BLURRING BOUNDARIES:

The Role of the Trickster in Zamyatin’s We and Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground
By Thea Anderson

Keene State College

 

Richard Wright’s dystopian novella, The Man Who Lived Underground, is set in 1940s America. In Wright’s America, hypocrisy and corruption masquerade as truth and justice, and wealth and skin color define an individual’s character.  In his novel We (1927), Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin creates a dystopian world in which the ideals of the Russian Revolution have degenerated into a totalitarian regime.  In Zamyatin’s city, called the One State, humankind is isolated from the natural world, supposedly shielded from irrationality and buttressed against the frailties of the soul.  Mathematics and rationality are posited as paradigms of human achievement, and the One State employs mathematical formulas to calculate the emotions and needs of its citizens.  To critique the artificiality of their societies, Wright and Zamyatin explore the dangers of binary thinking which occur when society cannot admit that gray areas exist.  To provide that missing “middle way,” these authors employ the literary device of the trickster, represented by their characters Fred Daniels in The Man Who Lived Underground and I-330, the love interest of the main character in We.

 

In his book, Trickster Makes this World, Anthropologist Lewis Hyde traces the trickster character in the folklore and mythology of many ancient cultures including the Greek god, Hermes; the Norse god, Loki; the Yoruba god, Eshu; and the folklore heroes Raven and Coyote of Native Americans.  Hyde describes the figure of the trickster as “the mythical embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox… the god of the threshold in all its forms.”[1]  Found at figurative or literal crossroads, the trickster is often not only the boundary crosser, but also the boundary creator.

 

Encountered in many old tales, the trickster is the agent of change coming into play when ideologies become too dogmatic, or when life becomes too closely defined.  Wright’s Fred Daniels becomes this cataclysmic change agent by creating a subterranean world in the city sewers, a world that mirrors and reverses the value systems of the aboveground world.  By creating this other world, Daniels reveals that corruption and brutality lie behind the façade of truth and justice, implying that ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ have lost their original meanings.  Daniels epitomizes the role and place of the traditional trickster as he stands in the doorway of a grocers’, on the literal threshold between two worlds; the subterranean world he has created and the aboveground world he has left.  He feels himself “emotionally hover[ing] between the world aboveground and the world underground.”[2] A boundary line has been drawn, and he has one foot on each side.

 

Similarly, Zamyatin’s I-330 straddles two sharply defined worlds:  the natural, “wild world” and the civilized, refined world within the city’s Green Wall.  She, like Daniels, rejects the limits society tries to enforce on the individual.  Individuals, she insists, do not all have the same needs and desires; emotions cannot be calculated with mathematical formulas, and humanity requires irrationality and imagination.  Zamyatin’s I-330 represents many of the trickster qualities described by Hyde.  She is highly ambiguous and she is an agent of radical change. Daniels and I-330 are the characters that can easily travel from one world to the other, and yet belong to neither, and so represent the traditional trickster as boundary creator and crosser.

 

As tricksters obscure existing value systems, they also blur distinctions in the language that supports such systems.  Hyde describes this quality as the trickster’s ability to “disrupt the web” of language which is “built around sets of opposites,” such as “real and illusory, and natural and unnatural.”[3]  Once this ‘web’ is disrupted, the terms lose their original significance and become, as Hyde states, “open to revision.”[4] Traditional tricksters blur such distinctions by using tricky language that can either be taken figuratively or literally revealing different meanings.  In contrast, modern tricksters such as I-330 and Daniels point out that the ‘sets of opposites’ Hyde refers to are already less distinct.  Operating as trickster figures, Daniels and I-330 force their respective societies to acknowledge this slippery quality of language.  I-330 blurs the line the One State tries to enforce between irrationality and reason.  Irrationality is attributed to the natural world, to individuality, and especially to the idea of the soul; reason is associated with civilization, homogenization of the individual, and to the rejection of the natural world.  I-330’s actions reveal that the ‘reason’ the One State enforces is actually irrational, even impossible.  This ‘reason’ rejects all that is incomprehensible to human understanding as dangerous.  I-330 proves that trying to eradicate individuality and sentimentalism, a project that the One State considers rational, is in fact irrational.  Through what is called the “Great Operation,” citizens of the One State are forced to endure an operation to remove the part of the brain responsible for imagination.  In trickster fashion, she reveals that the very thing the One State fears the most – irrationality – masquerades within the Green Wall disguised as reason.  If what the One State refers to as reason is actually irrationality, then the concluding sentence of Zamyatin’s novel, “Reason must prevail,” should be read ironically, because the irrational values of the One State have actually prevailed.

 

Daniels points out a similar absurdity in the aboveground world concerning innocence and guilt.  Aboveground, Daniels is an innocent man beaten into confessing to a crime he did not commit.  Later, he witnesses a boy wrongly punished for stealing a radio, and sees a thief slip through the cracks while another man pays for his crime.  A society that allows guilt to go free while presuming guilt in the innocent subverts the meanings of both concepts.  When guilt is found in innocence and innocence in guilt, each word loses its original intent to the extent that the meaning of one becomes the meaning of the other.  This is an example of the modern trickster’s ability to reveal to society that the ‘web’ of language is broken.  In both texts, the prevalent forces maintain that there is a great divide between such opposites as innocence and guilt, and irrationality and reason.  It is the trickster who reveals that these ‘sets of opposites,’ in reality sit in very close proximity to one another and are not so opposite after all.  There is some innocence in guilt and some irrationality in reason, and in some cases the meaning of one “opposite” actually eclipses its counterpart.

 

I-330 provides similar ambiguity, as she represents the unknown, irrational, infinite, and the incalculable; all features which are feared and considered highly dangerous in the rigid confines of the One State.  Her face is described as containing “the pointed horns of an X… a strange, irritating X, which could not be captured or defined in figures…”.[5]  This ‘X’ symbolizes a crossroads, duplicity of choices, and thus it is often a symbol of the trickster’s presence.  I-330’s gift is the assertion of the irrational and immeasurable human soul, and reliance upon our deepest natural impulses and emotions.  In this particularly mathematical novel, her ‘X’ face also evokes the multiplication sign, and indeed, I-330 literally multiplies the character D-503 once he falls in love with her.  D-503 is the engineer of the spaceship Integral, which is designed to spread the civilization of the One State to other worlds.  Before his encounter with I-330, he was one part of the “million-headed machine” that constitutes the One State.  After their meeting, he becomes two:  his former self and the “hairy-armed savage”.[6]  I-330, as a trickster figure, gives the gift or anti-gift of recognition to D-503 of his suppressed irrational side which tears him apart and makes him doubt his own reality.  The reader must decide for herself whether I-330 has offered the gift of enlightenment to D-503, or if she has thrown him into confusion and obscurity.  As with Hyde’s examples of tricksters, the gift is paradoxically an anti-gift.  Raven steals sunlight from the gods to give to humankind, but in doing so, he broadens the divide between the two worlds. Likewise, Wright and Zamyatin’s trickster figures bring ambiguity disguised as enlightenment.

 

Tricksters blur the language of opposites by revealing to society that words like guilt, innocence, reason, and irrationality no longer have their original meaning or signification.  This revelation confuses concepts that were once clear.  Likewise, the gift of enlightenment brought by Daniels and I-330 actually casts the shadow of obscurity on formerly clear concepts.  Society, through the actions of the trickster, loses the comfort and security found in its formerly well-defined and distinct world.  Hyde’s analysis, that “tricksters obscure as they enlighten,” fits well here, also.  What Daniels and I-330 offer their societies is both the “way and the no-way,” the portal and the end of the road.  It is precisely because the modern tricksters’ gift threatens not only the status quo, but even the very logical basis for that status quo, that both traditional and modern societies perceive them as radical and dangerous. 

 

Works Cited

Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes this World.  New York:  North Point Press, 1999.

Wright, Richard.  “The Man Who Lived Underground.” The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature.  New Jersey:  Prentice Hall, 2000.

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We.  New York: HarperCollins, 1999.