Transgression, Transformation and Enlightenment:

The Trickster as Poet and Teacher

James Conroy   Professor James Conroy is Head of the Department of Religious Education, Faculty of Education, the University of Glasgow. He is working on study leave in the Cardinal Clancy Centre for Reseach in the Spiritual, Moral, Religious and Pastoral Dimensions of Education.

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Fools, they are the only nation
Worth men’s envy or admiration;

                                                Ben Jonson Volpone Act1:Sc1. ll 156-57 (1962 & 1971)

Introduction

In contemporary Britain the curriculum is certainly no laughing matter!  Its construction is a matter of intense seriousness; its design expressly intended to deliver an ‘educated’ workforce capable of competing in global markets (Ferguson 2001).  It is certainly true that there is nothing new in the desire of governments to see education as primarily at the service of the economy (Lawrence 1992: 77ff). What is new in our present educational politics, however, is the palpable sense of urgency with which many governments now address perceived economic and industrial needs and the manner in which they publicly declare the subservience of locally determined educational and social goals to international economic forces (Conroy 1999: 491-494). Much has already been written on these matters and it is not the purpose of this essay to critique the pre-eminence of an economic discourse in educational policy-making and reflection (McNally 1993). Indeed, such questions are only of marginal interest here and affect the discussion only to the extent that they relate to wider epistemic and cultural issues. Rather, what is critiqued in this essay is the seriousness with which we confront education. This seriousness is bound up, we argue, in the modern obsession with numerical descriptions of who we are and what constitutes human purpose.  Statistical profiles of economic achievement, school league-table performance indices, body size indicators, popular attitude profiles and so on have come to dominate our lives, arrogating to themselves both explanatory and moral force. Perceived as the instrument of this ‘economic’ education the teacher is defined as a moral agent only to the extent that she delivers children into this serious, numerical world as fully-formed economic and social functionaries. Teachers and their students come to be held by this mentality in the grip of a performativity which measures educational attainment in terms of classical input-output ratios. (Blake et al 1998). 

This essay is an attempt to redress the balance.  We wish to suggest, however cautiously, that there is another, different and more ancient way of looking at the moral and social role of the teacher and the processes of education in which she is involved. This alternative perspective draws on older, more imaginative and complex sources of meaning than the latest Gallup poll or the latest adjusted performance indicator. It offers a rival interpretation of teaching and learning which, if actualised, has the potential to be more directly enabling than currently dominant modalities in allowing students to respond creatively to modern social conditions.  The older tradition which this essay explores is rooted in the notion of the Trickster figure: an important character in legend and story, social and symbolic practices across a broad range of world cultures. In the present context, we explore the use of the Trickster figure in specifically ‘Celtic’ mythology and literature as a means of shedding light on a neglected aspect of the moral role of the teacher in the educational systems of the British Isles. The Trickster is one who, in the patterns of myth, legend and folklore narrative, moves between symbolic categories of being and action, changing shape and identity in order to expose and redress various deep-seated human follies. He is related to the clown or fool and, like them, inhabits a borderland between different worlds or different conceptions of the world and its experiential content.  He is frequently a religious or quasi-religious figure who serves a ritualised function in mocking and challenging the forces of the status quo.

In the first section of this essay we draw upon the work of Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis to help understand the manner in which many aspects of our modern imaginative lives have been closed down by two major features of modernity towards which the Trickster figure is traditionally opposed. The first of these is the development of an over dependence upon an arithmetic calculus as the primary mythic, and therefore heuristic, device of our culture. The second is the rupture with our own history which has impoverished the storehouse of our collective imagination. We then go on to establish the Trickster figure as a social and moral signifier that might offer an alternative hermeneutical tool to the arithmetic for the interrogation and interpretation of our deepest experiences.  In the second section of the essay we explore the distinctively ‘Celtic’ Trickster as a way of giving this universal signifier a specifically local character. Here we try to understand the process of contestation and inversion as an ethical and educational practice.  In the final section of the argument we try to elucidate some of the pedagogic implications of deploying the Trickster image in the classroom.

Imaginary Cultures

In his essay on ‘The Imaginary’, Cornelius Castoriadis challenges the determinacy of our formulations of the origins of social meaning (Castoriadis 1997).  This determinacy - mediated in the curriculum by, most especially, arithmetic - claims an absolute value for itself as the dominant heuristic measure against which all other formulations of meaning are to be calibrated [i] .   Indeed, according to Castoriadis the arithmetic has come to be treated in our culture as ontologically originary, masquerading as the foundational principle upon which the existence of rational society and its institutions is predicated.    Accorded this originary and therefore axiomatic status, it is used to displace other ‘non-arithmetically based’ forms of signification from the discourse of social and symbolic exchange, most especially those involving the shaping of our attitudes, dispositions and meanings.  A clear if rudimentary example of this can be seen in the way that comparative analyses of our international economic performance or Gross National Product have steadily come to define the success or failure of national educational systems.  Another instance is where students in developed countries are increasingly measured one against one another to reap the benefits of positional advantage (see especially the impact of the Grammar school system and the 11+ in Northern Ireland)  (Davis 1998: Chs. 1, 8 and 9). But however insidious, these examples are simply symptomatic.  Educational policy throughout the industrialised world has come so far as to determine what ‘type of person’ an individual is by attaching sets of numbers to their attitudes, performances and dispositions according to a variety of inventories or numerical scales.   It matters little whether these scales derive from the Defining Issues Tests of the Kohlbergians (Rest et al, 1999), the Myers Briggs Personality Test (Myers & McCaulley 1985) or the OCEAN 5-factor model of Personality, (Norman 1963; see also Howard and Howard 2000). The point is not directly to criticise these particular ways of modelling human personality and disposition, but to indicate how, even where we attempt sympathetically to understand ourselves and each other using the enlightened methods of the human sciences, we have fallen back on number as the source of our dominant metaphors.

There are many who would suggest that the originary status of number derives from the loss of the continuity of Tradition in modern times - a continuity which, Hannah Arendt once argued, has been teetering on the brink of collapse since the Enlightenment and which experienced its decisive rupture in the aftermath of the Second World War.  In her essay on Lessing, Arendt observed that the pillars of reasonable communal engagement, shaken at the Enlightenment, now lie as a ‘veritable heap of rubble’ (Arendt 1955 & 1970: 10). Arendt’s is a highly individual interpretation of the now commonly articulated ‘postmodern’ theme of the loss of a sustainable and sustaining metanarrative (Lyotard 1979).  She maintains that the past can now give itself to us only in fragmentary ways with no certainty as to its relevance or evaluative status in the present (Arendt 1978: 212).  Until modern times, the past was understood as offering itself as a kind of learning resource to the present.   It was the repository of public ideas which were to be drawn upon imaginatively in the present to help interpret present possibilities and thus create the open horizons of the future.  

Nowhere is the loss of this continuity more clearly articulated, or indeed celebrated than in the pragmatism of Richard Rorty.  In his recent collection of essays (Rorty 1999), Rorty maintains that we have to jettison a view of the past as offering some kind of competing or nurturing account of reality with its particular preoccupation for finding the truth in/of things.  We must abandon this idea, Rorty insists, not so much because it was wrong per se but because our world is so different there can be no real dialogue with the ideas of the past. Rorty suggests that ‘…the question to ask about our beliefs is not whether they are about reality or merely about appearance, but simply whether they are the best habits of action for gratifying our desires.’ (xxiv) Accordingly, the only question to be asked of the past is: ‘has it any utility in the now?’ In a later essay in the same collection Rorty argues that Christians, Marxists and others who have behaved in a ‘saintly’ way may still be drawn upon for inspiration, but that their purchase on truth should be consigned to a receptacle for outmoded claims (201-209).  Thus Rorty wants to make of history a kind of ‘Lucky Dip’: there are indeed things there and we can scramble around and find them, but we need not expect that anything we pull out of the barrel will be related to anything else which might be there. They are all items to be utilised equally in so far as they have a usefulness at this or that moment. There are no hierarchical distinctions to be made between these items.

While there are similarities between Rorty’s and Arendt’s positions, the difference between the two is that Rorty rejoices in this state of affairs while Arendt emphatically does not.  Arendt laments the loss of continuity and she worries about the consequence of such a loss (Arendt 1955 and 1970). Both philosophers are clear nonetheless that the postmodern turn represents a fundamental change in the way that the past and future are met in the present.  The past, as a coherent or consistent narrative which forms the present and informs the future, has become an untenable idea in late modernity.  Despite this, Arendt wishes to maintain that the past remains important and in her essay on Walter Benjamin she suggests that the way in which the past is presented to and used in the present is essentially through the ‘storyteller’  (1955 & 1970). Drawing on Shakespeare’s The Tempest she plays with the idea that the storyteller is like the pearl diver who converts the pearls of the past into disturbing and challenging insights for the present (for a fuller discussion of this interpretation see especially Benhabib 1996: 92ff).

This inability of the present to mediate a range of cultural significations through and in a set of communal stories has given rise to a gap between the past and future.  There has been a rush to fill the space left by the collapse of continuity in our stories with what appear to be ‘originary categories’ such as arithmetic (a paradigmatic example is offered in the ruthless and unwavering arithmetic of the corporate ansaphone!) [ii] . Accordingly, the growth of axiomatic systems in the curriculum offers the appearance of stability in the midst of constantly shifting perceptions as to what is to count as educational value.   In British education this is manifest in the direct inverse relationship between the growth in the importance of Mathematics in Elementary and High school curricula and the expansion of a calculative technology that has reduced the individual‘s need to know and or engage in actual arithmetic computation unaided.  It is also seen in the contemporary obsession with a performative calculus in determining the efficacy of schools (Smith 1995; Blake 1998).  The ‘flight’ to the security of arithmetic represents part of the attempt to shore up Arendt’s rubble in order to attempt the futile re-building of the pre- Enlightenment - we might almost say the Roman  - pillars of intellectual certitude.   Arithmetic provides the appearance of a capstan on the stable foreshore to which we can attach the hawser of our bobbing and insecure existence.  This same tendency is seen, by Arendt, in the withdrawal of the individual from public spaces to a place behind the walls of family life.   The ‘four walls, within which people’s private family life is lived’, Arendt suggests, ‘constitute a shield against the world and specifically against the public aspect of the world’ (Arendt 1968: 168).   Both examples serve to illustrate the impulse to look for security out of the glare of the world of public affairs.  Arithmetic in particular (and Maths and Science in general) is seen as standing outside the domain of publicly created meanings.  It is not regarded as a creation of the imagination and is therefore granted immunity from the encroachments of the political.  Similarly the four walls of family privacy serve to protect the ‘real’ irreducible self from the imaginings of the public forum.

The re-working of these seemingly axiomatic systems - despite what is known from the work of Kuhn and others on the provisional nature of our formulations (Kuhn 1970) - will not, however, deliver the education which is needed by the students of today for tomorrow.  To retreat to an imagined life governed by arithmetical axioms is to deny the emergence and conditions of modernity.  It is inescapably to ignore the actual complexity that is modernity, or - worse - to construct it as a series of trivial ‘Attainment Targets’ masquerading as something more substantial than they are.  For Castoriadis, the attempt to maintain such originary determinacy ignores the truth that all societies express themselves in forms which partake in both order and disorder.  The two great moments of human existence - being born and dying - themselves embody these two competing principles.  They cannot be exhausted by the ‘natural’ or ‘real’, but embrace a supplement beyond their own corporeality which furnishes us with metaphors for organising a range of human fears and longings and for understanding the symbolic principles which shape social meaning.  In this regard they fall within the orbit of what Castoriadis terms ‘social imaginary significations’ - primary elements which hold a society together and which include ‘spirits, gods, God, polis, citizen...capital...taboo, virtue, sin...’ (op cit: 7) and which we extend in this analysis of the Trickster to embrace also the Bakhtinian (Bakhtin, 1968) [iii] themes of laughter, absurdity, parody, comedy and social inversion.  #

We offer an extension of the Castoriadis taxonomy in the belief that a society that is incapable of embracing self-parody and laughter has lost an important source of democratic social cohesion. It is not unreasonable to ask why this might be the case. -  Surely, following the Hobbesian tradition, it might be argued that a society needs laws, sanctions and so on to maintain its social frameworks, but it does not need laughter in the same way since this is a matter of private disposition (Conroy 1999; Gray 1993 & 1996) This might indeed be a sustainable position if societies were governed by common narratives and perceptions about what constituted ‘the good’. Contemporary societies, however, are not internally homogenous but fissiparous, with individuals and small groups drawing on different parts of varied historic narratives and traditions to make sense of and shape their social, cultural and anthropological understandings (contra-Rorty) (Parekh 2001).  These narratives perennially hold the potential for conflict, one with the other.  Potential conflicts are made actual when the ideological frameworks and ‘histories’ out of which adjacent groupings derive their meaning are perceived to represent some ineluctable truth which must of necessity contest similarly ineluctable truths of the other, rival groupings with which they come into contact; where there is insufficient ‘social space’ for groupings to co-exist without such conflict.  This is seen frequently in the schismatic tendencies of organised religions throughout the world. It might be argued, however, that those cultures that hold their own institutions subject to the power of parody are afforded a valuable means of avoiding such serious conflict.

In the context we have described, the myth of the Trickster offers itself as a vital educational resource for challenging the totalising impulses of the late capitalist polity and its axiomatic claims on how we should live socially.  It does so, at least in part, by engaging with the concerns adumbrated by both Castoriadis and Arendt.  Historically, the Trickster may be seen as an important source of social imaginary significations narrated into being by peoples from across a diverse range of cultures and epochs.  Since the Trickster figure manifests an ‘open’ signification it offers a challenge to the imaginative closure of the arithmetical.  It represents the reinvigoration of an historic interpretative tradition - one that embodies festive, imaginative and adversarial powers of great antiquity which have been elsewhere dislocated and disempowered by the forces of modernity (Cox 1969: 7-13).  In particular and in respect of the curriculum, the Trickster offers a redefinition of the textual and pedagogical practices of the secondary classroom across key subjects such as Language and Literature, Religious Education, and social, historical and political studies, opening their discursive spaces to the energies of transformation, play, difference and paradox. 

We now attempt in this essay to uncover how this neglected social imaginary signification has continued to remain a part of the distinctive cultural complex of – specifically – ‘Celtic’ myth and culture. This is particularly apposite since the  post-Reformation history of the ‘Celtic’ zones of the British Isles is dominated by a rejection of that most assertive of social imaginary significations: nomos.  Law, as Castoriadis intimated, is ‘heteronomous’ or ‘autonomous’ to the extent that it is determined within a particular society by the participants of that society (op cit 86). Reflection on the liminality of Celtic identity and its social signifiers in relation to the dominant ‘English’ curriculum may offer teachers some insight into how the stories of Tricksters, fools and shape shifters can be deployed in a thoroughgoing moral and social/civic education inside and outside the boundaries of the school. The use of these stories carries the potential to challenge the outcomes of a neo-liberal ideology bereft of any self-correcting sense of its own provisionality. 

To understand the role of the Trickster it is necessary to have some sense of the contested relationship between those who possess political and cultural power and those who do not.  In the case of Celtic history, from the early modern period onwards this is manifest in the sense (sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker) that the Law and the power which is its consequence were heteronomous or ‘given from without’ (Harrison 1989).  Consequently, the Celtic nations have enjoyed a markedly ambiguous relationship with the dominant forms of British imperial culture. Broadly speaking they have expressed two responses to this situation.   One can be seen in the turn to a different, more powerful though equally heteronomous source of the Law - God - who becomes in this alternative the pre-eminent social imaginary signification.  If the Law ‘really’ comes from God, and sacred Law is the primary social imaginary signifier, the laws of the dominant secular culture hold no power themselves because, as signifiers, they can be called into question, challenged, broken and ultimately rejected in the name of the divine sanction.  It is for this reason that post-Reformation Ireland developed into a Catholic theocracy; while in Scotland there emerged a civic Calvinism resistant to the monarchical and episcopal structures of the reformed Church of England. Thus, in their quite different ways, the Scots and the Irish turned to their variant forms of Christian religion as offering a challenge to England as the wielder of power and the source of authorised cultural meanings.

The second and not unrelated response to the cultural imperialism of the nomos is to exploit the archetypal adversarial potential of the Trickster motif as a source of power and resistance, facilitating the disengagement from those primary social signifiers seen to derive from English cultural supremacy.  In both Scotland and Ireland this response was expressed in the persistence and the renewal of ancient, pre-Christian Trickster traditions and stories with their extensive associations with liminality, borderlands and unexpected change (Muldoon 2000: Ch 1) [iv] . So it is that Trickster lore continues to this day to exercise a powerful influence in modern Celtic texts in Scotland and Ireland and may be considered both seminal and standard in the production of regional and national identity, while simultaneously laying such potentially reified categories open to the voices of multicultural diversity and difference.

In the second half of this essay we wish to suggest that the ‘English’ [v] curriculum, as it is implemented in the autonomous educational systems of Scotland and Ireland, is problematised and enriched by the Celtic cultural heritage precisely because that heritage incorporates the Trickster qualities of mystery, mockery and primordial subversion as its means of dealing with dominance and subordination.   Specific expressions of the discordancy between the hegemonising tendencies of the English ‘English’ curriculum are to be encountered in archaic culture heroes such as Merlin, Sweeney and Taliesin, and on into the work of key writers in the modern secondary English curriculum such as Flann O’Brien, Seamus Heaney, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan.   These modern writers embody the perennial ambiguity which exists between the centre and the periphery.  In both their work and their own positions as literary figures they articulate the Trickster myth within an overarching concern with the language of ambiguity.   They also represent the Trickster as a special kind of teacher; a teacher uniquely located on the threshold of inside/outside, hegemony and heteronomy, reverence for the mysteries of being, and scurrilous distaste for the operations of authority.  To his interlocutors the Trickster hints at truths he has himself cast into doubt.   His liminal location is most obviously manifest in the aporia of poetic language itself, and, drawing on these traditions, the teacher of English literature – most especially poetry – can him- or herself become a shape-shifting and transforming presence in the lives of young people.  The pedagogy of the Trickster thus implies a transformed vision of both the teaching of English and the teaching of children precisely because it is critical of the arithmetic imperatives of the technicist, competence-driven curriculum which governs much contemporary educational practice in industrial democracies such as those found in the nations of the British Isles.

The Celtic Trickster

In cultures as far apart as Northern Scandinavia and South America Trickster figures in the mould of Coyote [vi] abound: figures which inhabit the borderlands of religion and power and whose function is to prick pomposity, challenge the appearance of things and subject cultural, social and ethical assumptions to scrutiny. In this Tricksters are closely related to the carnivalesque [vii] (Welsford 1935).

The roots of the specifically Celtic Trickster figure, and the sources of his continuing influence, lie in the complex series of cultural and linguistic negotiations through which Celtic identity has been formed in Scotland and Ireland from ancient times down to the modern era.  The transactions between the Celtic peoples, and their ambivalent relationship with their populous and dominant neighbour, England, have made the Atlantic archipelago a seemingly classic setting for the enactment of the centre-periphery model of national and ethnic self-definition (Hay 1968; Burke 1992).  A particularly provocative theme in recent indigenous historical scholarship in Scotland and Ireland has cast doubt, however, on the local applicability of the centre-periphery model by challenging accepted understandings of a shared of universalised ‘Celtic’ consciousness (Pittock 1999).  It has vigorously critiqued essentialist and historically continuous conceptions of the Celtic, drawing attention to a more contingent and constructed series of representations of the Celtic heritage, mediated by competing cultural and political ideologies. 

Revisionist history certainly demands a more sensitive interpretation of the ideas and images which lie embedded in many accepted notions of the Celtic. It nonetheless confirms the enduring imaginative validity of a Celtic sensibility, whether manifest in powerful cultural movements of the last century such as the Celtic Twilight or in more vernacular expressions of the ‘Celtic Fringe’ in contemporary areas such as sport and popular music.  The persistence of a shared set of mythic and literary motifs among the peoples of the Celtic culture zones of the British Isles is, in this analysis, less a consequence of timeless archetypes housed in the collective psyche, and more a function of linguistic and material conditions with an ascertainable historical substrata.  As we have suggested in the previous section of this essay, the continuing cultural salience among the Celtic peoples of Scotland and Ireland of mythological figures such as the Trickster derives from patterns of power and subordination in the cultural and social history of the British Isles which have seen the Scots and Irish internalising and reproducing a conception of themselves as marginal, liminal, and outside.

Established analyses of the Trickster continue to stress, of course, that his marginality is inseparable from his complicity.  The Trickster participates in and is validated by the structures he simultaneously mocks and contests.  Revisionist history has inadvertently highlighted this ‘Trickster’ element of the Scottish and Irish experience (Foster 1994) by recording how each society has found itself inextricably bound to the overpowering English neighbour from which it would be free; caught in a web of collusion and mutual benefit bringing in its traffic gains as well as losses and stamping the subordinate cultures indelibly with the forms and the values of the dominant other.  The mutual involvement in the destiny and character of the other, which this account underlines, complicates endlessly - without entirely effacing - older colonialist and imperialist descriptions of the subject societies (Colley 1994).  It sees the subject societies applying a wide range of cultural resources to the task of creating a symbolic space in which an authentic identity can be forged and celebrated.  One of the attractions of the Trickster is that he illuminates the ultimate impossibility of such a task by teasingly reminding his audience that all cultures are hybrid, implicated, and compromised.  The Trickster figure travels so naturally across cultures, it might be argued, because his ‘promiscuous intermingling and juxtaposing of the categories’ (Turner 1969: 106) is sustained by an underlying recognition that what unifies diverse peoples is the messiness of human interaction and the consequent futility of all pursuits of the ethnically or nationally pure.

For the Celtic peoples of Scotland and Ireland, the continuing ambiguity of their relations with England has been felt most keenly at the level of language.  The colonial impact of English imperialism is most immediately obvious in the fact that English is the main language of both Scotland and Ireland, pushing the aboriginal Gaelic tongues of each country into regional enclaves.  In both Scotland and Ireland, nonetheless, separate and distinctive educational systems have flourished for centuries as vital compensating forces in the protection of national prestige and cultural difference.  These systems have roots running deep into the medieval origins of each nation, and they are widely recognised to carry within them cultural memories which antedate English influence and which have served as invaluable resources in the resistance to English hegemony.  Education in Scotland and Ireland can therefore legitimately be said to face both ways: the withering of native languages in the face of the pervasive presence of English language and culture is balanced by the deliberate and self-conscious preservation of a living literary heritage with atavistic sources in the indigenous folk and mythological traditions.  The modern literary imagination, which performs such an important function in the language curriculum in the schools of both countries, is also steadily replenished by its proximity to this tradition, forestalling its decline into antiquarianism.

In the protomyth of the Celtic Trickster, a doomed wild man or poet-figure is driven mad by the catastrophic outcome of a huge battle to which he is witness.  Overwhelmed by grief and loss, the poet flees to the woods, discarding the raiment and trappings of civilization, abandoning rational discourse and classical utterance, and taking upon himself the mantle of the theriomorphic shaman (O’Riain 1972).  From his forest habitat, the Wild Man assumes the status of an oracle or prophet, scorning the values of society and vilifying the deeds and the motives of the rich and powerful.  In the legends which surround the British saint Kentigern, or Mungo (Patron Saint and first Bishop of Glasgow), the Wild Man is Lailoken or Myrddin (a forerunner of the wizard Merlin of Arthurian romance).  He rails against the hypocrisies and immorality of the kings and nobles whom Kentigern seeks to convert.  He interrupts Kentigern’s services by sitting on a nearby rock and uttering obscure prophecies.  He repines bitterly at his own condition, yet pleads with the saint to receive the Blessed Sacrament.  Moved by pity, Kentigern recognises the deep bond of brotherhood that exists between saint and seer, and finally consents to reconcile Lailoken to the Church (Jarman 1991).

In the Irish version of the story, the Buile Suibhne or Frenzy of Sweeney, the Wild Man suffers periodic recurrences of his battle-panic and at these moments can fly like a bird among the treetops.  Seamus Heaney, in the preface to his own rendition of the tale, celebrates its trans-Celtic provenance and sees Sweeney in universal terms as ‘...a figure of the artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance...an aspect of the quarrel between free creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political and domestic obligation.’ (Heaney 1983: 2).

                        I am Sweeney, the whinger,
                       the scuttler in the valley.
                        But call me, instead,
                        peak-pate, Stag-head
                        Forever mendicant,
                        my rags all frayed and scanty,
                        high in the mountains
                        like a crazed, frost-bitten sentry.

Heaney’s account of the Sweeney myth makes explicit the identification of Trickster and poet which is such a marked theme of the Celtic heritage.  The Wild Man’s anti-social marginalisation has profound implications for the language of the poetic voice.  In the conditions of Celtic self-understanding, the poet is institutionally alienated from, yet imaginatively united with, his society.  His status as prophet and oracle accords him a quasi-religious respect, but his scandalous behaviour and contumely induce embarrassment and discomfort in his listeners because they imply ‘the suggestion that any particular ordering of experience may be arbitrary and subjective’ (Douglas 1968: 365).

This tradition of the literary figure as Trickster in Irish culture surfaces again in the twentieth century, and its outworkings and implications may be seen in the writings of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.  Flann O’Brien, the comic novelist and columnist with The Irish Times from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, represents a singularly Celtic account of the notion of the literary Trickster in both his own persona and in his writings. Constantly oscillating between his Gaelic and English identities, O’Brien embodied the foundational principle of the Trickster – as one who confounds the listener/reader; moving between different lifeworlds and enabling them to be interwoven into new patterns so as to chastise as well as inform each other.  He also switches between the language of the ‘oppressed’ and that of the ‘oppressor’.  Sometimes a work will be penned in Gaelic, sometimes in English and sometimes the same text will draw on both, trafficking between the two.  In a comic version of Joyce, O’Brien changes idiom and subject, moving seamlessly from the aphorisms of the vernacular to a comment on Keats or Goethe.  So, in one of his columns in The Irish Times he opens with an extract from Keats’ sonnet on the four seasons of man:

...he has his summer, when luxuriously

            Spring’s honeyed end of youthful thought he loves

            To ruminate, and by such dreaming nigh

            Is the nearest unto heaven; quiet coves

            His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings

His furleth close.

Having drawn his reader into the heart of English Romanticism, O’Brien immediately turns Keats' meditation on its head through the jibe that for Keats  ‘This is largely hearsay or guess work ... [given that he] dies when he was a boy’ (O’Nolan, 1968: 80).  He then goes on to rework the central motifs of the poem, opining that

There is nothing I like better than an evening with a few quiet coves in the dimmer corner of a pub, murmuring together in friendship the judgements of our mature minds.  As regards furling my wings close, that is also true enough. To spend a whole bob or a tanner in one go entails suffering. My little pension is woefully inelastic. A wing or two saved in ordering porter instead of stout is not to be despised. A borrowed match, a cadged filling of the pipe, all small things mount mightily in a year.  (80)

His interlocutors in this, as in many other pieces, are ‘the plain people of Ireland’, a description itself which is intended to carry a bucket or two of irony. Elsewhere, O’Brien’s wit and parody serve to upbraid, in turn, the English, the intellectuals of Ireland, those who would deem themselves cultured, and in the case of the Irish, those who see themselves as morally, politically and culturally superior - the ‘patriots’.  At the time of O’Brien’s most productive work Ireland was in the throes of becoming a post-colonial democracy and its icons were all those patriots who traced and expressed their fealty to an image of Ireland which ran back through the revolutionaries of 1916, the Presbyterian Enlightenment figures of the late eighteenth century, the heroic deeds of Brian Boru in the middle ages - to the mythic heroes of the Red Branch Knights and Cuchulainn himself.  It was, by and large, not a good time to call into question Ireland’s image of itself. The ambiguity surrounding identity which we have discussed above would not have been much articulated and even less would it have been well received. Much better to launch bitter satire on the English. While there is no doubt that O’Brien is not shy in directing healthy quantities of satire at the English and Englishness, his role as a Trickster is worked out and requires to be understood in the context of specifically Irish notions of national identity and moral superiority; identity and superiority which arise out of that most passive of virtues:  being oppressed.

O’Brien falls truly into the Irish tradition of learned poet-fool and story-teller: the seanchaidhe or shanachie (Harrison, 1989). For the seanchaidhe is not just a story-teller he is ‘an antiquary, historian or genealogist... one who traces relationships, [and is] versed in folklore’ (Dinneen 1927: 1007).  He draws upon the past to challenge the follies of the present.  He is the embodiment of Arendt’s principle that we require to draw selectively upon our past as a resource if we are the more effectively to scrutinise public claims about our identity and our inter-subjective self-referencing.  As Boston has it, ‘he exists both outside the norms of society and at the same time somewhere very near the centre of human experience’ (Boston 1974: 93).

O’Brien may be regarded as being in that long line of Irish poets and seers who, drawing selectively upon their traditions, challenge and satirise the seats of power whether they be Kings or priests.  He is unequivocally rooted in the anti-power stories of Ireland which go back to the pre-middle ages figure, Anier MacConglinne, and beyond (Welsford 1935: 88-93). Both O’Brien and the narrators of his tales fall within the Trickster tradition - that is, as ‘beneficent culture hero, ... clever deceiver, or the numskull’ (ibid). Indeed both he and his tellers constantly weave in and out of these roles.

Pedagogy

In offering the Trickster as a social imaginary signifier within education and culture we have sketched some of the genealogy of his particularly Celtic form. In the final section of this essay we wish to explore in more detail some of the educational – and particularly pedagogical – implications of this.   We do so in two parts.   The first involves an explication of how the notion of the Trickster might be seen to impinge on the general discourse about education.  The second traces some practical implications for classroom pedagogy.

The dual bequest of the Celtic Trickster to modern Irish and Scottish literature is communicated most sharply in the traditions of comedy, underlining William Hynes’ insight that ‘...the Trickster’s humour melds entertainment and education’ (Hynes 1993: 205).  The problem for the modern education systems of the two nations we have been discussing is that they fall prey to several conflicting impulses when seeking to make sense of these elements of their heritage.  The contemporary curriculum in both Scotland and Ireland aspires to embrace the cultural and linguistic riches of the Celtic past, including the vital subversive and Tricksterish components.  This is reflected most clearly in the role that imaginative literature is accorded in both systems in the development of pupil literacy and language skills.  At the same time, current educational policy and planning in Scotland and Ireland are increasingly driven by the instrumental and economic priorities of the global market which require even the arts and language domains of the curriculum to align themselves with the aims of competitive capitalism (Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum 1999). Of course, the skills-based, competence-focused and essentially vocational educational practice required by current theories of economic management also piously claims to seek, in societies such as Scotland and Ireland, realisation of the time-honoured goals of western democratic liberal education: personal fulfilment, social harmony and cultural enrichment (Learning and Teaching Scotland 2000: i and 4ff).  Hence the language curricula in Scotland and Ireland, seemingly in tension with the pressures of strict vocationalism, continue to affirm the centrality of the study of imaginative literature in schools.  It is arguable, however, that the resultant ‘meld’ necessarily displaces from classroom literature the intrinsic Trickster values of ridicule and disenchantment because these are too destabilising to the educational project as it is currently conceived and, in particular, to its socio-economic imperatives. 

This may be too bleak a picture.  Authentic ‘heritage’ literature in English and in Gaelic has established an increasingly high profile in Scotland and Ireland over the past fifty years, with the growth of political nationalism in both countries, and in response to the promotion of regional diversity by the European Union.  Besides, it can be argued that the Trickster is predestined by his own nature to sit uncomfortably at the edges of educational acceptance in even the most utopian of contexts.  For him to be comfortably recuperated by such a mainstream institution of cultural authority would represent an abrogation of everything we have come to see him embody.  This is one of the central challenges for the teacher of literature or religion, moral or personal development who seeks to be true to the fullest range of the Celtic cultural legacy, ancient and modern.  How is a usable pedagogy to be created for the classroom which incorporates the recalcitrant materials of the Trickster without robbing the mythic image of its contestatory essence?    

Part of the answer to this question must lie in a) the approach taken to the identity and role of the teacher and b) the diversity within, and the content of, teaching and learning in the domains of  literature, religion and other areas of the curriculum which deal with the ways in which individuals and communities ‘imagine’ themselves.  In respect of role and identity, we would suggest that the teacher shares a number of important features with the Trickster – recent attempts to reduce the teacher to a technician (Carr and Hartnett 1996: 195) notwithstanding. Like the Trickster, the teacher inhabits a borderland – in this instance between the world of adults and the world of children and adolescents; between the education of the self and preparation for public activity; between educating for a critical stance and education for social cohesion and so on.  How then does this work itself out?  As one who inhabits such a liminal position the teacher must, for example, help students to subject the mainstays of democracy to constant scrutiny precisely in order to sustain and protect them.  In a world where the value systems of students appear to be different from those of their parents (but not as different as might often be claimed) the teacher has to be in touch with both, moving from one to the other and back again; shifting shape and offering a challenge to both worlds.

Moreover, half-mockingly, perhaps, it might be argued that the Trickster is an ironic harbinger of the postmodern turn; that the intellectual climate of late capitalism in the advanced democracies is unprecedentedly hospitable to the relativising, transformative and corrosive energies of the Trickster.  More moderately, it can be seen that the genuinely ethical emphases in certain aspects of postmodern thought have indeed opened the curriculum to previously marginal voices, the Trickster accents of which survive the muting effects of educational priorities motivated by the arithmetical.  In suggesting this we are not necessarily advocating or endorsing the postmodern as the key way of understanding the contemporary world.   Indeed, drawing upon the Trickster as an image for teachers we ally ourselves with Arendt rather than with Rorty.   This is a result of construing the Trickster as offering something from the past which is not simply transient or useful in Rorty’s sense.  Rather, it is deeply embedded in the human endeavour not to take ourselves too seriously and to recognise the limitations of our cultural formulations (Conroy 1999). He, the Trickster, articulates a coherent motif in our history and has the potential for resurrection not just as another voice in the cacophony of modern public life but as a metaphor for change, interest and contestation. He nourishes the imagination.

 In, for example, both the literature and religious education classrooms the teacher has the potential to avail herself of both particular texts and of ways of reading and re-reading informed by the ethic of the Trickster. Often texts are chosen for the humanities classroom with insufficient regard to the need children have not only to imagine and reflect on the world beyond their experience but also to subject their own worlds to equally critical scrutiny. ‘Trickster’ texts offer this possibility because they embody elements of our tradition but not as coercive or conservative representations.  On the contrary, they offer support for the playful, ludic self by looking askance at much that both teacher and student take for granted.   The Trickster represents a reverence for culture while subjecting it to play, laughter, and the subversive claims of the marginalised body.

Despite some recent developments (Jackson, 1997) contemporary Religious Education in Scottish and Irish schools has tended to focus for the most part on the examination and discussion of various religious traditions and their ethical perspectives. According to this model religions are not only construed as monolithic but as agents of conservation, maintaining traditions which have little or no purchase in the lives of students [viii] (Francis 2001: 74). While those forms of religious education may not be enthroned in the consciousness of adolescents this may not be taken to imply that they are not religious nor interested in religion, nor indeed that religious values no longer shape their lives (Francis, Astley and Robbins 2001: 63) This version of the Religious Education curriculum offers a truncated and partial view of religion and occludes those elements of religion which, throughout the ages, have constantly contested authoritarian claims.  Indeed the contesting and challenging spirit manifest in the founders of many of the world’s religions is in turn subverted and inverted by curriculum documents and their enactment in the classroom. Founding figures are used in religion and in religious education as its concomitant as forces of conservatism and not as exemplification of the importance of liminality to communities and their conversations. As Bayless (1996) points out in respect of Christianity, to ignore the Trickster elements in Christianity is to misunderstand its historic practices and traditions and, we would suggest, misrepresents its relevance and importance in the contemporary classroom. Exploring with school students some of the Trickster texts that lie at the heart of almost all religions would facilitate the development of students’ personal critical faculties. It would also enhance their appreciation of and engagement with historic cultural and religious practices that might be seen to provide some contest to the ‘myth of the arithmetic’.

The Language and Literature curriculum offers perhaps the most hospitable spaces in the school to the mischievous inflections of the Trickster.  The teacher of ‘English’ in Scotland or Ireland must inevitably embrace a kind of self-parody if the identity of the subject is to overcome its own potentially alienated character.  In a sense, all teachers of English wear the mask of a Flann O’Brien or, in Scotland, an Edwin Morgan.  They respond to the pervasive presence of an historically conflicted linguistic culture, etched with a history of displacement and oppression, by simultaneously revering and reconfiguring both the dominant language and the other tongues and cultures with which it coexists.  Some of these tongues are indigenous survivals and regional dialects; some are those of recent waves of immigrants and refugees.  All are invited to flourish by utterance and reinvention and hybridity, but all are subject to the Trickster’s ironising deconstruction of their self-importance.  In part, this pedagogical attitude is worked out through the question of canonicity.  Recent times have seen a renegotiation in Scotland and Ireland of the classroom literary canon in order to admit new, neglected and challenging native writers ancient and modern.  More profoundly, however, the embrace of the Trickster in the study of English expresses itself as a reading strategy, which can be applied to a whole range of texts and writers from a diversity of origins.  The Trickster is a learning and teaching style, a way of being a teacher of language and literature, where every text is opened to the unsettling influences and counter-readings of pleasure, joy, sexuality, ethnicity, embodiment and laughter; where new readings and innovative methodologies are sought at the edges of texts, where readers connect with literature in unexpected ways.  Inhabiting the role of the Trickster, the English teacher harnesses the energies of childhood and adolescence not to deface established texts but to reanimate them pedagogically, attending to those areas of meaning and language choice mainstream readings overlook or actively repress.  The teacher opens zones of learning to the unorthodox, the prohibited interpretation, and the manipulation and recasting of texts into new and unprecedented forms. 

The Trickster in the classroom is never merely an outcast figure, a high-minded maverick condemned to institutional incomprehension and intellectual martyrdom.  Such a figure fails to communicate with his audience while the authentic Trickster revels in a surfeit of communication with his interlocutors.   Failure is not part of his lexicon because of the moral imperatives which bind him to his followers.  It is through his unique ability to capture the veneration accorded the culture hero and the laughter provoked by the clown that the Trickster wins his unique status.  It is also by virtue of these same qualities that he can help renovate the image of the teacher for the pupils of the postmodern world. 

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