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Book Review: Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth.

Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Pages, x + 200.  Paper, $17.50. ISBN13: 9780231111706

 

Reviewed by: Christopher D. Tirres, DePaul University

 

How is it that two or more distinct cultures, with dissimilar histories and geographies, can generate what appears to be a similar myth? In The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth, Wendy Doniger attempts to answer this question by crafting a space between a structuralist and historicist approach to myth. Whereas a full-blown structuralist approach would tend to focus on the myth’s “inherent,” “neutral,” and “natural” patterns, a historicist approach “if carried out to the letter” (52) would likely reduce myth to cultural production or to social function. Indeed, historicists fault structuralists for attempting to explain phenomena outside of history, and structuralists accuse historicists of downplaying the imaginative and subconscious power of myth. 

 

Attentive to both positions, Doniger attempts to mediate myth and myth-making, experience and imaginative constructions of experience. Her prose is rich and her stories are fresh and engaging.  Indebted to the structuralism of Levi-Strauss up to the point that he boils down rich and varying interpretations of stories to a banal set of logical symbols, the “moment when he finally deconstructs himself” (149), Doniger underscores the value of myth as a nominative pattern.  She speaks, for example, of the “inherent ability of myths” to help us link theology and daily life.  At the same time, however, she draws upon the historicist argument that myth is a shifting process, always under construction. 

 

Most notably, Doniger understands “shared life experience” (61) as the ever-alternating hinge that pivots between the two camps.  From one angle, Doniger’s “implied spider” is to be understood not so much in terms of us, the historically-situated human webmakers, but in terms of the existence of an experience behind the humanly-woven web.  “I argue that we must believe in the existence of the spider, the experience behind the myth… ” writes Doniger. Cautious of a structuralist reductionism, however, Doniger equally insists “ that we can never see this sort of spider at work.” After all, “[W]e can only find the webs, the myths that human authors weave (61).”

 

Despite her efforts to find a middle ground, Doniger ultimately leans more on the side of structuralism, for she is keenly interested in being able to name myth for what “it” discloses and shows. As Doniger astutely notes, our ability—or inability—to name the power of myth has everything to do with politics and power. Invoking Lawrence Sullivan, Doniger reminds us that “the social sciences, of which history is one, were utilized as a defense and distraction against the powerful [i.e. “mythic”] worldviews of colonized peoples emerging into Western consciousness”(52).  Doniger argues that a historicist approach to myth “if carried out to the letter” (52) may eventually silence the very power that imagination and myth yield in themselves.

 

In principle, I share Doniger’s concern with reductionism: data is never something that is entirely “out there” nor is inspiration or experience only an inward experience “in here.” (77).  Yet, I wonder if her own distinction between a structuralist and historicist method is at times too stark, as in the claim that “to defend social context over ahistorical structure is to choose empiricism over imagination” or that “to insist on historical context is therefore to deny the power of myth or imaginal consciousness…” (52, emphasis mine)  Does a historicist approach necessarily deny imagination and the power accorded to myth? While Doniger teases out the many shades of structuralism and highlights well its comparative value, she stops short of similarly asking whether myth can be responsibly probed in a historicist manner. What stands yet to be done, I believe, is to look at the imaginative power of myth through a historicist lens without an appeal to myth “in itself.”  Such an investigation would be of great service to theologians—particularly liberation theologians—for whom a non-reductionistic historicism is a fundamental starting point.

 

All that being said, Doniger’s Implied Spider is an indispensable springboard for further inquiry.  By looking at the relationship between myth, faith, imagination, God, politics, and power, Doniger performs the rare feat of bringing together the disciplines of religious studies, theology, literature, and politics, with notable interventions into phenomenology and post-colonial theory.  Perhaps more important still, Doniger reminds us that the comparative project is crucial in approaching religious and theological questions. After all, myth—at once the implied spider and the web that it weaves—is always greater than the sum of its parts.