The publication of Paradise Lost by John Milton in 1667 made Lucifer, previously a flat and uninteresting figure in western literature, a well-developed character full of depth and substance. This essay investigates a small, but by no means comprehensive, cross-section of his place in American literature through the lens of the powerful Trickster archetype. Unlike the medieval depictions of Lucifer that are rooted in Greek mythology, American authors portray him as a drifter who wanders into protagonists’ lives to overturn their perceptions about the nature of God and the universe. When Lucifer appears, he is the giver of revelations in the face of tragedy and terror.
Lewis Hyde has argued in Trickster Makes This World: “The origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures requires that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that culture is based on” (9). In literature and folklore, these figures emerge as Tricksters, those archetypal entities that, through their misadventures, create a balance between chaotic anarchy and oppressive fascism. When Tricksters appear, they force people around them to analyze the sacredness of their values, and in so doing, make them reject them or embrace them to the benefit of the community that shares them. Through this lens, there is no greater Trickster in American literature than Lucifer, Creation’s first wolf-in-sheepskin antagonist who unexpectedly shows up to overturn the protagonists’ misconceptions about the world.
The following essay stems from a puzzling question: is Lucifer really a Trickster? Many critics caution against confusing him with a Trickster because in terms of conventional religion, particularly Christianity, he is morally aligned with evil while traditionally, Trickster is morally indifferent. Hyde argues:
The Devil and the Trickster are not the same thing, though they have regularly been confused…The Devil is an agent of evil, but trickster is amoral, not immoral…One doesn’t usually hear said of the Christian Devil what the anthropologist Paul Radin says of the Native American trickster:
Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself…He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social…yet through his actions all values come into being (10).
He should be considered a Trickster, but is not by most theorists because, as William Doty and William Hynes observe, “Despite Augustine’s dictum that good can come from evil, we are taught to reject almost automatically the suggestion that a deceitful figure – by the definitions of our society, morally bad – can bring about good” as Tricksters tend to do (“Historical” 28). But if we examine him solely from Hyde’s point of view, Lucifer, particularly in American literature, is the portrait of Radin’s Trickster. Not the warped version of the god Pan carrying a banner that blatantly proclaims I’m evil!, Lucifer is an ambiguous wanderer who creates uncertainty and terror, who easily destroys people’s most sacred beliefs in the blink of an eye. He manifests the strongest traits of Trickster folklore and Christian dogma, and the resulting hybrid is a figure whose comedy is deeply sinister and dark, and whose tricks paradoxically lead to the salvation-through-damnation of human souls.
The depictions of Lucifer in the works I examine rely heavily on religious tradition, but also on folklore and mythology. Therefore, examining the intersection of Lucifer’s history with the Trickster’s will better help to illuminate his role in American literature.
Trickster
The Trickster is a powerful, archetypal character who emerges in every world culture since the dawn of mankind. In their essay, “Introducing the Fascinating and Perplexing Trickster Figure,” Doty and Hynes argue that “For centuries, perhaps millennia, and in the widest variety of cultural and religious belief systems, humans have told and retold tales of tricksters, figures who are usually comical, yet serve to highlight important social values. They cause laughter, to be sure, as they profane nearly every central belief, but at the same time they focus attention precisely on the nature of such beliefs” (1). They are some of the oldest characters in literature, dating back to mankind’s earliest days when pictures of them were scratched or painted onto cave walls. In the United States, we are most familiar with Coyote and Brer Rabbit, but elsewhere in the world is Robin Hood, Ananse, and Loki just to cite a few examples. In literature, there are Tricksters such as Robin Goodfellow from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In popular culture, Tricksters are still relevant figures because while they continue
to have a home in printed literature, they have also found a new home in movies and television. Bart Simpson, Bugs Bunny, Captain Jack Sparrow, and the Joker are all significant cinematic Tricksters because they are that element of comic relief flying straight into the face of all that is serious and sacred.
No matter what era of Earth’s history Trickster emerges from, and no matter what civilization produces him, he shares remarkably similar traits from culture to culture. Hynes identifies six traits universally common to Trickster: he is ambiguous and anomalous, a deceiver and trick-player, a shape-shifter, situation-inverter, lewd-bricoleur, and messenger and imitator of the gods (“Mapping” 34). Trickster’s biggest appeal is that he is the ultimate underdog; almost always portrayed as physically weaker than his opponents, he is forced to rely on his own cunning to overcome sticky situations, so he plays clever tricks to win something from those who exercise power over him. A true anti-authoritarian, Trickster ridicules status, hierarchy, and power, and thus he frequently uses his wits and his pranks to overturn traditional social conventions. Lucifer fits well into this archetype because he is Creation’s first rule-breaker who never stops challenging the authority of the foremost power in the universe: God.
In addition to these universal traits, Melita Schaum argues in “Erasing Angel” that “one of the predominant characteristics of Trickster is his restless, wandering nature. Like Br’er Rabbit or Br’er Fox – or like Hermes, god of roadways – we continually meet him ‘coming down the road’ as the tale begins. As a traveler, he is an emblem of indeterminacy, a figure ‘at the crossroads’ or in the liminal space between communities, ever ‘on the open road’” (4). Lucifer’s association with crossroads pacts, supernatural contracts in which some human sells his/her soul in exchange for money, fame, or talent further associate him with conventional Tricksters, as does his wandering nature: “And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Whence do you come from?’ Then Satan answered the Lord and said, ‘From roaming the earth and patrolling it’” (New American Bible, Job 1:7).
Lucifer
Lucifer – also known as the Light-Bearer or Morning Star – has an ambiguous history in western civilization; his exact origins are unclear as he is never mentioned by name in the canonical Bible, but an ancient Jewish myth that associates the planet Venus with fallen angels, as well as the apocryphal books The Life of Adam and Eve and The Second Book of Enoch provide some clues. In these stories, he is an archangel loved above all others who plots to take the throne of God, and after a terrible war that divides Heaven, he is cast out and doomed to spend eternity flying over the abyss. A biblical passage that refers to the Babylonian king, Helel, may also have inspired conventional ideas about him:
How have you fallen from the heavens, O morning star, son of the dawn! How are you cut down to the ground, you who mowed down the nations! You said in your heart: ‘I will scale the heavens; above the stars of God I will set up my throne; I will take my seat on the Mount of Assembly, in the recesses of the North. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will be like the Most High!’ Yet down to the nether world you go to the recesses of the pit! When they see you they will stare, pondering over you: ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, and kingdoms quake? Who made the world a desert, razed its cities, and gave his captives no release? All the kings of the nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb; but you are cast forth without burial, loathsome and corrupt, clothed as those slain at sword-point, a trampled corpse. Going down to the pavement of the pit, you will never be one with them in the grave.’ For you have ruined your land, you have slain your people! Let him not be named forever, that scion of an evil race! Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; lest they rise and possess the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants (New American Bible, Isaiah 14:12-21).
Though Lucifer’s origins are mysterious, he is well known as the Father of Lies, the one who tricked Eve in the Garden of Eden and subsequently introduced death into the world. In pre-Christian books such as the Talmud and Apocrypha, he evolves from a weak angel to the fearsome adversary who is the ultimate embodiment of evil, the nemesis of both God and of Man, and the entity who openly seeks the ruination of souls. This view of Lucifer has changed very little over the years, and has been reinforced by religious affirmation and popular opinion.
By the Middle Ages he also becomes known as an evil prankster. There are stories that tell how, to torment someone, he would lie on their feet every night to keep them from sleeping. Others attributed odd happenings to him, such as candlesticks mysteriously tipping over or bedspreads being violently ripped off beds in the night. Many European stories hold that he has constructed various bridges, so people must tread cautiously when crossing lest he appears to push them off. In Ireland, where he is sometimes called Pucca, he is thought to lure night travelers over cliffs to their deaths. The fear of his tricks becomes so prevalent that European cultures develop numerous charms, prayers, and spells to ward him off. For example, the early Halloween custom of lighting a lantern, an old version of the contemporary jack-o-lantern, was originally a means for people to ward off evil and mischievous spirits like him.
Lucifer as Trickster in American Fiction
Melita Schaum argues that in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, her “Trickster poses as a spiritual confidence man – liar, thief, smooth operator, the injector of disorder and bankruptor of souls – yet he is himself as often as not comically evil, snared by his own devices, and unwittingly conscripted into the service of divine good. Moreover, by breaking the rigid and sterile orders of misplaced human pride, righteousness, egoism, or appetitive greed, he becomes the disruptive force that paradoxically makes possible social and spiritual renewal” (3). Though Schaum refers solely to Flannery O’Connor’s work, her view is applicable to other American Tricksters as well. In American literature, Lucifer-Tricksters are not so much the arbitrary bringers of chaos from folklore as they are accidental redeemers of the human spirit who just happen to arrive on the scene when individuals or societies have become inflexible with their beliefs. Unfortunately for their victims, this redemption almost always comes only moments before a real or symbolic death because, as the Joker notes in The Dark Knight, “in their last moments, people show you who they really are.”
Hulga from Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” is the epitome of this sort of inflexibility. Having earned a degree in philosophy, as well as being an ardent student of science, she is a staunch atheist who has no patience for anyone who still believes that a man in the sky rules the world. Not wanting to be associated with beauty, she centers her whole personality around the theme of ugliness. She is ugly to her mother, she is ugly to the country people she loathes, and she is even ugly to complete strangers. Ironically, she changes her name from Joy to Hulga because it is the ugliest name she can think of, yet she gets angry when people call her by this new name. She is the sort of woman with an answer for everything, and looks down her superior nose at anyone who has a different point of view.
Enter Manly Pointer, the enigmatic Bible salesman who arrives at Mrs. Hopewell’s farm and introduces himself as someone who is “not even from a place, just from near a place,” which automatically calls attention to his ambiguity (7). Depicted as a “tall gaunt hatless youth” with “prominent face bones and a streak of sticky looking brown hair falling across his forehead,” and barely able to lift the heavy suitcase he’s lugging with him, Manly comes across as big a weakling as his brothers in traditional Trickster folklore (O’Connor 6). When Mrs. Hopewell tries to send this man she views as a simpleton away, he immediately plays towards her prejudices about “good country people” in order to invert the situation and to earn an invitation into her home:
He didn’t get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them, he said softly, “Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth – not many people want to buy one [a Bible] nowadays and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into her unfriendly face. “People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!”
“Why!” she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round. That’s life!” (O’Connor 7).
His manipulative words resonate so profoundly with Mrs. Hopewell that she invites him to supper, which calls to mind an old superstition that holds how people must actively invite unholy entities into their houses before they can enter and cause chaos. At dinner, Manly winds up inviting the obnoxious Hulga on a casual date, and the next evening, Manly leads her into the countryside and away from her home, farther from her comfort zone and farther from the “known” world where she has all the answers, first to the barn on the edge of the property, and then to the loft where he pretends to seduce her. Ironically, up to this point she has imagined seducing him, a daydream that tricks her into thinking she’s got the upper hand over him. Using her vanity in her own superior knowledge to his advantage, Manly lures her across the physical and symbolic boundaries that separate the things she is certain she knows from the unfamiliar territory she finds herself in.
He shows an unusual interest in her wooden leg, and it unnerves her because she has come to view it as her defining quality after her education, and therefore she possessively guards it, never letting anyone see it. However, this type of attitude without any faith in God leads to her downfall because once Manly talks her into removing it, she puts herself at his mercy. Further destabilizing the situation and her security, he takes Hulga’s glasses, leaving her virtually blind to the world around her. This, of course, is obvious symbolism for the blindness she creates inside of herself through her stubborn pride in her own beliefs. In this way she overshadows Manly’s deception; she has been deceiving herself for much longer. Now that she’s practically helpless, he inverts the situation even more when he reveals to her the contents of his Bible suitcase – whiskey, condoms, naked lady playing cards conveniently hidden in a hollow Bible – proving once and for all that he is not, in fact, “good country people.”
Vulnerable and confused, she asks “aren’t you just good country people?” as if he couldn’t have been clever enough to pull one over on her. He replies “Yeah…but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day of the week” (18). Then he triumphantly steals her leg. Before he runs off to resume his wandering and to let her contemplate her own stupidity, he states: “And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga…you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing since I was born (18).” If we are to believe Manly about his shifting identity, he, like Lucifer, goes by many different names. Hulga is left to reflect on how the world isn’t everything she believes it to be, and how if there is a Devil, there must be a God as well. Unfortunately for her, in spite of her superior education, she cannot recognize evil until it is too late.
In Joyce Carol Oates’ story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” the teenage protagonist Connie paradoxically mirrors O’Connor’s Hulga, but whereas Hulga goes out of her way to make herself appear uglier in order to exalt her superior intellect, Connie goes out of her way to make herself more beautiful. Anxious to become an adult, she rejects the role of the “nice” girl to cultivate her sexual persona, which flourishes only when she is away from her home and family. However, Arnold Friend’s unexpected arrival at her house forces her to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk, and the reader sees her struggle between staying an innocent child or running headlong into adulthood. She is reluctant to leave her family and home forever, but we can see that she is also curious to know what this trip with Arnold will mean for her. The two sides merge violently. At the crossroads, the only boundary separating Connie’s childhood from her adulthood is a screen door.
Arnold Friend, with his suggestive name that hints at “Arch Fiend,” is an ambiguous stranger who makes a grand entrance at Connie’s house in his gold convertible, and he looks bizarre enough to suggest that he is otherworldly. He wears mirrored sunglasses, has translucent skin, and has hair that is so wild that it looks like a wig. When he walks, he wobbles as though his shoes don’t fit properly, which possibly suggests that his feet are actually hooves, a throwback to the idea of Satan as a Pan-like satyr, but also a depiction reminiscent of Native American animal tricksters. When he claims to know things about her family and neighbors that he couldn’t possibly know, he further calls the humanness of his character into question. He is a malevolent character who initially tries to charm Connie into coming to him, and therefore could be seen as a symbol of temptation.
His trickery is more subtle in this story than in others. Rather than pull an outright prank such as Manly Pointer stealing Hulga’s fake leg, he tricks her using terroristic tactics. Cutting her off from outside help and refusing to leave, he threatens to harm her family if she refuses to come to him. The fact that he can’t seem to enter without invitation also calls into mind the superstition I discussed above about unholy supernatural creatures needing an invitation to cross a house’s threshold. Whatever the case may be, he disrupts her sense of security and certainty, and uses threats and intimidation to trick her into leaving the safety of her house:
She rushed forward and tried to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking. "But why lock it," Arnold Friend said gently, talking right into her face. "It's just a screen door. It's just nothing." One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it. It pointed out to the left, bent at the ankle. "I mean, anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood and iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all, and specially Arnold Friend. If the place got lit up with a fire, honey, you'd come runnin' out into my arms, right into my arms an' safe at home—like you knew I was your lover and'd stopped fooling around. I don't mind a nice shy girl but I don't like no fooling around." Part of those words were spoken with a slight rhythmic lilt, and Connie somehow recognized them—the echo of a song from last year, about a girl rushing into her boy friend's arms and coming home again—
It is important to note that painted on Arnold Friend’s car are the numbers 33, 19, and 17. If one counts backwards from the end of the Bible, which is another possible allusion to Lucifer who does everything opposite of God, it is obvious that Oates is referencing the Book of Judges, the thirty-third book of the Bible: “When he noticed the traveler in the public square of the city, the old man asked where he was going, and whence he had come” (New American Bible, Judges 19:17). Looking at the verse in its entire context, the passage it belongs to echoes the story of Lot at Sodom and Gomorrah; the corrupt people of Gibeah demand that a man hand over his guest, his son-in-law, to be sodomized at their leisure. Instead of handing over his guest, the old man throws his daughter, his son-in-law’s concubine, to these corrupt men, who violently rape her the whole night and leave her dead on the man’s doorstep. Here, “corrupt” literally translates from “the sons of Belial,” Belial being one of Lucifer’s many other names (New American Bible, Judges 19:22).
If one simply adds all the numbers together, the sum is 69, the name of a sexual act that could allude to Connie’s attempts to sexualize herself. But if playing a very specific ancient Jewish number-letter game, “Genesis” is the only biblical book title that adds up to 33; this could refer to God’s warning against overindulgence in the Genesis story of Lot, especially given the similarities between the stories. But playing this same game, “Connie” adds up to 33, “loves” adds up to 19, and “God” adds up to 17 (“33 19 17”). In light of all the demonic evidence generated by this highly symbolic and complex sequence of numbers, it is obvious that Arnold Friend is Lucifer incarnate and one of American literature’s more blatant Trickster-Devils, and he is the catalyst that changes Connie from a child to an adult — albeit through drastic, violent means.
Contemporary horror writer Stephen King is also not above employing Lucifer as Trickster in his works. In his novel, Needful Things, the mysterious proprietor, Leland Gaunt, is a charming elderly gentleman who opens a shop called “Needful Things” in the middle of Castle Rock, Maine. The store intrigues his customers because he always seems to have an item in stock that is perfectly suited to everyone. The merchandise Gaunt peddles, things like a rare Sandy Koufax baseball card, a carnival glass lampshade, and a fragment of wood believed to be from Noah’s Ark, are extraordinarily rare but also have some special, sentimental value to each of his customers that make them particularly priceless. Unbeknownst to the people of Castle Rock, though, his merchandise is utterly worthless in reality, but somehow he tricks his customers by making everything appear as if it’s something it’s not. For these curios, Gaunt asks for very little in terms of money, but to make up the difference, he expects each customer to also play a little prank on someone else in Castle Rock.
In the prologue, the first-person narrator describes the town of Castle Rock:
It’s the same here as where you grew up, most likely. People getting het up over religion, people carryin torches, people carryin secrets, people carryin grudges…and even a spooky story every now and then, like what might or might not have happened on the day Pop died in his junk shop, to liven up the occasional dull day. Castle Rock is still a pretty nice place to live and grow, as the sign you see when you come into town says…The Rock has always been one of the good places, and when people get scratchy, you know what we say? We say He’ll get over it or She’ll get over it (King 9).
Yet as the story unfolds, we see they won’t get over it. This newcomer Gaunt somehow knows about the long-standing feuds between the various townspeople, and the pranks he persuades others to pull are his means of creating madness and violence. Every prank pulled deepens blood feuds as well as paranoia about keeping their precious items safe. The needful things that Gaunt peddles consume their entire personality; the citizens of Castle Rock are so faithless and hollow inside that even their most prized possessions cannot fill the void. Somehow, they’ve created a Hell inside themselves that begs for a master to rule them, the wise Gaunt, and it is in this scenario that they turn to him to eagerly buy up the weapons he inevitably offers for sale and to happily trade away their souls. Their inner Hell becomes a very physical one when neighbor ruthlessly kills neighbor, friend turns against friend, and the body count quickly rises.
Finally, the one incorruptible soul, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, faces off against Gaunt by employing an explosive magic trick that distracts him; Alan uses this brief moment to steal a valise that contains the souls of all Gaunt's customers, and he manages to convince Gaunt that he's lost this battle. Gaunt departs, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces. Although many of the townspeople are dead, their souls have been saved; Gaunt has moved on, defeated this time, but ready to play his eternal game wherever there are other "buyers" to prey upon.
In the biblical Book of Job, Lucifer seems to serve God as a persecutor of mankind rather than as a demon terrorizing it. He accuses Job of faithlessness; he believes that Job is a pious man because God has given him everything he could ever want in life. But he wagers that if God took everything away from him, he’d quickly turn his back on God and on his faith. God accepts his challenge and allows Lucifer to torture him in the form of “tests” to prove his faithfulness and loyalty, but his wicked plan backfires when Job stays as strong as ever and therefore passes. To reward Job, God restores everything he’s lost and gives him even more than he had to begin with.
It is with this biblical story in mind that I include the movie, The Dark Knight, in this essay, a movie in the Batman mythology that retells Job’s story in contemporary Gotham City, with the arch-villain Joker stepping into Lucifer’s shoes. Gotham’s mob families, driven to their knees by Batman’s vigilante justice, find themselves at the Joker’s mercy when he promises to execute Batman, but only if they agree to pay him half of their combined fortunes. Money, however, is not his real ambition; the Joker is out to prove a point, that deep inside, mankind is truly evil, and it will lose its moral compass when chaos is introduced to it. He tells Batman in an interrogation scene that deeply parallels Satan’s challenge of God:
You see, their morals, their code…it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these ‘civilized’ people...they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.
Batman and Joker’s argument continues throughout the movie; at the end, Joker initiates a game with two ferries trying to escape Gotham City, something he calls a “social experiment.” He has rigged both ferries, one carrying prisoners and one carrying innocent civilians, with enough gasoline and C4 explosives to destroy each one several times over, and gives each of them the other ferry’s remote detonator. The catch is that one ferry must destroy the other by midnight, and if neither obeys him, he promises to destroy them both. After Joker’s horrific series of tests against Gotham City in which numerous people have already been killed, the people on both ferries knows he’s serious about his threat. Even still, the occupants on both ferries can’t bring themselves to destroy the other, thus proving their faithfulness in the face of catastrophe. Batman, smug about this little victory, says, “This city just showed you that it’s full of people ready to believe in good.” Joker quickly and sinisterly replies, “Until their spirit breaks completely…” which suggests he will never stop trying to prove their inherent wickedness.
The Joker’s origins are ambiguous because no one knows who he is or where he came from. After finally arresting him, Gordon tells the mayor in frustration just exactly how much an enigma he really is: “Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name. No other alias.”
As is the case in the other stories I’ve discussed, he too has a strong connection with roads. When we first see him in the film, he is standing on a corner at an intersection, the crossroads. The most important scenes – important because they lay the groundwork for his most significant tricks – of the movie take place on highways or streets where he unabashedly terrorizes the cops and civilians alike.
Additionally, he is a shape-shifter in that he employs many different disguises during the movie such as a robber and a police officer, and he even “changes” gender in typical Trickster fashion when he masquerades as a female nurse in order to see the well-guarded Harvey Dent, Gotham’s “White Knight” district attorney, in the hospital. But for him, it’s not enough that he shape-shifts; he forces his hostages to shape-shift their identities as well. Insane asylum inmates become cops and reporters and doctors become clown henchmen.
But the Joker’s most prominent Trickster characteristic is that he is a situation-inverter. He seems to allow Batman, the police, and the mob to fortify their defenses against him only to shock them by gleefully tearing these walls down from the inside. They are left debased and humiliated when they learn how the Joker’s been ten steps ahead of them the whole time, and that everything up to that point has been a carefully calculated trick designed to lull them into complacency. As an indifferent Trickster, he tells Harvey, in the midst of his reign of terror on Gotham City, that everything he does is random:
Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know? I just do things. The mob has plans. The cops have plans. Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmm? You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blowing up, nobody panics. Because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die…well, then everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy – upset the established order – and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.
In spite of his claims to the contrary, he does in fact have a plan, a diabolical one that hints that he is Lucifer in a clown’s clothing. He aims to turn Harvey Dent into an agent of chaos like him in order to corrupt Gotham City’s faith in goodness and justice. The whole movie, we find out, is an elaborate ruse to that end, and he succeeds. Hanging inverted from a steel beam, he asks Batman: “You didn’t think I’d risk losing the battle for Gotham’s soul in a fistfight with you? No…I took Gotham’s White Knight and I brought him down to our level. It wasn’t hard. See, madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push!” Later, after Dent dies the monster Joker made him to be, Commissioner Gordon muses that “the Joker took the best of us and tore him down.” The fact that Joker has been fighting all along, not just for the soul of one man but for the soul of the entire city, suggests he is Lucifer prowling the world seeking the ruination of men’s souls.
Like all cultural symbols in America, the fictional character Lucifer is a product of cultural history and rhetorical strategy in a society that always embodies the very essence of the Trickster, that of social change. He displays to his audience the spiritual and social rewards that might accrue to damning yet redemptive behavior. The authors who wrote about him constructed an old, dramatically powerful archetype, the Trickster, coming down the road to meet us head-on, in an effort to both entertain us and to make us question our own values. In their professional need to write stories having audience appeal, however, they delineated the attractive and cunning Lucifer, always the wolf in sheepskin with a dark sense of humor who has something important to teach those around him. As a Trickster, his morally bad behavior can bring about good in the lives he touches if they rise to the challenge and face their fall from grace with dignity and humility. Only then will they find salvation through the damnation of their soul.
Works Cited
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: Ferrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1998. Print.
Hynes, William J. “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 33-45.
Print.
Hynes, William J. and William G. Doty. “Historical Overview of Theoretical Issues: The Problem of the Trickster.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and
Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 1-12. Print.
----------. “Introducing the Fascinating and Perplexing Trickster Figure.” Mythical Trickster
Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G.
Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 1-12. Print.
King, Stephen. Needful Things. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Celestial Timepiece:
The Joyce Carol Oates Homepage. University of San Francisco. Web. 29 Sept. 2011.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” Weber University. 4 August 2003. Web. 28 Sept.
2011.
Schaum, Melita. “‘Erasing Angel’: The Lucifer-Trickster Figure in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction. The Southern Literary Journal 33.1 (2000): 1-26. Print.
The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart. Warner Bros., 2008. Film.
The New American Bible: St. Joseph Edition. Ed. Daniel E. Pilarczyk. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1992. Print.
Williams, Zoe. “33 19 17.” Native Saints. Blogger.com, 7 Dec. 2009. Blog. 29 Sept. 2011.
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