Review: Other People's Myths by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty Print E-mail

doniger(San Diego Tribune January 27, 1989)

Something Is A Myth Here

Yes, I know, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is the first Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. And yes, her new book demonstrates vast knowledge of the esoteric and common myths of world religions. But all the pomp doesn't quite support the pulpit. Missing in this hard-to-read treatise is the most elusive trait any scholar-writer can possess—simplicity.

Communicating one's knowledge takes writing that is clear, focused and taut, with a recognizable purpose. The range of erudition here is immense: Hindu, Greek, Jewish, Christian myths and rituals, and everything else in between: Freud-Jung-Homer-Plato-Jesus-Krishna-Woody Allen; fish-deer-goats-horses-dogs; gods-film-mind-madness-orality-sacrifice-transubstantiation-orthopraxy. Add to this unmanageable vista a problem with directness.

O'Flaherty emphasizes far too often the responsibility she feels to her subject.

She continually interrupts herself with an endless examination of the scholar's motives.

Sabotaged by such second thoughts, the book's spirit, a sort of light-heavy playfulness that myth-telling engages, quickly vanishes. As a mythologist, O'Flaherty knows that myths by their nature pose questions about a people's religious beliefs.

Myths also tell stories.

So to pose a question she begins the book with a tale about a hunter and a sage that describes how each of us may be characters in each others' dreams.

The point is that seeking truth always brings out in the seeker the will to deceive. She argues that this tale exemplifies what scholars (read "sages") do. They write a sort of "intellectual autobiography" where their scholar's ego often mixes up, to their detriment, other people's identities with their own. This I follow.

But O'Flaherty swerves away from more recognizable associations of people and myth to an esoteric META-land where the structure of myth is everything, and everything is structure.

Of course, the level of erudition has been raised.

She begins to wonder about the stories that tell stories about telling stories. This I sort of follow.

But not the levitation.

She is now asking why those stories that tell stories about telling stories ask particularly story-based questions. Reread that last sentence.

Now imagine seven chapters of a book on myth where each topic becomes an unwieldy set of questions and counter-questions, a maze of interrogation.

Compound that with a redundant, prolix style and an annoying penchant for footnoting (one-quarter of the 225 pages are notes, bibliography and index, and in some paragraphs a footnote follows every sentence). Taken together, it is a META-book batting back and forth the questions of META-myth without much META-point. O'Flaherty's best chapter discusses what a myth is and is not and how myths differ from classics.

She contrasts these types of storytelling skillfully, using examples easily understood from American culture and English literature. Occasionally she argues her claims well, as when she supports cultural pluralism in the academy.

And there are many thought-provoking twists that her study does achieve.

Her analysis of how Christ's crucifixion is related to other cultures' myths of sacrifice is fascinating. But these occasional buoys seldom lighten her insistence on defining and categorizing concepts. I do understand those who are "mythologized."

But on one page I am assailed by these variants: the unmythologized, the demythologized, the remythologized and the un-demythologized.