In this chapter, I will argue that this ability suggests that myth is an inherently comparative genre, in a double sense: it both compares and is amenable to comparison. I have also argued that myths may use microscopes and telescopes to link daily reality with global – indeed, galaxial – politics; that some myths open up our political vision just as other myths open up our theological vision, when juxtaposed with the events of our lives. I also suggested that political and theological texts act as lenses for one another. Now I argue that the comparison of myths from other cultures opens up our political vision. I vertically linked the cosmic and the banal within any single myth; the cross-cultural agenda I consider now looks sideways, constructing links between different tellings of myths in different cultures. My introduction argued for the uses of metaphor; this chapter and the next use three metaphors from the animal world – dark cats, barking dogs, and implied spiders – to advance the argument for comparison.
A rich body of evidence suggests that people compare things all the time, consciously or unconsciously, with useful results. Comparison is, after all, the basis of our value systems; to the question, “Do you like this, want this?” the answer is often, “Compared with what?” Maurice Chevalier, when asked on his 80th birthday, “How do you like being 80, Monsieur Chevalier?” is reputed to have replied, “Considering the alternative, I like it very well.” Hilaire Belloc, during the reign of Queen Victoria, remarked on the lurid details of the life of Queen Cleopatra, “How very unlike the domestic arrangements of our dear queen.” Comparison is our way of making sense of difference.
Indeed, comparison of things acknowledged to have something in common is the basis of our entire way of making sense of the world, our intellectual taxonomy, our survival system. The caveperson who reasoned, “This sabre-toothed tiger looks a lot like that lion I saw yesterday; this animal, too, may try to eat me. Therefore, I should run from this tiger as I ran from that lion” is our ancestor. The one who reasoned, “I’ve never seen an animal like this before. That lion yesterday had no stripes; this animal has. There is the difference of the mane, too. I wonder if …” did not live to bequeath his genes to us.
The problem of the same and the different has become a crucial issue within the field of comparative mythology and for the self-definitions of postmodernism. The simultaneous engagement of the same and the different, the general and the particular, requires precisely the kind of double vision that myth, among all genres, is best able to maintain. David Tracy has argued that we can know others only through analogy, what he calls “similarity-in-difference,” recalling that “The power of the analogical imagination as imagination was honoured by Aristotle in his famous dictum: ‘to spot the similar in the dissimilar is the mark of poetic genius.’” These “analogies-in-difference” allow one to reflect upon relationships “to other selves, to society, history, the cosmos.” Tracy uses a poem by James Tate about likeness and difference as the epigram for his epilogue on the role of the analogical imagination in religious pluralism. The poem speaks of the human need for likeness despite its paradoxical, topsy-turvy nature.
When I think no thing is like any other thing
I become speechless, cold, my body turns silver
and water runs off me. There I am
ten feet from myself, possessor of nothing,
uncomprehending of even the simplest particle of dust.
But when I say, You are like
a swamp animal during an eclipse,
I am happy, full of wisdom, loved by children
and old men alike. I am sorry if this confuses you.
During an eclipse the swamp animal
acts as though day were night,
drinking when he should be sleeping, etc.
This is why men stay up all night writing to you
Not to see the likeness in two different things is to miss the similarity of the woman and the lover (who sees the similarity of day and night) and the similarity of them and the nocturnal poets (to whom day and night are alike). Difference can be alienating; likeness, even the likeness that confuses night and day, generates love.
At the same time, we must acknowledge that the emphasis on likeness, often epitomised by its critics in the same metaphor that James Tate uses to defend it (the metaphor of not seeing in the dark), has done great harm in the history of the study of other peoples’ cultures. Occasionally, the metaphor is used to make a positive statement about sameness; thus, Francis Bacon, in his essay “The Unity of Religions,” argued positively for the mutual resemblance of religions: “All colours agree in the dark.” Almost always, however, it is pejorative. In a discussion of sameness and difference in Plato’s Sophist, the Stranger observes that “the Sophist takes refuge in the darkness of not-being, where he is at home and has the knack of feeling his way, and it is the darkness of the place that makes him so hard to perceive.” That is, since all Sophists are in the dark, they are hard to tell apart.
This is best known as a proverb – “In the dark, all cats are grey” – attested, with clear sexist overtones, in early French and English sources. Erasmus, at the beginning of the 16th century, cites the “Gallic” saying in his commentary on Plutarch’s Adages, and John Heywood, in his Proverbs in 1546, remarks, “When all candles be out, all cats be grey.” The Germans (or, rather, if I am to avoid the very cultural essentialism and stereotyping that I am here decrying, some Germans) apparently made the switch from cats to cows (so Indo-Aryan, so bovine, so domesticating, so redolent of Kinder, Kü[c]he, Kirche ), and also applied the metaphor to texts rather than to women (or religions).
In 1807, Georg Hegel provoked a great and absolutely final break with his very old friend Friedrich Schelling by saying that a naïve philosophy of Oneness in which “everything was the same in the Absolute” (recognisable to everyone as Schelling’s doctrine) meant that the Absolute was “like a night, as people say, in which all cows are black.” John Hollander incorporates the Hegelian image (presumably, a cow) into his poem “Kinneret”:
This night in which all pages are the same
Black: The Hegelians must shut up shop
But he reverts to the older image of cats in his Fitzgerald-Omar Khayyam-like quatrain:
All cats are gray at midnight, when the moon
Shines or when it doesn’t, though morning soon
Puts a stop to all that, until each cat’s
Too singularly like itself at noon
To be too much like oneself even at noon is the ultimate erasure of difference.
The Situationists (a group of rather unorthodox Marxists in Paris in the 1960s) borrowed this methodological metaphor (together with much else) from Hegel. Arguing that bureaucrats in the Soviet Union and in China had become identical state capitalists, class powers, even while each accused the other of not being sufficiently revolutionary, they went on to argue that “Ideology, pushed to its extreme, shatters. Its absolute use is also its absolute zero: the night in which all ideological cows are black.” Thus the Situationists argued that the competing ideologies were, like cows, all equally black in the shadow cast on all of them by the workers.
Ernest Gellner added another twist when he used the same metaphor to tell a joke against Marxism, invoking the “cat” variant of the metaphor:
There is an old East European joke concerning the differences between science, philosophy, and Marxism. What is science? It is trying to catch a very small black cat in a very large, entirely dark room. What is philosophy? It is trying to catch a very small black cat in a very large, entirely dark room, when it is not there. What is Marxism? It is trying to catch a very small black cat in a very large, entirely dark room when it is not there, and pretending that one has caught it and knows all about it.
That is not, I think, a fair characterisation of science, or philosophy (except, perhaps, Hegel’s Schelling), or Marxism – although it does note their differences; but it is not an entirely inaccurate characterisation of people who think that all Others (cows or cats) are alike.
The metaphor became so widespread that Dashiell Hammett, in The Dain Curse, let his tough private eye use it in a new variant; he refers to a “blind man in a dark room hunting for a black hat that wasn’t there.” Has the cat become a hat? Is it a typo? Is it a joke? I wonder. David Shulman, in response to an early draft of this book, expanded the range of the metaphor to various religions: “Judaism is looking for a tiny black cat in a large dark room where there is no cat, while complaining loudly all the time that you have been badly and repeatedly scratched. Christianity is looking for a tiny black cat in a large dark room where there is no cat, while insisting that the one that used to be there has risen from the dead. Writing a doctorate is putting a tiny black cat in a large dark room and then coming back over and over to try to check if it is there.” And so forth and so on: like light bulb jokes, or, if you will, like myths, the metaphor of promiscuous sameness is itself promiscuous.
In a review of a violent movie, Terrence Rafferty complained: “When it’s all over, and you’ve lit up your cigarette outside the theatre, you may have some trouble putting a name or a face to the movie that just had its way with you. “Die Hard,” “Lethal Weapon,” “Goldfinger” – what’s the difference? At a certain point, they all look the same in the dark.” Since this is at heart a sexual put-down, it lends a masked obscenity to insults applied to nonsexual objects – even to films viewed in the darkness not of the bedroom but of the screening room.
Even without the metaphor of cats or cows in the dark, the assumption that all members of a class are alike has been used in many cultures to demean the sexual or racial Other. (I capitalise Other in the anthropological rather than theological sense, designating people regarded as nonhuman because of their ethnic difference, rather than the deity that is other because of its metaphysical difference.) After all, the essence of prejudice has been defi ned as the assumption that an unknown individual has all the characteristics of the group to which he or she belongs. “People like you” or “They’re all alike” is always an offensive phrase. Racism and sexism are alike in their practice of clouding the judgment so that the Other is beneath contempt, or at least beneath recognition; they dehumanise, deindividualize, the racially and sexually Other. “All Japanese look alike” is the racist counterpart to the sexist “In the dark, all cats are grey.” The use of large numbers to obscure humanity, particularly the humanity of political Others, is a well-known sexist trick, too: Mozart/Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni boasted, famously, that he had seduced a thousand and three women in Spain.
Racism and sexism are often conflated not merely through people’s shared attitude to the sameness of the sexual or racial Other, but in their equation of the sexual and racial Other. Often the woman herself is depicted as dark; or, to put it differently, the sexual Other – the woman – is conflated with the racial Other. Freud’s use of the term “dark continent” to describe female sexuality has racial implications; he “borrowed the phrase from Victorian colonialist texts in which it was used to designate Africa,” as Mary Ann Doane notes:
The dark continent trope indicates the existence of an intricate historical articulation of the categories of racial difference and sexual difference. In it, there is an extraordinary condensation of motifs linking the white woman and the colonialist’s notion of “blackness.”
Yet, as Eve Sedgwick points out, it behoves us to understand “not that all oppressions are congruent, but that they are differently structured.” That is, sexism and racism do not look precisely alike in the dark. In myth, as in life, knowledge of difference is the key to both sex and politics. Thus the nineteenth-century Sanskritist H. H. Wilson regarded the widely divergent, sometimes sexually deviant texts called Tantras as all “basically the same”; though he granted that they were “infinitely numerous,” he remarked that a scholar need not read more than one or two Tantras to understand them all. And what was done to texts was also done to people; or, to put it in what was more likely the causal sequence, what was done to people was also done to texts.
“Visible minorities” is the phrase used in Canada for people whose disabilities are not hidden (unlike those of some nationalities, presumably, or those with disabilities like deafness), but written on their faces (or on their bodies, if, for instance, they are in wheelchairs). Yet, as Ralph Ellison pointed out years ago, people of other races often become virtually invisible. We speak of racial discrimination, but the myths teach us that the real problem is racial in discrimination – the unwillingness to discriminate between two different members of another race, the tendency to regard them all as doubles of one another. Niebuhr and Kant were part of an Enlightenment tradition that “expounded evil as the capacity to render invisible another human consciousness.”
One 19th-century writer asserted that “Tartar snouts all look the same, or Ethiopian ones all black, but when you look more carefully they are all different as well as alike … [There are] some creatures which are so alike, as with flies, ants, worms, frogs, and many fish, that they cannot be told apart.” Carlo Ginzburg, who cites this text, remarks dryly that “A Tartar architect, an Ethiopian unversed in architecture, or an ant would rank things differently.” Indeed, the colonised return the compliment from time to time; an anthropologist friend of mine told me a story about another anthropologist, a short, fat, dark Jew, who was doing fieldwork in a town of 30,000 Chinese in which the only other non-Chinese was a tall, skinny, redheaded Lutheran minister. When the anthropologist complained that he kept getting the minister’s mail, the Chinese postman apologised, saying, “Sorry, but you look so much alike.”
In order to continue to dominate these look-alikes, however, the powerful must be able to tell them apart. As Ginzburg puts it, “Every society needs to distinguish its members, but the ways of meeting this need vary with place and time.” Footprints in the ancient world and fingerprints in the modern world have been used to identify individuals. There is a political irony in the fact that the British learned the technique of fingerprinting from the Bengalis and then used it to control them (and other Indians). “In Bengal, as well as in China, there was a custom of imprinting letters and documents with a fingertip dipped in ink or tar; this was probably a consequence of knowledge derived from divinatory practice.” In 1860, Sir William Herschel, District Commissioner of Hooghly in Bengal, discovered this technique and decided to use it: “In India, as in other British colonies, the natives were illiterate, disputatious, wily, deceitful, and to the eyes of a European all looked the same. … The imperial administrators had taken over the Bengalis’ conjectural knowledge, and turned it against them.” Even this technique, predicated upon the assumption that all “the natives” were not alike, however much they may have seemed to be so, was put to racist uses: “Galton … tried to trace racial characteristics in fingerprints, but did not succeed. He hoped, however, to pursue his research among some Indian tribes, expecting to find among them ‘a more monkey-like pattern.’” It is this perverse use of the doctrine of sameness, applied to both texts and people, that the comparatist must overcome in order to argue for the very different humanistic uses of the same doctrine.
Excerpted with permission from The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, Wendy Doniger, Speaking Tiger Books.
