Tricks of the light

Trickster Makes This World: How The Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture
By Lewis Hyde
Canongate £16.99, 432 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

How has Lewis Hyde survived into the 21st century? The last of the last romantics, Hyde’s effrontery is to launch hippy 1960s idealism as a weapon against the American marketplace and its commodified culture. It is a battle he opened with his cult book The Gift, an impassioned defence of art as a non-commercial practice. Trickster Makes This World, here published for the first time in the UK, continues the fight, contending that cultures only flourish and develop if they are open to the disruptive intelligence of wise jokers, holy fools, and other outlandish creators who artfully change how we think.

Trickster, gangster, monster, spinster, lobster, oyster: why do so many “-ster” nouns represent the weird, eccentric or menacing? Ranging across continents and millennia, Hyde assembles a cast of unreliable, deceitful, cunning, charismatic characters: Coyote and the Raven in north America; Brer Rabbit in the south; Krishna in India; Eshu in west Africa; the Monkey King in China; the Greek messenger Hermes, god of poets, thieves and travellers; and Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus to give to mankind.

Homer invokes Hermes as a figure “of many shifts, blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle driver ...” In his Roman guise he became Mercury, patron of commerce, trader, nomad. Yuri Slezkine, in his 2004 masterpiece The Jewish Century, argued that traditionally populations could be divided into Mercurians, an entrepreneurial, mobile, urban minority, and Apollonians, the stable food-producing majority; the revolution of the 20th century was to make Mercurian fixers of us all. Hyde argues the same: his Hermes evolves into an American hero for “the land not of natives but of immigrants, the shameless land where anyone can say anything ... the land of opportunity and therefore of opportunists ... Trickster has not disappeared. ’America’ is his apotheosis; he’s pandemic.”

Modern America is Hyde’s eternal subject. He opens with a nostalgic vignette of the open road where you almost hear the husky voice and smell the log fire of the archetypal storyteller: “Once during winter ... I was hitchhiking north of Winslow ...” He closes with a contemporary fable of inclusiveness based on a 1980s novel, Tripmaster Monkey, whose hero Wittman Ah Sing (white-man monkey) imagines himself the “USA incarnation” of the Chinese Monkey King who stole the peaches of immortality. If he can get the peaches and sleep with the white girl and write an American play about China, then “the accidental could become part of the ideal, [and] America would rise green again, a New World made new”.

Pious, folksy, heavy, repetitive – Hyde is, maddeningly, all these things. His book is unleavened by humour and, once he has given his central thesis, lacks fresh insights about the art or legends he covers. But Hyde is also an armchair anarchist issuing a moral commentary about individuality which is urgently needed now, when American culture is so threatened by conformity and materialism.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s art critic.