The Trickery of the Trickster: Contemporary Transformations of the Trickster in Canadian Indigenous Novel
Abstrakt
The paper investigates the character of the trickster from traditional oral Indigenous storytelling and its forms and meanings in contemporary Canadian Indigenous novel. It explores both its definitions by Indigenous scholars and its uses and functions in texts.
The trickster is generally explained as an evasive, subversive, comic character of ever-changing form and gender, being neither god nor bad or both at the same time, teaching humans about the unpredictability of the world and volatility of human nature. There has been a rich critical debate around the trickster in the last decades, starting with the "trickster hunt" in the 80s when this character was perceived as an embodiment of poststructuralist and postmodern theoretical stances, their subsequent refusal expressed in Womack's "there is no such thing as a trickster" to the recent call for responsible, culturally specific understanding of it.
The paper briefly covers this ongoing discussion, presenting some of the recent, tribal-based perceptions of the trickster (Leanne Simpson, Neal McLeod, Kristina Fagan) and then uses these for interpretation of contemporary novels, Eden Robinson's Son of a Trickster and Drew Hayden Taylor's Motorcycles & Sweetgrass in particular.