Angels and Insects (17 page)
Read Angels and Insects Online
Authors: A. S. Byatt
‘Very eloquent,’ commented Matty Crompton, drily. ‘I am quite overcome with pity for these poor, useless male creatures. I must admit I had never seen them in that light before. Do you not think you may have been somewhat
anthropomorphic
in your choice of rhetoric?’
‘I thought that was our intention, in this History. To appeal to a wide audience, by telling truths—scientific truths—with a note of the fabulous. I have perhaps overdone it. I could tone it down.’
‘I am quite sure you should not—it will do
excellently
as it is—it will appeal greatly to the dramatic emotions—I have had an idea of writing some real fables of my own, to go with my little drawings of mestizo fairy-insects. I should like to emulate La Fontaine—the tale of the grasshopper and the ant, you know—only more
accurately
. And I have been making a collection of literary citations in a commonplace book, which I thought might be placed at the head of your chapters. It is important that the book be
delightful
as well as profound and truthful, is it not? I found a wonderful sonnet by poor mad John Clare, which, like Milton’s Pandemonium-beehive, seems to suggest that our idea of fairies may be only an anthropomorphising of insects. I like your Venus under the Mountain. She is related to the Little People under the Hill of all British fairy lore. I am convinced that many of the flying demons on church walls are inspired by stag beetles with their brows. How I go on! Here is the Clare. Tell me what you think. Rulers and labourers alike were men to him, you will see.’
What wonder strikes the curious, while he views
The black ant’s city, by a rotten tree
Or woodland bank! In ignorance we muse:
Pausing, annoyed, we know not what we see,
Such government and thought there seem to be;
Some looking on, and urging some to toil,
Dragging their loads of bent-stalks slavishly;
And what’s more wonderful, when big loads foil
One ant or two to carry, quickly then
A swarm flock round to help their fellow-men.
Surely they speak a language whisperingly,
Too fine for us to hear; and sure their ways
Prove they have kings and laws, and that they be
Deformed remnants of the fairy-days.
She was keen, she was resourceful, William thought. He half-wished he could confide in her about his own drone-nature, as he increasingly perceived it, though that, of course, was impossible for all sorts of reasons. He could not betray Eugenia, or demean himself by complaining of Eugenia. Moreover, to complain in this way would make him look foolish. He had yearned for Eugenia, and he
had
Eugenia, and he was bodily in thrall to Eugenia, as must, in this confined community, be apparent even to a sexless being like Miss Crompton.
It interested him, that he thought of her as sexless. That thought itself might have arisen out of some analogy with the worker ants. She was
dry
, was Matty Crompton. She did not, he was coming to see, suffer fools gladly. He was beginning to think that there were all sorts of frustrated ambitions contained in that sharp, bony body, behind those watchful black eyes. She was determined and inventive about the book. She was fiercely intent, not only on its production, but on its success. Why? He himself had an unspoken, almost unacknowledged vision of making enough money to be able to set out again for the Southern Hemisphere independent of Harald and Eugenia, but Miss Crompton could not want that, could not know that
he
wanted that, could not want him to go,
when he added so much to the interest of her life. He did not think she was so altruistic a being.
The end of the Summer made him think rather sourly of the fate of the drones, not only in terms of himself and the ants, but in terms of other male members of the household. Harald was enmeshed in the problems of instinct and intelligence and his powers of thought seemed paralysed. Lionel had cracked his ankle jumping over a park wall for a dare, and was laid up on the terrace, on a rattan chaise longue, complaining loudly of his immobility. Edgar went riding, and paid long visits to various neighbouring squires. Robin Swinnerton and Rowena were back in the neighbourhood, still childless. Robin invited William to ride with him, and said that he envied him his luck: ‘A man feels a fool, you know, if an heir doesn’t put in an appearance in due course—and unlike Edgar, I don’t have little love-children all over the county to show I can father them if I choose.’
‘I know nothing about Edgar’s private life.’
‘A veritable centaur, or do I mean a satyr? A man of
appetites
—no girl is safe, they say, except the most unimpeachably respectable young creatures, who innocently set their caps at him and whom he avoids like the plague. He likes a rough and tumble, he says. I don’t think a man should behave as he does, though there’s no denying plenty do, maybe most.’
William, about to be righteously indignant, remembered various golden, amber and coffee-skinned creatures he had loved on hot nights—and smiled awkwardly.
‘Wild oats,’ said Robin Swinnerton, ‘according to Edgar, are stronger and more savoury than the cultivated kind. I always meant to save myself, to commit myself—to one.’
‘You have not been married long,’ said William uncomfortably. ‘You should not lose hope, I am sure.’
‘I do not,’ said Robin. ‘But Rowena is downcast, and looks
somewhat enviously at Eugenia’s bliss. Your little ones are very true to type—veritable Alabasters.’
‘It is as though environment were everything and inheritance nothing, I sometimes think. They suck in Alabaster substance and grow into perfect little Alabasters—I only very rarely catch glimpses of myself in their expression—’
He thought of the Wood Ants enslaved by the
sanguinea
, who believed they
were sanguinea
, and shook himself. Men are not ants, said William Adamson to himself, and besides, the analogy will not do, an enslaved Wood Ant looks like a Wood Ant, tho’ to a
sanguinea
it may smell Blood-red. I am convinced their modes of recognition are almost entirely olfactory. Though it is possible they navigate by the sun, and
that
is to do with the eyes.
‘You are dreaming,’ said Robin Swinnerton. ‘I propose a gallop, if you are agreeable.
Early one morning, that Autumn, a disagreeable incident revealed the centaur or satyr in Edgar to William. William had risen early and was making his way to the stable yard when he heard a kind of choking sound in a scullery at one side of the corridor and turned aside to investigate. Inside the scullery was Edgar, bending over the sink, his back to William. In Edgar’s grasp, William saw slowly, was his little beetle-sprite, Amy, whose curls had become brighter and thicker over the Summer, though her face remained white and pointed. Edgar had bent her backwards, and had one hand over her mouth and one thrust into her bodice. His buttocks swelled behind him: his genitals were pushed up against Amy’s skirts. William said, ‘Amy?’
He wondered if he should retreat. Amy made an inarticulate cry. Edgar said, ‘I didn’t know you had an interest in this little thing.’
‘I don’t. Not a personal one. In her general wellbeing—’
‘Ah. Her general wellbeing. Tell him, Amy. Was I hurting you? Were my attentions unwelcome, perhaps?’
Amy was still bent back over the sink. Edgar withdrew his arm from her clothing with the deliberation of a trout-tickler leaving a trout stream. His fingermarks could be seen on Amy’s skin, round her mouth and chin. She gasped. ‘No, sir. No, sir. No harm. I am quite well, Mr Adamson.
Please
.’
William was not clear what the plea meant. Perhaps she was not clear herself. In any case, Edgar stepped back, and she stood up, head hanging, hands nervously rearranging her buttons and waistband.
‘I think you should apologise, Sir, and leave us,’ said Edgar coldly and heavily.
‘I think Amy should run away,’ said William. ‘I think she would do best to run away.’
‘Sir?’ said Amy in a very small voice, to Edgar.
‘Run off then, child,’ said Edgar. ‘I can always find you when I want you.’
His large pale mouth was unsmiling as he said this. It was a statement of fact. Amy ducked a vague obeisance at both men, and scuttled away.
Edgar said, ‘The servants in this house are no concern of yours, Adamson. You do not pay their wages, and I’ll thank you not to interfere with them.’
‘That little creature is no more than a child,’ said William. ‘And one who has never had a childhood—’
‘Nonsense. She is a nice little packet of flesh, and her heart beats faster when I feel for it, and her little mouth opens sweetly and eagerly. You know nothing, Adamson. I have noticed you know
nothing
. Go back to your beetles, and your creepy-crawlies. I won’t hurt the little puss, you can believe. Just add a bit of natural spice. Anyway, it’s none of your business.
You are a hanger-on
.’
‘And I have yet to learn what use
you
are to the world, or anyone in it,’ said William, his temper rising. Surprisingly, Edgar laughed at this, briefly, and without a smile.
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I have noticed you know
nothing
.’
And he pushed past William and went out to the stables.
The book was put together in a provisional way during the Winter of 1862. Its final title was to be
THE SWARMING CITY
A Natural History of a Woodland Society
,
its polity, its economy, its arms and defences
,
its origin, expansion and decline
.
William worked on it fairly steadily, and Matty Crompton read and revised the drafts, and made fair copies of the final versions. It had always been their intention to devote one more Summer to the checking and revision of the previous Summer’s observations. Two years’ data were better than one, and William wrote off with queries about comparative observations to various myrmecological parts of the world. The project of a publishable book was, by tacit consent, shared only by William and Miss Crompton: there was, in fact, no ostensible reason why this should have been so, but they both behaved from the beginning conspiratorially, as though the family should think of the ant-study as a family educational amusement, a gentleman’s use of leisure time, whilst
they
, the writers, knew differently.
The book took shape. The first part was narrative, a kind of children’s voyage of discovery into the mysterious worlds that lay around them. Chapter 1 was to be
HE
E
XPLORERS
D
ISCOVER THE
C
ITY
and William wrote sketches of the children, of Tom and Amy, of Miss Mead and her poetical comparisons, though he found himself unable to characterise either himself or Matty Crompton, and used a narrative voice that was a kind of royal or scientific We, to
include both of them, or either of them, at given points in time. Miss Crompton brightened this passage considerably with little forgotten details of friendly rivalry between the little girls, or fragments of picnics carried off by the foraging ants.
The second chapter was
HE
N
AMING AND
M
APPING OF THE
C
OLONIES
and then followed the serious work of describing their workings:
Builders, sweepers, excavators.
The nursery, the dormitory, the kitchen.
Other Inhabitants:
Pets, pests, predators,
temporary visitors and ant-cattle.
The Defence of the City:
War and Invasion.
Prisoners of Love:
The Queens, the Drones,
the Marriage flight and the Foundations
of new Colonies.
The Civic Order and Authority:
What is the source
of power and decisions?
After this, William planned some more abstract, questioning chapters. He debated with himself on various possible headings:
Instinct or Intelligence
Design or Hasard
The Individual and the Commonwealth
What Is an Individual?
These were questions that troubled him, personally, as deeply as the questions of Design and the Designer troubled Harald Alabaster. He debated with himself on paper, not quite sure whether his musings were worthy of publication.
We might remark that there is a continuing dispute amongst human students of these interesting creatures as to whether they possess, singly or collectively, anything that can be called ‘intelligence’ or not. We might also remark that the attitude of the human student is often coloured by what he would
wish
to believe, by his attitude to the Creation in general, that is, by a very general tendency to see every other thing, living and inanimate, in anthropomorphic terms. We wonder about the utility to men of other living things, and one of the uses we make of them is to try to use them as magical mirrors to reflect back to us our own faces with a difference. We look in their societies for analogies to our own, for structures of command, and a language of communication. In the past both ants and bees have been thought to have kings, generals and armies. Now we know better, and describe the female worker-ants as slaves, nurses, nuns or factory-operatives, as we choose. Those of us who conclude that the insects have no language, no capacity to think, no ‘intelligence’, but only ‘instinct’ tend to describe their actions as those of automata, which we picture as little mechanical inventions whirring about like clockwork set in motion.
Those who wish to believe that there is a kind of intelligence in the nest and the hive can point to other things besides the marvellous mathematics of the hexagonal cells of the bees, which recent thinkers have decreed to be a function simply of their building movements and the shape of their bodies. No one who has spent long periods observing ants solving the problem of transporting an awkward straw, or a bulky dead caterpillar through the interstices of a mud floor, will feel able to argue that their movements are haphazard, that they do not jointly solve problems. I have seen a crew of a dozen ants manoeuvre a stem as tall, to them, as a tree to us, with about as many plausible false starts as a similar crew of schoolboys might make, before finding which end to insert at which angle.
If this is instinct
, it resembles intelligence in finding a particular method to solve a particular problem. M. Michelet in his recent book,
L’Insecte
, has a most elegant passage on the response to the plundering attacks of a
lumbering moth, Sphinx Atropos, imported into France at the time of the American Revolution, probably as the caterpillar on the potato plant, protected and promulgated by Louis XIV. M. Michelet writes eloquently of the terrible appearance of this ‘sinister being’, ‘marked fairly precisely in wild grey with an ugly death’s-head’—it is our Death’s-head Hawk Moth, in fact. It is a glutton for honey, and pillages the hives, consuming eggs, nymphs and pupae in its depredations. The great Huber decided to protect his bees and was told by his assistant that the bees had already solved the problem either with, for instance, a variety of experimental barriers—by building new fortifications with narrow windows which would not admit the
fat
invader—or by making a series of barriers with successive walls zigzagging behind narrow entries, making a kind of twisting maze into which the Death’s-head could not insert its bulk. M. Michelet is delighted by this—it proves the bees’ intelligence, to him, conclusively. He calls it ‘the
Coup d’État
of the beasts, the insect revolution’, a blow struck not only against the Death’s-head but against thinkers like Malebranche and Buffon who denied bees any power of thought or capacity to divert their attention in new directions. Ants too can both make mazes and learn man-made mazes—some ants better than others. Do these things prove the little creatures are capable of conscious development? The order of their societies is infinitely more ancient than our own. Fossil ants are found in the most ancient stones; they have conducted themselves as they do over unimaginable millennia. Are they set in their ways—however intricate and subtle these may be—do they follow a driving force, an instinctual pattern rigid and invariable as stone channels, or are they soft, ductile, flexible, malleable by change and their own wills?
Much, so much, almost all, depends on what we think this force, or power, or indwelling spirit we call ‘instinct’ is. How does ‘instinct’ differ from intelligence? We must all admire the miracle of
inherited aptitudes, inherited knowledge
in a founding Queen of a new ant-colony who has never been outside her parent-nest, who has never been digging, or food-gathering, yet
is able to nourish her young, feed and care for them, construct her first home, open the pupal shells. This is inherited intelligence, and is part of the general thoughtfulness and intelligence diffused through the whole society, which gives to all a knowledge of how to answer the needs of all in the most suitable way. The debate between the proponents of instinct and the proponents of intelligence is at its sharpest in its consideration of the Vigilance on the part of the whole community which makes decisions as to how many workers, how many soldiers, how many winged lovers or virgin Queens a community may need at any given time. Such decisions take into account the available food, the size of the nursery, the strength of the active Queens, the deaths of others, the season, the enemies. If these decisions are made by Chance, then these busy, efficient communities are ruled by a series of happy accidents, so complex that Chance must appear to be as wise as many local deities: if this is automatic response, what would intelligence be? The intelligence that directs the activities of the founding Queen, or those of the mature worker, is the intelligence of the City itself, of the conglomerate which cares for the wellbeing of the whole, and continues its life, in time and space, so that the community is infinite and eternal, even if both Queens and workers are mortal.
We do not wholly know what we mean either by the word ‘instinct’ or by the word ‘intelligence’. We divide our own actions into those controlled by ‘instinct’—the sucking of a new-born infant at the breast, the swerve of the runner to avoid danger, the sniffing at our bread and meat to detect signs of dangerous putrefaction; and those controlled by ‘intelligence’—foresight, rational analysis, reflective thought. Cuvier and other thinkers compared the workings of ‘instinct’ with those of ‘habit’, and Mr Darwin has finely observed that in human beings ‘the comparison gives a remarkably accurate account of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but not of its origin. How unconsciously many habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious will! yet they may be modified by the will or reason.’
Are we to see the actions of the ants and bees as controlled by a combination of instincts as undeviating as the swallowing and swimming motions of the amoeba, or are we to see their behaviour as a combination of such instincts, acquired habits, and a directing intelligence, not residing in any particular individual ant, but accessible by these, when needed? Our own bodies are controlled by such a combination. Our own nerve-cells respond to stimuli and respond very strongly to the excitements of great fear, love, pain or intellectual activity, often arousing in us the possibility of new exercises of our skills previously unheard of. These are deep questions, pondered by every generation of philosophers, answered satisfactorily by none. Where do the soul and the mind reside in the human body? Or in the heart or in the head?
And do we find the analogy with our individual
selves
more useful, or that with the co-operative cells of our bodies, when understanding the ants? I believe I have been able to observe individual ants who habitually moved more vigorously and nervously, explored farther, approached other ants to interest them in new activities or to exhort them to greater efforts. Are these restless and inventive individual
persons
in the society, or are they large and well-fed cells in the centre of the ganglia? My own inclination is to wish to think of them as individual creatures, full of love, fear, ambition, anxiety, and yet I know also that their whole natures may be changed by changes in their circumstances. Shake up a dozen ants, in a test-tube, and they will fall on each other and fight furiously. Separate a worker from the community, and she will turn in aimless circles, or crouch morosely in a coma and wait to die: she will not survive for more than a few days at most. Those who argue that ants must blindly behave as ‘instinct’ dictates are making of ‘instinct’ a Calvinist God, another name for Predestination. And those observing similar reactions in human creatures, who may lose their wills and their memories after physical injuries or shocks, who may be born without the capacity to reason which makes us human—or may lose it, even, under the pressure of extreme desire, or
extreme fear of death—are substituting the Predestination of body and instinct for the iron control of a loving and vengeful Deity on a golden immutable Throne in a Crystal Heaven.
The terrible idea—terrible to some, terrible, perhaps, to all, at some time or in some form—that we are
biologically predestined
like other creatures, that we differ from them only in inventiveness and the capacity for reflection on our fate—treads softly behind the arrogant judgement that makes of the ant a twitching automaton.
And what may we learn, or perhaps fear to learn, or draw back from learning, in a comparison between our own societies and those of the social insects?
We may see their communities as the true individuals, of which the independent creatures, performing their functions, living and dying, are no more than cells, endlessly replaced and renewed. This would fit with Menenius’ fable in
Coriolanus
of the commonweal as a body, all of whose members help its continued life and wellbeing, from the toenails to the voracious belly. Professor Asa Gray, in Harvard University, has argued persuasively that in the case of the vegetable world, as in the branching animal communities of corals, it is the
variety
that is the individual, since the creatures may be divided and propagated asexually, without loss of life. The ant community is more varied than the corals, in the division of labour, and the variety of forms taken by the creatures, but it is possible to believe that its ends are no more complex and do not differ. They are the
perpetuation of the city, the race, the original breed
.
I made a Belgian friend in my travels on the Amazon, who was a good naturalist, a poet in his own language, and much given to meditation on the deeper things in life. He wrote despondingly of the effects on social animals of the
very high elaboration
of the social instinct which developed, he claimed, for the most part, from the family, the relations of mother and child, the protective gathering of the primal groups. He was in the jungle because he was not a social being, but a natural solitary,
a romantic would-be Wild Man, but his observations on these matters are not uninteresting. The more perfected the association, he said, the more probability there is of a development of severe systems of authority, of intolerance, constraints, proliferated rules and regulations. Organised societies, he said, tended to the condition found in factories, in barracks, in the galleys, without leisure, or relaxation, using creatures pitilessly for their
functional benefit
, until they were exhausted and could be cast aside. Such social being he characterised memorably as ‘a kind of common despair’ and he saw the cities of the termites, in which fellow creatures are rationally turned to food when no longer useful, as a parody of the terrestrial Paradises towards which the social designers of human cities and communes are working so hopefully. Nature, he said, does not desire happiness. When I retorted that Fourier’s communities were based upon the rationally indulged pursuit of pleasures and inclinations (1,620 passions, to count exactly), he said gloomily that these groups were doomed to failure, either because they would disintegrate into combative chaos, or because the rational organisation would substitute militarism for Harmony, sooner or later.
I retorted at the time that Réaumur claimed to have observed ants at play like ancient Greeks, indulging in wrestling-bouts without harm, on sunny days. I have since, I must confess, several times observed what I believed to be this playful phenomenon, only to conclude on closer inspection, that what I was watching was not play, but war in earnest, fought, as ant-wars usually are, for limited objectives and without wholesale berserker bloodlust. Alfred Wallace, who was travelling in the same parts at that time, and is a convinced Socialist, much affected by the vision and practical success of Robert Owen’s successful experiments at New Lanark, attempted to put the problem in a kinder and milder light. Owen, he argued, had proved by his social experiments that environment can greatly modify character
for the good
—‘that no character is so bad that it may not be greatly improved by a really good environment acting upon it from early infancy and that Society has the power of creating
such an environment’. Owen’s limited extension of
individual
responsibility to his workers, his care for their
individual
education, improved their wills, which were their individual natures. Wallace wrote (I quote an unpublished letter), ‘Heredity, through which it is now known that ancestral characteristics are continually reappearing, gives that infinite diversity of character which is the very salt of social life; by environment, including education, we can so modify and improve that character as to bring it into harmony with the possessor’s actual surroundings, and thus fit him for performing some useful and enjoyable function in the great social organisation.’
I have digressed far, you may think, from Elm Tree Bole and Osborne, the Red Fort and Stonewall City. In fact, these fundamental questions, of the influence of heredity, instinct, social identity, habit and will, arise at every moment of our study. We find parables wherever we look in Nature, and we make them more or less wisely. Religious thinkers have seen in the love of mother and infant, of Father and Son, a reflection of the eternal relations of the Prime Being with the Created World and with Man himself. My Belgian friend saw that love, on the other hand, as an instinctual response leading to the formation of societies which gave even more restricted and functional identities to their members. I have mentioned the role of Instinct as Predestination, and of Intelligence as residing in communities rather than individuals. To ask, what are the ants in their busy world, is to ask, what are we, however we may answer …