domenica 2 maggio 2010

BITTEN


Bitten
FROM NYTIMES
By PHILIP HOARE

INSECTOPEDIA
By Hugh Raffles
Illustrated. 465 pp. Pantheon Books. $29.95

Hugh Raffles’s beautifully written “Insectopedia” — part reference, part narrative and wholly engrossing — begins with an evocative image. On Aug. 10, 1926, a small monoplane began flying missions from Tallulah, La., to assess the population of insects in a vertical column of air. It was the first time insects had been collected by plane, and the results were astounding. In a square mile, rising to 14,000 feet, there were as many as 36 million insects.

The amazed researchers began to realize that the atmosphere was unbelievably alive for all our notions of its emptiness: another world, filled with an ever moving, airy regiment. “They found ladybugs at 6,000 feet during the daytime, striped cucumber beetles at 3,000 feet during the night,” Raffles writes. “They collected three scorpion flies at 5,000 feet, 31 fruit flies between 200 and 3,000, a fungus gnat at 7,000 and another at 10,000.” And at the exalted altitude of 15,000, possibly the highest elevation at which any specimen had yet been taken, a lone ballooning spider was floating on its filaments, its body borne up on unseen currents. It was evidence of an aerial plankton, an ocean over our heads.

Insects are all around us. They are the most numerous animals on earth, yet we pay them scant attention. Few of us attend to their innate beauty. More often than not, they are seen as pests sent to plague us (with the notable exception of the now threatened honey bee). “We simply cannot find ourselves in these creatures,” Raffles writes. “The more we look, the less we know. They are not like us. They do not respond to acts of love or mercy or remorse. It is worse than indifference. It is a deep, dead space without reciprocity, recognition or redemption.”

Insects are faceless, multilegged and compound-eyed aliens, regarded with distrust and disgust. It is such speciesism that Raffles, who teaches anthropology at the New School, seeks to redress in his eccentric encyclopedia. For too long the limelight has been hogged by “charismatic megafauna” (in the biologists’ dismissive phrase), all those lions and tigers, wolves and whales. It is time insects had their day.

Raffles’s approach is almost perversely eclectic. His alphabetical entries range in subject matter from the personal disgust he feels when he discovers a cockroach sharing the shower in his Manhattan apartment to epic journeys into Asia and Africa and observing cricket-betting in Shanghai and locust-eating in Niger. His essays may take up 20 pages or a mere two paragraphs. But the most satisfying ones illuminate his subject via potted biographies of men and women who are passionate about insects.

In “Chernobyl,” for instance, Raffles offers a cameo of Cornelia Hesse-­Honegger, a contemporary artist dedicated to creating near-perfect watercolors of insects deformed by nuclear fallout. This is sci-fi stuff: flies with legs growing out of their eyes, the kind of mutations that in any other animal would elicit our horrified response, yet which, because they occur in such small creatures, seem almost excusable because almost invisible. In the act of depicting them so exactingly, Hesse-Honegger, whose own child, we are told in an upsetting aside, was born with a club foot, “discovers that the insect is deformed in ways she hadn’t noticed before.” Her aesthetic is that of concrete art, isolated images placed in a grid; her intent is a silent rebuke, a solemn challenge to a world that, even now, is turning again to nuclear power to solve its problems.

Six entries later — one is tempted to see this book in musical movements — Raffles returns to the refrain in “The Ineffable,” one of his most wonderful chapters. Here, he describes the work of Joris Hoefnagel, a Flemish miniaturist whose compendium of the world’s animals, “The Four Elements,” appeared in 1582. Hoefnagel’s equally accurate gouaches are a historical counterpoint to Hesse-Honegger’s implicitly politicized aesthetic. In his effort to render nature through art, Hoefnagel paints even the shadows beneath his beetles and flies, a surreal effect that, paradoxically, imparts a sense of transcendence. As Raffles writes, “I began to understand that he wanted me eye to eye with these insects, as close as could be, in direct and transformative confrontation.” It is the equivalent of the child lying on the lawn on a dreamy summer day, watching earwigs and ants in the grass as they act out another, entirely microscopic existence.

Raffles’s particular gift is to draw the reader into that world, to see it with childish wonder. Yet his is also a darker world. In an intensely affecting entry, starkly titled “Jews,” he descends into the depths to which our fear of the Other has taken us. Even before the Holocaust, Jews were configured as vermin, as lice to be destroyed. “Parasites drain the lifeblood from the body politic,” Raffles writes. “But in order for this commonplace to sustain violence, a decisive metamorphosis has to take place: a people must become vermin in fact as well as in metaphor. . . . It is the final collapse of distinction between human and insect; the collapse that allows for extermination.” In this deathly mutation, the victims of Auschwitz were herded into showers and promised a purification, a delousing; instead they fell to Zyklon B, a powerful insecticide.

Raffles’s entry on “queer” insect sex is more life-affirming, and comic, sparked off by an image of a butterfly probing the anus of a rove beetle, “just two little animals enjoying a little action . . . and feeling pretty good about it,” as Raffles writes, exhorting, “We need more queerness!”

“Insectopedia” is nothing if not experimental. In one stream-of-consciousness riff, Raffles recalls nightmares about slithering, sliding, sucking insects, their stick limbs liable to make a lurking attack from any angle, from the air or the ground or even the toilet rim. This is illustrated by a hilarious graphic of a frantic figure assailed by bugs. Throughout the book, Raffles’s use of photographs, reminiscent of the German author W. G. Sebald, is matched by the often deadpan tone of his text — a sense of sly humor of which Sebald would surely have approved.

Sebald would also have appreciated the book’s accumulated effect. As Raffles moves insidiously toward his deft and subtle conclusions, the apparent looseness of his approach falls into sharp focus. What he is telling us about insects and their natural history reveals just as much about us and our human history. In an essay set in Africa, he notes that the span of locust recession — that is, the area where they breed and aggregate between invasions — almost exactly coincides with the all too familiar area of human dispute and resource antagonism that cuts a swath from North Africa to the Middle East. Thus the biblical swarm becomes a carrier of contemporary discontent.

Impossible to categorize, wildly allusive and always stimulating, “Insectopedia” suggests an Enlightenment amateur wandering around the world stocking his cabinet of curiosities, unrestricted by notions of disciplines or specializations. Its author is at one moment a scientist in the field, the next an art critic, then an acute historian. His is a disconcerting, fantastical, (multi-)eye-opening journey into another existence, and one thing is for sure: You will never look at a cockroach the same way again, even if it is sharing your morning shower.

Philip Hoare’s latest book is “The Whale.”

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