ABSTRACT
This article reviews the most popular, problematic, and powerful figure in Native American literature, follows the ubiquitous trickster through various incarnations in oral and written literature, and examines significant scholarly interpretations of the meanings and uses of this promiscuous figure. Trickster is popular, problematic, and powerful for the same reason-he/she knows no bounds, lives in a world before/beyond classification, and is always in motion. Timeless, universal, and indestructible, this “ragged four-legged verb” eludes and disrupts all orders of things, including the analytic categories of academics (Smith 1983: 192). Paradoxically, trickster is “multiform and ambiguous” by definition (Turner 1968:580). The “irreducible polymorphism” attests, Serres would argue, to the primacy, the necessity of disorder (Serres 1982: xxvii). Mythic and primordial, this champion of possibility and enemy of spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries has been variously conceived in Jungian terms as “an archetypal structure of extreme antiquity,” from the Freudian perspective as the personification of the id or life principle, and in the Navajo world view as “a symbol of that chaotic everything” (Jung 1956: 200; Roheim 1952: 193; Toelken 1969: 231).
