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Poetics of the Hive The Insect Metaphor in Literature By CRISTOPHER HOLLINGSWORTH UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS Copyright © 2001 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87745-786-2 Chapter One FROM HOMER TO VIRGIL Hiving the Dark Swarm
Let us begin at the beginning, - and that, as everybody knows, is Homer. He is, indeed, so much at the beginning for that very reason (if even there were no other)he is, and will be, supremely interesting. Thomas De Quincey, "A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature"
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force
The transplanted insect could not be expected to furnish its biographer with other than fragmentary evidence, very weak in those biological details which form the principal charm of entomology. To study the habits of insects one must observe them long and closely on their native heath, so to speak, in the place where their instincts have full and natural play. J. Henri Fabre, The Life of the Caterpillar
The Hive's Lost Dimension
If we forget what modern science has taught us, we may assume that Virgil saw the insect societies much as we do - specifically, that the beehive is brighter and better organized than the ant heap. Indeed, what could be more commonsensical and aesthetically necessary than his division of human cooperation into the images of the golden hive and the dark swarm? Given Rome's long history of contact with alien peoples and Virgil's considerable influence, we should expect Western literature to be filled with contending images of beehives and ant heaps, utopian and dystopian cities. But this is not the case.
With no significant exceptions, from Virgil through the Renaissance the beehive is used to picture the city. Hence, even when details suggest dissonance between the actual and the ideal, a poem's present and an inherited picture, we are supposed to see the beehive city as good. We are to note and to value the antique theory of social organization that the Hive uniquely embodies. This is to say that, in order to understand instances of the classical and classically influenced Hive, we must recover an older sense of allegory. Prior to the sweeping and uncompromising metaphors of modern science (powers of the imagination birthed by a new set of mental and material instruments), the insect analogy served poets and thinkers richly and well. Even Milton, who is close enough to us to imagine the universe as if through a telescope, complicates instead of rejects the ancients' ideal model, its satisfaction with philosophical process, and its poetic theory of nature.
In the days before Jan Swammerdam - the sixteenth-century student of the microscopic realm whom Michelet titles the "martyr of patience" - the symbolic relationship between human beings and nature was such that any comparison between city and hive, human being and insect, was made and received without the suggestion of biological synonymy, much less the sociological identity that is now generally accepted as truth. But we will never entirely outgrow our forebears' thoughts, the ever-accumulating presence of the past. Kenneth Burke likens one's experience of the history of ideas to joining a dinner party long after it has begun, a gathering that we have no choice but to leave early. Similarly, in the first sentence of The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler sums up what he has learned from his survey of Western cosmology: "We can add to our knowledge, but we cannot subtract from it." Indeed, so weighty are the old ways of seeing and thinking that it is not until the nineteenth century that the picture of the anthill (or, as in the instance below, a picture of a termite nest) begins to express a new definition of nature and humanity's position within it, one that flows from the hybridization of old and new ideas of the world. In a tableau of St. Ogg's, George Eliot mixes the antique and the new, the Hive's poetic inheritance and its scientific possibilities:
In order to see Mr and Mrs Glegg at home, we must enter the town of St Ogg's-that venerable town with the red-fluted roofs and the broad warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of their burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the precious inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces, which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through the medium of the best classic pastorals.
It is one of those old, old towns, which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature as much as the nests of the bower birds or the winding galleries of the white ants: a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their back on it from the camp on the hill-side, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce eager eyes at the fatness of the land.
This passage illustrates the modern double-mindedness about natural symbols in general and the Hive in particular. In the first paragraph, because she speaks of "classic pastorals," we know that Eliot has in mind the old conventions. Because her readers are "refined" (i.e., familiar with the classics), Eliot assumes that they know this bucolic region's "precious inland products." Of course, she means her "cheese" and "fleeces" literally. (In Eliot's time, cheese and wool - and lenses - were among Holland's primary exports: an allusion highly appropriate for this picture of a town's miniaturization.) But these objects also signify the ancient models, among which is numbered the image of the city as a beehive.
Eliot knows the classical Hive, but she also wields a new sense of the insect analogy: one that naturalizes - or, more accurately, biologizes - human cooperation. I think this is why she reserves "the winding galleries of the white ants" for her second, chronologically later, paragraph. Here she leaves behind the literary "inland" and its poetic obligations; she turns outward, to nonpoetic nature, the nature of modern science. Rather than occupy her white ants with their traditional office of poetic allusion, she uses them to introduce the natural history of St. Ogg's. Here the insect analogy, which for so long had been understood and treated by poets as a grand and elevating ornament, is subdued, deployed as one of several metaphors that together merge the human and animal realms. History is thereby rooted in familiar soil. By orienting her Hive toward nature instead of poetry, Eliot is able to mesh the traditional view from above with the modern insights of science. Eliot's metaphor asks us to consider human and insect as equivalent, each a "continuation and outgrowth of nature."
We are now entirely used to this sort of analogy, one that accepts a prescientific form as a habit, uses it as an armature for invention. By this I mean that the scientific metaphor tends to repress its poetic origins and thus redirects poetic invention. The inherited, original form is treated abstractly: even though we see through it, we do not ordinarily think of it as a designed structure. Thomas's orbital view of human expansion is an excellent example. In this instance, the Hive's poetic structure subtends and furthers the evocation of new feelings and of a seemingly objective insight into biological process. Because it stands closer to the origin of the modern scientific outlook, Eliot's metaphor is less extreme (i.e., biologically presumptive) than Thomas's. Nonetheless, both metaphors use the past similarly and assert the same sort of truth: both assume that without science the visual analogy between insects and man is superficial and misleading, that science pierces the surface of creation to reveal the verity of hidden connections.
In The Insect, Jules Michelet pursues these connections, clarifies what the relationship between surface and depth means to the scientifically empowered, modern outlook. His mechanism for piercing the surface is the microscope:
The most attractive forms are living forms. Take a drop of blood, and submit it to the microscope. This drop, as it spreads, rewards you with a delightful arborescence, - with the delicacy and lightness of certain winter trees, when revealed in their actual figure, and no longer encumbered with leaves.
Thus, Nature's infinite potency of beauty is not limited to the sur face, as antiquity supposed. It does not trouble itself about human eyesight, but labours for its own behoof, and on its own work. From the surface to the interior, it frequently increases in beauty as in depth. It invests with surpassing loveliness things which are absolutely hidden, and which death alone can unveil. Sometimes, as if to contradict and confound our ideas, it clothes in ravishing forms the organs which, from our point of view, accomplish the vilest functions. I am thinking of the exquisite beauty and delicate tenderness of that coral-tree which incessantly pours out the chyle of our intestines. (203-4)
Like Thomas and Eliot, Michelet intends to be scandalous. Because nature's beauties and purposes are her own, we must be shaken from the slumber of obvious resemblances and conventional seeing: in the body's hidden depths, for instance, Michelet discovers a digestive organ that has the appearance of "coral-tree." More significant to us is how he speaks of the surface. Through the microscope's agency, humanity's traditional sense of order and definitions of beauty are shown to be superficial, outmoded, inaccurate. This passage suggests that a poetry adequate to the reality of nature, one that is sensitive to the "surpassing loveliness [of] things which are absolutely hidden," must eschew the temptations of the surface, free itself from the dominion of inherited forms and their conventional ways of seeing.
Michelet's poetic style obscures, if not denies, his scientific program and its new definition of the natural symbol. This program and definition are clearer in Eliot's passage. Here, compared with its poetic ancestor, Eliot's scientific metaphor is leaner, more dependent upon and highly inflected by context. Unlike entirely literary insects, her termites do not strongly assert figural integrity - which is to say that Eliot subordinates artifice to ideas. And to any such shift in emphasis there are cost and compensation: intellectually potent though it may be, the scientific metaphor is rarely as beautiful and in no way as aesthetically generative as what it presumes to replace. In compensation, however, the new metaphor confirms a novel world picture, one that makes humans a part of nature and offers us what seems to be the power to view things directly. Once cut off from the ocean of expressive language and the obligations of the past, many old poetic resemblances and their ornaments simply pass away. But some - if they are necessary and strong like the Hive - survive their translation.
One should not then too energetically adhere to the commonplace that modern science and its outlook (its contentious mix of Cartesian psychology and Romantic assumptions) are poetry's negation and cure. For instance, is Darwinism truly the enemy of the neoplatonic metaphor for the universe, the Great Chain of Being? Or is Darwinism this metaphor's restorer, its preserver? The same point from a slightly different angle: When stated extremely, the scientific outlook holds that nature and art are distinct and that the latter is inferior to the former. Hence, nature cannot be improved by art, and aesthetic excellence is proportional to its fidelity to nature. How Platonic these principles seem if for "nature" we substitute the "world of forms." When he chides artists for not going straight to nature - specifically, to the insects - for inspiration, Michelet epitomizes the Romantic idea that nature is the supreme artist: "Frankly, is there aught approaching such a degree of excellence in our human arts? How great the necessity that, in their apparently fatigued and languid condition, that they should gain life and strength from these living sources! In general, instead of going straight to Nature, to the inexhaustible fountain of beauty and invention, they have solicited help from the erudition, the history, and the antiquity of man" (203). Michelet believes that any artist who without the aid of science "solicit[s] help from the erudition, the history, and the antiquity of man" is no artist at all - but blind to beauty, a mere copyist: "We have copied ancient jewels; sometimes those of barbarous peoples which first procured them from our own merchants. We have copied the old robes and the stuffs of our ancestors. We have copied, especially, the painted-glass windows of Gothic architecture, whose colours and forms have been selected haphazard, and transported to objects utterly discordant and unsuitable, - as, for instance, to shawls" (205). In order to regard properly even the modest beauties of human art, Michelet would have us study nature. His example merges Gothic stained glass and the iridescence of beetles. Again, his instrument is the microscope:
If we were desirous of comprehending and rehabilitating these ancient windows, we might have taken a lesson from the enamels of certain scarabaei. Seen beneath the microscope, they present very analogous effects, simply because they possess the same elements of beauty. The thirteenth century glass-windows (you may see them at Bourges, and especially in the museum of that city) were double. The light therefore remained in them, did not pass through them, gave them the magical effects of precious stones. And of a similar character are those insect wings composed of numerous leaves, between which you may detect, with the microscope, a network of mysterious hieroglyphics. (205)
Michelet's "mysterious hieroglyphics" are inspired by his nation's and era's fascination with Egypt, but the idea of a natural language alludes to a commonplace far older than Rousseau: nature is a book. And it is from this book's chapter on the insects that we are to "take a lesson." However, it seems that the Book of Nature's letters, like those in the more recent, affordable editions of the Oxford English Dictionary, have become miniaturized.
What I am saying is not new, but it is important enough for me to struggle with its restatement through an example. When Virgil wrote about bees, the book of nature could be read with the unaided eye. Virgil had little science as we now know it. He made do with the surface of things and thought his forebears wiser than he. Nowhere in the antique world could be found Blake's "dark satanic mills." In no way was Virgil anxious about the implications of mechanical reproduction; he was, therefore, comfortable with and happy to oblige exactly what Michelet opposes and would have modern science replace: the insect as a human creation. This is to say that, in addition to seeing bees as creatures in themselves and sensing their symbolic possibilities, Virgil recognized them as an artifact - a specific and palpable formal achievement - that before all others belonged to Homer. And it is the insect's antique, prescientific dimension that we must, to use Michelet's word, "rehabilitate" and keep always in our thoughts if we are to understand why, in order to have his own bees for his own uses, Virgil must so vigorously contend with Homer. Virgil's task is daunting. And his first challenge is that Homer's bees are wild: they cannot simply be lifted from the Iliad to signify the city, which to a Roman audience is civilization. Virgil discovers his Hive gradually, a process that begins with the swarm and its domestication.
That Homer and Virgil were keen observers of nature should not be disputed. But we need to remind ourselves that until Romanticism nature (our nature, anyway) was neither the primary object of artistic imitation nor the highest source of inspiration. During the rule of rhetoric, one did not either approach nature unaided or wish to see her unadorned. The precedent served as guide and was itself an object of veneration. In a manner of speaking, under the old system a worthy model was nature. The flowers of one's poetry had to be won from the soil of earlier verse.
To explicate the Hive's evolution during its first two thousand years, I must, therefore, approach it rhetorically, as an imitation of nature that was itself imitated and complicated over time. Thus, in this chapter and the next I will present the inherited model as a template for invention and closely examine the technology of allusion proper to it. But I must also allow for and be equally sensitive to visible as well as immanent structure, for sometimes it is only when reworked by a later poet that an original form's implications become clear. And finally I will attempt to show how much may be gained by seriously considering the novelty that naturally accompanies the committed and explicit reworking of literary form.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poetics of the Hive by CRISTOPHER HOLLINGSWORTH Copyright © 2001 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
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