Is ia fascinating to consider tricksterness linguistically. Ness- being 
a suffex that signifies essence and identity. Like Nessie, however, 
tricksters tend to subvert nesses and their implied anchorings.

Societies, though, have set ways. They depend on those anchorings. The 
more set, the more legalistic and fixed the relationship between 
signifierr and signified.

A good example is when you are lazying around on a raft and behold, far 
across a stretch of river, an axe bite into a log, and not until a good 
while later do you hear the thunk.

With that looseness between signifier and signified, tricksters enact 
acts of deviance that call those societies categories into question.

Like babbling children, who are just in the infancy of becoming 
enculturated, tricksters are often more driven by drives and urges. They 
are models of resistance to the status quo. Linguistically, the dialects 
Twanin's characters mouthed, were tricksterly.

Twain's bold act of linguistic deviance helped Huck Finn to be 
recognized as the first American novel.

When, in literature, I encounter such acts of deviance, I find Julia 
Kristeva's work illuminating.





On 2023-02-13 12:25 am, Scott Holmes wrote:
> I hadn't thought about Tricksters for quite a while, and then they were 
> usually the Coyote type.  I've recently been reading the essays in 
> "Trickster Lives", especially the two related to Huckleberry Finn and 
> Roughing It.  I see how Tom Sawyer and Br'er Rabbit fit the parameters 
> I'm familiar with but I'm concerned that assigning Twain's malevolent 
> Calvinist god to the role of trickster diminishes the utility of the 
> concept of Trickster.   I suppose I'm just conflating Trickster with 
> Prankster and I don't see the Duke and the King as pranksters just 
> greedy opportunists. It's the same with "Confidence Men".
> 
> 
> --/Unaffiliated Geographer and Twain aficionado/