Hermes

Of the Greek Gods Hermes is perhaps the most naughty. He is sometimes named the trickster God. He stole a herd of cattle from Apollo and had them walk backwards so he couldn’t be tracked. He then endeared Apollo to him with a spontaneous tune from his lyre, which he then traded with the bemused Apollo for his cattle. He also stole his mother’s clothes while she was bathing and fooled the goddess Hera into becoming his foster mother.¹

In the book Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms, there is a chapter on Hermes by William G. Doty, titled ‘A Lifetime of Trouble-Making: Hermes as Trickster’. As well as being something of a trickster, Hermes is commonly known as the god of boundaries, of limitations and their transgression. One crucial feature of the naughty behaviour is the game it plays with getting caught. In order to escape the capture and punishment that spells the end of naughty activity, the naughty subject must be deceptive or highly mobile. Hermes seems to be both these things. As I will come to show, deception, the testing of limits and freedom of movement, crucially inform the perception and expression of naughtiness in a variety of contexts.

Naughty Animals

According to Pierre Hadot, in his book The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, Aristotle characterised nature as inherently thrifty.² ‘A prudent man’, and a ‘good housekeeper’ are some of the metaphors he used (191). Continuing to appeal to the Aristotelian perspective, Hadot writes, ‘[nature] knows how to take advantage of leftovers ‘to make bones, tendons, hair, and hooves’, and how to compensate for an excess with a deficit, or vice versa, since she cannot distribute the excess to several points at the same time’ (192). ‘Ultimately’, writes Hadot, ‘the Aristotelian formulas can all be reduced to the principle of economy, which expresses the ideal of perfectly rational action that sets means and ends in precise proportion’ (192). Aspects of this understanding are no doubt alive and well today, and many of our scientific and technological achievements testify to the idea of nature as thrifty.

In contrast to this view of nature Hadot also traces a brief genealogy of nature as ‘playful’ and ‘spendthrift’. Naughty nature would seem to draw from these categories or characterisations. According to Hadot, Goethe and Diderot are the principle advocates of the playful, whereby ‘[nature] strives to develop the most diverse variations on the theme she has invented’ (198). Similarly, Nietzsche and Bergson, who represent spendthrift interpretations, argue for a nature that is variously ‘luxuriant’, ‘wasteful’, ‘prodigal’, ‘beautiful’, ‘impulsive’ and ‘joyful’ (198-199). Not surprisingly, Hadot describes the ‘playful’ and ‘spendthrift’ camp as tending to express philosophical rather scientific concerns.

These characterisations are of course abstractions from the many things nature is at any given time. More often than not things are baroque combinations of contrasting aspects. However, Hadot’s brief genealogy sets the scene for my proposition that naughty is one of the meaningful and expressive ideas to which nature give shape and variegation.

According to a poetic vocabulary that I occasionally attempt to seduce my friends into adopting, animals are often definitively naughty, even when seeming to express very little. Naughtiness to me seems something like an animal’s neutral condition. Cuteness plays a similar role for some people: the naughty animal is up to something, the cute animal is soooo cute. Animals doing their thing seem to instruct us to ask them: ‘what are you up to?’ This might say as much about me as the animal. But I want to focus on the taking place of this saying rather than the supposedly distinct creatures to which it testifies.

Animal talk is a particular genre of talk, a particular kind of speech act, the analysis of which may be relevant for communication or expression more generally. Speech acts or propositions are transformative with regard to the subject of enunciation. In calling an animal naughty I am not simply attributing a characteristic to it. I am greeting the animal because the animal calls me forth. And in greeting the animal I become a different kind of subject. I become the host for a certain idea which the animal makes available as a propositional potency. I could never be who I am without the animal I see and my expression refers to this singularity. Naughty is the word I use to greet the animal as messenger. It refers to the being of the animal and the fortuitousness of this particular encounter. It is not clear who does the talking here, or at least not clear if we deploy concepts that betray a bias towards simply located, speaking, conscious human subjects.

Birds are often particularly naughty, especially when they come in numbers of two or three. Perhaps here we witness the qualities of the trickster god Hermes in animal form: birds are naughty for the very reason that humans are unlikely to catch them. They are messengers from the heavens who steal off with our chips or our barbequed sausages. The description of cockatoos in W G Sebald’s Austleritz, is a celebration of these animals most primarily due to their naughty nature.³ Jacques Austerlitz, the book’s protagonist, whose story is relayed through the Sebaldian narrator, spends a good portion of his high school years with the FitzPatrick family, at their paradisiacal home, Andromeda Lodge, near the Welsh town of Barmouth. Austerlitz claims that the cockatoos, for whom Andromeda Lodge was also home, would make a point of harassing certain people, while paying no attention to others; they had their favourites and their enemies. Austerlitz remarks on how often the birds reminded him of humans in their seemingly purposeful behaviour. The cockatoos are described as being variously: ‘alert, scheming, mischievous and sly, deceitful, malicious, vindictive and quarrelsome’ (81) – a list which approximate to the gist of naughtiness. The attribution of naughtiness to animals also attests to the opacity of these beings whose insides we cannot know but see expressed in gestural form before us. To the cockatoo on the balcony, playing with a loose part of the awning in its beak, I say: I cannot tell why you do what you do, but there you are doing it anyway.

It is often said that humour is among the qualities that sets humans apart from other animals. In this sense, my laughter at the dog pretending to throttle a deflated football is an assertion of my humanness. In his book, The Bear, Michel Pastoureau tells of how from the beginning of the thirteenth century Christians made it their goal to reduce the brown bear to a spectacle of ridicule by permitting and tacitly advocating the work of jongleurs and tumblers, who would train bears to follow ‘their orders like sad, resigned clowns’ (171).⁴ Here the training of the bear ignores the lyricism of its soul. Can a sad animal ever be naughty?

But are humans really the only animals that possess a sense of humour? What makes us so sure? And what is it to possess something like a sense of humour? What are the implications of the word ‘possession’ here? In his book Parrot, Paul Carter challenges the theory that humour, and the capacity to joke, is a uniquely human aptitude. If George Loius Leclerc, (aka Comte de Buffon) ‘thought a sense of humour was confined to humans’, ‘so far as parrots go’, writes Carter, ‘the exact opposite might be true – parrots, I think, only joke’ (100). While it might be a stretch to suggest that animals appreciate intellectual irony, it seems that some animals do attitudinal irony (here appealing to Altieri’s definition), of which naughtiness is an exemplar, far better than humans.

In a chapter titled ‘Bestiality’, in his book Dangerous Emotions, Alphonso Lingis suggests that when we admire an animal doing its thing our very capacity to recognise its thingness is something we feel as a potency within ourselves.⁵ To watch the cheater sprint or the wombat burrow is to form ideas and feelings of sprinting or burrowing that are in part sympathetic. Dancing and sport are instances of such sympathetic perception; they are ways to perceive activity in a more intense fashion, through training or ritual, ways to exhibit the relationship between man and animal as one of exemplarity rather than exception.

Lingis somewhat teasingly remarks that …

the ceremonies and etiquette with which courtship was elaborated in the palaces of the Sun King were not more ritualised than the courtship of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica, the codes of chivalry in medieval Provence not more idealized than the spring rituals of Impalas in the East African Savannah, the rites of seduction in the geishas in old Kyoto not more refined than the black-neck cranes in the moonlit marshes. (39)

This proposition seems alluring, whether or not one chooses to wholeheartedly swallow the accuracy of Lingis’ anthropological zoology. We are far more likely to be kindly disposed to animals if they are conceived as our different equivalents rather than the half-formed things we appropriate for our own definition.

I remember another thing about my grandfather, who I mentioned briefly earlier. He was, to some extent, a terroriser of animals – perhaps a farmer’s preoccupation. He used to dab sump oil on the back of our pet sheep Russel. For a long time we couldn’t work out what was going on: did this sheep have a penchant for oil? How did it manage to get it splodges directly in the middle of its back? Grandad used to talk to this sheep quite a bit while he was working down in the shed. He had a dog, a Jack Russell terrier, called Smartie. The dog went wherever granddad went, even in the front of our ute. I hated going in the ute with granddad; Smartie stunk and used to run across my lap, from one side of the cabin to the other, barking loudly and scratching the tops of my legs. Smartie would perch up on granddad’s open window, two paws on his lap and two on the door, and bark at the landscape moving past outside. Granddad played this game where he’d use one of the small rubber bands from the newspaper to snap around Smarties yapping jaw. It was a deft action, he’d obviously done it many times and it seemed the dog had not grown wary. The noise would temporarily cease while Smartie worked the rubbed band off with his front paws.

What to make of these stories? One might emphasise the fact that my grandfather, clearly a bit bored, would entertain himself at the expense of animals that were defenceless in the face of his tricks. I do not wish to delve too far here into ethical questions concerning what it means for an animal to be a pet, to have animals as pets. I do not wish to rescue the memory of my grandfather either. What I want to emphasise is his irresistible naughtiness – he must have felt and known it – and that if I asked him to account for the nuances of his emotional experience, many of his other beliefs about man’s superiority would make far less sense. According to this example, human activity, the things humans do, often doesn’t match up with the abstractions we make regarding who we are and the things and ideas with which we share this world. This presumed denial of my grandfather to account for the things and ideas his activity includes is what strikes me as sinister about the story. But to witness it was to witness a transformation, of the man who posited the valuelessness of multiple boys, into a creature occupied by the ideas of naughtiness in the presence of his dog, Smartie, or the sheep, Russel.