Abstract
This article aims to interpret the work of American author William Gass in a “posthumanist” framework, establishing a thematic interest that is also linked to his poetics. After the introduction, the article traces “the anthropological difference” in Gass’ essays, then examines a specific theme, the interaction between human characters and arthropods in his fiction. A close reading of the early short story “Order of Insects” concludes the article, in which the ties between thematic and formal concerns are explored.
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Notes
- 1.
“Nazi politics wasn’t even a proper biopolitics, but more literally a zoopolitics, one expressly directed to human animals. Consequently, the correct term for their massacre—anything but the sacred ‘holocaust’—is ‘extermination’: exactly the term used for rats, insects, and lice” (Esposito 2008: 117).
- 2.
Leo Spitzer’s research into “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony” is well known. The German researcher Alexander Becker, on reading modernist theories of music (such as that of Varèse), concludes that in these “gewiss resultiert […] keine Übereinstimmung zwischen musikalischer und seelischer Ordnung im Sinne der ‘alten’ Harmonie der Harmonie” (Becker 2012: 278).
- 3.
For an early nineteenth-century version of the Great Chain of Being, with “insects and angels sometimes exhibiting common traits,” see Parikka 2010: 4.
- 4.
This, of course, presupposes a distinction between external technology and internal (embodied) experience, which can be complicated in a number of ways. One is obviously a Derridean deconstruction of the interiority of speech. Another comes from the archeology of animal philosophy: “An individuality is always constituted as a tension or machination between elements. So even if, as Bergson notes, the technics of animals and insects are immanent to their bodily formations in contrast to the intelligent externalization we find in humans, these technics are in constant tension with an outside, a folding, instead of a self-enclosed system.” (Parikka 2010: 74).
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Molnár, G.T. (2020). Towards a Literary Entomology: Arthropods and Humans in William H. Gass. In: Kulcsár-Szabó, Z., Lénárt, T., Simon, A., Végső, R. (eds) Life After Literature. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33738-4_16
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