Blog 7

Trickster Tales  Ed. by Matt Dembicki

Almost exclusively, the writing in the book was limp. These stories of the Trickster (usually a coyote or rabbit or raccoon) were simply uninteresting. Perhaps they make a better oral tradition than a written one, but my feeling is that almost any of the stories could have been made more compelling with a steadier author’s hand. Many of the tales take forms similar to Kipling’s Just So Stories. How the alligator got his skin, how the rabbit got his tail, how the raccoon got short and fat, how the beaver stopped being an unbridled killing machine, et cetera. There’s meat there for some decent stories. Or at least some lame stories told interestingly. But it just never coalesces.
And while very rarely all that good, there are times when the art is actually just plain bad. After several stories with lackluster art, I gave up entirely on hoping for good visual storytelling and merely crossed my fingers, hoping that it wouldn’t get worse. The inhabitants of the frame often looked like creatures in static poses, only rendered so still from the steady hand of some demented taxidermist. It was rare that I felt an artist had a good feel for the story being told.
I don’t know what to feel. Should I see Trickster as well-representative of the North American tribal folklore? If so, then what am I to make of that culture? I found the storytelling infantile and the artistry remedial. Am I then too quick to judge another culture by standards I have learned under the rigours of my own? If so, that would be deeply unfair, like judging the first novels to come out of Borneo by the standards to which we would hold the latest literary release from Knopf. I don’t want to be that person and yet: if Trickster is a fair representation of the North American tribal narrative art, I can honestly say that I’m not all that interested in sitting around, waiting for it to develop into something I can appreciate.