Trickster: An Affirmation of Life
I’ve always loved the trickster archetype.
In fact, I like to think it loves me too, and that it’s been fighting to keep me alive over the years.
In one of my favorite fantasy series, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, there’s a character named Kruppe. Kruppe is this butterball, a corpulent wad of annoyance that waltzes in and out of dreams (literally), and makes a general mess of the more serious and somber characters’ machinations. Most of the time, he’s an obnoxious side character that refers to himself in the third person and generally confuses everyone he encounters.
But he is also arguably one of the most powerful characters in the series. At one point, he stands in the way of Caladan Brood, a hulking, somber demigod of sorts who wields a giant hammer that has the potential to crack open the planet with a single blow. Brood is not to be trifled with, but Kruppe trifles with him. Brood hits him with the hammer, splitting the earth around the lard bucket, leaving him untouched.
I’ve always enjoyed characters like this the most in stories. Characters who don’t take themselves or others very seriously. Their lot is to laugh. It’s why I love the Doctor in Doctor Who, and why I love another one of Erikson’s characters, the tricky goofball Tehol Beddict, who beneath a mask of flippant stupidity, is one of the most intelligent men alive.
Tehol wanders around naked, wrapped in a bedsheet for most of the book. He singlehandedly manages to bring down a greedy capitalist society without breaking a sweat. But, in the resulting chaos, he is crushed to death, his intelligence and craftiness useless in the face of enormous power and evil. He is only saved by his manservant Bugg, a god in disguise, who brings him back to life. I will return to this in a moment.
I have a degree of intelligence which is not conducive to staying alive. I’m no genius, nor do I pretend to be one. My mind is always spinning, generating a constant and immovable mass of useless thought. I overthink, which may seem like a way of complimenting myself, but in reality, it poses a threat to my continued existence. Thinking too much gets in the way of you getting on with things. I think I see the truth of the world, but that counts for very little.
Mor often than not, I bounce my way down the staircase of overthought into this conclusion: I am a piece of meat with delusions of grandeur and my very existence is a curse that ought to be extinguished sooner rather than later.
To think too deeply is often to walk the road of self-hatred and madness.
But here, I think is where these tricksters have been trying to save me. Their existence within our collective consciousness is a response to people like myself, who take themselves far too seriously and believe that they are alone, unloved, and the only people who suffer. Depressives like myself view the world with a certain myopia. We see truth, but a distorted version of it. Often, it’s nearly impossible to shake ourselves out of it.
I would note: this should not be seen as an affirmation of life. Disavowing and dis-affirming (is that a word?) self-hatred and capital-T truth should not result in some sort of romcom happy-go-lucky love of life and all its pleasures and curses. I do not deny what great thinkers like Thomas Ligotti say when he says:
The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone (Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 75).
However, I am alive. I am here, and things have conspired to give me a healthy body and healthy mind for the time being. And that presents me with choices. I can immerse myself in the day-to-day of work and the un-examined life, make choices because societal superstructures tell me too (grow up, have kids, love my country, die). I can do what I do very often, hate myself to the point where everything around me becomes a reflection of that hatred, culminating in a death without remark.
Or, I can laugh. That is the lesson of the trickster. The trickster does not laugh because the world is beneath them, or that they have some special knowledge others do not. They laugh because to laugh is to love the bag of meat you walk around in, the bag that oozes and shits and squirms with fear in the night. To laugh is to express delight in one’s corporeal nature, and the delight of others silliness and seriousness.
Tehol dies, yes, but he is saved by the love of his friend. His friend does not save him from mortality permanently. Erikson leaves Tehol happy, we do not return to him, and for good reason, because that is not the nature of the trickster. The trickster has no end, not because he is mortal, but because it is not in the nature of laughter to subside.
Laughter is not a protective measure against the world — it is a way of being in the world, a way of showering yourself and others with life. God knows, we could use that from time to time.
