Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  This is the period in which we see the development of those technologies of disease control that achieve a kind of fulfillment at Auschwitz: collective showers, bacteriological soaps, chemical gas, cremation … These technologies were already compulsory features of a network of border-control stations that fortified the German frontiers with Russia and Poland and encouraged migrants from the east to regard German territory as implacably foreign ground. Following a severe cholera outbreak in Hamburg in 1892, which was widely attributed to Russian Jews, Germany closed its eastern borders, relenting only to establish a hygienic transport corridor to the ports of embarkation for Ellis Island. For a while, the major shipping lines took over the financing and expansion of the border-control posts.46

  The outbreak of war in 1914 soon produced mass epidemics among refugees, troops, and enemy captives. In a lightning typhus outbreak in Serbia, more than 150,000 civilian refugees and prisoners died in six months.47 Hygiene became an urgent political priority, and sanitary regimens became correspondingly more severe. It was Russian soldiers—rather than the atrocious conditions—who were blamed for the appalling mortality rates in the POW camps. “Eastern peoples” were characterized not as victims of disease but as its carriers. State efforts were directed toward protecting the civilian population from contamination (Russian prisoners were to be tended only by Russian doctors).

  The critical scientific breakthrough just prior to the war—the identification of lice as the typhus vector—led to an industrialization of delousing and its expansion to civilians. The historian Paul Weindling describes what this meant:

  The routine demanded total nudity, and special attention to the hair, skin folds, and the “Schamgegend” where the lice might lurk in pubic hair or between the bottom cheeks. If any person resisted the shaving of all their hair (and it was noted that women often protested), then a louse-killing substance like petroleum or eucalyptus oil was to be used on those parts of the body defended from more radical hygienic intervention.… Clothing, bed linen, and mattress covers had to be placed in ovens or steam chambers. For disinfestation of rooms either steam or canisters of sulphuric acid or sulphur dioxide were used. Items of low value were burned.48

  Weindling describes the mass application of such procedures by German disinfectors throughout German-occupied Poland, Romania, and Lithuania in response to typhus outbreaks during the war. He documents an increasingly strident association of disease with Jews and others regarded as racial degenerates. Jewish-owned stores in Poland were closed until the owners had undergone delousing. Lodz, a city with a large Jewish population, was ringed by thirty-five detention centers for persons considered infested.49

  But military defeat in 1918 radically changed the calculus. Rather than expanding into purified colonial living space, medical authorities now found themselves confined to a dramatically reduced national territory. They also found themselves confronting an unmanageable crisis of refugees—mostly ethnic Germans and Ostjuden—as well as sick and wounded military personnel returning from the front. In the years following the Treaty of Versailles, highly restrictive immigration controls and draconian inspection practices were imposed in an effort to protect the newly vulnerable Volk against contamination from the east.50

  Nonetheless, and despite the terrible events of the Russian Civil War—25 million typhus cases and up to 3 million deaths from typhus between 1917 and 192351—it was becoming clear that the real danger was no longer external. As early as 1920, police in Berlin and other cities were invoking “hygienic control” as they rounded up Ostjuden and transported them to disease-infested camps along the national borders.

  Not only the discourses of hygiene (themselves an amalgam of eugenics, social Darwinism, political geography, and pest biology) but also specific technologies, identifiable personnel, and particular institutions dedicated to the eradication of disease shifted rapidly and quite seamlessly to the eradication of people. The elimination of typhus would enable a simultaneous purification of race and polity—one and the same by the mid-1930s—and increasingly the disease’s human victims became functionally and perhaps ontologically indistinguishable from its insect vectors.

  From 1918, this trajectory accelerated as a conservative political and medical consensus formed around the understanding that contagion was directly tied to degeneration, that a body politic whose health had been shattered by the humiliation of Versailles was now dangerously contaminated, that disease had reached the racial heartland, and that exorcising the phantasm of infection was the only solution. The interwar period is striking for the radical conflation of political philosophy and medicine, such that ghettos, for example, become places of confinement that protect the excluded German population from disease, and simultaneously—and inevitably, given the conditions inside them—diseased sites that generate a pathological anxiety around fears of contamination from escapees. The rest is too well known to bear further repetition.

  11.

  An elderly Alfred Nossig appears repeatedly in the diary of Adam Czerniakow. The entries are cryptic and irritated, perhaps even condescending. Nossig runs to Czerniakow with prattle from the ghetto streets; he is short of money; he bombards the Germans with letters; on one occasion, they throw him out of their offices.52 It all raises the suspicion that the old man is senile.53 Czerniakow describes him as “pleading” and “babbling.” He talks about Nossig’s “antics.” At one point he “admonishes” him.54

  It is clear that even though Czerniakow may not find Nossig directly threatening, he does not trust him. For a start, Nossig is too familiar with the Nazis. It is the Germans who introduce him to the Jewish administration, to whom he is already known, and it is the Germans who insist on a position for him. Appropriately enough, he is appointed the council’s emigration officer. But what kind of farcical task is that? Ghettos were soon to be liquidated all across the Reich, and Nossig is negotiating resettlement with the SS as if this is 1914, as if we are all still Germans! Nonetheless, the work seems to energize him, and for a while he appears to convince himself (if no one else) that there is real hope of relocating the Warsaw Jews to the French colony of Madagascar.

  When the ghetto is sealed in November 1940, the Nazis appoint Nossig director of its Department of Art and Culture. It seems another absurd position. But opening the committee’s first meeting, the elderly Nossig speaks with characteristic force about the role of art in Jewish Warsaw, by now a place of acute desperation, advancing starvation, and disease. “Art means cleanliness,” he is reported to have said, momentarily bringing together those deeply tortured histories of social hygiene. “We have to introduce culture into the streets,” he insists. The ghetto must be made clean “so that we are not ashamed in front of our German visitors.”55

  Kafka

  Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed

  Into different bodies.

  TED HUGHES, Tales from Ovid

  1.

  We know this story. A solitary Ammophila hirsuta captures and paralyzes a larva of the turnip moth, Agrotis segetum. She drags it to her nest, lays an egg on its soft belly just beyond reach of its feebly waving legs, and exits, barricading the entrance to the burrow behind her. The egg hatches, and the emerging wasp larva at once starts to feed. It grows fat and strong. The caterpillar, unable to move with force but still discerning shape and shadow, sensing atmospheric and chemical changes, and experiencing pain, is slowly consumed, first the nonessential tissue, later the vital organs.

  2.

  This morning, I read that less than 1 percent of caterpillar eggs survive to adulthood. Such is the ferocity of the predators they face: the birds, reptiles, and mammals (large and small); the parasitoid wasps and flies, the ants, spiders, earwigs, and beetles; the viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Not to mention the gardeners. This state of affairs accounts for the caterpillars’ spectacular battery of defenses: toxic flesh, chemical sprays, aggressive sounds, spiny bristles, garish coloring, biting mouths, silky escape ropes, unpleasant flu
ids regurgitated, repellant odors diffused, the precision mimicry of eyespots, horns, faces, and camouflage, the barbed hair, the stinging hair, the intimidating postures, the alliances with ants.1

  Still, less than 1 percent survive to adulthood, to that moment when “with a reckless smile,” as Roberto Bolaño put it, they emerge anew.2

  3.

  Less than 1 percent survive to adulthood? It must be difficult to establish this fact with confidence when there is no reasonable estimate of numbers to begin with and when each caterpillar instar—each larval stage, of which there are often five or six before pupation—can look quite different.

  In short, consider the difficulty of establishing this statistic with confidence when caterpillars, as the ecologist Daniel Janzen recently pointed out, “are the last unknown group of big things on the terrestrial world.”3

  4.

  One claim, two problems: the problem of quantifying survival and the problem of conceptualizing adulthood. If the first problem is insurmountable, the second is harder.

  The textbooks explain that a caterpillar is a Lepidoptera larva, the stage in the life cycle of a butterfly or moth between the hatching of the egg and the formation of the pupa. It is the stage that leads to metamorphosis and the adult form, the stage during which some animals increase their mass a thousandfold and repeatedly molt as they travel through their various instars.

  Jules Michelet, the historian and naturalist, considered the ways in which this extended journey of the insect from one state to another might parallel the passage of other animals “from the embryonic existence to the independent life.” Unlike mammals, he wrote in L’insecte in 1857, for pupating insects “the destination is not merely different, but contrary, with a violent contrast.” This “is not a simple change of condition,” and these are not “the gentle manoeuvres” by which the rest of us achieve maturity. These beings that are one and the same could not be more different: clay-footed yet ethereal, earthbound yet aloft in the skies, scurrying to the shadows yet drawn to the light, a grinder of leaves yet a sipper of nectar, unencumbered by genitalia yet dedicated to sex. “The legs will not again be the legs…. The head will not be the head,” wrote Michelet. This transformation, he saw, “is a thing to confound and almost to terrify the imagination.”4

  Michelet no doubt knew that the word larva had entered the Romance languages accompanied by older, darker associations. In a time of meaningful correspondences between natural phenomena and everyday life, an age when people discerned potent signs in stones and storms, the word larva conjured disembodied spirits, ghosts, specters, and hobgoblins, and it seized on its insect in a fit of recognition. The duality of the word expressed the occult ambiguity of the creature. It was Linnaeus who insisted on the restrictive modern meaning of the term and, with that shift of logic and sentiment, began the textbook entry that still stands between us and the uncanny reality of the thing.

  Here is the larva and there is the adult. For Michelet, author of a celebrated seven-volume Histoire de la Révolution française, the event that lies between these states of being was a “revolution,” an “astonishing tour de force.”5 It was perhaps possible for Linnaeus to disenchant the word but quite another matter to pacify the thing itself.

  5.

  As stubborn as its goblin nature was the idea—still with us—of the larva as a mask behind which lies the animal’s truth. One being enters the chrysalis. Another comes out. “All is thrown aside with the mask,” said Michelet. “All is, and ought to be, changed.”6

  Michelet was fifty-nine when he published L’insecte. He would live for another seventeen years, but he was nonetheless already preoccupied with death. His massive works of history were works of resurrection, of bringing back to life. And, indeed, the dead were always around him. When he was seventeen, his mother died. Six years later, it was his closest friend. When he was forty-one, his first wife died. Seven years after that, it was his father, with whom he shared a house. At fifty-two he lost a baby son, the only child of his new marriage; five years after that, his thirty-one-year-old daughter.7

  And his health was poor, riven by a series of psychosomatic complaints brought on by his agonized response to the upheavals that shook France from 1848: the February revolution that created the Second Republic and the subsequent imperial reaction under Napoleon III. A believer in the unity of nations, he was horrified by the assertion of class on all sides. But the restoration of the emperor led—as it did for Fabre—to a dramatic reversal of Michelet’s fortunes; in his case to his sacking from a prestigious position at the Collège de France and his untimely departure from Paris.8

  Death was all around Michelet. “I have drunk too much from the black blood of the dead,” he had written in 1853. Yet he is still drawn relentlessly to resurrection.9 And that surely is why he is drawn also so relentlessly to the larvae.

  He is unconvinced by the primacy of the butterfly, the assumption that this most seductive of animals is the fulfillment of the caterpillar in the same way that the adult human is understood to be the fulfillment (for better or worse) of the child. Some of that assumption anticipates Darwinian teleology: the emphasis on reproduction as the purpose of existence confirms that the sexually mature form is the only one that counts. Some of that assumption is more generally evolutionary: the logic of immaturity and development, the progression through ever greater, more advanced stages to ever more advanced, more perfect states that would become so deeply lodged in post-nineteenth-century politics, culture, and personal life—even though our experience of politics, culture, and personal life tells us emphatically that there really is no guarantee of directional progress.

  But perhaps, suggests Michelet, the lesson of metamorphosis is not teleology but impermanence and its immortalities. “Throughout my life,” he writes, “… each day I died and was born again; I have undergone many painful strugglings and laborious transformations.… Many and many times I have passed from the larva into the chrysalis, and into a more complete condition; the which, after awhile, incomplete under other conditions, has put me in the way of accomplishing a new circle of metamorphosis.” He is a moment in the midst of many connected lives. Occasionally he catches himself making a gesture, an intonation, and feels his father alive inside him. “Are we two? Were we one? Oh! it was my chrysalis.”10

  6.

  More than a century and a half earlier, as 1699 rolled over into 1700, financially independent but hardly wealthy, twenty years of marriage and five more of ascetic withdrawal into the mystical Labadist community in West Friesland firmly behind her, twenty-something daughter and Amerindian slaves in tow, the fifty-two-year-old Maria Sibylla Merian, already a noted painter of European insects, rode a donkey through the tropical forests of the Dutch colony of Suriname, “the only European woman who journeyed exclusively in pursuit of her science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”11

  Merian traveled with slaves, but as colonial travelers go, she was relatively benign, never speaking ill of the natives, bemoaning their vicious treatment at the hands of the Dutch settlers, and acknowledging with unusual candor (though in general terms rather than by name) the locals’ substantial contributions to her collection.

  Raised in a family of artists and publishers—her maternal grandfather was Théodore de Bry, whose iconic engravings made the New World real for readers of the first European travel narratives—Merian developed an early fascination for nature study that never left her. She began at thirteen with silkworms (another family connection: her mother’s second husband’s brother was in the silk trade) but was soon preoccupied by caterpillars in general and, above all, by their transformations.

  The beauty of butterflies and moths, she wrote later, “led me to collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to study their metamorphoses.”12 It was an eccentricity in a girl, but as with the famous and similarly youthful heroine of the twelfth-century Japanese story “The Lady Who Loved Worms” (who did not pluck her eyebrows, did not blacken her te
eth, who was, indeed, not very ladylike at all), the peculiarity was one of sensitivity and insight that perhaps indicated a philosophical refinement.13 It proved to be a tolerable eccentricity—despite the dark associations that crawling creatures often carried.

  Surrounded by books and artists, Merian had access to a large library of natural history illustration. She collected her own insects and bred their larvae through their transformations, drawing and painting from life. She honed her conventional drafting skills, copying from the leading emblem books, including Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), a popular collection of insect engravings executed by Jacob Hoefnagel in the style of his father, Joris.14 But Merian’s times were different, and so was her vision: if the Hoefnagels’ incandescent insect universe was dedicated to the revelation of the microcosmic, she occupied a world refreshed by the introduction of the microscope, in which the new preoccupation was with observation and the classifications it made possible. Where Hoefnagel had arranged his insects in a symbolic order, Merian placed hers in a different relation, one that was drawn from her own life studies and revealed a fascination with the profusions of time, place, and connection.