Comparative Mythology After the Postcolonial Critique

Doniger opens The Implied Spider with the methodological question that had come to define the academic study of myth by the late 1990s. The comparative method that Frazer, Eliade, Campbell, and Lévi-Strauss had each developed in distinctive forms had been, by the time of the book’s writing, largely driven out of the academy by the postcolonial and postmodern critiques that had identified — accurately, in many of the relevant cases — the imperial-universalising assumptions on which the older comparative practice had often rested. Doniger neither dismisses the critique nor surrenders to it. Her argument is that comparative mythology is recoverable as a serious scholarly practice if the comparativist holds together the universal patterns and the particular political-cultural contexts without collapsing either into the other. The book is the constructive response to the critique, and its constructive move is methodological rather than merely defensive: Doniger supplies the working apparatus — the lenses of textual, theological, political, and human reading; the discipline of close attention to context; the spider/web distinction — by which comparison can be conducted with the philological seriousness the older tradition had not always achieved and with the political accountability the newer scholarship had rightly demanded.

The Implied Spider: A Methodological Image

The book’s central image is the implied spider — the spider implied by the web that the comparativist studies. The image, drawn from Wayne Booth’s narrative-theoretical concept of the implied author, supplies the precise methodological position the book defends. The recurring patterns one finds in myths across cultures imply something about human beings that produced them; the implication operates at the level of the structural commonality (the web) rather than at the level of the universal claim about the producer (the spider) that the older comparative tradition had often presupposed. The comparativist who studies the web is not committed to a substantive thesis about a universal human nature; the comparativist is committed to a description of the structural patterns the comparative work has uncovered and to the implication those patterns carry about the kinds of beings who produce such patterns. The methodological discipline the image enforces is exact. The comparativist is not entitled to abstract from the patterns to a universal claim about the unitary human spider; the comparativist is entitled, and indeed obliged, to register the patterns and to honour what they imply about the comparable conditions under which human beings produce such patterns. The framework allows comparison to proceed without flattening difference and without retreating from pattern. Doniger’s methodological frame is named exactly:

“The implied spider is a way of talking about the recurrent patterns we find in myths from many cultures without making any claim about a universal human nature.” — Doniger, The Implied Spider (paraphrased from the methodological chapter)

The Four Lenses: Textual, Theological, Political, Human

The book’s opening chapter, “Microscopes and Telescopes,” lays out the four lenses Doniger uses across the rest of the book: textual lenses (myths as artefacts of philological practice), theological lenses (myths as carriers of religious commitments and cosmological pictures), political lenses (myths as instruments of legitimation and contestation), and human lenses (myths as forms of human experience and self-articulation). The point of the four-lens framework is that no single lens is adequate to a serious reading of any particular myth, and that the comparativist who works with a single lens — whether the philologist who reads only textually, the theologian who reads only theologically, the political historian who reads only politically, or the depth psychologist who reads only humanly — is producing a partial reading whose partiality is part of what produces the misreadings the postcolonial critique had registered. The chapter on Job and the Bhagavata Purana — read as theological lenses through which the problem of suffering is given particular cultural-religious form — is the book’s exemplary demonstration of the multi-lens method at work. The reading is unsentimental about the particularity of each text and serious about the structural commonality that the comparison brings to view.

Multivocality and the Voices of Women

The book’s middle chapters address the question of multiple voices within a single mythic tradition. The argument is that no mythology is monolithic; each tradition carries within itself the multiple, often contradictory voices of the various social positions that produced and transmitted it, and the comparativist’s task is to listen for these multivocalities rather than to settle for the dominant version that institutional transmission has preserved. The chapter on Mother Goose and the voices of women is the most analytically distinctive: Doniger reads folk and literary materials for the women’s voices that have been transmitted within ostensibly masculine traditions, and demonstrates that the apparent unity of a tradition often masks an internal pluralism the comparativist can recover with sufficient philological care. The reading of the Mahabharata’s Draupadi and of the biblical Ruth, set alongside European folk material, supplies the cross-cultural demonstration of the multivocality framework at work. The implication for the depth-psychological reading of myth is that the dominant archetypal interpretations the Jungian tradition has carried forward should be tested against the multivocalities the philological work has uncovered, and that the relationship between archetypal pattern and cultural particularity is more complex than either the older Jungian or the recent postcolonial accounts have allowed.

For any practitioner whose work draws on the comparative-mythological tradition — Jungian, archetypal, religious-studies, literary — The Implied Spider is the indispensable methodological text after the postcolonial critique. After Doniger, the comparativist is not improvising; the spider/web distinction, the four-lens framework, and the multivocality discipline supply the working apparatus by which comparison can be conducted with the philological seriousness and the political accountability that contemporary scholarship requires. The book is also the natural pair to Bruce Lincoln’s Discourse and the Construction of Society (Lincoln is one of the book’s dedicatees) and to Jonathan Z. Smith’s methodological writings on comparison: reading them together discloses how late-twentieth-century religious-studies scholarship was quietly recovering the comparative method on terms the postcolonial critique had made stronger rather than weaker, and what depth psychology owes to the recovery for its own ongoing engagement with cross-cultural mythological material.