7. Mito

(Myth)

It might be fair to say that Wendy Doinger’s The Implied Spider is a survey in mythological methodology. Doniger asserts that the cross-cultural comparison of myths is “pragmatically possible, intellectually plausible, and politically productive” (4-5). However, this comparison comes with a caveat that I find most problematic – Doniger proposes to do all this mythological comparison sans methodological structure!

Undoubtedly, comparative work has merit. However, Doniger does not convince me of her astructural approach to comparison.

Perhaps my current studies in the issues of ethnographic method have made me partial to the structural approach, but I find that studies with no structure are messier, by far, than the inevitable outliers found in a structured comparison. In The Implied Spider, Doniger maintains that the best theory is unobtrusive. She argues that, like the rocks in an Irish stone wall, if a researcher “selects her texts carefully and places them in a sequence that tells the story she want to tell, she will need relatively little theory to explain why they belong together and what sort of argument they imply” (60).

This bottom-up method of careful (albeit random) selection is arbitrary. If a scholar is “arranging” the blocks to tell the story that he or she wants to tell, then isn’t the author’s authority and position questionable? Furthermore, this random selection provides a very busy palate from which the author is forced to pick a random pattern. Wouldn’t having some idea of what one is looking for provide some sort of direction (structure!) in which to focus – rather than a multi-focal smorgasbord of data that may or may not make sense at the end of the presentation?

The possibility of comparison between cross-cultural myths arises from, what Doniger argues, is the commonality of concerns from different cultures. “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” (53). Doniger goes on to create a list of this ‘common human experience’ – sex, food, singing, dancing, sunrise and sunset, et cetera (53-54).

These shared experiences are the ‘spider’ that Doniger refers to in the building of myths (webs). The idea that no one subjective experience – i.e. Ali eating olives in Istanbul on March 13, 1976 while the sun was setting and the mosque prayers were ringing out in the street – can be accessed, is what makes these ‘spiders’ (experiences) implied. “I argue that we must believe in the existence of the spider, the experience behind the myth, though it is indeed true that we can never see this sort of spider at work; we can only find the webs, the myths that human authors weave” (61).

Not only does the spider metaphor come from a variety of sources, but also the lack of implication in use of the spider was very confusing to me! For instance, Doniger draws on such varied sources as Geertz and Obeyesekere, the Upanishads of the Hindu tradition, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, linguists, and Jewish mythology. Doniger highlights this scattered sense of myth-collection, herself, when she says: “The spider is used as a metaphor for blind faith in the future. But we can use it as a metaphor for blind faith in the existence of spiders – or authors, or shared human experience, or the text” (63). This question of one’s faith in the text being shaken simply because the identity of the author cannot be ascertained, is one that was discussed extensively in class a few weeks ago. I believe that the general consensus was, that while authorial presence is important, there are certain instances in which the web matters more than the spider itself. I believe I’ve mentioned the Ramayana here before, but it bears repetition. While scholarship is consumed with figuring out whether or not the great seer Valmiki wrote the Ramayana, I am forced to question whether the mythological epic loses its potency simply because its authorial origin is unknown. Are the myths of good versus evil contained within the epic redundant merely because the spider is implied?

Doniger however, insists that an analysis of the pan-cultural meaning of a myth and its subjective application must include an appreciation for the historical contexts in which that myth is articulated. “Attention to cultural specificity is part of the Hippocratic oath of historians of religions, including mythologists” (43).