Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture - Softcover

Hyde, Lewis

4.2

1,805 ratings by Goodreads

9781847672254: Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847672256 ISBN 13: 9781847672254

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2008

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"Art is a lie that tells the truth." - Pablo Picasso

Picasso disrupted the world around him, and in doing so he reshaped it. That is the Trickster spirit. Playful, mischievous, subversive, amoral. Tricksters are a great bother to have around, but paradoxically they are also indispensable heroes of culture, because ourworld - with its complexity and ambiguity, its beauty and its dirt - was trickster's creation, and the work is not yet finished.

Authoritative in its scholarship, supple and dynamic in its style, Trickster Makes This World encourages you to think and see afresh.

'Artists of whatever sort need Trickster's help from time to time: when you're blocked or stuck, take an aimless walk and let your mind off its leash, and call on Trickster. He's the opener of dreams, of roads, and of possibilities.' - Margaret Atwood

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Review:

'Hyde is persuasive and is at his most interesting on contemporary tricksters.'

From the Author:

Description of the TRICKSTER book.
Here is the description of my TRICKSTER book, as it appears in the publisher's catalog. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art An enchanting investigation into the significance of trickster figures, old and new. Lewis Hyde's ambitious and captivating TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in the trickster mythology. Most at home on the road or at the twilight edge of town, tricksters are the consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through keyholes, breaching walls, subverting defense systems. Always out to satisfy their inordinate appetites, lying, cheating, and stealing, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but paradoxically they are also indispensable culture heroes. In North America, Coyote taught the race how to dress, sing and shoot arrows. In West Africa, Eshu discovered the art of divination so that suffering humans might know the purposes of heaven. In Greece, Hermes the Thief invented the art of sacrifice, the trick of making fire, and even language itself. Hyde revisits these old stories then holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frederick Douglass and others. The old myths say that the trickster made the world as it actually is. Other gods set out to create a world more perfect and ideal, but THIS world with its complexity and ambiguity, its beauty and its dirt, was trickster's creation, and the work is not yet finished. -- Lewis Hyde / Kenyon College

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