This is why Nancy Freeman Regalado, a specialist in medieval literature, has studied him as a trickster alongside the character of Tristan in Tristan and Isolde (4). Renart embodies renardie, which is cunning and deception par excellence. Tricksters operate in intermediate, unstable and neutral spaces that anthropologists call “liminal” He constantly plays tricks, and thanks to his cunning and astuteness, his art of lying and hypocrisy, and his total lack of scruples, he not only succeeds in satisfying his appetites, but also extricates himself from impossible situations, such as when he manages to take on the costume of a pilgrim when, condemned to the gallows, he finds himself “bound, held back on all sides” (3). These definitions make it possible to consider tricksters from two different perspectives : the psychological perspective, which leads to the identification of the character traits of this character, given that flesh-and-blood individuals are likely to possess them the mythological and folkloric perspective, in which the trickster character is a fiction that can fulfil a social role.Ĭonsider the case of Renart, the fox in the Roman de Renart. The first insists on the character of the trickster: “borrowed by anthropologists from the English trickster, derived from trick, to designate in tales and legends the character of the trickster, who uses tricks and lies, and whose Western model is that of the fox ” the second introduces the notion of role: “a character who, in very different mythologies, plays a role that consists of disrupting the normal play of events, joking about the gods, etc.” In parentheses, it adds: “it is the raven or the coyote that plays this role in Amerindian myths Renart, Till Eulenspiegel in European tales” (2). The definitions proposed by two French language dictionaries attest to this distinction. This qualification allows us to situate them in a social framework and to propose a definition that is not limited to a list of character traits. It allows us to return to a distinction that appears in the definition of the trickster that we mentioned when speaking of “figure” and “character.” Jung mentions the role of the trickster. Notwithstanding this foray into Jung’s work, the brief overview we have offered indicates that work from business ethics generally equates the trickster with the dishonest or the swindler, without seeking to exploit the richness of the character as it appears to us in mythology, folklore or literature.īut before addressing this point, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider Jung’s quotation. Jung defined it “an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity” which, in its “clearest manifestations a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level” (1). Euphemisms can lead economic actors to form attenuated, and therefore misleading, representations of their own actions, when these are objectively immoral.įinally, reference was made, in a very specific way, to the trickster as conceived by Carl Jung. The word “trickster” has also been used figuratively to personify the euphemism, a well-known figure of speech used to soften the impact of an unpleasant fact. The trickster’s intelligence is sometimes such that it can lead them to achieve ends that would have been unattainable by the practice of truth alone, which can have the consequence of devaluing the very value of truth. The trickster, whose cunning may lead them to change their appearance by disguising themselves, may also be elevated by the public to the rank of hero or magician, like some highly successful entrepreneurs when in reality they are merely tricksters or gamblers whose practices are immoral and illegal. Thus, the trickster represents a real, non-fictional type of character who seeks to achieve their goals by any means, for example by causing others to act immorally in order to gain an advantage. The fifteen or so articles that refer to it mention it incidentally to denote deception or to make moral distinctions for various forms of deception. One is hard pressed to find references to the trickster in business ethics, especially in the three main English-language journals ( Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly, Business Ethics: A European Review).
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