Ongoing Themes Mary Poppins 4

Tricksters can be culture heroes or clownish buffoons who appear in times of trouble, or who bring trouble with them. They are concerned with opposites, and boundaries—they never met a boundary they did not break, cross, evade, move, blur, or in some instances create (Hyde, 1998). Tricksters are the lords of the threshold, transition, and transformation. They are boundary crossing psychopomps, culture creators, and transformers. Tricksters are hermeneuts and psychic adventures, super-shamans who boldly go where others do not. They especially favor liminal lands of chaos and communitas. Tricksters violate taboos and customs, and have no regard for authority—disrupting the established order and inverting situations as they go. But there is a method to the madness of the trickster. While tricksters are playful and use jokes and laughter along with tricks and deception to work their magic, their stories simultaneously educate and enlighten. Their metaplay dissolves the order of things and in bricoleur-style they create new worlds out of the bits and pieces of old orders that they have disassembled, and as such tricksters also are associated with creativity and the creation of consciousness.

Now that we have an overview of the trickster, let us consider a few of the trickster qualities more deeply, beginning with a bit of background. ∆RC[mp11]

A Bit of Background on the Trickster

In less rational times, trickster tales were considered sacred, because they describe the world and are often creation stories. Stories of tricksters occur in mythology and folklore from around the world and much has been written on the tricksters, despite his indefinability (Hyde, 1998: Pelton, 1980; Radin, 1972; Jung 1954/1990; Kerenyi, 1973/2003; Hynes & Doty, 1993; Combs & Holland, 2001; Hansen, 2001). Hansen (2001) relates that “the term was probably first introduced in this context in 1885 by Daniel G. Brinton” (p. 35).

Tricksters have a number of common characteristics, however not all tricksters exhibit all of these characteristics. First of all, most trickster characters are usually male, and they usually trick or deceive more powerful beings than themselves, hence the name trickster. Tricksters are marginal characters and their statuses are ambiguous. Hansen relates that marginalized groups, such as women and minorities have an affinity for tricksters, and observations from these groups have shed important lights on the trickster phenomenon.

Tricksters often end up being tricked by their trickiness, too. Almost all tricksters have magical powers and they are often unmarried. Hansen (2001) notes that the trickster’s most important characteristics include: “deception, disruption, reduced sexual inhibition and magical practices” (p. 46). As Radin (1972), who worked with the Winnebego Indians between 1908-1918 and wrote The Trickster in 1956, explains:

Trickster is at one time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself . . . . He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of all his appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being . . . . Laughter, humor and irony permeate everything Trickster does. The reaction of the audience in aboriginal societies to both him and his exploits is prevailingly one of laughter tempered by awe. (pp. xxiii-xxiv)

Radin (1972) says that in the figure of the trickster we are dealing with a speculum mentis [a mirror of the mind] depicting “man’s struggle with himself and with a world into which he has been thrust without his volition or consent” (p. xxiv).

During the 1960s, anthropologists Mary Douglas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Victor Turner all wrote about the Trickster. For Douglas, who wrote Purity and Danger in 1966, the trickster had

a social function of dispelling the belief that any given social order is absolute and objective (1968: 365). The anomalous is precisely that realm excluded by rigid classifying systems, and Douglas’s works returns again and again to categories between categories—such as the various trickster representations that reflect repeatedly strong antinomies (male vs. female, good vs. evil) caught into a single figure. (Doty & Hynes, 1993, p. 21)

Douglas argued that what “can’t be clearly classified in terms of traditional classical criteria of classification, or falls between classificatory boundaries, is almost everywhere regarded as ‘polluting’ and ‘dangerous’” (V. Turner, 1969, p. 109). Lévi-Strauss, not surprisingly saw the trickster in terms of opposites, specifically as the embodiment of opposites:

Claude Lévi-Strauss views the trickster is the epitome of binary oppositions, a necessary anomaly incorporating every set of extremes (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 224-226) . . . . Still none of these arenas fully captures or defines the trickster: he is not fully delimited by one side or the other of a binary distinction, nor by both sides at once, nor by a series of oppositions. Anomalous, a-nomos, without normativity, the trickster appears on the edge or just beyond existing borders, classifications and categories . . . . Breaking down division lines, the trickster characteristically moves swiftly and impulsively back and forth across all borders with virtual impunity. (Hynes, 1993, p. 34)

Victor Turner characteristically, saw the trickster in a liminal light, as symbolic of the liminal state itself. I, too, share V. Turner's view. V. Turner regards the trickster as "temporarily breaking down and intermingling all categories so as to cause new combinations and anomalies (1967;106)" (Doty & Hynes, 1993, pp. 19-20). Pelton (1980), whose work draws on V. Turner’s writes:

Some years ago, Turner pointed out that the “anitnomian, multiform, and ambiguous” character of the trickster was like that of man himself in certain liminal states, but here his insight into the nature of liminality suggests that the trickster is more than a symbol of liminal man. It seems closer to the truth, rather, to say that the trickster is a symbol of the liminal state itself and of its permanent accessibility as a source of recreative power. (p. 35)

Joseph Campbell felt that tricksters were “super-shamans” and like shamans, tricksters mediate the middle ground between different opposites, such as life and death, heaven and earth, good and evil (Doty and Hynes, 1993). Shamans, like tricksters use magic and are often on the margins. This middle ground, which shamans and tricksters are able to cross, was considered to be dangerous and surrounded by taboos. Hansen (2001) notes:

The middle area goes by several labels: liminality, interstitiality, transitional space, betwixt and between, anti-structure. These are dangerous positions, situations and statuses. They break down categories, classifications, and boundaries. Violation of the boundaries was taboo and brought the wrath of the gods. There was a price to be paid. Yet during some liminal periods, taboos were deliberately violated in order to obtain magical power. (p. 31)

In this regard, trickster tales often have scatological and sexual elements to them, since both of these areas are typically surrounded by taboos. However, since Mary Poppins is a Disney movie, taking place in a Victorian setting no less, it is no surprise that the sexual and scatological components are absent. The most scatological thing in this movie is the chimney soot!

Doty and Hynes (1993) report that Joseph Campbell saw in the trickster a primitive or less developed “Paleolithic form of the hero archetype (1959: 274)” (p. 21). Campbell (1990) also associated this trickster-hero with the fool:

Almost all non-literate mythology has a trickster hero of some kind. American Indians had the great rabbit and coyote, the ravens, and blue jay. And there’s a very special property in the trickster: he always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. He’s both a fool and someone who’s beyond the system. And the trickster hero represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn’t decided it wants to deal with. The mind structures a lifestyle, and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities. He doesn’t respect the values that you’ve set up for yourself, and he smashes them. The fool really became the instructor of kings because he was careless of the king’s opinion, careless of the king’s power; and the king allowed them because he got wisdom from this uncontrolled source. The fool is the breakthrough of the absolute into the field of controlled social orders. (p. 39) ∆RC[mp12]

Of course, Mary Poppins would never consider herself to be a fool, but her friend Bert plays the fool during the movie at times, and from George Banks’s point of view, what Mary is teaching the children is pure foolishness.

Trickster myths embody the playful and disruptive side of human imagination. Combs and Holland (2001) in their book on synchronicity, discuss the trickster and his relation to synchronicity, shedding light on the boundary blurring and bricolage aspects of the trickster as well. They also give us insight into the selfish and uncontrollable aspects, and the trickster's relation to play and boundary breaking:

For the inner, archetypal Trickster, play includes a synchronistic taking hold of whatever materials come to hand in order to break the boundaries of our usual perceptions of reality . . . . In addition, trickster stories almost universally emphasize his doing exactly what he pleases regardless of the consequences. The apparent selfishness is, in part, a way of portraying his sovereign nature as an uncontrollable aspect of the human psyche that originates totally outside the reach of the conscious mind. The meaning of his actions, however, depends not on himself but on some deeper aspect of the psyche in whose service he acts . . . . There are no limits to his antics. It is his delight to shatter our boundaries, borders, and frames, stripping us of our protective coloration and baring us helplessly to something new. This is his play, and when we ourselves are playful, we are in harmony with him. (Combs & Holland, 2001, pp. 133-134)

Hansen (2001) relates that tricksters cannot be reduced to the formulations of any one discipline and to see the trickster, boundaries must be crossed and blurred. Hansen also mentions that “several commentators have noticed that productions of trickster characters is often something of a bricolage, a French world meaning a product made from a hodgepodge of materials at hand . . ." (p. 29). One such commentator is Pelton (1980) who sees the trickster as representing the human race:

The trickster depicts man as a sort of inspired handyman, tacking together the bits and pieces of experience until they become what they are—a web of many layered being. In symbolizing the transforming power of the imagination as it pokes at, plays with, delights in, and shatters what seems to be until it becomes what it is, he discloses how the human mind and heart are themselves epiphanies of a calmly transcendent sacredness so boldly engaged with this world that it encompasses both nobility and messiness—feces, lies, and even death. (p. 4)

Doty and Hynes (1993), commenting on Pelton, summarize and explain his argument:

According to Pelton the trickster represents the human race “individually and communally seizing the fragments of his experience and discovering in them an order sacred by its very wholeness” (255) hence “the trickster discloses the radically human character of the whole cosmos,” while at the same time “he shows the holiness or ordinary life. And in causing reflection upon the boundaries, upon the very nature of social order, the trickster represents “metasocial commentary” (266) or “hermeneutics in action” (243). (p. 21)

Tricksters are found in conditions of transition and their tales often deal with transitions. In fact, as Hansen (2001) notes:

Many trickster qualities can be understood in terms of boundaries, structures and transitions. They also embody paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity . . . . In a multitude of ways, the trickster doesn’t quite “fit in.” By his nature, he resists complete and precise definition, and Barbara Babcock and Jay Cox comment that he “eludes and disrupts all orders of things, including the analytic categories of academics.” (p. 46)

This is precisely why Victor Turner (1988) equates play with the trickster. Hansen maintains that the key to understanding the trickster lies in the “concepts of liminality and antistructure” (p. 28). Westcott, in discussing the West African trickster Eshuh-Elegba explicates: “He is present whenever there is trouble and also whenever there is change and transition” and “his unscrupulous tricks define him as a creature who has no regard for authority” (Hansen, 2001, p. 41).

Mary Poppins, although not unscrupulous, is definitely tricky, and has no regard at all for George Banks’s authority. She takes every opportunity and uses every advantage to rupture his stifling routine. It is no surprise that the trickster would turn up in the guise of Mary Poppins, and would be present in the troubled transitional time of the 1960s, a time, as we have seen, that was particularly liminal, as we have seen.

Hynes (1993) observes that R. D. Laing, an unconventional psychologist from the 1960s, saw “his task as mediating between man’s present and potential states. The trickster is also a mediator. He’s usually pictured at a crossroads. He’s very cunning” (p. 209). Lunsford (2000), in discussing the concept of nepantla, talks about the unsettling nature of liminality:

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