To those of us brought up in the shadow of Western religion, lying is WRONG. Yet we enjoy it. But before we embark on a guilt trip, let’s take a more detailed look at the figure of Coyote, the arch-deceiver, and see if we can’t figure out what we find so attractive about liars despite any moral scruples we may have.

Coyote’s a trickster, he transforms things, creates trouble, and, as a figure of mischief, he’s one of many in cultures all round the world. There’s also his colleagues Kokopelli and Raven in North America, Eshu and Legba in Africa, the Monkey King in China, Krishna in India, and Brer Rabbit of the American South. These guys (and they are all guys) bring disorder into the world. In every culture that has a trickster god, it’s the other gods who have made the various forms of perfection, but it’s the Trickster who’s responsible for the changes – the mistakes – that have brought about the sometimes deplorable mess and the sometimes joyful muddle that is the everyday reality for most of us.

 

And guess what? They’re invariably associated with storytellers, but storytellers who lack any real meanness in their lying. They tell porkies just to stir things up.

In his excellent cross-cultural examination ‘Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art’,  Lewis Hyde notes that the Trickster figure “feels no anxiety when he deceives. … He … can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation.” And if that isn’t the definition of what a writer does, I don’t know what is.

So why this worldwide connection between writers and con-men? Because, says Hyde, “Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world” And the next world is, among a host of other things, the Imagination. His mischief is often creative, amusing, attractive, energetic, a deflator of pomposities, and the scourge of the dull; but most importantly, as readers and lovers of literature, we all have a bit of the Trickster in us.

To a greater or lesser degree, we all want to be like him. We admire him, even though, somewhere in the back of our conscience, we know we shouldn’t.

It’s no coincidence, as Hyde notes, that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. To make something fit the circumstances. To accommodate or try to cope with complexities, or that which doesn’t fully make sense. To bring these things within your sphere of understanding, even if you aren’t fully aware of the facts.

And if you look at it this way, lies don’t equal untruth, they equal resourcefulness, energy and the triumph of possibility and invention. Which is what meaning should represent as the animating principle behind great literature. So the teller of stories keeps stirring the pot of meaning using his restless capacity for invention as the spoon, ensuring it doesn’t dry out by constantly adding fresh ingredients. And he makes the recipe up as he goes along.

We can take the argument one stage further if at this stage we introduce the trickster’s close relative and ally the Fool or Jester. And if we look at some famous fools in Shakespeare, they use their art in the form of songs, tales and parables to remind their masters of unpleasant truths, whether it’s in a comedy (‘As You Like It’) or tragedy (‘King Lear’). Although they’re mischievous, sailing perilously close to the wind of their employers’ displeasure, they get away with articulating things none of the other courtiers can. Because, like the storyteller, they have an unwritten dispensation in their job spec to tell the truth as they see it - for which they often receive punishment, because their foolery is usually more real than anyone’s prepared to admit. It also brings home the little strategies their masters use to deceive themselves, those small subterfuges that disguise what’s unpalatable about their personalities or behaviour. As Lear’s fool ruefully notes, “Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipp'd out, when Lady  Brach may stand by th' fire and stink.” So the Fool, although primarily a comic figure, tends to know more about reality than those who are nominally in charge.

 

The same principle can be applied to the madman, for whom storytellers have been mistaken throughout literary history.

When Don Quixote meets the prostitute, Aldonza, he declares, in his deluded state, that she is his Lady Dulcinea, the Virgin Queen of his affections. Aldonza laughs at him, but Quixote continues his adoration, flatly ignoring every aspect of her obviously squalid life as a whore. In the end, Quixote's family hauls him in and subjects him to the cure. When they force him to confront the obvious facts, it kills him. In what I reckon is one of the most poignant scenes ever written, Aldonza approaches his deathbed. In his defeated state (sanity), Quixote finally acknowledges her as Aldonza. "No," she says, "my name is Dulcinea." She has, at last, found the truth  within her that contradicts the facts. If Quixote's madness didn't save him, it did, at least, liberate her. The transforming power of lies eventually proves redemptive.

As we’ll see in the following section, poets in Ancient Greece were often thought mad on account of the supernatural inspiration some of them lay claim to. And of course, there’s been artists who actually were mad; the Nobel prizewinner Juan Ramon Jiminez’s prose poem ‘Platero Y Yo’ (Platero and I) portrays a young writer (not dissimilar in height, weight, build and age to Jiminez himself) touring rural Andalucia on his donkey being chased by gypsy  children who shout “The Madman!” The Madman!” as he rides through their encampment, on account of his other-worldly appearance and demeanour.

So far then, we’ve gods of mischief, madmen and clowns. To which, of course we must add that fourth category of ‘innocents’ who can get away with expressing things that the rest of us cannot recognize or that we leave unsaid - children.

It’s no coincidence that children’s literature is often described as the most subversive of all genres, since its heroes tend to undermine the mean, dull, platitudinous, money-grubbing, hypocritical adults - and win out every time. They take on the real world - and prevail.

If you’ve got this far, you’ll need no further evidence of the imaginative value of children’s stories. But don’t just take my word for it. The poet Louis Macniece states that “Contrary to what many people say, even now, a fairy story . . . is a much more solid affair than the average naturalistic novel.” And he’s in good company. The novelist Edmund Gosse, in ‘Father and Son’, recalled a childhood without fiction:

Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble: 'Once upon a time!' ... I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me . . .  sceptical.

A state from which he evidently recovered. And there are many other eminent examples of those who triumph over the Gradgrinds of this world.

But it’s not just writers and poets who stick up for lying; when Albert Einstein was asked how to cultivate intelligence in children, he advised, “Read them fairy tales. Then more fairy tales.” Similarly, the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in his excellent tome ‘The Uses of Enchantment’ analyses the importance of fiction in the educative process. So it’s not just storytellers sticking up for their colleagues - there’s compelling scientific proof that lying is good for you which I won’t re-rehearse here.

And I’ll bet you’ve also noticed that from talking about lying, we’ve now flipped the negative and are talking of truth. How did that happen?

It’s quite simple, despite being a philosophical minefield: it’s the difference between the literal truth and imaginative truth. The latter will always be more powerful because it’s personalized truth, truth filtered through our own perceptions that may owe nothing to any objective criteria of what constitutes ‘reality’. And this imaginative truth is the key ingredient of literary meaning, transcending issues of literal truth and veracity. It’s the salt that gives it flavour, the yeast that makes it rise and the water that bulks it out.

It’s never more powerful than in pre-literary forms, before it’s been recorded, stabilized and solidified, or when it’s in the hands of those whose perceptions have not been dulled by convention - the trickster, the madman, the fool, and the child.

So for the student of meaning, it’s  interesting to note this connection between meaning at the dawn of man’s evolution; and the status of meaning at the dawn of each of our lives. The more we grow up, the more sophisticated we get, the more we’d like to hide behind the child in ourselves. Those endowed with imagination grow impatient with realism, which is why literary realism tends to sit uneasily in the canon - it seems merely to rise up occasionally when we collectively get an attack of spiritual nerves in times of civilizational crisis, before shuffling off as quickly as it arrived. We seem to want literal meaning to be more than it is, to believe that there’s something more alive than the surface reality of something. Meaning is therefore aspirational, and even though maturity inevitably dulls our imagination, the recollection of this primal childhood source of energy, of play, of animation, of fun, mischief and transformations not only connects us with a thread of meaning that predates written language, it also stretches into the present day of hard rationality, inflexible systems and unchanging perspectives. And makes them melt away.

Before we travel to Ancient Greece for the continuation of the story of meaning, let’s have a quick read of Robert Graves’s poem, ‘The Cool Web’, that manages to express what I’ve just been arguing more eloquently than I ever can:

 

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses's cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.

 

Footnotes:

1. It is, of course, no coincidence that the fool in ‘AYLI’ is called ‘Touchstone’.

2. One Swedish reviewer wrote the following tribute to Jiminez and his art on being informed of the Nobel Laureateship. It’s one of the most telling short descriptions of the poetic calling I’ve come across: “Juan Ramón Jiménez is a born poet, one of those who are born one day with the same simplicity with which the sun's rays shine, one who purely and simply has been born and has given of himself, unconscious of his natural talents. We do not know when such a poet is born. We know only that one day we find him, we see him, we hear him, just as one day we see a plant flower. We call this a miracle". Poetry has often been described as a talent that comes out of nowhere, for which its creator is sometimes referred to as ‘mad’.