The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth by Wendy Doniger

Author:Wendy Doniger [Doniger, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Religion, Religion/Comparative Religion, Comparative Religion, Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 9780231527118
Google: 3Zc7AAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2010-12-15T00:26:59.018551+00:00

THE MYTH WITH POINTS OF VIEW

There are many myths, like the story of the serpent in the garden, that have been used even within a single culture to argue for diametrically opposed morals, political theories, or social codes. Some are independent variants of a single theme, which can stand on their own and express their own point of view without reacting against anything else, though they may take on greater depth if the audience knows other, opposing variants. This is true of, for instance, the many tellings of Cinderella in many different cultures.54 It is also true of the many tellings of the Ramayana in India, which are aware of one another through what has been called “intertextuality”55 but which do not necessarily, at least explicitly, respond to one another or to some “original” Ramayana.

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. An anecdote is told about Thomas Edison who, after some nine thousand unsuccessful attempts to devise a new type of storage battery, was asked, “Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven’t been able to get any results?” 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. 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. Then a new telling emerges to confront—or to paper over again—the newly exposed hole.

This process is captured in a terse parable by Franz Kafka:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.58

The commentary that calls attention explicitly to what everyone has ignored also becomes a part of the ceremony, a part of the text.

Another, delightful instance of this process is provided by Evelyn Waugh’s portrait of Mr. Tendril, the vicar

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