Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  Bergson offers an intuitional view of instinct as a “divinatory sympathy” and, like Fabre, opposes instinct to intelligence. But the opposition has a different basis. Where Fabre sees intelligence as the mark of human superiority, to Bergson it is a limited form of understanding, cold and external. Where Fabre sees instinct as mechanical and shallowly automatic, to Bergson it is a profound understanding, a kind of knowledge that takes us to “the very inwardness of life,” reaching back through the common evolutionary history of wasp and caterpillar, back before they diverged on the tree of life, back to a deep intuition of each other, so that the Ammophila simply knows how to paralyze the caterpillar without ever having learned and so that their dramas “might owe nothing to outward perception, but result from the mere presence together of the Ammophila and the caterpillar, considered no longer as two organisms, but as two activities.”39

  Still, as Bertrand Russell noted as early as 1921, “love of the marvellous may mislead even so careful an observer as Fabre and so eminent a philosopher as Bergson.”40 Fabre got a lot wrong about the hairy Ammophila, and it is on plain empirics that his critique of natural selection has been most effectively dismissed. This is not, it seems, a zero-sum game after all. It is true that, in general, the wasp paralyzes its Lepidoptera larvae with multiple stings, one to each segment. But the operation is not so miraculously accurate, nor so consistent, nor does it always follow the same order. Nor does the caterpillar even survive every time. Sometimes the larvae feed off its putrefying body. Sometimes they are killed by its thrashing torso. Moreover, as both reflexive and hormic theorists suggested, the wasp adjusts its behavior in response to changing external stimuli, such as climate, the availability of food, and the condition and behavior of its prey. And it readily alters the sequence and (what, for want of a better term, we might call) the logic of its actions for reasons that may be self-evidently necessary or, on other occasions, quite opaque. Wasps have been observed stinging forty separate larvae and then choosing to drag the forty-first, unparalyzed, to their nest. They have been recorded paralyzing their prey but not following this action with any kind of nest building. They have been seen stinging at random, opportunistically, apparently just trying to get a good shot in. And it has been discovered that their sting is an injection as well as a stab and that it contains poison that produces instant paralysis and the longer-term effect of inhibiting metamorphosis and maintaining the larval body in a supple state, the effect on the victim less percussive than chemical.41

  There’s something uncanny here. And it’s not only the wasp. Herrnstein was right to point to the mysticism at the heart of Fabre’s account. He understood that the “vague wonder” that readers take from Fabre is the most potent legacy of the intuitional position. Yet it has its paradoxes too. Fabre pleads with us to understand that these animals are acting blindly, automatically, without will or intention. And to get there, he revels in the animals’ behavior, believing that the more complex it is and the more rational it appears, the more devastating his unmasking of it as no more than blind instinct, the more crushing his denunciation of the transformists that follows. These wasps are “surgeons” who “calculate” and “ascertain.” Their victims “resist.” But the effect is unforeseen. Fabre is enthralled. And the wasps claim the stage. He is their host. They speak through him, live through him. His prose leaves us not with a sense of the insects’ insufficiencies but with a profound impression of their capacities. A profound impression of the wasps’ capacities, that is, and of Fabre’s too. Despite his insistence, it is not instinct that is miraculous but the animals themselves.

  5.

  The celebrity Fabre enjoyed in his final years did not long survive his death. Though there was little possibility of his embrace by the scientific community, literary fashion ensured that his stature as a nature writer would also rapidly fall. Nowadays, he is largely forgotten both in France and in the English-speaking world. Not even the creationists claim him.

  Only in Japan is Fabre now a household name. There, he is a stalwart of the elementary school curriculum and is often a child’s first introduction to a natural world that soon comes alive in summer insect-collecting assignments. He frequently returns in later life too, as parents introduce their children to the pleasures of natural history and recall the carefree days of their own youthful insect love. (“I write above all things for the young,” Fabre, a schoolteacher for a full twenty-six years, once told his critics in the scientific establishment; “I want to make them love the natural history which you make them hate.”)42

  As we might expect, he is a fixture of Japan’s numerous insectaria. But he also pops up in less likely places: incarnated in the resourceful boy hero of a current manga (Insectival Crime Investigator Fabre) in the top-selling biweekly omnibus Superior; as an anime character (in the series Read or Die, he is cloned as an evil genius with the power to turn insects loose against civilization); as a free promotional plastic figurine (a souvenir entomologique)—along with models of the cicada, the scarab beetle, the hairy Ammophila, and other favorites—in any of the thousands of 7-Eleven convenience stores throughout the country; and in luxury advertising, as a marker of male cosmopolitanism, intellectual curiosity, and a certain spiritual yearning.43

  But it is not just in schools, nature centers, and Japan’s vibrantly commodified popular culture that Fabre’s presence is felt. While his writings are available in English only in haphazard and elderly translation, a recent tally calculated that Japanese scholars produced forty-seven complete or partial editions of the Souvenirs alone between 1923 and 1994.44 Okumoto Daizaburo, literature professor, insect collector, and founder-director of Tokyo’s new Fabre Museum, points out that the early history of these translations is especially interesting.45 It was, after all, Osugi Sakae, the famous anarchist and author of the memorably subversive aphorism “Beauty is to be found in disarray,” who completed the first systematic translation of Fabre into Japanese and whose plan—cut short by his brutal murder in the police repression that followed the great Kanto earthquake of 1923—was to translate the entire Souvenirs. In 1918, around the time he first read Fabre, Osugi wrote: “I like a spirit. But I feel a repugnance when it is theorized. Under process of theorizing, it is often transformed into a harmony with social reality, a slavish compromise, and a falsehood.”46

  Though a committed Darwinian (he had already translated the Origin of Species), Osugi felt he had found a kindred spirit in Fabre. Captivated by the energy of Fabre’s prose and by the pedagogical possibilities of popular science, Osugi was also drawn strongly to Fabre’s hostility to theorizing. The problem of theory, the charismatic writer-activist believed, lay less in its ability to explain than in its desire to order, less in its ambition to make sense of the world than in its appeal to the analytic over the experiential. The ordering impulse was a constraining impulse, one driven by the desire to dominate, to master, both intellectually and practically. The elevation of the rational, he asserted, impoverished the possibilities of apprehension. “To desire collapsing the universe into a single algorithm and to master all of reality with the precepts of reason” was, Fabre had written, a “grandiose enterprise,” not a grand one.47 It didn’t seem to matter to Osugi that this suspicion of global explanation arose from Fabre’s constant rediscovery of God’s hand in nature, a very different basis for wariness than his own.48

  I don’t know whether Okumoto is correct in his argument that Fabre’s appeal for Osugi lay in their shared nonconformity, but I like where it leads us. As Okumoto tells it, the revolutionary labor leader took inspiration from the schoolteacher-naturalist’s rejection of authoritarian pedagogy, his insistence on teaching girls as well as boys, and above all, his attitude toward categorization. (“A fig for systems!” Fabre exclaims in the Souvenirs when discussing taxonomists’ refusal to classify spiders as insects.)49 Fabre’s celebration of the sensuality of inquiry, his rejection of authority, and his democratic accessibility fascinated Osugi—as it does Okumoto, wh
o places Fabre alongside the celebrated naturalist and folklorist Kumagusu Minakata (1867–1941), another household name in today’s Japan and another figure honored for his nonconformity and independence: “These two idiosyncratic autodidacts never simplified their own thoughts into laws and formulas. Some people criticized their lack of strong, consistent theories, but they kept searching for the diversity of the world and kept seeing everything with a fresh eye. They are, indeed, what Rimbaud calls ‘voyants.’”50

  “Insect lovers are anarchists,” writes Okumoto elsewhere; “they hate following other people’s orders and try to create something like ‘order’ by themselves—or else they don’t care about such a thing at all!”51 Insect lovers, he says, see the world from the place of the insect, from inside the life of the animal, from within its micro world. They pry into life, not death.

  There’s another insect lover who might help here. Imanishi Kinji, ecologist, mountaineer, anthropologist, founder of Japanese primatology, and best-selling theorist of nature study (shizengaku), began his career in the 1930s studying mayfly larvae in the Kamo River, in Kyoto. A theorist of evolution, Imanishi was no theoretical Fabrean. But he was no Darwinian either. Like Osugi’s hero, the great anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Imanishi saw cooperation as the motor of evolution, rejecting both inter- and intraspecific competition as the basis of natural selection. Imanishi stressed the connection and harmonious interaction among living things but insisted that the meaningful ecological units are societies, outside of which an individual cannot survive. Individuals come together not for reproduction but because they have needs in common, which they meet through collaboration. With its interest in cooperating groups rather than competing monads, his shizengaku is, he maintained, a Japanese view of evolution, distinct from a Darwinian system ideologically rooted in Western individualism.52 Like Fabre, Imanishi attracted considerable condescension from professional biologists in Europe and North America, who scented an anti-scientific anti-Darwinism at work. But Imanishi’s ideas have widespread popularity in Japan.53 Even though there is little overlap between the architecture of Imanishi’s thought and Fabre’s natural historical theology, there is an unambiguous affinity. “There are people in the world,” Imanishi wrote in 1941,

  who have spent their whole lives dressed in white smocks, and have never once been out of the laboratory. There are probably even famous scholars who have never once seen animals and plants as they exist in nature. I will not stand for the lumping together of people who have views of nature like that, and people like me, who have shaped their views of nature by spending their lives in the midst of nature; this feeling, perhaps an undercurrent, is somewhere behind my work. Even if there are no natural sciences, nature will still exist. No matter how great the natural sciences make themselves look, they can know only a part of nature. Having subdivided nature and become a specialist in some field, one is a mere specialist of constituent nature (bubun shizen). In the schools they do not teach us that, in addition to constituent nature, there is also total nature (zentai shizen). It was the mountains and exploration which taught me of the existence of total nature.54

  The “anti-science” rejection of mechanistic theory, the intuitive connection of observer and observed, the immersive affinity of person and world, this enfolding of a life and its work. Remember Fabre: the simplicity, the patience, the life eked out far from metropolitan glamour, the attempt to grasp the living whole, the disdain for authoritarianism, the ethical independence, the moral life, the scholarly life, the pedagogical life. These are lessons that appeal just as strongly to old and young, to radical and conservative.

  And what’s more, for Imanishi as for Okumoto, Fabre’s pursuit of the godly in insects is recognizable in another way. It has a sensibility that is easily assimilated to a set of ideas often invoked by Japanese nature lovers (and foreign commentators on Japanese attitudes toward nature) seeking to explain what nationalists, Romantics, New Agers, and others frequently consider a unique Japanese affinity to nature and, in particular, to insects: that animist, Shintoist—and subsequently Japanese Buddhist—notion that divinity (kami) “take[s] abode in natural features that give people a feeling of awe or spirituality,” that “nature is divine,” that nature itself is divine.55 (Not, I should emphasize, as Fabre would have it, that nature is an expression of the Divine.)

  And there’s something else. Osugi and Okumoto reveal the inadequacies of literal-meaning-centered reading. They remind us that to understand Fabre and his appeal, we have to listen for other languages in his work, not simply to what the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin would call his “constative” meanings—his unconvincing theory of instinct, his poorly reasoned rebuttal of transformism—but to his poetics, the poetics of his storytelling and of the writing that unexpectedly pulls you through the hand lens and into the wasps’ nest, the poetics of his haunted life and of his consummate self-mythologizing, the poetics of grand affinity with the natural world, the poetics of his insects, of the impossible, uncertain intimacy between you, me, and those others that are simultaneously most commonplace and most alien.56

  6.

  In one of his famous monthly essays in the magazine Natural History, the evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould noted that the parasitic wasps—both the endoparasites, which consume their living prey from the inside out, and those ectoparasites described by Fabre, who eat from the outside in—confronted Western theologians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century with their most terrifying problem, the problem of evil. If God is benevolent and the Creation an expression of his goodness and wisdom, “why,” they agonized, “are we surrounded with pain, suffering, and apparently senseless cruelty in the animal world?”57 It was easy to understand that predation was intrinsic to survival in nature, but why would a compassionate God allow the horrors inflicted by the wasp on its victims, the “slow death by parasitic ingestion,” a death made more nightmarish in that it was suffered by living, evidently conscious beings in a manner that, as Gould put it, recalled “the ancient English penalty for treason—drawing and quartering, with its explicit object of extracting as much torment as possible by keeping the victim alive and sentient.”

  “As the king’s executioner drew out and burned his client’s entrails,” Gould wrote, “so does the [wasp] larvae eat fat bodies and digestive organs first, keeping the [victim] alive by preserving intact the essential heart and central nervous system.”58

  It is hardly original to point out that nature has long been an irresistible mirror to the human condition, its laws seen as expressions of God’s laws, its every gesture embodying a moral lesson, its “societies” taken as atavistic versions of our own. Faced with the frightening inscrutability of the parasitic wasp, two roads were possible to these observers. One involved the painful acknowledgment of nature’s evil followed by the necessary next step of a determination to transcend animality and fulfill the promise of humanity through goodness. The second, more common nowadays than in earlier centuries and more aligned with the contingency of modern evolutionary theory, rested on the moral disenchantment of nature, on the claim that there are in fact no lessons to be found in the behavior of nonhuman beings or phenomena, that nature, in Gould’s word, is “nonmoral,” that, as he put it, “Caterpillars are not suffering to teach us something; they have simply been outmaneuvered” (and that, although currently improbable, they and their fellow victims may one day even turn the tables on the wasps).

  But parasitic wasps don’t lend themselves to disenchantment. Somehow, in their presence, observation is filled with drama. “We cannot,” Gould pointed out, “render this corner of natural history as anything but story, combining the themes of grim horror and fascination and usually ending not so much with pity for the caterpillar as with admiration for the [wasp].”59

  Poor parasitized Fabre! A fine host indeed. If he had only seen it this clearly perhaps he would not have told us quite so much about the Sphex, the Bembix, and the rest. He might have th
ought twice before dwelling so long on the details of their hunting strategies and, in particular, on the precision of their surgical skills. But the point, of course, is that he couldn’t help himself. From the moment he wept before the Ammophila, the die was cast. And that surrender was both his undoing and his triumph. When it came to it, he let the animals tell their tales. In this, at least, his instincts were exactly right.

  Fever/Dream

  1.

  That too-hot, too-shadeless morning, pushing the outboard motor to its very limit, first one river, then the next, those never-ending Amazon rivers—never realized anywhere could be so far, worrying about the gas tank, worrying about fallen trees in the water, worrying about the time, heading for the medical post with poor, sad Lene, her hair hacked short in an act of rebellion that only confirmed her madness; Marco, her husband, stone-faced, watching over her, her body now sprawled under the bench seats in the hull of the bouncing dinghy, motionless, lifeless but not quite dead, lifeless on the outside, but everything happening within, malaria coursing through her veins, bloating her liver, fevering her poor, troubled brain.

  2.

  Everyone got sick. It made no difference that the area around the house had been cleared of forest, as the public health leaflets insisted. Nor did it matter that each house had its neat, handwritten number on the doorpost to confirm that it had been sprayed with DDT. Everyone got sick, some worse than others, the weakest—the children and the elderly—as always, worst of all. When it was my turn, I just lay in my hammock, burning with icy shivers, my body racked from top to toe, eyes dull, mind listless, utterly dependent on the kindness of people who knew there was nothing to do but wait it out. Every day as night fell, it returned. And then, afterward, in the morning, a feeling of weakness that was pleasantly ascetic, as if I had been purged and cleansed, had survived a trial. But within, the knowledge that my body was stitched fatefully to the rhythm of the day in a new and previously unanticipated pattern.