Insight Editions · No. 183
The Implied Spider
Politics and Theology in Myth
Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger examines comparative mythology through examples from Hindu and biblical traditions, arguing that cross-cultural interpretation reveals shared patterns without erasing historical and cultural differences.
A study guide to The Implied Spider by Wendy Doniger. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
Wendy Doniger's The Implied Spider (Columbia, updated edition) is a defense of comparative mythology after postcolonial suspicion of universals. It argues that myths hold microscope and telescope at once, that comparison lights difference rather than erasing it, and that an implied spider of shared human experience supplies narrative silk that cultures weave differently.
Argument map: from optical metaphors to pluralist discipline
The argument in brief
- Updated preface. Context and history can join comparison; myths are not excavation reports; ideas are facts that light new fires.
- Introduction. Myth is a tool raising religious questions; comparison is a kind of metaphor or translation between worlds.
- Ch. 1. Double vision: Job whirlwind vs boils; Krishna's cosmic form vs friend form; Schindler's red coat.
- Ch. 2. Sideways comparison: dark cats, silent dogs, Ship of Theseus / chariot identity.
- Ch. 3. Implied spider as shared silk; reject Campbell monomyth; answer postcolonial critique with rigor.
- Ch. 4. Micromyth / macromyth; multivocality; political inversions (Eden, Cinderella, Sita).
- Ch. 5. Mother Goose to salvage: hear women without inventing Woman.
- Ch. 6. Pluralism with teeth: seventy interpretations, not infinite license.
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Pref | Context and History | Second edition myth; compare contexts; myth vs event |
| Intro | Myth and Metaphor | What myth does; translation leap |
| 1 | Microscopes and Telescopes | Double vision in theology and politics |
| 2 | Dark Cats, Barking Dogs | Comparison as light and as omission-detector |
| 3 | Implied Spiders | Shared silk; critique of bad universals |
| 4 | Micromyths, Macromyths | Strip, compare, re-expand; inversions |
| 5 | Mother Goose | Gendered voice and salvage |
| 6 | Textual Pluralism | Tightrope between rigor and openness |
Preface to the Updated Edition: Context and History
Back in the 1970s, Phil Lilienthal, Director of the University of California Press-fed up with pleading with me, in vain, to stop making changes in the proofs of my book in press ( The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology )-had a small sign made for me to put on my desk: SAVE IT FOR THE SECOND EDITION. Forthwith I started a file of errata and addenda.
Scale ladder variant 1
Preface: two meanings of myth.
The Myth of the New Edition
Back in the 1970s, Phil Lilienthal, Director of the University of California Press-fed up with pleading with me, in vain, to stop making changes in the proofs of my book in press ( The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology )-had a small sign made for me to put on my desk: SAVE IT FOR THE SECOND EDITION. Forthwith I started a file of errata and addenda. But, although the book is still in print over thirty years later, the second edition proved to be nothing but a myth, a story that was good for me to believe in but unverifiable in the real world.
Cycle 9
There are, however, other reasons for keeping notes on things you'd like to change in a book. Mircea Eliade used to scribble in the margins of the published books he'd written, correcting new thoughts that he had continued to have on those subjects, and expanding the bibliographies when other scholars continued to publish related works, often in response to his own. In doing this, he once told me, he felt he was keeping the books not merely up to date but alive,2 changing, even though most of his notes never found their way into new editions.
(Of course a book lives on in one sense as long as anyone reads it, but it doesn't continue to grow like a living thing unless the author acknowledges the ways it could be improved.) I kept such a file on The Implied Spider , right from the point of no return in page proofs. But this time, to my delight, Columbia University Press has given me the chance actually to make the changes, to give the book a second incarnation a decade after its birth.
Perhaps we could even call it The Revised Spider. Aside from the more trivial errata, most of the changes consist in additions to the cluster of examples that illuminate or substantiate particular points in the original text, adding more players to my team in defense against potential critics. For the old, mad, bad idea of making the study of religion a science rather than an art continues to corrupt the discipline, though to be honest, comparative mythology has always gotten bad press.
Method loop variant 10
I had originally noted Shakespeare's Fluellen as the very model of a bad comparatist, but a sharper, more relevant satire on a comparatist is the villain in one of the great novels of the nineteenth century, George Eliot's Middlemarch. The Reverend Edward Casaubon, a pompous, arrogant, selfish megalomaniac, is every comparatist's nightmare. Here is how he is first introduced: He told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.
Scale ladder variant 11
I also came to see that comparative approaches that subordinate context to morphology or shared meanings need a stronger defense in the face of the continuing move, in the field of religious studies, away from anything that smacks of a broader universalism. I haven't changed my basic thinking about comparison; I haven't gone over to the dark side of hard-core Marxist-Foucaultian historical studies.
But I now realize more fully how much is lost if context is abandoned, and how many ways there are of contextualizing comparison to make it richer. In other words, I intend to hold my ground, but I now acknowledge that the arguments against my position are stronger than I had previously recognized and must be faced more boldly and honestly, if only to reculer pour mieux sauter. An unexpected ally in defense of comparison, not only despite but also precisely because of the loss of context, is the team of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin.
Arendt writes in her introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations : From the Goethe essay on, quotations are at the center of every work of Benjamin's. This very fact distinguishes his writings from scholarly works of all kinds in which it is the function of quotation to verify and document opinions, wherefore they can safely be relegated to the Notes. This is out of the question for Benjamin.
Contrast pair 12
Hub map 13
Such comparison still begins with the scholar's formulation (however arbitrary) of the subject of study, the micromyth, and the selection of at least two cultures that have thought about that subject. But at that point, a second process intervenes, taking into account the historical context of each occurrence of the micromyth, showing how it was inspired or configured by the events of the times, how it responded to what was happening on the political and economic scene. The two contexts can then be compared, along with the two myths, as can the relationship between each story and its context.
This contextualized synchronic approach avoids some of the worst pitfalls of the more purely morphological comparisons of the Eliadean school. It helps us to see not merely that stories change but why they change. I sketched out, in the first edition of this book, the way I was trying to do this in my comparison of the myths of the shadow Helen in Greece and the shadow Sita in India; the result is the book Splitting the Difference.
Cycle 14
In the first edition I argued that the focus on context to some extent dulls our appreciation of individuality. The question of originality is always a puzzle, in part because we can never account for individual genius; of course ideas don't arise in a vacuum, nor are they nothing but the sum total of ideas that came before them. Individuals have ideas, often quite different from the ideas of other people living at the same time and place.
Preface tension Doniger revisits.
Myth and History
This brings us to the relationship between myth and history. My ideas about this changed largely as a result of writing about the political uses of myth through the course of Indian history in The Hindus: An Alternative History. And at the same time as I was moving closer to history, history was moving closer to me, as the insights of postmodernist historians (Collingwood, Hayden White) exerted an increasingly pervasive influence on the study of myth.
Method loop variant 15
(Ideas generally reach historians of religion a decade or two after the anthropologists and historians have thrown them out.) Yet few scholars of myth, however postmodern, would argue that myth and history are the same thing; and we have to be careful how we use each to understand the other. For example, when the Ramayana (one of the two great ancient Indian Sanskrit epics) speaks of ogres (Rakshasas), it may be simultaneously constructing an imaginary world in which evil forces take forms that can destroy us and using ogres as a metaphor for particular types of human beings.
Scale ladder variant 16
Rama left no archeological or inscriptional record. There is no evidence that anyone named Rama did or did not live in Ayodhya; other places, in South India as well as North India, also claim him, for the Ramayana was retold many times, in many different Indian languages, with significant variations. There is no second Troy here for a Schliemann to come along and discover.
Contrast pair 17
Or, rather, there is a second, and a third, and a nineteenth Troy for anyone to discover. To take another example, when we read a text that says that a Hindu king impaled eight thousand Jainas,10 we need to use history to understand myth-that is, we need to know a bit of history to understand why such a story was composed and retold many times. That means knowing the reasons for the tensions between Hindus and Jainas at that time (such as the competition for royal patronage).
But we cannot use the myth to reconstruct the actual history behind the text; we cannot say that the text is evidence that a Hindu king actually did impale Jainas. Such myths reveal to us the history of sentiments rather than events, motivations rather than movements. But stories, and the ideas in stories, do influence history in the other direction, into the future.
Hub map 18
People who heard or read that story about the impaled Jainas may well have acted differently toward Jainas and/ or Hindus (better or worse) as a result. More often than not, we do not know precisely what happened in history, but we often know the stories that people tell about it. In some ways, the stories are not only all that we have access to but all that people at the time, and later, had access to, and hence all that drove the events that followed.
Cycle 19
Real events and sentiments produce symbols, symbols produce real events and sentiments, and real and symbolic levels may be simultaneously present in a single text. Myth has been called "the smoke of history,"11 and we must constantly strive to separate the smoke of myth from the fire of historical events, as well as to demonstrate how myths too become fires when they do not merely respond to historical events (as smoke arises from fire) but drive them (as fire gives rise to smoke).
Method loop variant 20
Contextualized comparison sketch.
Myth as smoke and fire of history.
Telescope supplements microscope.
Closing summary
This chapter gathers its sections into a usable habit for comparative work on myth: keep double vision, name context, and refuse both forced sameness and isolationist silence.
Introduction: Myth and Metaphor
Myth and Metaphor This book is about why and how myths from different cultures should be compared. I will take up the "how"-the actual method, the step-by-step procedure that a comparatist may follow-in chapters 4 and 5.
Contrast pair 2
Book architecture: why then how.
Introduction
Myth and Metaphor This book is about why and how myths from different cultures should be compared. I will take up the "how"-the actual method, the step-by-step procedure that a comparatist may follow-in chapters 4 and 5. But in the first three chapters, and in the final one, I will take up the "why" of comparative mythology.
I will be talking about all sorts of stories; but the points that I wish to make are particularly relevant to myths, one discrete subdivision of the broader category of "story." It is customary in scholarly approaches to myth to begin with a definition. I have always resisted this, for I am less interested in dictating what myth is (more precisely, what it is not, for definitions are usually exclusivist) than in exploring what myth does (and in trying to demonstrate as inclusive a range of functions as possible).
Scale ladder variant 21
Defining myth requires building up the sorts of boundaries and barriers that I have always avoided and that this present work is specifically designed to combat. I do not wish, for instance, to limit myths to stories involving supernatural beings (though many myths do), and though there are important differences among myths and epics, legends, history, and films, in many ways I think these texts function similarly and should be studied together. I certainly would not limit myths to written texts, let alone ancient written texts; they may be written or oral, ancient or contemporary.
On the other hand, I would also narrow the field of my concern in certain ways: all myths are stories, but not all stories are myths. In my definition, myths raise religious questions (which of course means that I should define religious questions, and I will in chapter 3). But my remarks are intended to apply only to the rather narrow field of comparative mythology within the broader field of the history of religions (which would include doctrines, rituals, ethics, and so forth), not the entire discipline of religious studies (which would include philosophy of religions, psychology of religions, and so forth).
Other considerations would certainly have to be taken into account in an argument for comparison within these larger arenas. And it is worth keeping in mind at all times that myth is not an active force in itself but a tool in the hands of human beings-and different human beings will not only use it in different ways but also define it in different ways. The word may seem to be the same, but-like the narratives it represents-it will have different meanings in different contexts.
Contrast pair 22
But not everything in it is false! Right!2 Jacques Roubaud, in his postmodern fairy tale, The Princess Hoppy, or, The Tale of Labrador , plays with this idea: "The tale always tells the truth. What the tale says is true because the tale tells it.
Some say that the tale tells the truth because what the tale tells is true. Others that the tale doesn't tell the truth because truth is not a tale. But in reality what the tale tells is true of what the tale tells that what the tale tells is true.
Hub map 23
And this ambivalence in the definition of myth endures to the present day. I will make further claims for myth in each chapter of this work, claims that could be taken as part of a cumulative working definition (the only sort of definition that I am comfortable with): in chapter 1, that myth combines distant and near views; in chapter 2, that it is greater than the sum of its parts; in chapter 3, that it expresses cross-cultural human experiences; and in chapter 4, that it expresses both an idea and its opposite, reveals-or sometimes conceals-certain basic cultural attitudes to important (usually insoluble) questions, and is transparent to a variety of constructions of meaning.
Cycle 24
In this present work, I wish simultaneously to use certain metaphors to explain what comparative mythology is and should be, and to argue more theoretically that comparison is a kind of metaphor, and that we all think metaphorically and comparatively. (The wonderful thing about metaphors is that they are simultaneously real and unreal. When I presented an early version of chapter 1 as a lecture in Atlanta, two evolutionary biologists came to it, thinking that it was about real microscopes and telescopes.
Method loop variant 25
Pumpkinhead begins it by insisting, "I don't understand your language. You see, I came from the Country of the Gillikins, so that I am a foreigner…. So it will be impossible for us to understand one another." So the Scarecrow sends for the allegedly bilingual Jellia Jamb and offers Jack a chair.
But Jack insists, "If you wish me to sit down you must make a sign for me to do so." The Scarecrow pushes him violently into the chair and asks politely, "Did you understand that sign?" "Perfectly," declares Jack. The interpreter then arrives and translates Jack's harmless greeting into, "He says that your Majesty's brains seem to have come loose," and the Scarecrow muses, "What a fine thing it is to understand two different languages." But when the Scarecrow instructs the interpreter, "Ask him, my dear, if he has any objection to being put in jail for insulting the ruler of the Emerald City," Jack indignantly protests, "I didn't insult you!" "Tut-tut!" cautions the Scarecrow; "wait until Jellia translates my speech.
Scale ladder variant 26
Plato keeps both poles.
Working definition cluster.
Bringing-across family.
Land of Oz language joke.
Chapter One: Microscopes and Telescopes
In this first chapter I will consider the metaphor of the microscope and the telescope in the functions and the analysis of myths, and will demonstrate my method by comparing texts from two traditions, the Hebrew Bible and Hindu mythology. Let me begin by arguing that the microscopic and telescopic levels are intrinsically combined within the myths themselves.
Hub map 3
Narrative continuum.
Myths As Textual Lenses
In this first chapter I will consider the metaphor of the microscope and the telescope in the functions and the analysis of myths, and will demonstrate my method by comparing texts from two traditions, the Hebrew Bible and Hindu mythology. Let me begin by arguing that the microscopic and telescopic levels are intrinsically combined within the myths themselves. One way to begin to define myth is to contextualize it on a continuum of all the narratives constructed of words (poems, realistic fiction, histories, and so forth)-all the various forms of narrations of an experience.
If we regard this textual continuum as a visual spectrum, we may use the metaphor of the microscope and/or telescope to epitomize the extreme ends of this narrative vision. The end of the continuum that deals with the entirely personal (a realistic novel, or even a diary), the solipsistic ("This never happened to anyone but me"), is the microscope; this is where I would situate a dream or the entirely subjective retelling of an experience. Some novels on this end of the continuum may be contrasted with myths in several respects.
Contrast pair 27
These novels depend on the individual; character is all-important; these novels say, this could only happen to this one person or at least only did happen to this one person. In most myths, by contrast, character, except in the broadest terms (young or old, wise or foolish), doesn't count at all; myths say, this could happen to anyone. Yet some novels are more like myths than others; many novels assume that the drama of a few representative men and women speaks to our condition.
And while "romantic realism," a phrase denoting a detailed description of a particular event or person that simultaneously conveys another meaning, is often used to categorize some novels, it also applies to certain myths in which a detailed description of an actor vividly suggests the myths' applicability not only to many individuals but also, sometimes, to certain abstract concepts. Eliot hoped that James Joyce would beget a lineage of mythological novelists: "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr.
Hub map 28
Here at the telescope end is where we might locate experiences unimaginably great ("This has happened to two million Armenians, six million Jews," or even, "This is happening every day in some one of the billions of other planets in the galaxy"). It is also where we might imagine an ideal experience devoid of any human telling, devoid of subjectivity-though this is a purely theoretical construct. On this continuum between the personal and the abstract, myth vibrates in the middle; of all the things made of words, myths span the widest range of human concerns, human paradoxes.
Cycle 29
The simultaneous engagement of the two ends of the continuum, the same and the different, the general and the particular, requires a peculiar kind of double vision, and myth, among all genres, is uniquely able to maintain that vision. Myth is the most interdisciplinary narrative. The reflecting telescope uses a concave mirror as its eye,5 and some scholars of myth have used the related images of reflection and transparency to express the ability of myth to capture simultaneously the near and far view, as in the title of A.
Method loop variant 30
The same thing occurs in the mythical signifier: its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full."7
Scholarly f-stops.
Scholarly Lenses on Myths
Scale ladder variant 31
"God is in the details," as Mies van der Rohe said (though he also said that the devil is in the details). But through the telescope end, we can see the unifying themes. We might distinguish three levels of lenses in methods for the analysis of myths: the big view (the telescope) is the universalist view sought by Freud, Jung, Eliade; the middle view (the naked eye) is the view of contextualized cultural studies; and the small view (the microscope) is the focus on individual insight.
In chapters 3 and 4 I will suggest two different, specific ways the big view and the small view can be combined in a scholar's work; here let me approach the more general question of scholarly focus. Where do we set the f-stop? When do we use a wide-angle lens, a zoom lens?
Contrast pair 32
Victor Hugo posed this question: "Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view? Choose."9 The subjective nature of this choice, and of vision through any lens, is best demonstrated, I think, by a story that James Thurber told of his youth, when his eyesight was already very poor.
Hub map 33
When you first look through binoculars, for instance, you can't see a thing. You look at the inside of the barrel; you blink and watch your eyes; you play with the focus knob till one eye is purblind. The micro scope is even worse.
Cycle 34
Method loop variant 35
Our choice of lens level is arbitrary, but not entirely so, for it is circumscribed by certain boundaries that we ignore to our peril. The choice is heuristic: we choose a specific level in order to make possible a specific task. Where we focus depends on the sorts of continuities we are looking for; in all instances, something is lost and something gained.
One particular focus lets us ask just one set of questions, but does not stop other people from focusing in other ways. Taking the two extreme ends, the microscope and the telescope, as I propose to do, at the cost of the middle focus (or the focus provided by normal human vision), is another way of expressing my choice to focus on the individual and the human race in general, at the cost of the focus on any ethnic group or historic moment or cultural milieu-a choice I will defend in chapter 3 and apply in the micromyth and the macromyth in chapter 4, though I will now qualify it in the ways that I laid out in the preface to this second edition.
Scale ladder variant 36
My choice of these two extreme points of focus is sustained, though hardly validated, by the tendency of the myths themselves to maintain these polarized foci-though always, of course, with the mediation of culturally specific materials. Let us therefore turn to the myths, to see how they do it.
Contrast pair 37
Job lens shift.
Myths As Theological Lenses in Job and the Bhagavata Purana
How do texts provide us with microscopes and telescopes? I will approach these questions first by taking a look at two texts from two different cultures, the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible and the Sanskrit text of the Bhagavata Purana , and then by considering the role of the double focus in human life. When, in the Book of Job, Job confronts God, the level of focus of the text changes, and that changes the level of focus of the text's readers or hearers.
What precedes this transitional point in the text is Job's sufferings, not the sufferings of a Greek hero or a Shakespearean king, but everyday sufferings (admittedly raised to the nth degree), "the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to":12 the loss of our possessions (the destruction of Job's livestock), the deaths of those we love (friends and parents, Job's children), physical illness (cancer and heart disease, boils), injustice. Job tries, in vain, to deal with these problems in the normal human way, with words-words of acceptance, words of denial, arguments with his friends, arguments with his wife, arguments with God.
Hub map 38
That is, he naturally enough confronts the problem on the plane on which he experiences it, the plane of human experience, human injustice, human grief. Instead of giving a direct answer to any of Job's arguments-for they cannot be answered-God sends him the voice from the whirlwind. Refusing to deal on the level of argument, of logos , on which the problem remains insoluble, the text catapults Job out of the plane of his existence onto another plane altogether, that of muthos.
It whips the microscope of self-pity out of his hand and gives him, in its place, a theological telescope. The voice of God begins at the beginning, with cosmogony, the making of the world: "Where were you when I planned the Earth? Tell me, if you are so wise.
Cycle 39
In the Book of Job, too, God poses riddles: "Does the rain have a father?" Stephen Mitchell, the author of the beautiful translation that I am using, comments on this in his introduction: "Does the rain have a father? The whole meaning is the lack of an answer. If you say yes, you're wrong.
If you say no, you're wrong. God's humor here is rich and subtle beyond words."19 Beyond words, indeed. The power of the passage lies not in its arguments, its words, but in its images, more precisely in the dizzying way it ricochets back and forth between images of cosmic machismo and of familiar, treasured things.
Method loop variant 40
First, the cosmic (though even here connected to the personal, for the great constellations are called by their nicknames): "Can you tie the Twins together or loosen the Hunter's cords? Can you light the Evening Star or lead out the Bear and her cubs?… If you shout commands to the thunderclouds, will they rush off to do your bidding? If you clap for the bolts of lightning, will they come and say, 'Here we are'?" Then, in contrast, familiar things evoke family and human reproduction, viewed in the mirror of animal metaphor: "Do you tell the antelope to calve or ease her when she is in labor?
Do you count the months of her fullness and know when her time has come? She kneels; she tightens her womb, she pants, she presses, gives birth. Her little ones grow up; they leave and never return." This passage-which repeats the motif of counting and time, measuring again-sets up a tension in the outer frame of the story too, for Job has lost the one thing that is most precious to him of all: his children, his posterity.
And is God mocking this value in Job when he tells him of an ostrich who has lost her offspring and does not care? When, in the end, God has the last word, it is the word beyond words. He mocks Job-"Has my critic swallowed his tongue?" And Job replies, lamely, "I had heard of you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you.
Scale ladder variant 41
Therefore I will be quiet, comforted than I am dust." This is a comfort that renders words irrelevant; Job says, "I am speechless : what can I answer ? I put my hand on my mouth, I have said too much already; now I will speak no more." But this vision, and its brand of comfort, is of course expressed in words, the words of the text, the words of the myth-muthos, not logos. Does Job forget the image of the beast who "chews clubs to splinters and laughs at the quivering spear"?
We are not told, but it is clear at the end of the story that Job is caught up once again in the snug and smug world of material wealth and family pleasures, in which we first encountered him: "So the Lord blessed the end of Job's life more than the beginning. Job now had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters"-and a partridge in a pear tree.
Contrast pair 42
We are back in the world of account books and dowries, business as usual. We have moved back from the cosmic measuring cord to the cash register. But we have also moved back to a world in which God has restored to Job what is most precious to him in real life: another set of children, his posterity.
Hub map 43
Many readers refuse to accept this invitation. For them, if they identify with Job, it is certainly not a game-it has real consequences in their lives. For the author, perhaps, who kills Job's children (fictional creations, after all) for his sport, and more than sport, and who moves the reader for his sport, and more than sport, it is a very serious game indeed.
Cycle 44
Method loop variant 45
Hey, pal!" And he begs him to turn back into his pal Krishna, which the god consents to do. Again the worshipper is comforted by the banality, the familiarity of human life. Outside the text, however, the reader has been persuaded that since war is unreal, it is not evil; the warrior with ethical misgivings has been persuaded to kill, just as God kills.
Illusion endings compared.
Myths As Political Lenses
We have seen how myths use different scales of words, different verbal lenses, to link theology with daily reality. The abstract end of the textual continuum may be antipolitical (though certainly not a-political) if it withdraws the gaze from human affairs entirely, to a life of philosophical contemplation or renunciation-religious or other-or eschatological expectation. But the process of generalization, of abstraction from local detail, has a political aspect as well: it is where we begin to look beyond our selfish personal concerns and think globally, environmentally; think of the future; think of what is happening elsewhere on the planet Earth; think of the consequences of what we say and do and write for people in political circumstances very different from our own.
Scale ladder variant 46
Just as our theological vision is opened up by myths like those discussed above, so too our political vision may be opened up by our own myths: by the juxtaposition of certain texts with the events of our lives; by the comparison of myths from other cultures; and, most of all, by the interaction of political and theological texts acting as lenses for one another, so that we see each differently, better, through the insights of the other. Here again, if one should ask of politics and theology, "Which is the reality?" the answer is "Yes." In Thomas Keneally's book Schindler ' s List (and in the film),42 the hero stands on a high hill, mounted on a high horse, and views, as if through a telescope, the panorama of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto.
Contrast pair 47
At the end of Oh What a Lovely War, the hero whom we have come to know and care about in the course of the film-through the cinematic microscope-is fighting in the trenches. He is shot, the movie shifts into slow motion and silence, and we see him sitting on the grass at a picnic on a hill in England with his family, full of the mellow drowsiness of sunshine and wine. He leans back against a tree to take a nap, but the tree becomes a white cross that marks his grave, and he vanishes.
As the camera zooms back farther and farther from the cross, enlarging our field of vision, we see that the cross on the grave of the soldier we know is just one among the millions of crosses marking the graves on the battlefields of France, one small white tree in a great forest of death. For a second, or perhaps ten seconds, we are able to experience, simultaneously, the intensity of personal grief that we feel for that one soldier and our more general, cosmic sorrow for the astronomical numbers of young men who, as we have long known and long ceased to notice, died in World War I.
A similar double vision of another war, the American Civil War, is achieved in the scene in Gone With the Wind (1939)46 when Scarlett O'Hara's horror at the suffering of one soldier is suddenly magnified as the camera zooms back to reveal the horrifying dimensions of the full slaughter, the enormous Atlantan square full of wounded and dying soldiers. In a Star Trek episode,47 the half-Vulcan Mr. Spock, who has the ability to "bond" with other minds, suddenly experiences agonizing pain when he senses the death screams of four hundred Vulcans on a star ship some distance from him.
Hub map 48
McCoy expresses his amazement, Spock says, "I have noticed this insensitivity among wholly human beings. It is easier for you to feel the death of one fellow-creature than to feel the deaths of millions." And when McCoy asks if Spock would wish that empathy upon humans, Spock replies, "It might have rendered your history a bit less bloody." Our myths allow us "wholly humans" a glance through the telescope of Vulcan vision. "One man's death is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic," said Joseph Stalin (who knew whereof he spoke).
The myth turns the statistic back into a tragedy, turns the telescope back into a microscope. But sometimes, like Job, we need to change the lens in the other direction. In fury and despair, Job gazes through the microscope at the millions of tiny gnats that are gnawing away at his peace of mind.
And the poet magnifies them for us, magnifies the banality of human suffering, the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt put it. "A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye," as Horatio says to Hamlet,48 speaking of the way our own eyes magnify the small things that trouble us. This same mote, as Matthew tells us (7.3), is the sign of our selfishness, our inability to see ourselves in proper proportion to other people: "Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" Whenever the microscope of our ego rivets our gaze to the minutiae of our daily lives, myths may catch our eye and make us see with our telescopes, make us think about the stars and the galaxy and how small the planet Earth is.
Cycle 49
And it is difficult for us to think like this for long. It is difficult for us to go on living with care and concern and at the same time to stay fully aware that "Our lives don't really amount to a hill of beans," as Rick (Humphrey Bogart) says at the end of Casablanca49 when his own love affair, which had seemed all that mattered in the world, is dwarfed by the giant reality of the Nazi threat, seen through the political telescope.
But just as Job and Yashoda could not believe for long that their lives were unreal, so we can't live our lives if we think only about the galaxies, or the Nazis, or the children who are dying of starvation or disease or gunshot wounds on the streets of our own cities as well as in wars and famines throughout the world. We can't think about those things for long because we are human and we care about our lives, about what film we're going to watch tonight.
Method loop variant 50
Yet at the same time we know that there are all those galaxies out there, and all those children. This tension in us, in either direction, haunts us and threatens either to dim the intensity of the pleasure that we rightly take in our lives or to weaken our commitment to causes beyond our lives, causes that we undertake for the sake of those who will inhabit this planet hundreds of years after we have died. The difficult choice between the two foci is captured in Reinhold Neibuhr's prayer (now best known as Alcoholics Anonymous's "Serenity Prayer"), which asks for the serenity to bear the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to tell the difference.
But wisdom often nudges us in the direction of "serenity" or acceptance of other peoples' lives, which we can simply ignore. The sorts of stories I have been discussing-myths like the Book of Job and the story of Krishna-and other sorts as well may inspire a number of different reactions in the reader-regret, guilt, rage. Too often they fail to produce comfort.
Scale ladder variant 51
But sometimes they shake us out of whatever focus we happen to be stuck in. The tension gives rise to the myth. And this tension may affect us in many different ways, of which one, perhaps the most idealized but very real nevertheless, is to inspire us to strive to keep both of these levels of political vision, the microscopic and the telescopic, alive in us at the same time.
Gita epiphany loop.
Myths As Human Lenses
Contrast pair 52
Kierkegaard's general insights into human nature allowed Roosevelt to understand not that the Nazi evil had occurred (which, by then, he knew) but how it could have occurred. Delbanco also wrote about the effect of the publication of John Hersey's Hiroshima in a 1946 New Yorker magazine: Hersey gave the anonymous victims of the nuclear firestorm faces and names. He showed the citizens of Hiroshima in the kitchen, on the porch, putting their children in pajamas in the moments before the bomb fell.
Hub map 53
Cycle 54
The other is a map of Europe with pins marking the advance of the Allied forces-too late, as we now know, to allow that first chart to grow more than a few poignant inches. They are roughly the same size, those two charts, and they represent the tragic intersection of the tiniest, most banal personal concern and a cataclysmic world event. For me, they are the microscopic and telescopic view of the Holocaust, side by side.
We can use these lenses either to see or to blur a world that we cannot fathom. In great myths, the microscope and the telescope together provide a parallax that allows us to see ourselves in motion against the stream of time, like stars viewed from two different ends of the Earth's orbit, one of the few ways to see the stars move. And when we take into account myths not, perhaps, from different ends of the Earth's orbit, but at least from different ends of the Earth, we have made our mythical micro-telescope a bit longer than the one provided by our own cultures, and we can use it to see farther inside and also farther away-a double helix of the human paradox.
Method loop variant 55
To jump ahead to the argument that I will make in subsequent chapters, not just for myths but for comparative mythology, the individual text is the microscope that lets us see the trees; the comparison is the telescope that lets us see the forest. The myth allows us to look through both ends of the human kaleidoscope at once, simultaneously to view the personal, the details that make our lives precious to us, through the microscope of our own eye and, through the telescope provided by the eye of other cultures, to view the vast panorama that dwarfs even the grand enterprises of great powers, that dwarfs the sufferings of Job and of ourselves.
Scale ladder variant 56
Every time we listen to a story with mythic dimensions, about human beings in crisis, and really listen and think about the ways it is telling us the story of our own lives-and not the story of our own lives-we see for a moment with the double vision of the human microscope and cosmic telescope.
Mouth-as-cosmos motif.
Bhagavata Purana cycle.
Two directions of lens change.
Stalin line inverted.
Human-lens case.
Relative span myth claims.
Levels Cyril Smith style.
Chapter Two: Dark Cats, Barking Dogs, Chariots, and Knives
In chapter 1, I spoke of the inherent ability of myths to compare the views of the microscope and the telescope, to use different scales of words and different verbal lenses to link theology with daily reality. In this chapter I will argue that this ability suggests that myth is an inherently comparative genre, in a double sense: it both compares and is amenable to comparison.
Cycle 4
Ch. 2 agenda: comparison sideways as well as vertical
The Difference of Dark Cats
In chapter 1, I spoke of the inherent ability of myths to compare the views of the microscope and the telescope, to use different scales of words and different verbal lenses to link theology with daily reality. In this chapter I will argue that this ability suggests that myth is an inherently comparative genre, in a double sense: it both compares and is amenable to comparison. In chapter 1 I also argued that myths may use microscopes and telescopes to link daily reality with global-indeed, galaxial-politics; that some myths open up our political vision just as other myths open up our theological vision, when juxtaposed with the events of our lives.
I also suggested that political and theological texts act as lenses for one another. Now I argue that the comparison of myths from other cultures opens up our political vision. Where chapter 1 vertically linked the cosmic and the banal within any single myth, the cross-cultural agenda I consider now looks sideways, constructing links between different tellings of myths in different cultures.
Contrast pair 57
My introduction argued for the uses of metaphor; this chapter and the next use three metaphors from the animal world-dark cats, barking dogs, and implied spiders-to advance the argument for comparison. A rich body of evidence suggests that people compare things all the time, consciously or unconsciously, with useful results. Comparison, is, after all, the basis of our value systems; to the question, "Do you like this, want this?" the answer is often, "Compared with what?" Maurice Chevalier, when asked on his eightieth birthday, "How do you like being eighty, Monsieur Chevalier?" is reputed to have replied, "Considering the alternative, I like it very well." Hilaire Belloc, during the reign of Queen Victoria, remarked of the lurid details of the life of Queen Cleopatra, "How very unlike the domestic arrangements of our dear queen." Comparison is our way of making sense of difference.
Indeed, comparison of things acknowledged to have something in common is the basis of our entire way of making sense of the world, our intellectual taxonomy, our survival system. The caveperson who reasoned, "This saber-toothed tiger looks a lot like that lion I saw yesterday; this animal, too, may try to eat me. Therefore, I should run from this tiger as I ran from that lion" is our ancestor.
The one who reasoned, "I've never seen an animal like this before. That lion yesterday had no stripes; this animal has. There is the difference of the mane, too.
I wonder if…" did not live to bequeath his genes to us. The problem of the same and the different has become a central issue within the field of comparative mythology and for the self-definitions of postmodernism. The simultaneous engagement of the same and the different, the general and the particular, requires precisely the kind of double vision that myth, among all genres, is best able to maintain.
When I think no thing is like any other thing I become speechless, cold, my body turns silver and water runs off me. There I am ten feet from myself, possessor of nothing, uncomprehending of even the simplest particle of dust. But when I say, You are like a swamp animal during an eclipse, I am happy, full of wisdom, loved by children and old men alike.
Hub map 58
Cycle 59
Method loop variant 60
Scale ladder variant 61
Dark cats: sameness is often an artifact of bad light
The Dog That Doesn’T Bark
The metaphor of barking dogs has been used by historians of religions to describe various uses of comparison,29 but like all good myths, it bears retelling in each new context and can always be used in new ways. Sherlock Holmes once solved a mystery, the case of Silver Blaze, a racehorse, by using a key clue of omission. When Inspector Gregory asked Holmes whether he had noted any point to which he would draw the inspector's attention, Holmes replied, "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time," objected the puzzled inspector, the essential straight man for the Socratic sage.
Contrast pair 62
Hub map 63
Comparison defamiliarizes what we take for granted. We can only see the inflection of a particular telling when we see other variants. The behavior of dogs offers another paradigm for the comparatist.
Both the nature and the training of foxhounds make them use their noses, not their eyes (as sighthounds like Borzois do) to track the fox. A foxhunting colleague of mine, David Grene, once described his frustration on seeing a fox just yards away from young hounds who had their noses to the ground and insisted on following the scent off into the distance where the fox had been and back again to where he was now-but would not be for long.
Cycle 64
The comparison that chooses an Other in which the initial likeness is more immediately apparent is more ethnocentric; it is easier and ultimately it proves less. But what aspects of the Other define Otherness? My colleague David Tracy, the Catholic theologian, is fond of engaging in dialogues with Buddhists; I used to chide him that he was taking the easy way out by choosing the reasonable, ethical Buddhists; to dialogue with Hindus would be the real test-all those gods, all those arms and heads.
Method loop variant 65
Scale ladder variant 66
But it must immediately be qualified by both difference and the shift of center: one must go on to say, "I am like you," "I will be able to understand you because I am like you," and then, later, "I see ways in which you are in fact not like me." One must end by going over to the other side. For instance, if you know the Greek epic, the Iliad , you begin reading the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana , by saying, "It's like the Iliad " (an epic).
Contrast pair 67
But then you must shift ground to notice how the Iliad is not like the Ramayana. It is natural but not good to be ethnocentric; acknowledging it is the first step but cannot be an excuse, a justification; you have to go on to see how the rest of the world is. There is no value-free comparison, but you do the best you can.
The initial, assumed comparison is always between us and the Other; this happens whenever we confront a single phenomenon from a culture not our own. Indeed, one of the arguments in favor of the comparative method is that even methods that pretend to be culturally specific are in fact comparative, when you take into account the fact that the scholar studying the one Other culture will always be making implicit judgments based upon implicit comparisons between the Other culture and the scholar's own.
Hub map 68
Moreover, particular tellings need comparative insight to prevent the interpreter from glossing that telling only in terms of the specific cultural context: a Cinderella tale in India, for instance, may very well be told in terms of the caste system (Cinderella treated as an Untouchable), but it cannot be explained only in those terms, once one knows that the story also occurs in other cultures that have no caste system. When we go on from these initial, implicitly comparative assumptions to compare one Other with another Other, we are doing what is explicitly called comparison.
But we are always pivoting upon our own understanding, which forms an invisible third side in the eternal triangle of the comparison of two other things. Deconstructionists see this subjectivity as inevitable in any interpretive position, and in a sense it is. But it is also a strength for anyone engaged in explicitly cross-cultural work: the observer, the one who compares the stories, stands at the intersection of cross-cultural paradigms and the unique events of history.
Cycle 69
By positioning herself on the plane of the various story lines, a scholar is able to triangulate and to construct a three-dimensional corpus of related stories. Of course, another person at another point of the triangle would construct a different corpus, but such structures are not competing for a single prize of Truth. Smith has put it well: "In the case of the study of religion, as in any disciplined inquiry, comparison, in its strongest form, brings differences together within the space of the scholar's mind for the scholar's own intellectual reasons.
Method loop variant 70
That third thing, the third side of the comparative triangle, is what makes them similar in my view: they both have a particular plot that interests me. To say that both the story of Tamar from the Hebrew Bible and the story of Helena from Shakespeare's All 's Well That Ends Well have meaning for me, in America in 2010, speaks for a degree of generality: some problems that confronted Tamar and Helena are also being faced by contemporary American women.
Scale ladder variant 71
When myths tell us what happened, they do not always tell us why the people in the story did what they did or how they felt about what happened to them. To this extent, the myths remain open and transparent and can be retold within one culture or in several cultures with several very different meanings. Laconic texts leave us in the dark, where one thing looks much like another.
Contrast pair 72
Barking-dog metaphor for comparative omission
The Same Old Story
What do we mean when we say that the story of Tamar and the story of Helena are variants of "the same" myth? No two retellings of the same story are quite alike. Even two variants of a story composed by one person at different moments, or two identical recitations of one variant heard by the same person at different moments, may be very different.
Hub map 73
The signifiers translate from Sanskrit to English, but what is signified may be very different indeed. And since the meanings given to those structures even within a single culture often differ dramatically, we can expect even wider variations when we cross the boundary into another culture. The myth that is reassembled from "the same" parts, even a variant that presents "the same" parts in "the same" order, may take on a new meaning and become a different myth within a single culture, let alone when it is translated into another.
Cycle 74
In Anthony Trollope's novel Kept in the Dark , a man and a woman meet; he tells her his story, that he was jilted by his fiancée; she, it happens, has just jilted her own fiancé, and hesitates to tell him this because, she reasons, her story is the same as his story and he will think that she is mocking him, throwing his own story back in his face. She keeps the secret of her previous engagement even after she eventually marries him.
When he finds out, he is deeply troubled-not by the similarity, but by the difference: her fiancé was a cad and a bounder, unlike him; and his fiancée was a silly little girl, unlike her. And even if their stories were in essence the same, why did she assume that this would estrange them rather than draw them even closer together (as, in the end, it does)?
Identity across variants is contested but workable
The Context
Attention to cultural specificity is part of the Hippocratic oath of historians of religions, including mythologists. The need for historical, in addition to cultural, specificity demands even more rigor, for it requires that the phenomenon (in my case, the myth) be contextualized not only in space (the bounds of the culture) but also in time (the particular moment in that culture when the myth was told). This demand is one that many historians of religions regard as even more essential to their work than the demand for cultural specificity.
Texts have contexts, are determined by their contexts; the context in which "the same" story is told may totally transform its meaning, like the glass of water in the old toast to the exiled kings: when James II and James III were in exile in France, their supporters in England, forced to toast the reigning kings whom they did not recognize, would raise their wine glasses and say, "To the king"-but they would hold their wine glasses over their water glasses, so that they were in fact toasting "the king over the water." Exponents of the myth-and-ritual school argue that the ritual (the equivalent of the gesture with the wine glass) holds the key to the meaning of the myth (the equivalent of the words of the toast). With myths such as the story of Eden, which we will consider in chapter 4, the particular point in time and space in which the myth is told may serve, like the glass of water in the toast, to turn the meaning on its head.
Method loop variant 75
Even if we acknowledge that the myth in all of its widely distributed forms carries some cross-cultural human meaning, what it says about this basic meaning differs not only from culture to culture but also within individual cultures. And when one culture borrows a plot or a theme from another, it becomes a different plot; it is not "the same" story anymore. Context is the key to the answer offered by Laura Bohannan to a question we considered above-Would the author of a story in the Hebrew Bible have felt like Shakespeare about such things as sexual rejection?
Yet I would be the first to grant that a story told in a different context can become a very different story. Jorge Luis Borges writes about the difference between two tellings of a story that are literally the same, word for word, in his tale of Pierre Menard, who personally reinvented Cervantes' story of Don Quixote: It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine): …truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.
Scale ladder variant 76
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "lay genius" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: … truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor. History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding.
The content of the piece is not insignificant, either: if history is truth, then when the same words move forward in history, they are no longer the same words. Wherever possible, it is important to note the context: who is telling the story and why. Even when we do not know the answers to these questions (as is usually the case, especially with ancient texts), it is still useful at least to hazard an educated guess (a guess I will try to make about women's voices).
Contrast pair 77
Even though we cannot know the context of the readers (let alone the authors) of many of our ancient texts, we ourselves, as readers, are a context, sometimes the only one to which we have access: we can always know (and sometimes only know) what the texts mean to us. And when we do not know the true voice of the tellers, the original authors and audiences, we must, faute de mieux , listen to the voices in the text. But even when we do know the author, the text's embeddedness in its culture makes it extend beyond its "author." Texts may be not only androgynous but also, ultimately, nonsectarian.
Their authors may not be anonymous, but they are collective. And that collectivity extends beyond the bounds of culture to other cultures that may share many of the same plots and agendas, despite their different historical experiences. Moreover, the contexts themselves are embedded in the texts if we know how to look for them, in the unique details that each text takes from its context.
Clearly we lose a great deal when we lose context. But comparative work need not be contextualized to be rigorous, and concern for context can become hypertrophied. Of course, it is essential for the comparatist to know the general context in order to have data against which to test any interpretation (this means learning languages, reading commentaries, and so forth).
Hub map 78
Often the best way to understand a myth is by understanding how it differs from other myths in the same culture as well as from variants in other cultures. We might also compare the contexts themselves, and some people do. We can, for instance, compare performative contexts, asking in each case, What makes a teller choose to tell that story then?
Cycle 79
Method loop variant 80
Context can reverse a myth like a Jacobite toast
The Whole and the Parts: Chariots and Knives
Given the change that inevitably takes place when a myth is moved from one culture to another, how can one argue for the continuing identity of one story in many variants, or the essential unity in cross-cultural variants of a story? One might adapt to this case the argument that was made by William James about Sir John Cutler, who had a pair of black worsted stockings that had been darned so often with silk thread that they had no trace of the original thread.
Scale ladder variant 81
Which, if either, is the original Ship of Theseus? David Hume used the metaphor of the Ship of Theseus to argue for the continuing identity of one person in many different forms: A ship, of which a considerable part has been chang'd by frequent reparations, is still consider'd as the same; nor does the difference of the materials hinder us from ascribing an identity to it…. This is the case with all animals and vegetables; where not only the several parts have a reference to some general purpose, but also a mutual dependance on, and connexion with each other.
Contrast pair 82
Hub map 83
And scientists tell us that our bodies are entirely regenerated, cell by cell, every seven years (the period also traditionally regarded as the limit for sexual fidelity, the so-called "Seven Year Itch," perhaps not a coincidence). Ernest Gellner has argued that Hume's Enlightenment metaphor of the ship was designed to prevent a kind of Manichean splitting: [Hume's] Treatise on Human Nature gave a profoundly un -dualistic account of man, and one continuous with nature…. So duality was overcome: the old cohabitation of Angel and Beast was replaced by Hume's famous "Bundle of Perceptions." The elements from which this bundle was assembled were exactly the same as those of any other object of nature, and were simply accumulated by the senses.
Cycle 84
The Buddhist text is in itself a fine example of cross-cultural understanding: it is The Questions of Milinda , which purports to record a conversation that took place between the Greek king Menander, who ruled in northwestern India about the middle of the second century B.C.E. (though the text is later by some centuries), and the Buddhist sage Nagasena, who converted the king to Buddhism. Here is a somewhat condensed version of their conversation, another version of the sage-and-stooge routine that we first encountered in the tale of Sherlock Holmes (with the added Socratic twist: "Read my mind"): King Menander asked, "How are you known, and what is your name?" and Nagasena replied, "I'm known as Nagasena, your Majesty; that's what my fellow monks call me.
Method loop variant 85
But though my parents may have given me such a name, it does not imply that there is a permanent individual." The king said, "If your fellow monks call you Nagasena, what is Nagasena? Is it your hair?" "No, your Majesty." "Or your nails, teeth, skin, or other parts of your body, or the outward form, or sensation, or perception, or the psychic constructions, or consciousness? Are any of these Nagasena?" "No,your Majesty." "Then for all my asking I find no Nagasena.
Surely what your Reverence has said is false." Then the Venerable Nagasena addressed the King. "Your Majesty, how did you come here-on foot, or in a vehicle?" "In a chariot." "Then tell me what is the chariot? Is the pole the chariot?" "No, your Reverence." "Or the axle, wheels, frame, reins, yoke, spokes, or goad?" "None of these things is the chariot." "Then all these separate parts taken together are the chariot?" "No, your Reverence." "Then is the chariot something other than the separate parts?" "No, your Reverence." "Then for all my asking, your Majesty, I can find no chariot.
Scale ladder variant 86
The chariot is a mere sound. Sure what your Majesty has said is false! There is no chariot!" "What I said was not false," replied the king.
"It's on account of these various components, the pole, axle, wheels, and so on, that the vehicle is called a chariot. It's just a generally understood term, a practical designation." "Well said, your Majesty! You know what the word 'chariot' means!
Contrast pair 87
Together, the two cross-cultural uses of this image provide a parable of the similar-in-the-different. Ramanujan made a good case against Hume and for Nagasena, using a folk metaphor for the way that different histories make the "same" symbol different: A bird had golden feathers, and plucked them out one by one to help her friends. Each time a feather came off, a black feather came to take its place.
Hub map 88
Cycle 89
Chariots, ships, knives: whole and parts metaphors
Whole/parts metaphors for myth persistence
Chapter Three: Implied Spiders and the Politics of Individualism
What do we mean by saying that a story is "the same as" or even "similar to" another story while acknowledging that the context is different? We often feel that the various tellings of a much-retold myth are the same, at least in the sense that they do not disappoint us by omitting what we regard as essential parts of the myth, without which it would lose at the very least some of its charm, and at the most its meaning.
Method loop variant 5
Universalist problems start from felt sameness
Universalist Problems
What do we mean by saying that a story is "the same as" or even "similar to" another story while acknowledging that the context is different? We often feel that the various tellings of a much-retold myth are the same, at least in the sense that they do not disappoint us by omitting what we regard as essential parts of the myth, without which it would lose at the very least some of its charm, and at the most its meaning.
When we say that two myths from two different cultures are "the same" we mean that there are certain plots that come up again and again, revealing a set of human concerns that transcend any cultural barriers, experiences that we might call cross-cultural or transcultural. As Marina Warner puts it, Of course there are fairy tales unique to a single place, which have not been passed on. But there are few really compelling ones that do not turn out to be wearing seven-league boots.
Method loop variant 90
What happens to us when we die? How did men come to be different from women? Questions such as these, which are the driving force behind myths, have no empirical answers, and there is much disagreement about the nonempirical answers that have been advanced.
Scale ladder variant 91
Different cultures predispose their members to perceive shared experiences differently and to ask shared questions differently. Cross-cultural comparisons therefore have much to contribute to the insoluble chicken-and-egg paradox of nature versus nurture: if we suspect that certain things are culturally constructed but several different cultures construct them in the same way, that sameness strikes a blow on the side of nature. The themes held in common with other texts may not constitute the most important aspect of a myth, but they do make a useful base from which to ask questions about differences.
Some of the questions posed by myths and some of the images and the naked outlines of a narrative are cross-cultural, but the shared images and ideas are structured in a narrative in different ways, so as to give very different answers and sometimes to ask different questions. Onto the shared base, each telling adds something unique, sometimes transformingly unique. And a shared meaning need not be an identical meaning.
Contrast pair 92
All we need point out is that the same forms do appear in many different places, in response to human experiences that appear to be similar on at least one level, and that they take on different meanings to the extent that those experiences turn out to be dissimilar on other levels. This essential quality of being shared, of extending beyond the individual, is part of the power of myth on its most basic level. For when myths are told in a group or enacted in a ritual, they lose their solipsistic terror and become communal, so that the individuals who have experienced the phenomenon that the myth is about-loss, existential anguish, emotional chaos-can say, "Ah, so it's not just me." (Bruno Bettelheim argues for this function of scary folktales told to small children, in his The Uses of Enchantment.) Mythic communities thus form a kind of archaic self-help group, Paradoxes Anonymous.
As Shylock said in defense of one minority group, "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
Hub map 93
Sweat, urine, feces, phlegm, mucous, and blood flow out of all our bodies. How then are the classes distinguished?" (12.181.5-10). Kennedy, in his epoch-making speech at the American University in 1963, trying to end the Cold War, named what he regarded as "our most common link": "We all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal." The arguments of Antiphon, Shylock, and Kennedy arose out of political, rather than academic debates, and are unabashedly romantic, but their point is useful in a more general humanistic argument.
Cycle 94
My single, seminal experience (for each myth) is a human one that occurs again and again, such as the withdrawal of a mother at the moment of inevitable separation. The parallelism between these two events is obvious: both are about the loss of a creator, though Plato's loss occurs on what I would call the level of the telescope, mine on the level of the microscope. I would take from Plato not the specific content of his theory but the outlines of the process that he specifies: the fragmentation of myths from a single experience.
Behind a narrative is an experience, real or imagined: something has happened-not once, like a historical event, but many times, like a personal habit. Narrative does not receive raw experience and then impose a form upon it. Human experience is inherently narrative; this is our primary way of organizing and giving coherence to our lives.
Method loop variant 95
And we can get close (as close as Achilles got) to this ideal raw experience by extrapolating from what all the myths have in common, modified in the light of what we can simply observe about the human situation in different cultures. A parallel to the Platonic experience behind the myth may be seen in linguistics (an area from which other mythologists, notably F. Max Müller10 and Claude Lévi-Strauss, have drawn their inspirations).
Scale ladder variant 96
Certain words are strikingly similar in a number of Indo-European languages: foot (English), pied (French), fuss (German), ped (Latin), pada (Sanskrit), etc. Following linguistic rules such as Grimm's Law, which tell us how sounds change through time, it is possible to construct the one *proto-Indo-European word that could have given rise to all the words in the group. That word does not exist; the asterisk that precedes it marks it as a purely theoretical construct.
Doniger: bottom-up continuity beats grand systems
Cross-Cultural Solutions
Demonstrating that a particular myth does in fact occur in every known culture is theoretically impossible, since stories are being forgotten and cultures created all the time. Moreover, this task is, in practice, unlikely to be achieved even in approximation. But even if we were able to prove that a certain myth was universal, we would have to explain its universality in terms of some universalist theory (Jungian, Freudian, Eliadean, or at least diffusionist), a daunting proposition.
Contrast pair 97
On the other hand, to assert that a myth occurs cross-culturally is merely to show that its meanings are not bounded by any one particular culture, a far less ambitious task (though no sinecure, either). The universalism of most systems of comparison can, I think, be avoided. The great universalist theories were constructed from the top down: that is, they assumed certain continuities about broad concepts such as sacrifice, or a High God, or an Oedipal complex; but these continuities necessarily involved cognitive and cultural factors that, it seems to me, are the least likely places in which to look for crosscultural continuities.
The method that I am advocating is, by contrast, constructed from the bottom up. It assumes certain continuities not about overarching human universals but about particular narrative details concerning the body, sexual desire, procreation, parenting, pain, and death, details that, though unable to avoid mediation by culture entirely, are at least less culturally mediated than the broader conceptual categories of the universalists. Elaine Scarry argued this well: The concepts of body and voice… though not themselves prior to cultures and artifice, are perhaps as close to prior as is possible, for they appear to emerge as explanatory rubrics in early moments of creating, or when there is some problem in the relation between maker and made things that carries us back to the original moment of making.
Hub map 98
Cycle 99
Working from the bottom up also encourages a scholar to build an argument like an Irish wall: a good Irish wall needs no mortar, for if the stones are selected carefully and arranged so that they fit together tightly, they will hold one another up and the wall will stand. So too, if a scholar selects her texts carefully and places them in a sequence that tells the story she wants to tell, she will need relatively little theory to explain why they belong together and what sort of an argument they imply together.
Method loop variant 100
Title metaphor: shared humanity as silk, not culture itself
The Implied Spider
Scale ladder variant 101
Contrast pair 102
Sometimes there is smoke without fire. But the wind, the author, the dream, the spider (and, in a psychological sense, the ghost and the lover)-above all, the experience-must have existed in some way to leave the tracks that we see, the bent stalks, the text, the secondary revision, the web (and the shadows and the footprints)-the narrative. And they are essential points from which we orient (or, for most people, occident) the materials that we can get back to, the materials of the narrative.
Hub map 103
Recently, Joan Aitchison used the metaphor of the spider and the web to describe the universality of human language in terms not inconsistent with our earlier discussion of Chomskian grammar: Webs, especially cobwebs, may entangle. Yet webs themselves are not a tangle. They have a preordained overall pattern, though every one is different in its details.
Cycle 104
Nature forces humans to weave the language web in a particular way, whatever language they speak. We are free only within a preset framework…. But humans, unlike spiders, can think about the webs they have woven.
Method loop variant 105
The details, and the superfluous cobwebs, vary from culture to culture and from individual to individual. But the mind itself, the basis of language and myth, is part of what could truly be called a World Wide Web.
Three challenges to comparison
The Postcolonial and Postmodern Critique of Comparison
I have been arguing for the uses of comparison despite the problems that it poses. But in the discipline of the history of religions, scholars have, by and large, abandoned universalist comparative studies of the sort that Mircea Eliade made so popular, as had the triumvirate of Frazer, Freud, and Jung before him.
The most common arguments against extant works of comparison are that they lack rigor; that they advance unfalsifiable universalist hypotheses; and that they are politically unhealthy. I will take up these three challenges one by one.
Scale ladder variant 106
As for the lack of rigor, it is certainly true that there is a great deal of shoddy and superficial comparative work flying about; the less talented acolytes of the great comparatists of the early twentieth century have fallen into many of the pits I have described above as well as others that we will consider below, and given comparison a bad name. One of the reasons I lost my temper with Joseph Campbell was because he did it wrong and made it harder for me to persuade people that it was possible to do it right;44 his static monomyth is the very antithesis of the ceaselessly engaged and always subject-filled approach that I argue for here.
Contrast pair 107
I would also insist that the comparatist have a knowledge of the language of the primary texts of at least one of the traditions in question, which would then inspire a proper sense of caution and limited ambitions in the inevitable dealings with translations of texts from other traditions, an understanding of what one can and cannot do with translations. And the comparatist must know the context-at the very least, have read a good book by someone who really knows the context-in order to know the meaning of the text, even though she may not use the context in the comparison.
I hesitate to say any more in the abstract about rigor other than that, like pornography, lack of rigor is something I always know when I see it. Rigor for me comes out of practice, out of being aware of the sorts of problems and assumptions that are addressed in this book; and out of adhering carefully to a step-by-step method like the one that I am about to describe. But there is always a danger that rigor will turn into rigor mortis.
Hub map 108
A glance at any newspaper should tell us that this goal has yet to be fulfilled in the world at large. But the academic world, having gone beyond this simplistic paradigm, now suffers from a post-postcolonial backlash. In this age of multinationalism and the politics of individual ethnic and religious groups, of identity politics and minority politics, to assume that two phenomena from different cultures are "the same" in any significant way is regarded as demeaning to the individualism of each, a reflection of the old racist attitude that (in the dark of their own skins) "all wogs look alike." In our day too, and at the other end of the anticolonial continuum, seeing correspondences between cultures has come to be regarded as politically retrograde for different reasons.
Cycle 109
Merely by emphasizing their commonalities, we are implicated in what Rolena Adorno has called "the process of fixing 'otherness' by grasping onto similarities." Other evil effects of simplistic comparison have already taken their toll in some of the social sciences today (particularly political science and economics), where dominant theories like that of "rational choice," supposedly the same for everyone, have driven out the more particularized disciplines of area studies. Psychologists also have, until quite recently, too often assumed a universal biological, cognitive, and affective base for human behavior, neglecting cultural factors.
Method loop variant 110
But we must beware of leaping from the frying pan of universalism into the fire of another sort of essentialism that can result from contextualizing a myth in one cultural group. In this Kali Yuga of cultural essentialism, we must search for something that is essential but not essentialist. Indeed, I might formulate the basic problem addressed in this chapter as the problem of competing essentialisms.
And by essentialisms I mean hypotheses about the unity of a group that a scholar holds on to even when they have destructive results, like a monkey who traps himself by refusing to let go of a banana in his fist inside a cage whose opening is big enough for his fist but not for the banana. I mean a priori prejudices (and, as I have argued, any scholarly hypothesis must begin with something like such a prejudice) that are not dropped or modified when members of the target groups turn out to be different.
Scale ladder variant 111
Contrast pair 112
If all stories on a given theme were the same, any study of them would make a very short book: one text and a very long footnote. But if they were all entirely different, incomparably, incommensurably different, not only would there be nothing to compare, but also we would never be able to understand any story but our own. We must strive to "keep an exquisite balance between the Platonist drive to unity and the nominalist drive to the irreducibly particular.
Hub map 113
Campbell as foil for doing comparison wrong
The Art and Science of Mythology
Cycle 114
But I do not see why careful comparison of individual texts should not be public, precisely in the sense of illuminating qualities that are shared by a large number of individuals. I would hope that a good comparatist could strive simultaneously to demarginalize art (to use artistic examples in comparative studies) and to deprivatize religion (to show how these individual examples are relevant to a very broad human continuum). That the comparatist is part scientist, part artist is too seldom acknowledged.
Method loop variant 115
Scale ladder variant 116
Smith argues, that what the comparatist creates is not "out there" but in the comparatist's mind. Yet this would be to give away too much, for, as I have argued about the implied spider, it is not only in the individual scholar's mind; it is also out there, in other peoples' minds. Indeed, we trust the artist, not as we trust the scientist-because of our ability to falsify or duplicate her experiments or even to apply her formulas-but rather because we have faith in her ability, like that of a scientist, to see connections (however subjective) among phenomena that really are out there.
Contrast pair 117
So art and science form, each within itself and together, another continuum, with degrees of dependence on the data out there and the inspiration in here. And on this continuum, the comparatist stands halfway between the "pure" artist and the "empirical" scientist. For the phenomena that the comparatist deals with are "out there" to a greater degree than are the materials of most artists, such as those who paint on entirely blank canvas.
Hub map 118
It is also a less obvious yet equally valid paradigm for the work of both the artist and the scientist, and for the work of the comparatist.
Art and science of mythology loop
Chapter Four: Micromyths, Macromyths, and Multivocality
Chapter 1 discussed the inherent ability of myths to compare the views of the microscope and the telescope. Chapters 2 and 3 suggested that myths from different cultures are both comparative and comparable.
Scale ladder variant 6
Ch. 4: multivocality toolkit
The Myth with No Point of View
Chapter 1 discussed the inherent ability of myths to compare the views of the microscope and the telescope. Chapters 2 and 3 suggested that myths from different cultures are both comparative and comparable. This chapter will discuss the micromyth and the macromyth as scholarly constructions that make comparison possible.
Myths are retold over and over again for several reasons: because the community becomes attached to the signifiers, and they become authoritative and historically evocative; because myths are at hand, available, like the scraps of the bricoleur, and using them is easier than creating from scratch; and because they are intrinsically charismatic. But perhaps the greatest of all myth's survival tactics is its ability to stand on its head. The very word myth is one of a small but interesting group of words that mean, usually for reasons of historical conflation, both one thing and its opposite (like cleave -meaning both "adhere [to]" and "split [apart]").
Cycle 119
Similarly, sacer in Latin (English "sacred") means "wonderful" or "terrible," and altus, "high" or "deep," depending upon context. Kal means either "yesterday" or "tomorrow" in Hindi, an ambiguity that accounts for some, though not all, of the confusions about time that prevail among South Asians, but the word basically just means "time" and connotes "one day from today" (in either direction). Anglo-Indian is a more complex in-built contradiction, meaning either someone at the very top of the social scale in colonial India (an English aristocrat governing the Indian colony) or someone at the very bottom (a person of mixed English-Indian blood, a half-caste).
Method loop variant 120
(Wittgenstein would, I think, have appreciated a more recent double image that has been circulated on the Internet. Close up, it looks like Albert Einstein, but from five feet away, it is the spitting image of Marilyn Monroe.7 ) That is precisely what myths force us to do: see both at once, which can mean both the telescopic and microscopic view captured by a single myth, or the view of the "same" story in its different forms in two different cultures, or the "same" myth carrying opposite meanings for different people even within a single culture.
Scale ladder variant 121
Nies Bohr's remark about a profound truth, and its opposite, applies most closely to myths, which sometimes contain not merely their opposites but the whole range of meanings between one opposite and the other. As we saw in the introduction, the word myth has two very strong, very opposite meanings, depending on one's point of view: "truth" and "lie." Even the proto-demythologizer himself, Plato, spoke with a forked tongue when he spoke about myths. But it is really myth itself that hunts with the hounds of truth and runs with the hare (or fox) of antitruth.
The hero kills the monster, but even as he does so we perceive that the opposite is also true: the monster kills the hero. The hero carries off the princess, yet even as he does we perceive that the opposite is also true: the hero deserts the princess. They keep the mythical blood in circulation.
Contrast pair 122
Let's imagine that all the variants of a certain myth have been lost, erased by some invisible hand. Would the myth still be the same? Here one arrives at the hairline distinction between myth and every other kind of narrative.
Hub map 123
In this chapter, I consider each of these three related aspects of myth, beginning with the transparency that makes them all possible and going on to the political implications of this multivalence and multivocality of myths. Transparency comes from the experience behind the myth, which is transparent or neutral at least in the sense that it is capable of being interpreted from any number of different points of view. Although we cannot have access to an untold experience, we may hypothesize an untold story, a nonexistent story told with no point of view at all.
Cycle 124
If it is in a story we say "and then?" If it is in a plot we ask "why?" That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by "and then-and then-" They can only supply curiosity.
Micromyth / macromyth workflow
Many Voices
This quality of myth, its ability to contain in latent form several different attitudes to the events that it depicts, allows each different telling to draw out, as it were, the attitude that it finds compatible. But each telling may have within itself, simultaneously, several points of view, several voices. Thus when we have seen the variants of the myth of the man, the woman, and the serpent, etc., we can take another, harder look at the inflected version that we know (in this case, the Book of Genesis).
Method loop variant 125
And then we can notice the text's ambivalence about the tree (there are, after all, two trees) and indeed about the woman and the fruit, even in the story as it is told in the Hebrew Bible, a text often alleged to have a single point of view ("patriarchal"). Setting aside the possibilities raised by multiple authorship, any perceptive author is simultaneously aware of the points of view of all the characters in the story. Homer tells the Iliad from the vantage point of an elite dead white male; but he allows Thersites to show us the underside of the Trojan war.
Shakespeare both condemns and defends Othello; the voice of Feste in Twelfth Night, or of the Fool in King Lear, is a built-in voice of subversion. Myth is like opera in its ability to represent several different people saying different things at the same time; in an opera, you can hear them all at once as separate voices, instead of the incomprehensible babble that results in real life if several people speak at once. The multivocality that characterizes myth reaches its apotheosis in the quartet from Rigoletto, the sextet from Lucia di Lammamoor, and the final trio from Rosenkavalier, when each character speaks from his or her heart, each voice contributing to a single pattern of song.
Scale ladder variant 126
Contrast pair 127
On the great seventh-century frieze at Mamallapuram, in South India, there is a man standing on one leg in a yogic posture, about whom art historians have argued for many years. Some say he is the hero Arjuna, generating inner heat to persuade the god Shiva to give him a special weapon; others say it is the sage Bhagiratha, who also appears in the Mahabharata (3.105-8) (and in the Ramayana [1.42-3]), generating inner heat to persuade the heavenly Ganges (the Milky Way) to come to earth to revive the ashes of his grandfathers.
Hub map 128
Cycle 129
The surrealist paintings of De Chirico or Magritte or Escher function like myths in suggesting narratives and a place that is in two worlds at once, our world and another that plays by different rules. The art of bricolage, of objets trouvés, is intrinsically mythic, as are all the images, from Lascaux to present-day Christian icons, that refer to a story that everyone in that particular culture knows. But they do not always tell us-or even the people within the culture-what to think about that story.
Method loop variant 130
Scale ladder variant 131
Or perhaps we might say that if dogma moves in a Ptolemaic universe and novels move in a Copernican universe, myths move in an Einsteinian universe, a place of true relativity. One particular trick of myths contributes greatly to their multivocality: the literary convention of nested tellings of stories within stories, which collapses all the tellers from the outermost layer to the central, most immediate one so that often we do not know which voice is speaking; they all speak simultaneously.
Contrast pair 132
Mieke Bal has argued for this sort of multidimensionality in the interpretation of myths in the Hebrew Bible, including not only the myth of Eden (whose multidimensionality I have just argued for) but also myths about sexual tricksters like Tamar: Focusing on the different subject-positions involved in narrative has allowed me to differentiate between the status of various expressions. That is how it was possible to notice both the idea of lethal love and its problematic background, its struggle against other views of love, its insecurity.
Hub map 133
If David kills Uriah for love, we don't need to assume that the overall ideology of the text agrees. And this for the simple reason that there is no overall ideology of the text. The type of narratological analysis advocated in this study provides insight into what the text presents as problematic.
Love is not lethal, but there is a problem for some people who think it is: such is the statement I have read in the stories, if statements there were at all. What went wrong in the history of the reception of these stories is precisely the repression of the problem, hence, of the heterogeneous ideology of the text, which had to be turned into a monolithic one. Textual subjectivity had to be replaced with the subject of the text….
Cycle 134
From transparent myth to contested tellings
Micromyths and Macromyths
The multivocality of myths is a quality that we encounter in actual texts. But a myth-still in the sense of a story embodied in a group of texts-can be analyzed through two kinds of nonoccurring metamyths, which I would call a micromyth and a macromyth. The micromyth is the neutral structure that I have been describing, the nonexistent story with no point of view: "A woman and a serpent in a tree gave a man a fruit…." It is an imaginary text, a scholarly construct that contains the basic elements from which all possible variants could be created, a theoretical construct that will enable us to look at all the variants at once and ask questions of all of them simultaneously.
It minimizes, though it cannot entirely exclude, the expression of any point of view. The micromyth is not merely a scaffolding on which each culture erects its own myths; it is more like a trampoline that allows each culture to fl y far away to its own specific cultural meanings, leaping to make wildly different variants instead of remaining stuck to a limiting, constraining structure (a description often used for archetypes). After all, even the same skeleton can support very different bodies.
Method loop variant 135
Abraham Lincoln and Marilyn Monroe had, basically, the same skeleton (give or take a rib or two). The micromyth is not a colorless grid, but rather a rainbow or a beam of pure light that seems colorless until it is refracted through the prism of a particular cultural telling. It's like one of those haystacks that Claude Monet kept painting over and over again, not primarily for their own sake (though haystacks are not without meaning-breast shapes, harvest time, autumn, the country) but in order to paint the light at different times of day and year, to depict by the indirection of the haystack that same pure beam that, like the spider, no one can see or paint directly.
Scale ladder variant 136
The subjectivity of this choice does not make the micromyth any more arbitrary than the "third thing," for the scholar chooses not just what interests her personally (if she did, no one would buy the book), but what is important in her time, to her students and colleagues. The micromyth must be situated at the intersection between our questions and those asked by other cultures, in the area that remains when we have jettisoned both contemporary questions peculiar to our own culture and ancient questions that have no analogues in our day.
Tell us in expanded detail [vistarena]," and the narrator goes back and tells the whole story, filling in the gaps left by the micromyth that he used as bait to snag the curiosity of the audience-including, of course, the audience outside the text. As a heuristic device the micromyth provides us with a springboard by which to vault over several otherwise insuperable hurdles in the comparative enterprise. It enables us to compare as variants of "the same" basic narrative different versions that embellish that narrative with different points of view.
Contrast pair 137
It is useful as an armature that defines a group of texts. The micromyth only superficially resembles what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth;39 it is more particularly constructed on combinations of specific concrete details. If we define the micromyth as a sentence, with a subject noun and a verb, often also with an object noun ("A woman and a serpent in a tree gave a man a fruit"), we exclude the adjectives and adverbs that betray the presence of the editorializing and moralizing author.
Hub map 138
When we add a verb, such as "gives" or "bites," the meanings of the resulting micromyth are more circumscribed than the meanings of the noun alone, because the meaning of the micromyth is constructed in the area in which the two terms, the noun and the verb, intersect, each activating a particular subarea within the larger potential area of meaning of the other term: another Venn diagram (or spider's web). Bynum has articulated another good reason to focus on what he calls motifs (and I call micromyths) rather than on nouns (that he calls symbols): A symbol is by nature a perfectly adequate purveyor of meaning in its own right whenever it passes between persons who are initiated into its symbolism.
But a narrative motif by itself means nothing and cannot even be identified apart from the other motifs surrounding it in the story-patterns to which it belongs. Moreover, when one is not privy to the symbolism of an image used symbolically, it means little or nothing, and no amount of effort will suffice to extract its symbolism from it alone, because symbolism is meaning associated with an image and not resident in the image itself. But in their proper patterns, narrative motifs bear certain meanings inherent in narrative regardless of whether anyone apprehends that meaning or puts it to any extra-narrative use whatsoever.
Cycle 139
The micromyth makes it possible for us to find meanings shared by all the cultures that share the myth, meanings over and behind the individual cultural inflections. It allows us to isolate within a group of myths a core that no teller of those myths from any culture would find foreign, and that retains some intrinsic meaning that is not limited to any single text. It allows us to outline the borders of the sphere of influence of any particular myth.
Method loop variant 140
It is also useful as a source of some basic cross-cultural meanings that may not be explicit, or even conscious, in individual tellings but are there, latent, and give the punch to the manifest meaning that may at first appear to be the only meaning of any culturally specific retelling. Just how interesting those cross-cultural meanings are is determined by the balance between, on the one hand, a structure simple enough to accommodate a significant number of variants and, on the other hand, a corpus of detail complex enough to constitute a distinct, unique myth.
It comes down, again, to the subjective question of where to make the cut. For you can state any myth in a series of forms that can be arranged on a continuum: you can say, "A man and a woman had children," and it applies to a million stories and hardly tells us anything we do not already know. Or you can include all the details of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, which is not quite like any other myth.
Scale ladder variant 141
Depending on where you draw the line of details, you can argue that the stories are more similar or more different. I choose to make the cut for the micromyth where they are relatively similar, and to begin by investigating what it is that they share. The micromyth, however, systematically eliminates all the detail that gives the myth its color and complexity, if not its meaning.
Contrast pair 142
Abandoning the mythic analysis when you have just isolated the micromyth is like abandoning psychoanalysis at the point when the personality has been dismantled, before it has been rebuilt. To put it differently: comparison involves a "second naïveté" like the one implicit in our emphasis on the individual: the initial comparison is superficial, but the human meaning deepens as the comparison leads us into the individual culture and then goes below the culture to still deeper levels of human meaning. For in order to note the particular spin that each individual telling (not merely each individual culture) puts on the basic tale, including details that no other telling has, we must use the basic units we have formulated, the micromyths, to construct a macromyth.
Inverted political versions and readings
The Myth with Points of View
Hub map 143
One of the reasons myths generate so many variants is that they wrestle with insoluble paradoxes, as Claude Lévi-Strauss noted long ago,56 and they inevitably fail to pin the paradox to the mat. The failure to fit a round peg into a square hole generates potentially infinite ways of not fitting a round peg into a square hole-hence our multiple variants. Edison replied, "Results!
Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won't work."57 Myths, too, know thousands of things that won't work. But sometimes this ongoing system of trial and error leaves logical holes in a myth large enough, as the Irish saying goes, to drive a coach and horses through.
Cycle 144
For most traditions, the hole becomes part of the story; you tell it that way, note the pothole, and walk around it. The community ignores the hole until someone falls in; this is what Mieke Bal calls "the repression of the problem." But as the years go on and sensibilities change, suddenly someone notices the hole; some smartass kid shouts out that the emperor has no clothes, and then a new suit has to be woven for him, a new episode inserted in the myth to cover its logical nakedness, suddenly exposed after so many years of polite, tacit agreement to ignore it.
Method loop variant 145
Scale ladder variant 146
Contrast pair 147
Yet the racism of the sermon loses its force in the new context of the English village, where both heathens and jackals are unknown. Moreover, the sermon gradually undergoes a sea change without altering a syllable of the text; after a while it loses its original subtext of "How we colonials do long for England" and even its next subtext of "What an idiot this vicar is" to evolve into a new tradition: The words had temporarily touched the heart of many an obdurate trooper, and hearing them again, as he had heard them year after year since Mr.
Hub map 148
Cycle 149
Like sand in an oyster, the insoluble problem is an irritant that keeps generating literary pearls; like a string suspended in a supersaturated solution (which is to say, a culture), it keeps generating literary crystals. The different ways the "same" story can be interpreted within a single culture (or a closely related group of cultures) may be seen in a myth that is as important to the ancient Indo-European world as the myth of Eden is to the world of Judaism and Christianity: the story of Yama and his sister Yami.
Method loop variant 150
It is the same myth and not the same myth. But there is another way myths generate variants: by inspiring not two parallel versions of the same story but explicit parodies, which assume that the audience knows the version being imitated and use that assumption to challenge its point of view. (The two versions of the Indo-Iranian incest myth may actually fall into this category, though it is difficult to know from the historical evidence.) We have already seen this process at work in the myth of Genesis, with satires (or at least subversive responses) by people like Shelley, Royall Tyler, and Mark Twain.
Fairy tales too can be rearranged in order to make ironic points. Here is a contemporary satiric inversion of the story of the Frog Prince: Two guys, "with the experience that comes with age," [are] playing tennis. At one point, the ball rolls into some bushes, and when one of the players goes to retrieve it he is confronted by a frog who claims to be a beautiful princess who has been turned into a frog by a mischievous wizard.
Scale ladder variant 151
If the player will kiss her, the frog assures him, she'll revert to her princess state and marry him, and they'll both live happily ever after. The player pockets the frog and returns to the game. After a bit, the frog, inside the player's pocket, croaks, "Sir, did you forget about me?
Contrast pair 152
Multivocal myth texts
Inverted Political Versions
To speak of an army is to speak of politics. Roland Barthes sees myth as essentially nonpolitical; but whereas I would see myth as pre political, he see it as post political, as a text from which politics has apparently been extracted: What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined, even if this goes back quite a while, by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality….
Hub map 153
Cycle 154
We can see the protean political nature of myths at work in a few examples that I have taken from contemporary culture. They are mythic not in any explicit religious content but in the looser secular terms that Barthes has defined for such contemporary mythic practices as wrestling,77 and in my own terms of a story transparent to polarized retellings. These are myths that swing both ways, politically speaking, and have generated separate, polarized variants.
Method loop variant 155
A rather touching reversal of this sort took place in a single, pregnant phrase in Moscow in 1991, the moment of glasnost. Moscow subways have no safety devices to protect people who get caught in the doors; instead, Muscovites are subjected to a droning voice that repeats, over and over ad nauseam, "Warning, the doors are closing." In 1991, people started wearing T-shirts depicting subway doors made of prison bars and inscribed with the motto: "Warning, the doors are opening." Two very different versions of the same switch-hitting story by Alexandre Dumas were filmed a decade apart.
In 1929, Douglas Fairbanks made The Iron Mask,78 playing the part of d'Artagnan, who protected the good king Louis XIV when the evil Rochefort (Ulrich Haupt) tried to put the king's (evil) twin brother on the throne of France. The film was remade in 1939 as The Man in the Iron Mask,79 with Warren William as d'Artagnan, but now with a twist: this time, d'Artagnan was the protector not of the king, now regarded as evil (Louis Hayward), but of the twin, now regarded as virtuous.
Scale ladder variant 156
Contrast pair 157
Hub map 158
The basic narrative remains stable: the cowboys move West, the Indiansattack, the cowboys circle the wagons, the Indians kill some of the cowboys, the cavalry arrives at the eleventh hour, and they and the cowboys massacre all the Indians. When I was growing up in the '40s and '50s we saw films with these plots, and we cheered for the good cowboys and booed the evil Indians. Now we see the same films (Dances with Wolves84 is a good example), but we cheer for the good Indians and boo the evil cowboys.
Cycle 159
"The same" myth, but now a different idea has been attached to it. It is "the same" narrative, based on the undeniable outlines of actual history, which I would include in what I am calling experience: the white man did move West, and many white men and women and Native Americans died in the resulting clash of cultures. "The same" characters were involved, too, but the narrative has a very different meaning.
We might have assumed that the Indiansalso told more or less "the same" story except that they always rooted for the Indians, but until recently no one but anthropologists, perhaps, certainly no one in Hollywood, cared about those variants of the myth. The change of point of view was well demonstrated in a television program telling the story from the Native American point of view, entitled, "How the West Was Lost." Yet another development on this theme came in the film Into the West,85 which conflates the myth of the cowboys riding into the American West with the Irish myth of the land in the west where no one ever grows old; two little boys, who are Travellers (Tinkers, Gypsies), ride into the west of Ireland on their magic white horse that comes from the west of Ireland and is named Tir Na Nog (Land of the West); they sing cowboy songs and watch cowboy films, and are persecuted by the police.
Method loop variant 160
At the end, the little one asks his brother, "Are the Travellers Cowboys or Indians?" To which no answer is given. The myth of cowboys and Indians survived precisely because it was a myth, and we could stand it on its head; otherwise, if it had been a historical story that we had to keep on telling the same, now unacceptable, way, we would have had to drop it altogether. A striking example of a myth that has grafted very different political meanings onto the basic narrative, from ancient times to the present, is the Old Norse myth of the Valkyries, which already had a richly multivalent set of meanings in the medieval texts of the German Nibelungenlied and the Norse Volsungasaga: the daughters of Wotan, riding on the horses of the storm, gather up fallen warriors and bring them to a glorious afterlife in Valhalla.
Wagner added new, Aryan triumphalist layers to the meaning of the Valkyries in his cycle of operas known as The Ring of the Nibelung, and the Nazis in turn reinterpreted both the ancient myth and the Wagnerian variant for their own anti-Semitic purposes. The Wagnerian variant took on the status of a true mythic retelling; people still find, and I think will for many generations continue to find, beauty and meaning in it. The Nazi variant lasted far too long, but ultimately it did not succeed as a myth; it is no longer generally regarded as a valid retelling of the ancient tale.
Inverted Political Readings of Contemporary Mythic Texts
But inverted tellings need not replace one another; since a single multivocal myth may express diametrically opposed viewpoints, a single telling may express the traditional view cheek by jowl with a view that subverts it. And even an apparently monolithic telling may be interpreted differently by different people in the tradition (and by different scholars), and say diametrically opposed things to different readers/ listeners. In many tellings different political opinions are simultaneously expressed and may be differently perceived by individuals in the audience.
The proposed ground was the site of an old royal village, marked by the shady tree under which the council of King Mbandzeni [the last independent Swazi king, r. To prepare the ground the tree would have to be removed. On their advice the King said that the ground could be used if the tree were not touched.
Storytellers may, like judo wrestlers, use the very weight of archetypes to throw them, and with them to throw the prejudices that have colored them for centuries. Call it deconstruction, call it subversion, or just call it creative storytelling.
Chapter Five: Mother Goose and the Voices of Women
Let us now consider, among the many competing voices in multivocal myths, the voices of women, regarding them, from the standpoint of cultural morphologies, as a social group whose most basic shared interests span cultures. I remarked in the introduction that it never occurred to me that anyone would have to argue for the comparative method, which seemed so obviously useful-until I discovered that many people objected to it.
Contrast pair 7
Ch. 5: gender and mythic voice
Old Wives’ Tales
Let us now consider, among the many competing voices in multivocal myths, the voices of women, regarding them, from the standpoint of cultural morphologies, as a social group whose most basic shared interests span cultures. I remarked in the introduction that it never occurred to me that anyone would have to argue for the comparative method, which seemed so obviously useful-until I discovered that many people objected to it. I feel even more strongly about this chapter, in which the argument that there are women's voices in men's texts seems to me not only blatantly obvious but also already well argued by a number of scholars before me.
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I believe this to be true, but I think this truth has obscured another that I want to defend here: that these voices were not entirely silenced, that we can retrieve them from existing patriarchal texts. Texts composed by men often differ in interesting and significant ways from those composed by women, but not entirely, and some more than others. I argue that it is time to stop asking whose voice is the author of the text.
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We can ask whether the text expresses women's concerns and interests, points of view; but we must also acknowledge that a man can express such concerns and interests too, and a woman might not. It is precisely because feminists are successfully excavating silenced women's voices that we now have the luxury of going back to men's texts without either damning them for their lack of such voices or ignoring the traces of such voices in them. As in other matters that I have touched upon, I want to erase the either/or, to find women's voices in both women's texts and men's texts (or anonymous texts).
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There was a time not so long ago (beginning with Simone de Beauvoir's attack on Freud in The Second Sex, in 1949, and continuing through Mary Daly's definition of "therapist" as "the/rapist") when some people stopped reading Freud, newly aware of his sexism, of how much he left out of his portrait of the human psyche when he ignored the female psyche as subject. But now that feminists have begun to illuminate what Freud left out, we can read him again; they complete him for us.
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Indeed, psychoanalytic feminist scholarship, beginning with Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism in 1974, has become the cutting edge in Freudian scholarship; the feminists have, ironically, retrieved Freud from the dustheap to which other factions would consign him. This argument depends upon a spirit of true pluralism in the academy. But it is also an argument that builds on feminism's contribution to our understanding of multivocality.
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I want to use "men's" texts-the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, most of Sanskrit literature-not merely critically, to demonstrate that their dominant (but not only) agenda may be sexist; not (or not merely) to undercut their influence and privileged status by demonstrating their errors, biases, and limitations. I want to find meanings in them that transcend their gender errors, and in some cases to find gendered meanings in them that transcend their gender errors. In reading Freud's study of Dora, for example, I would search for his insights into the interpretation of texts, many of which are valid despite his serious lapse (a Freudian slip?) in totally disregarding Dora as a subject,4 a blind spot in a vision otherwise in large part still useful to us.
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As I argued for colonial scholarship, I don't want to throw out the Freudian baby with the sexist bathwater. One of the contributions that deconstruction has made to our project is in its attempts to dismantle (male) subjectivity. In the writings of Freud and most continental philosophers, no female subject is possible; but now that we have tried to imagine what a female subject could be like, we see that there is no male subject, either.
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And I would rush in, where deconstructionists deign to tread, to argue that there is no American subject, or Jewish subject, or black subject. The labels force us to go out of the project through the same door by which we entered. The solution should be to imagine a human subject, which is what I propose to do.
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And this is more likely to be accomplished not with philosophical texts, which really do have male authors who exclude the female, but with mythological and folk texts that may or may not assume a male subject (a flexibility enhanced by the assumed anonymity of such texts). Although we might expect to hear women's voices more clearly within texts composed and transmitted by women, first we have to identify those texts. Now that we have modern texts composed by women and have begun to recover more texts composed by women in the recent past, can we use them to tease out patterns of difference between male-authored and female-authored texts, and then look for the female patterns in texts from the past to establish female authorship even in anonymous works?
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It is not quite so simple. Such a project is saddled not only with the general problems of time travel and boundary-jumping that we encounter in using Shakespeare to flesh out the Hebrew Bible but also with problems specific to gender: the problem of men's voices in women's texts as well as the less obvious problem of women's voices in men's texts. We begin with a paradox: women are regarded as the traditional purveyors of myths and folktales, but most of those tales are "patriarchal," which I take to mean two things: first, men have controlled most of the written records of such stories and second, most of these records depict women in a most unfavorable light.
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How then can we hear women's voices in them? Let us consider the first part of the paradox, the assertion that women tell the stories. Plato refers to myth as the property of mothers and nurses,5 and this has remained the dominant view: "old-wives' tales" are "old" in the double sense of the antiquity of the story (the old tale) and the age of the traditional storytellers (the old wives), the women in charge of the care and feeding of myths.
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Midas Dekkers argued for a gendered asymmetry in the authorship and subject matter of stories about bestiality: Compared with reality, in which it is virtually always men who actually copulate with animals, in art the roles are completely reversed. Since most artists over the centuries have been men, the reason for this role-reversal is obvious: because it corresponds with male fantasies…. The fact that the man identifies with the animal is best illustrated by all those myths and stories in which a man actually turns into an animal….
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As always a man identifies with the active party: the animal. He is the stallion, the dog, the bull, the lusty monster with its outsized organ…. His fantasy is destroyed by the woman as beast.
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Layers of gendered voice in myth
Women’S Points of View
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She invited them to sleep in the main hall though they would have preferred the stables. When they were asleep, she asked us to set the house on fire. We saw the perfection in her plan: [their] charred skeletons would be taken for ours….
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They'd eaten our food; they'd gone to sleep trusting us. To kill them would be a great sin. Our mother looked us in the eye.
I drugged the wine, she said. As for the sin of killing them, I swear it will not touch you. I take it all on myself.
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Putting them together as Divakaruni does throws into bold relief submerged aspects of Draupadi's own problems with gender and multiple sexual partners. So too, Divakaruni's speculation that Kunti and Draupadi would suffer from the canonical tensions between an Indian mother-in-law and daughter-in-law explains several otherwise unexplained peculiarities of the plot, such as, Why does Kunti make all five of her sons marry Draupadi, in flagrant violation of Hindu custom? In this way, a woman's retelling of the story doesn't merely update it, introducing contemporary concerns; it sends us back to the ancient text to see things that the male author obscured.
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Ann Grodzins Gold has illuminated a different complexity in Rajasthani folktales told by a man: The construction of femaleness that is generated may be a vigorous and positive one, even though it emerges from an apparently misogynous text…. Episodes of [sexual] violence, such as Gopi Chand's abuse of Moti De, are described with a kind of relish that might be seen as playing to sadistic [male] sexual fantasies. However-and this may be what initially captivated me about the tale-the women in it not only have genuine power, they also have character.
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and separates the slant of the explicit text from the slant of the implicit subtext. This is a most welcome corrective to the current tendency to identify as "women's texts" those that display women as powerful or women as good. For powerful women are often depicted only in order to be destroyed or shown to be evil, and what "goodness" is is also up for grabs; if women defeat the system, this may be construed by other women as clever and resourceful, but by men as dishonest and corrupting.
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Cross-gender textual ventriloquism
Men’S Voices in Women’S Texts
We must also bear in mind the likelihood that even women authors will share the dominant mythology of their culture; they learn and assimilate the images that men have of them, and express those images in their own storytelling. Men's voices work on women on the subconscious level, through what some feminists call false consciousness. This is why, as many folklorists have noted and as we have just seen, women's tellings often do not subvert the patriarchal point of view at all, but merely offer ways either to satisfy or to evade it.
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By this line of reasoning, taking on a maternal voice in a pillaitamil would be a way of expressing devotion to a male deity. Another example of this sort of ventriloquism may be seen in a Telugu text in which love poems composed by men speaking as women for the love of (a male) god are then recast as poems sung by courtesans about their customers,47 a text that may thus be viewed as poems by men pretending to speak for women (both courtesans and female devotees).
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Yet actual men and women might have shared the authorship of these poems to some degree, though we will never know who or when or how much. Perhaps we might do best to differentiate between proximate and ultimate narrators, acknowledging their complex presence in any text.
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Salvaging women voices without essentialism
Women’S Voices in Men’S Texts
But just as there are men's voices in women's heads (and hence women's texts), so too women's voices are often closeted within patriarchal texts. How tightly shut is that closet door? Even when the final recension is controlled by a man, women's voices may speak through it.
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Certainly some men can reproduce women as subjects, with voices. Here again, what we want is not a dichotomy (women can only write about-or understand-women) but a continuum: some men come closer to others in recognizing women's subjectivity. The statement "She was a gorgeous blonde, just asking for it, so I fucked her good and then beat her up," operates, after all, on a rather different level of discourse from the statement "What does he know of love for children-of my love for Seriozha, whom I gave up for him?
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And this desire to hurt me? No, he must be in love with another woman: it can't be anything else." The first statement I have reconstructed from the memory of furtive adolescent readings of Mickey Spillane; the second (which deals directly with the question of men's inability to know what women think and feel) is by Tolstoi,53 who was neither a woman nor good to women (as his published correspondence with his wife makes horrifyingly clear) but who understood some women very well indeed and was, in this very real sense, Anna Karenina, just as Shakespeare was, in the same sense, Helena in All's Well, and Flaubert was Emma.
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It certainly does not apply to India. Since women were generally excluded from the Sanskritic tradition preserved in the myths recorded in the Vedas and the Puranas, we might hazard the guess that women's contribution was stronger in the field of the vernacular, oral folklore, but it would be difficult to substantiate such a claim-especially since there is no clear demarcation between the so-called "great" and "little" variants of any story. For although the classical Indian myths were almost always written and recorded by men, there is good evidence within the tradition itself that women-the old wives-were the source of some, if not indeed most, of the storytelling; theirs might well have been an oral contribution to the tales ultimately written down by men.
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Even an aggressively male author is a man who has a mother, a wife, and probably a mistress, and therefore he has women's voices in his head. In South India, as Ramanujan admits, men hear women's stories: Sometimes the tales that are told by women are also told by men, but a single inquiry makes it clear that, invariably, the men had heard them first from a woman in a domestic setting, usually in childhood. Young boys and girls are told such tales by older women who feed them in the evening, in the kitchen-which is exclusively the field of women.
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Androgynous Language
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In the Ocean of Rivers of Story, a medieval Sanskrit text, a woman commits adultery with the king of the gods, her husband comes home early and surprises them, and her lover takes the form of a cat. When her husband asks, "Who is here?" she replies, "It's just the tomcat," in Prakrit. But she uses her linguistic restriction as a weapon, producing an ambiguity that saves her.
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So too, our main access to the suppressed voices of Native Americans may be through the filter of the writings of white anthropologists, or to pre-Christian Celtic religions through the writings of the Christians who converted them, or to the Aztecs through the writings of the Spanish who destroyed them. This is not the kind of access we would have chosen, but it is often all we have, and better than total silence. But sometimes language is the one thing that men and women share.
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And the stuff of discourses-words and syntactic constructions- travel through many levels of discourse and do not shed all their associations when going from one to another. In other words, linguistic levels are not watertight. We can use language as a periscope to peer below the waterline, if we can tap into the associational nexus that the elements of language are part of.
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I argue that since these texts were not created by men in isolation from women, they do not express exclusively male views.
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I contend that the extensive descriptions of the interactions and shared practices of women and men are in themselves sufficient evidence that the yogini-tantras are the product of circles consisting of both women and men…. Reading texts as repositories of the insights of both men and women, rather than approaching them as texts written solely by and for men, opens new avenues of interpretation. Passages on women can be examined for potential evidence of how women viewed and experienced their own lives.
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Salvaging Women’S Voices
Here are some examples of what I would call women's voices in men's texts. Feminists have analyzed a number of Western misogynist works, among them a particular genre that denounces marriage-from the man's standpoint. Yet these texts often reproduce the voices of women, if only to disagree with them.
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And, by and large, these reasons express a woman's point of view. Nor is it necessarily the case that one sort of man composed this text and another composed the misogynistic Laws of Manu. They may well have been composed by the same man, or at least the same sort of man, who in his moments of piety excoriated women whom he regarded as evil and in his moments of relaxation sought them out (and perhaps redefined them).
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Thus when such a man wrote a legal text he would imagine the point of view of the husband (which he could do well, since he was almost certainly someone's husband), but when he composed the Kamasutra he put on (or, perhaps, took off) the hat (or pants) of the lover, which may well have also been his own hat; and, having talked to his wife (and his mistress), he was able to express the woman's point of view. There was no special caste of adulterous scribes who were the custodians of a genre that lobbied for adultery.
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With one hand (presumably the right), our educated Brahmin wrote the dharma texts; with the other (presumably the left), he wrote stories in praise of adultery. In any case, in writing the Kamasutra, he-whoever he was- incorporated the voices of women. It is interesting to note that in both cases-the French and the ancient Hindu-we find meanings that have value for us only by transcending, if not totally disregarding, the original context and, in fact, the fairly patent intentions of the author.
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When the lovers decide to join in any of the Animal Embraces mentioned above, and in others such as The Vulture Has Second Thoughts, The Mule Escapes Exploitation, and The Antelopes Form a Support Group, they first enter into deep meditation, facing one another, breathing deeply, and… then call into question the very idea of using animal names to describe human sexual activities. Rejecting this subtle mode of domination of the natural world, they separate, enter once again into profound meditation, and fall asleep….
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More seriously, the multivocality of Indian stories makes it impossible to be sure that we are hearing a male or female voice at any time: a sympathetic man may mirror a woman's point of view. And if we grant that these stories are not entirely male creations, we may view some of these myths from the standpoint of the man and others from the standpoint of the woman, even if we cannot prove that a man expressed the former and a woman the latter.
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The gender of the person who tells the story is not necessarily the gender of the dominant voice in the story. Ann Grodzins Gold compares the gendered tellings of her Rajasthani sources with the ancient Sanskrit texts translated by other scholars, including Sudhir Kakar and myself. She writes: I have noted that their major sources are largely male-authored (in the case of texts) or from the male viewpoint (in case of ethnography).
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The classical twelfth-century Japanese novel The Changelings is about a brother and sister, each of whom changes genders several times: the biological male, whom the narrator refers to by his apparent gender, when he cross-dresses, as the "sister," impregnates the imperial princess, while the biological female, the "brother," who cross-dresses as a male, is impregnated as the result of a rape. This results in surprising sentences on the order of, "He was ashamed to tell anyone that he was pregnant," and "She realized that the imperial princess was bearing her child." This text, of the type known as monogatari, is of unknown authorship: it might be by a man or by a woman.
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The confusion of male and female voices in a reworked text is well demonstrated by a famous case from the classics. Sappho, a woman poet in ancient Greece, once wrote a poem about a man looking at a woman whom she (Sappho) desired: He seems as fortunate as the gods to me, the man who sits opposite you and listens nearby to your sweet voice and lovely laughter. Truly that sets my heart trembling in my breast.
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Chapter Six: Textual Pluralism and Academic Pluralism
In chapter 3 I tried to defend comparison against charges that it lacks rigor, advances unfalsifiable universalist hypotheses, and is politically unhealthy. This last accusation sometimes takes the form of the contention that transcultural themes perpetuate stereotypes of gender, some of which we have just considered in chapter 5.
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Ch. 6: pluralism without collapse
The Archetype
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And we can change that; indeed it is easier to change if we acknowledge that it is given. "I have seen the enemy, and he is us" is surely true of archetypes. Moreover, I have argued that the great cross-cultural themes of myth are not given or natural, that they are merely widespread responses to shared experiences that are, in a sense, given and natural.
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If the great mythic themes are social and artistic rather than biological (or psychological), they are not built into the brain and can certainly be changed. But to the extent that they are expressed in linguistic patterns that may well be built into the mind, deeply embedded and strongly compelling, they can only be changed within the rules of the game-which often means inverting given patterns or breaking dichotomies down into continuums, rather than creating new patterns with entirely different structures.
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Mythmakers know this, which is why all of them-including our own contemporary spin doctors-are bricoleurs rather than patented inventors. Mircea Eliade took pains to distinguish his "exemplary models" or "paradigms" from Jung's archetypes: In using the term "archetype," I neglected to specify that I was not referring to the archetypes described by Professor C. For to use, in an entirely different meaning, a term that plays a role of primary importance in Jung's psychology could lead to confusion.
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Closing pluralism claims
Diffusion and Survival
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Within the area of "borrowing," we might begin with the most specific register on which the myth operates, and we may account for the similarities between stories on this level by historical contact, diffusion. An appropriate metaphor, I think, for the network of diffused narratives with no common origin is not the family tree that folklorists used to favor, but rather a banyan tree, which must have an original root but sends down so many subsequent roots from its branches (other variants) that one can no longer tell which was the original.
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The pattern of banyan roots is rather like a Venn diagram of family resemblances, or the web of any invisible spider. Sometimes "the same" story-that is, not merely the broad outline but certain otherwise arbitrary details, such as proper names and distinct cultural artifacts-appears in two different cultures. In such instances, there has almost always been some possibility of contact between the two cultures, even in the case of the most remote islands, given the omnipresence of Indo-European invaders, ancient merchants, and Buddhist and Christian proselytizers, and an ancient land link between Asia and North America across the Bering Strait.
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There are no Galapagos Islands for myths. Therefore when we find "the same" myth in two different cultures, it is more likely that one culture borrowed the story from the other than that the story was independently created, in parallel, by both cultures. If "the same" story is told by a Greek and a Roman, we may hazard a guess that the Roman heard it (or read it) from a Greek.
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For an example of the genealogical method, let us return to the story of Cinderella. Folklorists have long asserted that this story developed (through a disease of language that would have delighted Max Müller) from a story from China or Mongolia (remember those small feet as the standard of female beauty) in which the slipper was originally made of fur or ermine, which was vair in the French translation and which Perrault (who first recorded the story in French) misheard, presumably from some other Francophone teller, as the homophone verre-glass.
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Dundes concedes that "It is clear that the 'glass' slipper which occurs in several versions of the tale of Cinderella (AT 510A) is an appropriate symbol for virginity. Glass is fragile and once broken cannot be repaired."20 It is still the same slipper, and not the same slipper. The Chinese genealogy has not explained the story.
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Tellers tend to regard their own culture as the book and other cultures as the borrowers and to deny that they themselves have borrowed from other cultures, for reasons of status and hierarchy: to be upstream, to be the giver rather than the receiver, is to be superior. (Recall the old Soviet claims that Russians invented the telephone, etc.). Outside the culture, British (and German) scholars may well have been inspired to trace stories back to India (and China: the colonies), in part as an outgrowth of the nineteenth-century craze for origins (the source of the Nile, the source of Language [itself an old search, as in Herodotus's experiment with the infant who said "bread" in Phrygian]) but also as a way of feminizing these cultures, as David Henry Hwang reminded us in M.
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For on the one hand, diffusion still fails to account for the particular genius of each telling-the genius (with or without the inspiration of a linguistic slip) of a glass slipper instead of a fur slipper. And on the other hand, the lineage of a story does not explain its endurance. When two different cultures tell a very similar story, it is because that story expresses a sentiment that is native to both.
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The Indian stories that are merely Indian, whose meaning is entirely contingent upon the structures of Indian society, do not, like certain wines, "travel well"; they do not survive the journey to appear in Shakespeare's plays. And this suggests that even when we know the historical diffusion of a story (and in general we do not), we must take into consideration its more general appeal, its cross-cultural meanings, the culturally nonspecific register on which the myth can be played. Like Typhoid Mary, myths transmit memories from one culture to another through images and themes whose meanings those who receive them may not recognize.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss met the problem of cross-cultural parallels head on in his attempts to account for certain striking similarities in what he called "split representation" in the art of Asia and America (a subject that, like the two related cultures that explore it, involves two halves of a single substance): Do we rest, then, on the horns of a dilemma which condemns us either to deny history or to remain blind to similarities so often confirmed?… These studies have been jeopardized even more by intellectual pharisees who prefer to deny obvious relationships because science does not yet provide an adequate method for their interpretation…. How shall we explain the recurrence of a far from natural method of representation among cultures so widely separated in time and space?
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Diffusion versus survival from shared experience
The Foul Rag and Bones Shop of the Heart
Many of the accusations made against archetypes in the analysis of myths are also made against structure, which is generally regarded as the polar opposite of history: where history is contextualized, structure is decontextualized; where historic is diachronic, structure is synchronic. Let us jump in at the deep end and consider the work of the founder of structural mythology, Claude Lévi-Strauss. What does structuralism tell us about myths and how to analyze them?
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These are closely related questions, for the method mirrors the making. Structuralism gives us a pretty good idea of how myths are made. If you take an early story (more precisely, a story that was recorded early, since no one knows when it was first told) and compare it with later tellings, it is as if the first story was dropped and broken into pieces, then put together again differently-not wrongly, just differently.
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The broken pieces are the atomic units of a myth, which Lévi-Strauss called "mythemes" in response to the "phonemes" of his colleague, the linguist Roman Jakobson. The set of mythemes that the structuralist isolates from any corpus of myths is roughly (but only roughly) equivalent to what I call the micromyth. In the ecology of narratives, recycling is a very old process indeed.
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Miniver:36 little streams of little boats float silently together, their ranks swelling as they join finally in the broad Thames and the even broader Channel, what Hindus call the Ocean of the Rivers of Story. Each piece has its own previous life history and brings its own barnacles into the story. And there are several good reasons to call the rag-bag of themes "the same" even when it undergoes major transformations in different cultures, or in different periods or sectors of the same culture.
Lévi-Strauss has always been interested in the messiest, juiciest aspects of human culture-eating and killing and marrying. Is it just that mythology is full of those things, and Lévi-Strauss knows it (i.e., that mythology has a dirty mind)? Or is it that he has selected myths that have dirty minds?
Or that he imposes his own dirty mind upon the myths that he selects-myths about, as Geertz admits, jaguars, semen, and rotting meat? Hard to say; but the end result is a cold method that analyzes the hot content of myths. Where his critics see Lévi-Strauss as reducing myths to logical oppositions, I see him as illuminating human ambivalences.
After all, he is the one who taught us that every myth is driven by the obsessive need to solve a paradox that cannot be solved, a mess that cannot be cleaned up. And it is his obsession too: paradoxes are to him what white whales were to Captain Ahab. Lévi-Strauss is talking not merely about mental constructs and patterns, but about emotional needs and conflicts.
Yet he himself insists that he is only revealing structures. What is he repressing that he keeps insisting he is just interested in the structure (just the facts, ma'am)? And what makes him insist that he is doing science, as he does in this remarkable passage?
I am convinced that the number of these systems is not unlimited and that human beings (at play, in their dreams, or in moments of delusion) never create absolutely; all they can do is to choose certain combinations from a repertory of ideas which it should be possible to reconstitute. For this one must make an inventory of all the customs which have been observed by oneself or others, the customs pictured in mythology, the customs invoked by both children and grown-ups in their games.
Walking the tightrope of pluralism
Jumping Off the Bricolage Bus
Structuralism is, like myth itself, a neutral construct that could theoretically be used to ask any of a number of questions, to address any of a number of problems. But structuralists tend to group mythemes in dyads, contributing to the general dichotomization of thought that I am arguing against in this book. In Structural Anthropology, as well as in subsequent works, Lévi-Strauss asserted that all mythology is dialectic in its attempt to make cognitive sense out of the chaotic data provided by nature, and that this attempt inevitably traps the human imagination in a web of dualisms: each dualism (such as male/female) produces a tension that seems to be resolved by the use of a mediating term (such as androgyny), but then that new term turns out to be one half of a new dualism (such as androgyny/sexlessness), ad infinitum.
Myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is a form of language, and language predisposes us to attempt to understand ourselves and our world by superimposing dialectics, dichotomies, or dualistic grids upon data that may not be binary at all. And underneath language lies the binary nature of the brain itself. Right and left, good and evil, life and death-these are inevitable dichotomies produced by the brain that has two lobes and controls two eyes, two hands.
Rather than a neat grid, therefore, we would do better to attempt to construct yet another Venn diagram (or spider's web) of interlocking motifs, in which each variant has some of the themes, but not all, and each arranges them differently and, more important, interprets them differently. Or we might construct yet another continuum such as Edmund Leach proposed in his modification of Lévi-Strauss's starkly polarized oppositions. "We need to consider not merely that things in the world can be classified as sacred and not sacred, but also as more sacred and less sacred.
Structuralism does not arrange the pieces chronologically or sequentially or causally; the narrative does, and when it changes the arrangement it changes the point of the story, the point of the new answer to the old questions. Forster's terms, the structure gives us the story, not the plot. But the myth does not settle for elementary structures; it modifies them and qualifies them in many different ways, and often even rejects them.
If a reader of Lévi-Strauss is foolish enough to seek the punch line, to cut to the chase, to turn to the end of the mystery to find out who did it, then that reader is likely to be disappointed. The formula that Lévi-Strauss often provides at the end, holding it up proudly for us to see, like a cat that brings its master a half-masticated mouse, is anticlimatic; often that formula bleeds the myth of all of its meanings. But before he gets to that end, Lévi-Strauss reveals to us more complex levels of meaning.
He tells the stories and tells about the stories and suggests many rich patterns of interpretation before he boils it all down to a set of logical symbols (such as a:b::c:a -1 ). The trick is to jettison Lévi-Strauss right before the moment when he finally deconstructs himself. It is a point that is hard to gauge, and calls to mind the story of the woman on the bus who, when asked by a stranger about a particular stop, advised him, "Just watch me and get off one stop before I do." We must jump off Lévi-Strauss's bus one stop before he does.
In order to remain truly engaged with our texts, we must wallow in the mess for a while before the structuralists clean it up for us. I have argued that we must not stop at the empty micromyth but must fill it with texts; so too we must not hasten too quickly to the macromyth, another theoretical construct; we must linger in the texts. For once we have jumped off the structuralist bus, we are likely to find that we are not there yet.
We have to get on another bus (political, theological, psychological), or several buses. We need a lot of transfers on the mythic journey. At the beginning stage of the analysis, it is enough to identify certain unifying structures.
Later, when we begin to search for the meanings of the structures and to locate those meanings in particular historical situations, we must venture into the symbolic territory of Eliade, and beyond it into the land of Freud and Mary Douglas and many others. But if one knows what pocket to look in for those transfers, Lévi-Strauss provides them too. If we need a form of post-postcolonialism, surely we also need a form of post-poststructuralism.
David Tracy has noted the ways the flaws of structuralism can be obviated by other kinds of awareness: It may well be true that Lévi-Strauss' structuralist methods are sometimes entangled with the bleak beauty of a despairing structuralist ideology, that Foucault's genealogical method is often entwined with a bitter polemic against any form of humanism, that Barthes' semiotic method sometimes seems inseparable from a deliberate, if energizing critical perverseness, that Derrida's deconstructionist methods seem to need the aid of some determinate meanings as they spill us and all our classic texts into his energizing abyss of indeterminacy. Yet all these ideologies possess, after all, their own truth: a suspicion of the illusions, the alienation, often the death and slackness of all self-congratulatory humanisms.
We can structure competing voices as opposed mythemes (Lévi-Strauss does not, but one could), and if we attempt to structure more than two competing voices, we find ourselves once again on a continuum rather than a dialectical grid, which is just where we need to be. The structural mythemes are there, all right, but they must be formulated in such a way that they can be plotted, not graphed. If a man kills his son in one variant, the theme might be inverted so that the son kills his father43 in another (an inversion that Freud taught us, and Lévi-Strauss, to recognize long ago).
For inversion is an intrinsic quality of myth. Ivan Strenski insists that in a structural study, "Myths reveal no religious truths and deploy no supernatural power."44 This too I would debate. The neutral structures are not dependent on religious thought as they are in, say, an Eliadean analysis, but they are open to it at any point.
Lévi-Strauss includes the cosmological level in many of his analyses, and we can use other sorts of ideas to flesh it out (as he does not), once we have used the structural method to isolate the structures. Since Lévi-Strauss neither privileges nor excludes religious or political questions in myths, by incorporating such questions into a structural analysis we would be staying on the structuralist bus after Lévi-Strauss gets off. The mythemes, as we have seen, can be arranged in any order, thereby excluding both cause-and-effect and value judgments.
Seventy Different Interpretations
I have argued that structuralism can be enriched, its shortcomings overcome, by combining it with other methods of interpretation. There is a word for this, the "e"-word in academia: eclecticism. Hilary Mantel offered both a challenge to and a defense of methodological eclecticism in the work of John Demos: "Biography, psychology, sociology, history," he has written: "four corners of one scholar's compass, four viewpoints overlooking a single field of past experience."… Once you have decided on such a multidisciplinary approach, where do you stop?
Within the myth there are so many points of view, and outside the myth there are so many different ways of telling the story; and different scholars will produce different micromyths and bring together different texts in their macromyths. For the culture of the interpreter is no more monolithic than the culture of the teller; there are the competing schools of feminists and deconstructionists, Jungians and Freudians, among us, and different interpretations will be produced by different sorts of interpreters (theological, psychological, structural, and so forth).
Moreover, each individual interpreter will approach "the same" story in different ways at different times. It follows, therefore, that any cross-cultural analysis will have to be sufficiently multivalent at least to acknowledge the validity of all of these sets of variants, if not necessarily to employ all of them at once. The many refractions of the narrative require multiple techniques-each maintained by a separate discipline-to isolate their various facets, and it is not necessary for a single scholar to encompass them all.
"But there are seventy different interpretations of Torah," said the rabbi. "Yes," said the opponent, "but that is not one of them." Even Collingwood admitted that, though you can indeed tell the story of Caesar's assassination in various ways, there are ways you can't tell it; you can't say that Caesar killed Brutus. It is possible both to misinterpret and to misuse myths.
We misinterpret them whenever we ignore context and difference, and we misuse them in the ways to which postcolonial discourse has alerted us. We can there eliminate some interpretations, but we should still be left with more than one.
The Multiversity
The richness and nuance of the best sort of comparison is nourished in the context of a university: a community in which a number of scholars work together on different projects in different ways. The very fact that so many people are now doing contextualized work frees the comparatist to do something else, to draw upon their work to ground new comparisons. I wish to carve out a space where, alongside the contextualizers doing their valuable work, those of us who work comparatively can do ours too.
We don't all have to do the same thing or do it in the same way; we can stand on the shoulders of giants, or as the case may be, pygmies, and they can stand on ours. My argument here is for the academy, for multicultural, multidisciplinarian approaches. I would hope that the respect for "difference" (and pluralism, and diversity) that prevails in cultural studies would extend to the methodologies within the discipline of the history of religions, and indeed within the academy at large.
I have argued against the present trend of studying only one cultural group-Jews, African Americans-or, as discussed in chapter 5, only one gender. Now I challenge the trend of limiting those who study any group to those within the group-women studying women, Jews studying Jews-a trend that, if followed slavishly, would automatically eliminate not only my tiny, precious world of cross-cultural comparison but also the more general humanism of which it is a part. This is a trend fueled, in large part, by the high moral ground assumed by disciplines, such as feminism and cultural studies, that argue, or imply, that their subject matter (racism, sexism, the class struggle, genocide) has such devastating human consequences that there is no room for error or playfulness or the possibility of more than one answer.
When did scholarship cease to be a collective enterprise? When did interdisciplinary values cease to apply to comparative studies? When did the "uni" in "university" come to refer to ideology?
Perhaps we should rename our institutions multiversities (with overtones of multivocal, multivalent, multicultural) or polyversities, if not diversities (let alone inversities-for structuralists-and perversities-for our academic enemies). Whatever we call it, the academic world should never be a place where there is only one poker game in town. It should be a place where we can say, as in an ice cream parlor or hamburger joint: "Make me one with everything" (a phrase that can also be read as a pantheist prayer).
Walking the Tightrope
In the often stormy ocean of stories, a scholar needs to hang on to some rope stretched across the deck; for a mythologist, this rope is the cross-cultural narrative. But it is also a tightrope that the comparatist must walk between universality and essentialism, cultural distinctiveness and cross-cultural resemblance, a tightrope as narrow, but as strong, as the strand of a spider's web. It is, of course, intellectually dangerous to walk that tightrope, especially for scholars engaged in fieldwork.
And here we encounter yet another distorting dichotomy, between textualists and field-workers, similar to the false dichotomy between comparatists and contextualizers. Textualists (like myself) often feel that they are less implicated in the negative fallout of scholarship because they (we) read texts in libraries while others and go out and talk to people in "the field" (in my case, India); the only danger for textualists is of getting it wrong, which is on an entirely different order from the dangers of hepatitis and bus wrecks that field-workers encounter.
But the text, like the Other encountered in the field, can change the scholar's life;60 and although the textualist cannot change the text quite as directly as the anthropologist can change the people encountered in the field, yet scholars do change the text-not just literally, as in Woody Allen's story about Madame Bovary, but by changing the text's reception, its value and meaning for others. If we have learned anything at all from postcolonial discourse, it is that the texts scholars publish have an impact on the people they write about, not entirely unlike the more obvious impact of participant-observer anthropologists.
Field-workers and textualists, engaging similar problems in different ways, need one another, and the academy needs both of them, the participant observer and the femme de cabinet (or even the butch de cabinet). That said, I will conclude this book with two examples of the sort of fieldwork dangers that I have in mind. Clifford Geertz tells a story about the interaction between the comparatist and the cultures that are compared.
In 1957, as a young anthropologist in Bali, he had the only Jeep and had to decide where to take a child who had a high fever (perhaps cholera): I wanted to take him to the only Western doctor on the island. The villagers wanted to take him to the local "curer." If I take him to the curer, and he dies, I feel bad. If I take him to the doctor, and he dies, they think I killed him….
I think the curer first, just because he was closer. But if both'd been impossible, I would've taken him to the foreign doctor and taken the heat. There are times when you stop being an anthropologist.
The bottom line was the kid got better. The Belgian doctor didn't know what was wrong with him. Nobody knows why.61 Jonathan Walters, a historian of religions trained in Chicago, told me a similar story, which was resolved for him in a similarly ambivalent way.
Some years ago, Walters was living in Sri Lanka, studying the religion and the healing methods of the people in a certain village. He was thoroughly committed to the belief that non-Western healing methods have been unjustly neglected by Western science, that in many instances they are more effective than our own. He became dangerously ill with cholera and treated himself with the native remedies, but to no avail: a high fever and dehydration reduced him to a condition in which he could neither eat nor stand up, and he realized that he would probably die if he didn't get the medicine he needed-Western medicine, antibiotics.
He couldn't bring himself to do it. As he lay there, breathing what he thought to be his last breaths, the people of the village came, put him on a stretcher, and carried him to the place where they carried out their religious healing ceremonies.
And Walters's story is both the same as and different from Clifford Geertz's story: the historian of religions was ill himself and someone from the other culture made the ambivalent choice, while the anthropologist had to choose when someone from the other culture was ill. Geertz assumes that Western medicine is better; Walters begins by assuming that the other culture's medicine is better, and comes to think that Western medicine is better for him. Both stories therefore end with the triumph of Western medicine, science, and scholarship.
But the "other" cultures themselves, in both cases, are less dichotomous; they have always had a both/and solution, using their own medicine and Western medicine together; they have the advantage of not being engaged in writing a book or a dissertation on native methods of healing. The anthropologist/comparatist has to learn from them the nonpolarized approach that the Spanish conquistadors failed to learn form the AmerIndians in Lévi-Strauss's Story of Lynx. Medical opinions need not be mutually exclusive, nor should any other ideologies.
Main Points
1. Myth sits mid-spectrum between diary solipsism and algebraic abstraction and specializes in double vision. 2. Microscope and telescope are both theological and political tools inside narratives. 3. Comparison is ordinary cognition before it is a method; value answers often mean "compared with what?" 4. Dark-cat sameness is usually a lighting failure, not proof that myths are identical. 5. Silent dogs reveal what a culture's telling omits; omission is evidence. 6. Myth identity across variants resembles Ship of Theseus / darned stockings: pragmatic continuity under repair. 7. Top-down universals (High God, Oedipus-as-system, Campbell monomyth) overclaim; prefer bottom-up bodily details. 8. The implied spider is shared life-experience silk, not a culture-erasing super-myth. 9. Postcolonial critique requires better comparison, not a ban on sideways reading. 10. Micromyth / macromyth is the workshop pair: strip names, compare cores, re-expand politics. 11. Multivocality is native to long traditions; "the" story is already a package. 12. Political inversion of the same plot (Eden, Cinderella, Sita) is data about power. 13. Mother Goose stigma hides women's storytelling channels and editorial capture. 14. Salvage women's voices without inventing a timeless Woman or ignoring male frames. 15. Diffusion and spider-silk can both explain cross-cultural sameness; test locally. 16. Bricolage helps until it stops tracking power; then jump off the bus. 17. Seventy interpretations still allows "but that is not one of them." 18. Art and science of mythology belong together: exact, interesting, and poetic. 19. Context compares too: micromyth plus situations that configured each telling. 20. Myths are not excavation reports; they reveal sentiments and can still light future fires. 21. Fluellenism (forced false parallels) is the comparatist's cardinal sin. 22. Individual genius is not dissolved by context; context explains flourishing. 23. Translation and metaphor share the leap across worlds; lossy and necessary. 24. Tightrope ethic: rigor and openness in one motion; rule readings in and out.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Microscope / telescope | Myths and readings need near and far focus | A text feels only cosmic or only banal |
| Dark cats | Bad light erases difference | Someone says all myths are the same |
| Silent dog | Missing reaction is a clue | Comparing omissions across tellings |
| Implied spider | Shared experience supplies silk; cultures weave | Defending comparison without monomyth |
| Micromyth / macromyth | Strip core, then re-expand locally | Starting any cross-cultural pair |
| Seventy readings | Pluralism with exclusion | Relativism without standards appears |
Who's who
| Name | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Wendy Doniger | Author; Chicago historian of religions; comparatist |
| Clifford Geertz | Webs of significance; juxtaposition without superfield |
| Gananath Obeyesekere | Asks where the spider is; Upanishadic spin |
| Lévi-Strauss | Structuralism, bricolage, Lynx; ally and limit |
| Joseph Campbell | Static monomyth foil |
| Marina Warner | Traveling tales; archetype gender warning |
| A. K. Ramanujan | Indian women's tales; mirrors/windows |
| Elaine Scarry | Body and voice as near-prior categories |
About this book
The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth by Wendy Doniger, 1998. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions