Arachnographia: On Spidery Writing

I need to begin with a joke, or at least a pun, to which I will return later. There is a definition of "spidery writing" in the Free Dictionary on the web. The definition has to do with writing that "resembles a web" and is "very fine"; this is not, perhaps, the first thing we might think of when attending to "spidery writing," which is most obviously the stuff of Gothic fiction—the idea of wills, testaments, documents of all kinds being completed in a "spidery handwriting" which suggests something coming down from a remote past, something that might be easily erased, something difficult to decipher. We could extend the series of metaphors in relation to the Gothic: for example, there is a current website called spiderywriting.com, which turns out to provide "ghost-writing" skills. Spiders and the ghostly; spiders and the secret, or secretive; spiders as those presences that you see, if you see them at all, out of the corner of your eye, in the corner of the room. Spiders and corners; spiders live in places that are difficult to reach, difficult to sweep clean, and are therefore emblematic, perhaps, of all those aspects of life that cannot be cleansed by the ubiquitous broom of modernity, to which all things that might be considered as dirt are abhorrent, as I have demonstrated in my book Modernity (2007); they are that which "lives on," that which threatens our clear, encyclopedist catalog of forms of life, perhaps even of "form" itself. Spiders write, and are writ, large in our fantasies.

But these, of course, are not the earliest reference points for the textual life of the spider, for the role of the spider as mythological creator has far earlier beginnings. For that we have to turn back to the myth of Arachne, the female human weaver—or perhaps spinner—who, in Ovid's Metamorphoses, challenges the goddess Athena to a contest. At this point the myth goes in two separate directions. One has it that Arachne unacceptably depicts the male gods as debauched and abusive; according to the other one, Arachne's weaving is simply more accomplished than Athena's. Either way, the Arachne myth is about transgression, about mortal encroachment onto the territory of the gods. But it is also a myth about freedom of speech, about being allowed, or not allowed, to display truths that are forbidden by the voice of authority. And either way, Arachne wins the battle but loses the war: Athene sprinkles her with a potion derived from Hecate, the goddess of night, and dooms her to life as a spider. It is perhaps not irrelevant that Hecate is, however, not only the goddess of night and darkness but also the goddess of household rubbish, of all that cannot be accommodated in a well-ordered, cleansed society, all that is left over just when we think we have banished the darkness, inspected the corners, destroyed those scary webs that flutter just out of our eyesight. But Arachne's rebirth as a spider, of course, also marks in one sense the apotheosis of weaving, and thus the origin of text itself in a notion of the "textile": when there is form in narrative, or in story, then we could say that we are in the continuing presence of Arachne, the human maker of tapestries, teller of tales free from the undue, unfair influence of the gods, creator of a paradoxically anthropomorphic form of writing. This is where text begins: in an arachnid weaving, in the evolution of a thing of fragility and beauty, blown like gossamer, yet with a strength, as scientists love to tell us, greater than that of steel.

The idea of narrative I am working with here is similar to that proposed by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle in their Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, where they offer five propositions about the nature of story:

1. 1. Stories are everywhere.

2. 2. Not only do we tell stories, but stories tell us: if stories are everywhere, we are also in stories.

3. 3. The telling of a story is always bound...