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Tricksters are a bundle of contradictions, but specific contradictions: estranged from family/community yet contributing to the evolution/transformation of community, transgressive yet often entangled by their own strategems, innovative/creative but also gullible and often outsmarted, and so on. "Naughtiness" doesn't really cut it. Dennis, for example, has a stable home life and a structure which he doesn't violate. I can't remember any comic strips where Dennis is truly transgressive; like Calvin and all the other "precocious kid" comic strips, Dennis returns to the safe, the normative at the end of every adventure.
This is a very good point, and one reason why I'm pretty hostile to a reading of characters like this as manifestations of the Trickster archtype. Much as I love Calvin and Hobbes, there's a kind of reactionary element to that kind of narrative. I don't see positioning Dennis or Calvin as a manifestiaton of the Trickster as at all healthy or productive; rather than rendering the Trickster more accessible, they limit and neuter the powerful figure. Instead of a bold transgressive force that can cross boundaries, introduce novel elements, and shake up an existing structure, you have a figure who essentially functions as a componant of that structure without really challenging it. You have this minor nuisance who never leaves a permanent mark, who is easily accomodated within the dominant structure, and in fact is repeatedly shown to need the dominant structure, which in turn is assumed to have a duty of care.
This duty of care is probably the biggest reason as to why it's so very tempting for plastic tricksters to insert themselves into the Dennis or Calvin role, rather than truly embracing the Trickster. Calvin is safe. He has a secure dwelling, material comforts, and people to love and care for him in spite of all his minor transgressions. (It is pleasant to fiction that the world owes one a living and that all one's transgessions against it are equivalent to the innocent pranks of an imaginative child; however, unless one actually is a child neither is likely to be the case.)
It is notable that many of the PT's we've had around here have generally been pretty reactionary types, much given to the use of ethnic or sexual slurs and the adopting of "edgy" political stances, all of which were touted as being bold and challenging acts of transgression. In actual fact, they've almost always been safely in line with prevailing cultural mores. Homophobia, racism, the abuse of women--these have all been presented here at one time or another as edgy and transgressive, despite the fact that all these things are facts of life in the outside world. In choosing to "transgress" against small groups with little power rather than the dominant social structure, they show their true colours: a nasty yellow streak. It's my fond hope that the Gods they so freely invoke see fit to bless them. Hard. |
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