Classical literature teaches the reader not to divide the world exclusively into black and white. Indeed, there are works where good and evil are differentiated very clearly. The antagonist enters into a fight with the protagonist, and the good always strives to win over the bad. The current article addresses the theme of tricksters – characters on the verge of good and evil (Hyde, 1998). As a rule, such heroes are characterized by a penchant for cheating and petty fraud. Tricksters are excessively active, and even the retribution for their sins that overtakes them does not stop adventurers from new achievements. One of the notable trickster examples in the works of Shakespeare is Ariel from The Tempest, whose main ability to morph makes him one of the core characters.
Tricksters are often ambiguous characters who can change over time and, depending on circumstances, can exhibit supernatural abilities. Ariel is a spirit which actually causes the ship of Prospero to crash by creating a storm (Shakespeare, 2015). Essentially, Ariel is a mighty entity that has the capacity to transgress boundaries and perform unconventional actions, which eventually allow the plot to progress further. At the same time, despite being exceptionally powerful, Ariel serves his master Prospero who released him from imprisonment. Thus, Ariel mirrors Caliban, who, unlike the spirit, betrays his master, Prospero, and suffers for it (Shakespeare, 2015). Ariel’s actions in the play are of dubious nature, and therefore he cannot be regarded as a completely good or evil character. On the one hand, he causes the shipwreck, while on the other hand, Ariel, even after punishing the enemies of Prospero, expresses his pity for them (Shakespeare, 2015). Thus, Ariel, in many ways, can be regarded as an exemplary trickster character portrayed by Shakespeare.
The levels of development of a trickster as a literary character can be defined as follows: Trickster-guiding, Trickster-acting, Trickster-leading. After leaving the cradle of mythology, the trickster began his journey in literature. He was a minor character at the first stage, just telling the main character the right direction – a Trickster guide. At the second stage, he continued to be a minor character but already helped the heroes with words and deeds – the trickster is acting. He came to the fore on the third and led the others – the Trickster-presenter. Different moods of the epochs caused this development. Every turn of evolution was a response to the main events of the time.
The crown of the evolution of tricksters – the Trickster-leader – appears in the XX century, a time of great hopes and even greater disappointments. Two world wars, moral, economic, and political crises which engulfed humanity during these periods. The intensification of cruelty, the spread of fascism, and other totalitarian regimes completely suppressed the human personality (Taketani, 2019). This situation, most likely, was the reason for the trickster’s isolation from the society of other literary characters. A rogue and a merry fellow, easily overcoming all the hardships of life, becomes a kind of personification of freedom and a better life.
Trickster transforms cheating and transgressions into an artistic gesture – a special kind of performance – in which the pragmatics of the trick is reduced, and the artistic effect is brought to the fore. The first obvious explanation of the specific sacred context created by tricksters in the culture of the XX century is the concept of transgression. Transgression – breaking boundaries and overturning social and cultural norms – is the most important method of a trickster. In this act, the concept of such an important sacred signifier as taboo is recreated, albeit through violation (Hyde, 1998). Transgression, especially in the culture of the twentieth century, does not serve to destroy the religious foundations of social and cultural norms but, on the contrary, paradoxically produces the sacred.
The view of the trickster as a sacred transgressor is also confirmed in archaic cultures. That is why, in the twentieth century, this method of embodying the sacred acquired central importance precisely because of the erosion and fragmentation of “positive” ideas about the sacred. A trickster is devoid of a stable identity but capable of artistically reproducing the signs of any identity, slipping between the antinomies of the social, political, and cultural order, ambivalent and elusive. As a” floating” signifier, the trickster embodies a gap and an impossible contradiction, on the one hand, between symbolic languages – official or unofficial – with which society models and describes itself, and, on the other hand, social practices unfolding in relative independence from these languages.
In conclusion, tricksters become active in the culture at a time when society is oversaturated with cynicism and is aware of it; in these images, an excess of cynicism is wasted, turning against itself and striking not only everything claiming authority and value but also cynicism itself, which loses its pragmatism in this act and turns into cynicism. The more tightly society “closes,” the more urgent the need for cultural valves. Tricksters are such valves, or, in other words, they are cultural “leukocytes,” which are more intense the more a social organism is susceptible to proto-, pro-, or simply fascist “infections.”
Reference
Hyde, L. (1998). Trickster makes this world: Mischief, myth, and art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Shakespeare, W. (2015). The Tempest. Simon & Schuster.
Taketani, E. (2019). Tricksters and cosmopolitans: Cross-cultural collaborations in Asian American literary production East-West literary imagination: Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison. Web.