The Implied Spider

“Attention to cultural specificity is part of the Hippocratic oath of historians of religion, including mythologists” (43)

Wendy Doniger’s The Implied Spider walks a precarious tightrope between two very different types of comparative work, akin to using two very different telescopes.  The first, which I believe can be useful, compares two myths from different cultures and points out areas of similarity and difference, and asks the question ‘why did this culture explain this experience this way, and not like this other culture”.  It is like pointing your telescope at two nearby planets, and comparing the similarities and difference between their craters or rings to better understand craters and rings in general.  The other, much more problematic approach that occasionally rears its head is to use one culture’s myth to infer a more complete meaning on another culture’s.  It’s like looking at a thousand yellow dots in the Hubble Deep Field, and then assuming they are all the same.  Universality is a dangerous assumption and can lead a scholar to manufacture ideas about a text and the people who wrote it.

The idea of a universal human experience that binds people together across cultures is enticing, but it is important to limit a text within its contexts.  Doniger states that a “text’s embeddedness in its culture makes it extend beyond its “author”...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” (45).  A text is a product of the period and culture in which the author was writing, for the author’s views are shaped by his lived experiences.   For example, it is important to understand the politics and religious conflict occurring in North Africa and Rome at the turn of the 5^th century to understand Augustine.   To say that this authorial collectivity extends beyond the time and place of a texts creation, however, is true but problematic.  A text does reach across cultural lines by interacting with the reader, who puts her own experiences and knowledge of history into her understanding of the text.  This can change the meaning of a text in fundamental ways, demonstrated clearly in Bohannan’s anecdote on how the Africans she studied believed Hamlet to be a villain and Claudius a hero.  It is faulty, however, to assume that the African prospective on Hamlet sheds light on Shakespeare’s intentions.  

Doniger’s assumption on the universality of human experience, the strands of the web, can lead to the reader’s context influencing the original context of the text.  An example of this is the authors reading of the story of Tamar and Judah and Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.  Both stories involve the ‘bed trick’, where a wife masquerades as someone else so as to trick her disinterested husband into bed.  The problem for biblical commentators is that the story of Tamar and Judah is woefully lacking in the psychology of how Tamar felt about the whole situation.  Shakespeare’s play, however, is clearer on why Helena decided to trick Bertram.  Doniger argues that “we can answer some of our own questions about the Bible by reading Shakespeare, we can imagine what a woman in Tamar’s situation might have felt, and imagine a woman’s voice in the bible asking that, and being suppressed” (40).  She then goes on to ask the question that should have been asked by anyone reading her comparison of the two works, “Would the author of the story of Tamar have felt like Shakespeare about such things as sexual rejection?...How do we know our questions are not projections?” (40)  She answers that we of course cannot know what is in the mind of the author, but that by projecting texts with similar themes of human experience, one can create a situation where the texts communicate in ‘textual intercourse’, and draws a line between “Shakespeare’s head and the Bible” (40).  It is acceptable to have Shakespeare affect your reading of the Bible, but to use his plays to fill in the emotional gaps of the Tamar story as a form of commentary on the original meaning or intent of the author is assuming that there is a universal experience.  That Helena in 16^th century England would have the same motives as Tamar in biblical times.  This is simply not falsifiable, we have no means of knowing what Tamar thought and it is especially problematic to justify these assumptions by showing similar themes in a text written in a dramatically different time and place.  This is the danger of cross-cultural comparison of myths, and demonstrates the problems that can occur when a comparatist succumbs to his artist half and substitutes imagination for empiricism.