Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Uncle Remus 221
Mixon’s view found infl uential support in a massive and important
1993 book by Eric J. Sundquist titled To Wake the Nations: Race in
the Making of American Literature. Sundquist began by conceding that
there “is no question that Harris’s attitudes toward blacks were very
complicated. . . . Even though his essays show him to be an unapologetic
paternalist, when measured against the southern demonology
of his day Harris was often and obviously liberal. But his views are
hardly predictable” (339). By the end of his discussion, however,
Sundquist concludes that Harris sometimes speaks as a “doublevoiced
trickster”: “Brer Rabbit is a trickster disguise for Remus, who
in turn is a trickster disguise for Harris himself ” (343). Th is view has
found emphatic recent support in a signifi cant article from 2004 by
Robert Cochran. Th ere is a very strong likelihood, Cochran asserts,
that Harris
constructed his tales and their framing narratives with
consummate skill and deliberate cunning, that multiple ironies
were not only not lost upon him but were in fact something of
his stock-in-trade, and that he was, in short, something of a
Brer Rabbit among authors. Uncle Remus, by such an approach,
is revealed as a secret hero of Harris’s work, a fi gure worthy of
comparison with Brer Rabbit himself. . . . Fundamentally,
Harris’s strategy as a writer is of a piece with that of Remus the
storyteller and Brer Rabbit the character. (24)
It would be inaccurate to suggest that the views of Hedin, Mixon,
Sundquist, and Cochran now represent anything like the critical
orthodoxy concerning Harris and his “Uncle Remus” tales. Many
critics and readers still fi nd these works quite unsavory in their explicit
and implicit racism and paternalism, and many readers and critics are
far from sympathetic to the view that either Harris or Remus can
be seen as a cunning, clever, and fi nally sympathetic trickster who
sought to undermine racist assumptions. Mixon and Cochran off er
the most substantial support for such a view, but much more investigation
obviously remains to be done. Over the course of his lengthy
career, Harris published scores of “Uncle Remus” tales in a succession
of diff erent collections; the standard edition of the complete tales
runs to more than eight hundred pages. Only after careful, detailed
study of all the tales in their historical and biographical contexts