One economical way to start the investigation of the aesthet-
ics of the Yoruba trickster tale discourse is to examine briefly
some of the ways others have dealt with either the trickster as a
character or the tale as a communicational mode in very recent
times. The two most related of such studies are Ojo Arewa and
G. M. Shreve's work on Zande trickster tales and Robert D.
Pelton's study of four West African trickster-figures. These two
works also happen to have summarized most of the other contri-
butions considered to be of seminal value to the discussion of
African trickster narrative in general.

Since I share the same methodological or hermeneutic strate-
gy -- semiotics -- with Arewa and Shreve, I prefer to start with
their works on the genesis of structures in Zande trickster tales.
This work advocates for a mediation of the Proppian-Dundesian
emphasis on the processual surface plot of the story and the Levi-
Straussian focus on the semantic potential of the paradigmatic,
hidden plot of the tale. Their work draws attention to the
hermeneutic potential of the combination of these two views.
However, their analysis of forty tales still applies the syntagmat-
ic and paradigmatic methodologies separately such that the read-
er is denied the insight that their mediation is capable of. It is
reassuring that the authors promised in this volume to bring this
mediation to full fruition in the subsequent volumes on
Dahomean narratives.

Even with the first volume of a series in semiotic studies of
African folkloristic products, Arewa and Shreve have drawn
attention to important and yet hitherto neglected dimensions of
folklore. Their concept of Zande trickster narrative mode as a
communicational event liable to and enriched by the application
of such sophisticated analytic procedures as the generative theo-
ry of structuration touches remotely but significantly on one
major theme in my research. The importance of a "logical calcu-
lus that can be supported by empirical folkloristic phenomena" ¹

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