickster’s appetites. Most of the appetites occurring in Frederick
Douglass’s narrative are literal and essential for the slaves’ survival in slavery. Hence, the fruit in Colonel Lloyd’s garden stands for itself, as well as the education that Douglass obtains. In the other two literary works discussed above, the portrayal of appetites offers more freedom of interpretation. Thus, the sexual desire of the Battle Royal fighters in
Ellison’s work might serve as an analogy for their unspoken wish to be a part of society and Sula’s sexual promiscuity in Morrison’s piece might be interpreted as a call for gender equality, reading it metaphorically rather than literally. It is up to debate why these two books written later in time portray the appetite in a loosened, metaphorical sense.
One possible argument might be that, taking into consideration that the African American trickster figure emerges as a reaction to oppressive conditions of slavery, as the oppression decreases and the living conditions of the marginalized black community 59 improve, they are able to experience a broader spectrum of appetites. Drawing again from
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in slavery, the slaves face extreme hunger, lacking one of the most basic human needs. Thus, their main appetite is in the form of food rather than an abstract concept. In the later period, as food becomes more accessible and the social inequality moves to different, less repressive levels, such as segregation, which is admittedly still a horrifying type of repression, the portrayal of trickster figure adapts to such new form of oppression, reacting to the current situation. Such an assumption, however, would need more research and a bigger sample of the examined literary works.
While the previous two trickster traits show signs of a pattern, whether it is the change or the similarity of their portrayal, the last trickster’s characteristic discussed in this thesis, sacrifice, is an exception. Although it might be tied to Hermes’s exchange of an earthly appetite for a heavenly one in all three works, its representation in each novel differs significantly. In Douglass’s Narrative, the sacrifice of alcohol for a sober mind draws directly to Hermes’s meaning of a sacrifice. In the other two novels, however, the art of sacrifice is developed more into depth, placing the trickster in more than one position within the sacrificial ritual. Thus, Ellison’s narrator finds himself being at the same time a sacrificer, a sacrificed, and an entity for which the sacrifice is performed.
Similarly, in Sula, Eva Peace is at the same time a sacrificer and a sacrificed. Moreover,
Morrison also paints a picture that contrasts one trickster’s (Eva’s) ability to make a sacrifice with another trickster’s (Sula’s) inability to perform such a ritual. Such diversity in interpretation might be a consequence of a decades-long struggle to properly define trickster archetype. The lack of definition and the ambiguity of a trickster himself leave the author with the freedom to re-write the trickster trope in various ways. As Lewis Hyde argues, trickster “is the archetype who attacks all archetypes” (14). Therefore, the
60 tricksters in Narrative, Invisible Man, and Sula are not only tricksters, but also heroes, mothers, creators, and jesters.
This diploma thesis’s main focus was to trace the similarities and differences between the depictions of trickster archetype in each work, however, further research could be conducted to more thoroughly examine the reasons for these patterns. Some, one might argue, are associated with the developing American society and, to the racial inequality which is attached to it. Others are associated with the number of different trickster definitions. Yet other reasons for different trickster interpretations might originate in the personal backgrounds or gender of the authors of the literary works. Even a small sample of books, such as the one used in this thesis, seems to be showing a different perception of the trickster by the authors of the opposite gender. In this thesis, it is mostly visible in the setting and the gender of the main character that Douglass, Ellison, and Morrison portray. While both male authors set their male heroes in an adventurous, individualistic journey, Morrison creates strong female characters and puts them in a community. Nevertheless, such statements need further research.
In conclusion, the works specifically selected for this thesis prove what the character definitions of a trickster say about him. He is at once clever and foolish, a hero and a fool. Ambiguous in his essence, the trickster cherishes the opposites and resides in the shadow areas of no-man’s land, not belonging anywhere. He is driven by his appetites, but able to make a sacrifice. He is a creator, yet usually unintentional. Frederick Douglass,
Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison took these characteristics and created trickster figures who demonstrate these traits at the margins of the American society.
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Abstract
This diploma thesis analyses the interpretation of the trickster archetype in selected works of African American literary canon, namely The Narrative of Life of
Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself by Frederick Douglass,
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Sula by Toni Morrison. It focuses on four distinctive trickster traits - boundary-crossing, defying binary opposition, appetites, and sacrifice – and traces different depictions of the same trait in the above-mentioned works. It uses close reading and comparative analysis at the main methods.
The thesis is divided into an introduction and four chapters. The introduction identifies a trickster figure and synthetizes the previous attempts to define the archetype.
It further introduces the reader to the origins of the African American trickster tales.
The body focuses on the analysis of the said trickster characteristics, supported by the secondary sources and criticism of each work. It argues that while some of the trickster interpretations stay relatively the same in all discussed works, other interpretations show substantial differences in depiction. Namely, boundary-crossing and defying binary opposition seem to stay the same despite of the different time periods that the books in question were written in. The depiction of appetites shows a significant difference between antebellum and postbellum literature. On the contrary, the portrayal of sacrifice does not show any pattern in interpretation.
In the conclusion, the thesis suggests further research of the trickster archetype, which would not only focus on the differences of trickster interpretations, but also on why these differences occur. The reasons for such changes might be the changing racial oppression in the American society, author’s personal understanding of the trickster archetype, and author’s gender.
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Resumé
Tato diplomová práce analyzuje interpretaci archetypu šprýmaře ve vybraných dílech afroamerického literárního kánonu, konkrétně Vyprávění o životě Fredericka
Douglasse, amerického otroka od Fredericka Douglasse, Neviditelný od Ralpha Ellisona a Sula od Toni Morrison. Zaměřuje se na čtyři charakteristické rysy šprýmaře – překračování hranic, vzdorování binární opozici, apetit a oběta – a ve výše zmíněných dílech sleduje různá zobrazení téže vlastnosti. Jako hlavní metody používá důkladné čtení a srovnávací analýzu.
Tato práce je rozdělena na úvod a čtyři kapitoly. Úvod charakterizuje postavu
šprýmaře a popisuje předchozí pokusy definovat tento archetyp. Dále seznamuje čtenáře s původem afroamerických příběhů o šprýmaři.
Hlavní část práce se zaměřuje na analýzu uvedených charakteristik šprýmařů, doplněnou o sekundární zdroje a literární kritiku každé práce. Tato část uvádí, že zatímco některé z interpretací šprýmaře zůstávají ve všech diskutovaných dílech relativně stejné, jiné interpretace vykazují podstatné rozdíly v zobrazení. Konkrétně se zdá, že překračování hranic a vzdorování binární opozici jsou chápány napříč různými časovými obdobími, v nichž byly zmíněné knihy napsány, stejně. Znázornění apetitu však vykazuje významný rozdíl mezi díly napsanými před a po zákazu otrokářství v Americe. Naopak, zobrazení obětování nevykazuje v různých interpretacích žádný vzorec.
Ve závěru práce je navržen postup dalšího studia archetypu šprýmaře, které by se zaměřilo nejen na rozdíly v interpretaci šprýmařů, ale také na to, proč k těmto rozdílům dochází. Důvodem může být měnící se rasový útlak v americké společnosti, autorovo osobní chápání archetypu šprýmaře a pohlaví autora.
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