MYTHOGRAPHY #1

Image description: a book’s front cover with a purple band at the top, over which is written the title and author: "The Implied Spider; Politics & Theology in Myth | Wendy Doniger” Below this is a stylized illustration of a spider and its web. The focus is tight on the spider so it takes up most of the picture plane. Its body is fragmented. The pieces of its body seem to be made up of pieces of a map of constellations.

This past week I finished reading, and greatly enjoyed, Christina Tudor-Sideri’s Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, just out from Sublunary Editions, but as I began to write about it, the blog post started to morph into a longer essay. While that is cooking, a snapshot of what I’ve been reading or returning to since:

I started Loudermilk by Lucy Ives, which a friend lent to me, a satire on the Iowa MFA and its ilk. More on this as I read more!

I started re-reading Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson’s contemporary interpretation of the myth of Geryon and Herakles, based on Carson’s engagement with fragments of work by Stesichoros, and a book that my generation enthusiastically took up as a queer coming-of-age narrative.

I read another short story from The Human Family, a collection of stories by Lou Andreas-Salomé translated from the German by Raleigh Whitinger, as part of my ongoing research for the Rilke chapter of my Sissies, Sickly Boys, and Grown-Ass Trans Women book project. (the story was “Unit for ‘Men, Internal’” if you’re curious). Mentioning the ongoing work of researching for a book project is actually a good pivot to where I’m headed. I was recently walking with a friend who critiqued dilettantish readers. Anxious to not have to include myself in this category (though she preemptively assured me that she didn’t include me in it), in part because of our asymmetry as academic (her) and grad school drop-out (me), I reflected on the fact (that long-time readers of this blog know well) that I sometimes lay out these grandiose plans for blog series, only to proceed wherever my whimsy takes me.

I actually don’t think this is a terrible working strategy for me, since I always work harder at whatever I’m interested in, and if something is a true ongoing interest for me, I will always eventually circle back to it. But life is short, and I was feeling hypersensitive this week, so my desire to disavow the label of dilettante, spurred me on to finish or at least extend something I have started but left unfinished.

And since Under the Sign of the Labyrinth which, in another document, I’m also writing about, is so focused on myth:

Mythology succeeds in an endeavor that both science and religion have not been able to accomplish: it brings together the body and soul and creates an entity that comes closer to portraying the reality of humankind. Whilst religion focuses only on the soul and science deals with the body—with matter—mythology and folklore acknowledge that we are not just our bodies, and we are not just our souls. (75)

and since the spine of The Implied Spider, sticking out from a precarious pile of books, caught my eye, after almost a year—a longish time, but shorter than the seven years it took this John Cage piece to change notes—I’m returning to my mythography series, which began here.

My mythography series began last November. I had just finished reading Karthika Naïr’s fabulous Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, which I loved, but which I felt ill-equipped to write about with any authority. As one of my introducers to Vedic literature had been Wendy Doniger (in the form of her 1981 Penguin translation of the Rig Veda), when I picked up a copy of The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth in Tim’s Used Books (this is all pre-pandemic), and found it to be about comparative mythology, I thought she might help me to build—ethically—a bridge that could at least support my foot-traffic between the body of work that the Mahabharata is and is part of, and my own cultural location.

When I picked up The Implied Spider I began where I left off. Last night, I read Chapter 3: “Implied Spiders and the Politics of Individualism,” which opens with the question: “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?” (That she begins the process of answering this question with a quote from one of my literary beloveds, Marina Warner, endears her to me, as does her later dunking on the sloppiness of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth.)

Stylistically, Doniger seems very well-versed in her discipline but writes approachably with a folksy raconteuse vibe, and she is very given to metaphor and simile—like the book’s overarching metaphor, the ‘implied spider’—which would really bug some readers, but which appeals to my poet mind.

The chapter takes on first the problems with universalist approaches to studying myths, the most familiar of which is probably Jung’s collective unconscious. Doniger also goes on to talk about the parallel project of accounting for linguistic parallels between languages by postulating the ur-language of “proto-Indo-European” which project was also attempted, albeit less successfully (and more problematically) for mythology.

She moves lightly from here to Chomsky’s universal grammar to Elaine Scarry’s investigations into the relationship between language and pain (which, incidentally, was one of the inspirations for Terror Matrix):

The universality of pain, even in its wordlessness, is an example of the experience behind the narrative, before language, that both deconstructionists (like Mark Taylor) and post-Freudian feminists (like Julia Kristeva, following and modifying Lacan) have tried to reach in very different ways. (57)

Clifford Geertz, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Max Müller, George Dumézil are all mustered out for citation and critique in the sweep of this chapter’s arguments.

Then, the spider herself emerges out of Geertz’s formulation of, “…humans as animals suspended in webs of significance that they themselves have spun, webs of culture” to which Gananath Obeyesekere replies, “In reading Geertz I see webs everywhere but never the spider at work” Doniger builds on this exchange:

This is a useful metaphor for the comparatist if we take the spider to be, not as in Obeyesekere’s usage the maker of culture (or the anthropologist) who spins the web of myth (or the ethnography), but the shared humanity, the shared life experience, that supplies the web-building material, the raw material of narrative to countless human webmakers, authors, including human anthropologists and human comparatists. These human storytellers gather up the strands that the spider emits, like silk workers harvesting the cocoons of silkworms, to weave their own individual cultural artifacts, their own Venn-diagram webs of shared themes all newly and differently interconnected. My image of what I want to call the implied spider draws upon Wayne Booth’s useful concept of the “implied author” (which itself builds upon Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the “implied reader”), the author implied by the individual passions revealed in his [sic] writing. The implied spider generates, and is there for implied by, the stuff that myths are made on; this is my answer to Obeyesekere’s question, “out of what?” 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)

Reading this, my mind goes several further flung places before settling back down: to the history local silk production in Western MA, to Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems, finally alighting on Eva Hayward’s brilliant essay “Spiderwomen,” from Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. I wrote earlier of being drawn to a comparatist like Doniger out of desire to build a bridge. This passage from Hayward might help concretize what I mean. In it she discusses Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture Crouching Spider:

…from this angle, the Bay Bridge extends this giant, metal spider, giving it a capacious outstretch that recalls the racial and economic divides (divisions are always also dependencies) between Oakland and San Francisco. Though its spinnerets are encased in inorganic hardness, it seems to have spun out a filament web made of steel and concrete. The spider metonymizes, generating zones of correlation and correspondence between object and space. It is not an endless reach; all things are not counted equally, though one could go far on these threads. This spider is an urban designer just as it is sculptural, a weaver of cityscapes, concatenating parts of the city into its grasp. (264)

And again:

Silken spiderlines reference the skeletalization of surface; the web is an extension of the surface affects of the spider—it feels with its web. This is not a shallow surface, but a dynamic threshold of sensuality. Likewise, the body is stretched topographically to affectively and perceptually (sensually) react through a spatial and temporal generativity. Bodies are not ruptured or burst open such that they are boundless. Instead, bodies, like cities and web-builders, are inter- and intra-threadings of many sensuous vectors that relay like the spider in its web.

By thinking with animality, and with artists like Bourgeois and Katchadourian, Hayward helps articulate how I think feelingly, my receptors twitching, straining with the curiosity (desire?) that spurs the bridge-building project. And Hayward shows up not out of simple associativity but  because white anglophone US settler society’s problems with myself and my ilk’s relationships to embodiment prompted my investment in a corpus of trans lit and theory that I extend prosthetically towards other disciplines like, in this case, comparative mythology.

Returning to The Implied Spider, once Doniger gives us her central image, she goes on to address the postcolonial and postmodern critiques of comparison, against and with which she gives a qualified defense of comparison. “So far in this chapter, I have tried to tackle the question of whether they can be done; now let us consider whether they should be done…” (64). This section left me with some reservations, though Doniger insists on what she calls “responsible comparatism” (“I would insist that the comparatist have a knowledge of the language of the primary texts of at least one of the traditions in question…And the comparatist must know the context…” (65). As for the context of this comparatist, The Implied Spider was published twenty-two years before I wrote this sentence.

This is just to say that I’m an interested amateur, and I wonder what someone working in this field professionally might be able to add about how these debates have progressed over this span of time. (Though I also always want to trouble the idea of professionals and amateurs, the level of sustained focus on a subject that academic careers seem to have at times supported makes them a resource for this kind of knowledge.) That said, I can accept a lot of Doniger’s positions on a provisional basis because I am still making the map in my head of this area of knowledge. As of now, she is provisionally a fixed point. Later, when other points on my map of comparative mythology exist, I can return to her assertions with some of the skepticism I am currently bracketing about the ease and rapidity with which she conjures her postcolonial and postmodern interlocutors and addresses their objections.

Doniger explores a space between micro focus on the specificity of the individual creator and the generalizability of the group. Part of her answer is in how she engages with individual myth writers:

The emphasis on the individual balances the move outward, from culture to cross-culture, with a move inward, from culture to the individual author. It balances the focus on the individual with a focus on the human at the other end of the continuum—the microscope and then the telescope, thus opening up a second front in the battle against the constricting category of culture…The focus on individual insight leads us to a variety of what Paul Ricoeur called a second naïveté, positing a “sameness” that only superficially resembles a quasi-Jungian universalism but is actually based on a pointillism  formed from the individual points of individual authors. (73)

But her focus, as I have hopefully not occluded through my selective quotation above, is not overmuch on the individual, but includes individual creativity as a component in a theoretical structure which is held together by the principles of tensegrity (Buckminster Fuller’s portmanteau of “tensional integrity”) (which makes me think of another beloved trans theory text: Lucas Crawford’s Transgender Architectonics, in which Crawford riffs on the Blur Building).

AND this is where I burned out on this today! To be continued!