The Mirth of Tragedy: Hermes, the Trickster Spirit, and the Real Oedipus Complex

By Craig Titley

Seventy years.

Within the short span of approximately three score and ten years dating from 484-406 BCE, Greek tragedy was born, flourished, and then slipped away into the Eternal, leaving only a handful of extant footprints as proof of its brief but influential walk upon the earth. Likewise the human being, that tragic creature who crawls on all fours as a child, walks upright on two legs throughout life, and hobbles on a walking stick into the twilight, suffers the same brief fate.

According to the United Nations, the average worldwide human life expectancy is 66.7 years and in OECD nations, it is 77 years (HDR chart). Most experts agree that these expectancies have all but reached their limits (Oeppen 1029). Thus, either by Grand Design, Tiresian foresight, or mere coincidence, it appears that the life of tragedy is the tragedy of human life: seventy years and then “out, out brief candle.” The real Oedipus Complex, therefore, might not be that we want to fuck our mothers, but that that we are just plain fucked, period.

Carl Jung would daresay there are no coincidences, and I would suggest that it is no mere coincidence that the lifespan of Greek tragedy approximates the maximum lifespan of the human experience. Tragedy is the riddle of human mortality given form and, when viewed from the perspective of the god whom I would consider Greek tragedy’s true benefactor, the answer to that riddle lies tragically close.

Who then is this god who presides over the limit of human life and, in our synchronic hypothesis, the finite life of Greek tragedy? Instinctively one might suspect Pluto/Hades, Lord of the Underworld. However, it appears to be a god of a different hat. Or, actually, of the same hat but of a different head: Hermes.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche posits that Greek tragedy was born of the tension created when the Apollonian and Dionysian worldviews collided: the worlds of sculpture (Apollo) and music (Dionysus); dreams (Apollo) and intoxication (Dionysus), appearances (Apollo) and “seeing through” (Dionysus). Without rehashing or debating the merit of Nietzsche’s theory, suffice it to say Hermes was not in the equation.

Yet despite Nietzsche’s slight, Greek mythology’s Mercurial trickster is clearly lurking in the background of the tragic genre. In fact, Hermes, may be its director; and Apollo and Dionysus merely his stagehands. In the first “Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” the poet reveals that the child Hermes, after killing a turtle, “started thinking about words and action” (21). Aristotle, in his Poetics, describes tragedy as “an imitation of action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament [...]” (VI.2-3). It seems revealing then that Hermes’ “words and action” lead him to create a lyre out of the turtle’s hollowed-out shell (“Hymn to Hermes” 21-2) that, according to Aristotle, was then used to create harmony, the source of all poetic imitation--including tragedy (I.4-5). Hermes subsequently passes this gift onto his brother Apollo so that he might make music that provides “jolliness, love, and sweet sleep” (“Hymn to Hermes” 49)--or to become the “Apollinian (sic) artist in dreams” of Nietzsche’s theory (38). In exchange, Apollo makes Hermes “the famous and rich guide among the Gods” (“Hymn to Hermes” 50), escort between the gods and mortals, between the living and the dead.

Hermes’ harmony-producing lyre was also instrumental in the building of Thebes, perhaps the most tragic city in the genre. According to William G. Doty, Hermes’ lyre “was crucial to the creation of the walls of Thebes as a sort of enacted musical architecture--the city was characterized as lyrodmetos, lyrebuilt, and Hermes received the epithet lyraios” (Doty 55). It is important to note the connection to boundaries that these walls signify, especially when Oedipus as the murderer of his father, the king of Thebes, and as the husband to Jocasta, his own mother, breaks down the moral boundaries within Thebes before being exiled beyond the physical lyrebuilt walls. Hermes’ lyre literally built the stage for the tragic Theban plays to come.

As for his influence on Dionysus, Hermes is said to have been the father of Pan as well as the satyrs (Doty 53), followers and sycophants of Dionysus. Furthermore, Hermes’ role as a psychopomp, like that of Orpheus, clearly suggests a Mercurial trickster presence behind the Dionysian half of Nietzsche’s equation. In fact “Dionysian ecstasy,” according to Karl KerÈnyi, had the same function as the trickster myth: it abolished the boundaries, not the least the boundaries of sex” (188)--a boundary clearly ignored by Oedipus and other tragic figures. Yet Nietzsche fails to see Hermes’ tricksterish footprints stamped across the pages of tragedy. More recently William G. Doty also argues, “comedy and satire were more appropriate for the development of [Hermes’] character than the more elevated genres of tragedy and lyric” (61). The analysis of both Nietzsche and Doty is not surprising since, as we know from his Homeric Hymn, Hermes likes to cover his tracks. Yet his invisible influence on tragedy--remember the hat he shares with Hades makes the wearer invisible--comes from a power that transcends even his own stealth mischievousness. The power that manifests as Hermes, and thus manifests itself in Greek tragedy, is the power of the trickster archetype.

To place the trickster archetype at the scene of tragedy’s birth, life, and death it is first necessary to travel to a continent where another Sphinx resides. It is in Africa that we find a cultural counterpart to Greek mythology’s great riddle-solver and, perhaps, tragedy’s defining character: Oedipus. It was while reading Robert Pelton’s classic work The Trickster in West Africa, that I found Oedipus in the guise of Legba, the West African trickster closely associated with Africa divination and the idea of fa--“that destiny of fate which is peculiar to each individual” (Pelton 114). Maya Deren, in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, describes Legba as “God of the Cross-roads” (97), “the parent and the patron” (96) who became “an old tattered man shuffling down the road, with his crude twisted cane or crutch” (99). When Legba possesses someone his or her “limbs are crippled and twisted and terrible to see” (99).

The parallels between Legba and Oedipus--whose name literally means “swollen foot” and who met his destiny at the crossroad where he encountered and killed his father--suggest at first that Oedipus might himself be as much a trickster figure as a tragic figure. Clearly, like a classic trickster, he lives at the margins of society and is a violator of sacred taboos. However, it is not so much the physical (albeit mythic and literary) manifestation of an actual trickster in tragedy (whether of not that be Oedipus himself in this case) but rather the “spirit of the trickster”--the invisible Hermes--that seems to pervade tragedy.
Hermes incarnate is rarely a central character in the Greek tragedies yet, as for example, in Aeschylus’ Oresteia cycle, he is always lurking in the background. The Libation Bearers begins with Orestes’ prayer to the swift-footed god: “Hermes, lord of the dead, look down and guard/the fathers’ power. Be my savior, I beg you,/be my comrade now” (1-3). In The Eumenides, Hermes is a character on stage, but he speaks no lines. Still his presence is always felt. His power resides in his invisible trickster nature.

The nature of the trickster spirit, hard enough to define within the confines of Greek tragedy, is arguably impossible to define in general terms. There are as many characteristics of the trickster as there are tricksters. KerÈnyi sums up such trickster traits as “phallic,” “voracious,” “sly,” and “stupid” as the paradoxical “spirit of disorder, the enemy of disorder” (KerÈnyi 185). Jung claims that he “found a suitable designation for [the trickster’s] character component when I called it the shadow” (Jung 202). For Claude LÈvi-Strauss “the trickster is the embodiment of all complementary opposites, but in particular of that between immediate sexual gratification and the demands of civilization” (Doty and Hynes 21). In his essay “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide,” William J. Hynes gathered all the definitions and compiled a list of the six most prominent and distinguishing trickster characteristics: (1) Ambiguous and Anomalous, (2) Deceiver and Trick-player, (3) Shape-shifter, (4) Situation-Inverter, (5) Messenger and Imitator of the Gods, and (6) Sacred and Lewd Bricoleur. At the core of them all we find paradox.

What is interesting about Hynes’ list is that these same six characteristics could just as easily apply to the genre of tragedy itself. In fact tragedy may very well be its own (and our own) trickster! Are not ambiguity and anomaly the hallmarks of tragedy? Christine Downing notes that “Oedipus is both a victim of fate and responsible for his deeds. Orestes is both guilty of the most heinous of all crimes, matricide, and a son dutifully avenging his father’s murder. Both Antigone and Creon are right. And both are wrong!” (96). And how many times have we, the spectator, as well as the Choruses on the stage been deceived and tricked by situation-inverting twists and turns of character and plot crafted by the deft-hands of such tragic channelers as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides? And does not the genre shape-shift radically from one poet to the next? Consider the various renditions of the Elektra tale. Or Euripides’ The Bacchae, an almost farcical version of the stately plays of Sophocles. Like the trickster who finds the “lewd in the sacred and the sacred in the lewd” (Hynes 42), we may find something sacred in the sacrificial dismemberment of Pentheus or in the unholy union of Oedipus/Jocasta that produces the noble Antigone.
Finally, is not tragedy in and of itself, a message from the gods? If it is indeed no coincidence that the lifespan of tragedy parallels the lifespan of human beings, then what are the gods trying to convey through the trickster-tragedy? Perhaps it is what naturalist John Burroughs called the Cosmic Chill, the awareness that,

, “[t]he universe is going its own way with no thought of us [...]. We have been so long housed in our comfortable little anthropomorphic creeds, with their artificial warmth and light, that when we are suddenly turned out of doors by this thought, we experience, I say, the cosmic chill. (Burroughs 119)

The message of despair within the fabric of tragedy is that with only a mere seventy years of existence we are fucked, and ultimately there will be no footprint left behind. On the other hand, as Nietzsche suggests, tragedy also carries a message of hope: “The metaphysical comfort--with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us--that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable” (59). To solve this tragic puzzle, we will now, once again, journey to Africa.

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell retells the story of the African trickster Edshu who tricked a couple of farmers with his multi-colored hat so that each was convinced the hat was of a single color. The men argued incessantly, each convinced that his view was the correct and only view. Finally “the old trickster revealed himself, made known his prank, and showed the hat. ‘The two could not help but quarrel,’ he said. ‘I wanted it that way. Spreading strife is my greatest joy” (Campbell 45).

Both the trickster and tragedy thrive on the strife of ambiguity and conflict. This conflict, according to Downing is “between chthonic and Olympian deities, between physis and nomos, nature and culture, between men and women” and “[t]he tragedies were written to illuminate--not resolve these tensions. For that is what drama is: agon, struggle, the representation of multiple perspectives” (96). The trickster spirit is two farmers looking at the same hat and seeing something completely different.

Tragedy is the hope and despair of existence. Both are right and both are wrong. “The Greeks knew and felt the terror and horror of existence,” Nietzsche says (42). In Oedipus at Colonus, the Chorus expresses this horror: “Not to be born is best/when all is reckoned in, but once a man has seen the light/the next best thing, by far, is to go back/back to where he came from, quickly as he can” (1387-1391). Perhaps this is why Oedipus literally re-entered his mother’s womb. But in the end, fear was gone, salvation was his at last, and Oedipus went peacefully to his grave, the womb of Mother Earth.

In The Trickster of West Africa, Robert Pelton notes that,

The laughter of the trickster evokes the laughter of truly disillusioned delight. Human dread begins with the suspicion that the project that is life will fail, that every human trajectory will fall short of its goal. Tragedy is the discovery that this failure has its own magnificence, while systems of salvation deny the finality of failure. (266)

This, perhaps, is the mirth of tragedy--the tragedy of life embodied in the life of tragedy. Our seventy-odd years on earth may be fraught with joy or sorrow, but either way they are brief. It is our blessing and our curse. And our own mortality is the punchline in the trickster soul of tragedy. “Hermes,” explains Doty, “is both an old man (sphenopogon: having a wedge-shaped beard, like old men in Comedy) and a baby or youth (achnous: beardless, downy-cheeked)” (Doty 48). Furthermore his signature emblem is his staff (Doty 51). Thus it would seem that Hermes himself is the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, for he is that figure who walks upon four legs (the child), two legs (the fleet-footed messenger) and three legs (with his staff). He is not, however, a second possible answer to the riddle, but the same answer in a different guise.

Likewise Deren says that Legba “is himself the destined answer to the riddle of the Sphinx: he was once the new-born infant sun, lived through the fertile prime of his noon, and is now the old sun, walking with a cane--the ‘third leg’--in the afternoon of life” (98-9). As Robert Pelton notes, the trickster

[...] establishes the world as it is, no matter how unthinkingly or selfishly, against the plans of gods and the threats of monsters. He is simultaneously trickster, transformer, and cultural hero, and all these elements are integrated into one character, who, in reality, is none other than Man (sic). (8-9)

Tragedy is trickster and the trickster is us. How appropriate then, that Oedipus, the most tragic hero of all, was the one to solve this riddle.

In Oedipus at Colonus, one of the final Greek tragedies to be written, and the redemptive end to one of its most defining trilogy, the Chorus sums it all up rather nicely: “Show me a man who longs to live a day beyond his time/who turns his back on a decent length of life/I’ll show the world a man who clings to folly” (1378-80). Tragedy did not, as Nietzsche suggests, commit suicide. It crawled, it walked, it hobbled, and then it exited stage left quietly and peacefully just as it should have.

Greek tragedy, as directed by Hermes and the trickster spirit, had a good seventy-year run and, like the rest of us, to linger any longer would be to miss the point: seventy years and then into the ground. Bitch, wail, laugh, rejoice, or rage against the gods, it makes no difference. But maybe, just maybe, if we’re lucky and if we can offer up a bit of the “laughter of disillusioned delight” in the face of it all, Hermes will leave a couple of our tracks intact.

Or course, they may be backwards.

Works Cited

Aeschylus. “The Libation Bearers.” The Oresteia. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961.

Boer, Charles, trans. “The Hymn to Hermes.” The Homeric Hymns. Putnam, Connecticut: Spring Publications, 2003. 18-58.

Burroughs, John. The Light of Day. New York: Houghton, 1900.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.

Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Kingston, New York: McPherson & Co., 1983.

Doty, William G. “A Lifetime of Trouble-Making: Hermes as Trickster.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Ed. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 1993. 46-65.

Downing, Christine. “Greek Tragedy in Its Historical Hour--and Ours.” The Luxury of Afterwards. New York: iUniverse, 2004. 93-106.

Hynes, William J. “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricketers: A Heuristic Guide.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Ed. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 1993. 33-45.

Jung. C.G. “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure.” Trans. R.F.C. Hull. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. By Paul Radin. New York: Schocken, 1972. 193-211.

KerÈnyi, Karl. “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology.” Trans. R.F.C. Hull. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. By Paul Radin. New York: Schocken, 1972. 171-191.

Nietzsche, Fredrich. The Birth of Tragedy. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967. 15-144.

Oeppen, Jim and James W. Vaupel. “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy.” Science 296 (2002): 1029-1031.

Pelton, Robert D. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkely: U of California Press, 1980.

Sophocles. “Oedipus at Colonus.” The Three Theban Plays. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1984.

United Nations, World Population Prospects 1950-2050: the 2002 Revision. New York: Department of Economics and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2003.

Posted by john at June 6, 2006 07:39 AM