Description
About the Author
Lewis Hyde is the author of Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, and a book of poems, This Error Is the Sign of Love. He is Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.
Michael Chabon is the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Werewolves in Their Youth, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Wonder Boys, and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Kavalier & Clay won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. In 2000 Wonder Boys was adapted into a critically acclaimed film starring Michael Douglas. Chabon was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Columbia, Maryland. He now lives in California with his wife and children.
Product Description
In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first visits the old stories―Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among others―and then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Twelve years after its first publication, Trickster Makes This World―authoritative in its scholarship, loose-limbed in its style―has taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism.
This new edition includes an introduction by Michael Chabon.
Review
“[A] hymn to the gods of mischief, who are also the gods of artistic and cultural renewal.” ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“A major work of scholarship that is also a major work of art.” ―Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University
“Brilliant . . . By the time [Hyde] is done he has folded language culture, and the very habit of being human into his ken.” ―The New Yorker
“Hyde is one of our true superstars of nonfiction.” ―David Foster Wallace
“[Trickster Makes This World] should be ready by anyone interested in the grand and squalid matter of all things human.” ―Margaret Atwood, Los Angeles Times
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Trickster Makes This World
Mischief, Myth, and ArtBy Lewis Hyde Farrar, Straus and GirouxCopyright © 2010 Lewis Hyde
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374532550
Trickster Makes This World
PART ONETRAP OF NATURE1SLIPPING THE TRAP OF APPETITEThe whitebait Opens its black eyes In the net of the Law.--BashoTHE BAIT THIEFThe trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his tracks and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs. Trickster starts out hungry, but before long he is master of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of art. Aristotle wrote that Homer first "taught the rest of us the art of framing lies the right way." Homer makes lies seem so real that they enter the world and walk among us. Odysseus walks among us to this day, and he would seem to be Homer's own self-portrait, for Odysseus, too, is a master of the art of lying, an art he got from his grandfather, Autolycus, who got it in turn from his father, Hermes. And Hermes, in an old story we shall soon consider, invented lying when he was a hungry child with a hankering for meat.But I'm making a straight line out of a narrative that twists and turns,and I'm getting ahead of myself. We must begin at the beginning, with trickster learning how to keep his stomach full.
Trickster stories, even when they clearly have much more complicated cultural meanings, preserve a set of images from the days when what mattered above all else was hunting. At one point in the old Norse tales, the mischief-maker Loki has made the other gods so angry that he has to flee and go into hiding. In the mountains, he builds himself a house with doors on all sides