*Criterion Winter 02-4.16 - Divinity School - University of Chicago

A bedtrick, just to be sure everyone’s in on the joke,
is “sex with a partner who pretends to be someone else. . . .”
and not to impose a prefabricated formula over diverse and
paradoxical material. One suspects that Arendt was rather
more systematic than that, and it is clear that Professor
Doniger is, too. In fact, she has encyclopedic tendencies: she
is a collector.
A few more words about the complex arrangement of this
text. Each chapter is divided into two parts. The first part presents
the texts and contextualizes the story, most often a Hindu
story, with variations on the theme. Professor Doniger goes on
to offer a broader interpretation at the conclusion of each
chapter that she calls an “approach,” of which there are ten:
philosophy, psychology, zoology, feminism, theology, law,
critical studies, queer theory, rhetoric, and structuralism.
Professor Doniger’s way of working offers what she calls “the
textual and methodological equivalent of the kind of ‘thick
description’ that Clifford Geertz has prescribed for anthropological
fieldwork.” Here I picked up an immediate connection
to a way of working in at least a few of my books. Geertz’s
Interpretation of Cultures was important for me as I made good
my escape from the confines of positivistic social science, which
in my case was an inoculation that never took. My Women and
War best exemplifies this Geertzian approach, although the
most theological of my books, Who Are We? in its kulturcritik
sections, is rather Geertzian as well. One final quote on the
capacious playfulness of Professor Doniger’s approach: “I am
poaching in these preserves”—her many approaches is the
reference here—“making commando raids to pick up any
ideas I can find that shed light on the tricks played in the
dark; I am using the theories that I know, the ones that I
like, the ones that make sense to me for this problem.”
She takes up her stories in the conviction that none of
them can be reduced to their social contexts, no more than the
meaning of the political theories of Machiavelli, Hobbes, or
Rousseau is exhausted by elaborating on life in strife-ridden
Florence, or civil-war-addled England, or Catholic-Huguenot,
prerevolutionary France. There is universal significance to
find in their reflections on, and that grew out of, the contexts
in which they found themselves. For any great thinker, of
course, his or her context is not limited to that which is in
an immediate surround. Machiavelli communed with busts
28 WINTER 2002
of the ancients that dotted his study when he came in from
a day on the farm. Hobbes immersed himself in Thucydides
as well as geometry. Rousseau gobbled up anthropology like
a hungry child with a bag of M&Ms. Thinkers help to make
their contexts.
A bedtrick, just to be sure everyone’s in on the joke, is
“sex with a partner who pretends to be someone else. The
bedtrick contests the intimate relationship between sex and
gender, power and identity, raising a number of questions:
Why weren’t you able to tell the difference in the dark? And
why does it matter so much? Why is this story told over and
over again? Why do we find it compelling? What deep human
concerns does it respond to? How unique and unmistakable
is one lover to another? Can you recognize your lover in the
dark? Can true love always tell the difference? Is it the body
that is desired, or the mind? How does sex change if we do
or do not know who our partner actually is? And, at the bottom
of it all, does sex tell the truth or lie?”
Professor Doniger finds cross-cultural significances in the
universality of bedtricks that range from “lighthearted comedy
and farce” to tension, leading sometimes unto death, between
restraint and desire. They range from the cruel and rapacious
to the tender and self-giving. Sometimes all sorts of bits are
mingled in. For example: sex with a five-headed cobra—the
snake had turned into the human image of the husband of
Kamakshi when he entered her bed—is not exactly my cup
of tea. But the cobra, the king of snakes, winds up being selfgiving
unto death, killing himself (when he might have killed
her) as his lady is curled up sleeping next to her husband and
the child he has fathered. I found this story oddly affecting,
probably because it has something to do with animals, so let
me focus for a moment on the zoology approach assayed by
Professor Doniger.
The chapter that precedes the discussion of the zoology
approach is called “Waking up in Bed with an Animal,” both
literally and metaphorically, as it turns out. There are all sorts
of masquerades and disguises here. Sometimes the humans
know their partners are humans bewitched to become animals.
Sometimes the animal lover is first encountered in human
form and then reveals its animality. This is not, for the most