Insectopedia (22 page)

High on its hill overlooking Los Angeles, the J. Paul Getty Museum and Research Institute holds another of Hoefnagel’s masterpieces: the
Mira calligraphiae monumenta
(
Model Book of Calligraphy
), an illuminated writing book of rare beauty and sly wit. The original manuscript was inscribed by the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay from 1561 to 1562. Some thirty years later, at the request of Rudolf II, Hoefnagel began to illuminate the text, adorning Bocskay’s work with fruit and flowers and with perfect little insects of all descriptions that climb over and around the intricate lettering, balance on serifs, slide down descenders, dart through flourishes, and nibble their way along crossbars, poking irreverent fun at Bocskay’s ornate virtuosity as they demonstrate Hoefnagel’s conviction that the visual image communicates on a plane inaccessible to the written text.
³⁹

Despite the airy touch of the
Mira calligraphiae
, Hoefnagel’s belief in the capacity of the image to access the truly recondite is utterly serious. In this, he reminds me again of Walter Benjamin, who, similarly intent
on transforming relations between people and the world in which they move, struggled to find words to paint his “dialectical images”—images that would seize life in all its contradictions and blast a hole through the world of appearances.
⁴⁰
In the moment of danger in which Benjamin found himself as a Jew and a Marxist (albeit an idiosyncratic one) in pre–Second World War Europe, his faith in words rested in this ability to explode reality with the densely compressed image. A rather flimsy faith, we might think. But we would be wrong. Even if their power resides in their capacity to appropriate the image and even if the ability of the most daring of them to act on the world is frail and tentative, there is, in this idea, no barrier that the magic of words cannot breach.

Although their views on the relationship between word and image differ, I like to think that Hoefnagel and Benjamin would have understood each other’s approach to the task of the philosopher. For both, inspired as they are by traditions of piety, the work of criticism is a work of revelation. For both, revelation involves a drastic and transformative disruption of the everyday. For both, the method of revelation is something we might call mimetic shock: a psychic disordering that is accomplished best in moments of supreme artistry.

The centuries have softened the power of Hoefnagel’s insects. It is the arresting beauty of the images that strikes the viewer now, rather than the sudden vision of unanticipated difference. It didn’t take me long to realize that the gasp that escaped my lips when Greg Jecmen turned the page as we sat together that morning in the National Gallery of Art was a gasp of awe at Hoefnagel’s talent rather than a reaction to the fullness of the insects’ presence—a quite different kind of interruption from the one I imagine Hoefnagel intended. I was deeply impressed by the perfection of his imitation of life but less astonished by the life itself. And I didn’t at first recognize his mimesis as a magic designed to act upon the world. Perhaps, as Benjamin foresaw, familiarity with the reproduction has inured us to the magic of the original.
⁴¹

But what a labor Hoefnagel set himself! Committed not simply to achieving perfection in representation but to capturing a deeper quality, something elusive and invisible that he knows is there and believes can be made apparent through the art of the copy. What kind of agony is this, working in miniature, striving not simply for realism but for a version of
the real that is
so
real—more real even than the copy from which he is working—that it takes him beyond what he can see, takes him into the unknown inside, takes him across the species barrier to a place in which difference dissolves, to the immanence at the end of imitation.

Was he successful? Was his mimetic magic strong enough to jump the gap between representation and real, between vellum and paint and wondrous beings, between human and divine, between human and insect? Perhaps it’s enough to recognize the possibility, the weight that beauty once contained. Perhaps. But I suspect it wasn’t sufficient for Hoefnagel.

Greg turned another page, and we both gazed down at folio 54. Realizing that I hadn’t noticed, he pointed to the unusually worn wings of the two lower dragonflies. They were
real
, he told me,
real wings
that Hoefnagel had detached from his real insect models and carefully, with a care we can only imagine, pasted on to his painting. I saw then that they looked different. Rubbed through and disintegrating, they were decayed, far less lifelike now than the delicately robust imitations he had painted on the central insect. There was, I knew, a tradition of attaching found objects to medieval manuscripts—badges, seashells, pressed flowers—as a sign of witnessing. The objects, relics of a kind, were proof of a visit to the pilgrimage site and tactile mnemonics with which to recall the
experience.
⁴²
But this was something else. This was Hoefnagel staring at the failure of his desire, staring at the limits of representation, staring at the ineffable. I heard Moffett’s exclamation—“How wonderful are thy works, O Lord!”—but less as celebration than lament. “How wonderful are thy works, O Lord,” I heard Hoefnagel’s echo, “How inadequate are my own!”

Traveling alone through a ravaged and hostile postwar central Europe, the narrator of Aharon Appelfeld’s searing novel
The Iron Tracks
encounters a man on an empty train who unhesitatingly identifies him as a Jew.
¹
But how could you tell? Siegelbaum asks, bewildered. It’s nothing physical, the man replies matter-of-factly. It’s your anxiety. You have the anxiety of the Jew. The anxiety of the guilty and the hunted. The anxiety of the degenerate. He might have added, You have the scuttling neurosis of the cockroach, the parasitic temerity of the louse. However many we killed, there were always some left. Now, wherever we see one, we know there are many more.

“Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing,” said Heinrich Himmler.
²
And although at times he would strain for the apposite euphemism, the SS
Reichsführer
was famous for choosing his words with precision. Antisemitism is not
like
delousing, nor is it merely
a form of
delousing. It is
exactly the same as
delousing. Did he mean that Jews actually are lice? Or only that the same measures should be taken to eradicate both evils?

Himmler is a constant presence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Controlled and confident among his famous colleagues—Göring, Goebbels, the führer himself. The calm within the storm. Downstairs, when I visited in the summer of 2002, the museum had hung an exhibition by the painter and propagandist Arthur Szyk, student of medieval illumination, savage caricaturist, and activist for the Revisionists, the ascendant militarist wing of the Zionist movement.
³
Szyk captured the SS commander’s clinical impassivity well.

In summer 1943, soon after the U.S. State Department had for the first time officially confirmed conservative reports of 2 million Jews killed by the Nazis, Szyk, exiled in New York and aggressively campaigning for an interventionist rescue policy, produced a drawing of characteristic clarity.
⁴
Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, and Hitler complain: “We’re Running Short of Jews!” On the table, the Gestapo report: “2,000,000 Jews Executed.” In the upper-right-hand corner: “To the memory of my darling mother, murdered by the Germans, somewhere in the Ghetto of Poland … Arthur Szyk.” He was only guessing this last part, but he was right: his mother had already been herded onto the transport from Lodz to Chelmno.

A year later, at the end of 1944, with Majdanek already liberated, Szyk again drew his Nazi gang, this time for the cover of the Revisionist journal
The Answer.
The dead are present in skulls, bones, and tombstones etched with the names of the camps. The Nazi leaders, towering over the ruined landscape, are tattered and facing defeat; Goebbels, at the front, throws up his hands in disbelief and a kind of surrender as Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, passes through, grimly grasping the Torah, the emblem of collective survival. Where we see one, many lurk in the shadows. “An eternal people,” as the magazine’s caption says.

The Answer
was the house journal of the Bergsonites, Revisionist militants in the United States who had thrown themselves into the task of publicizing the destruction of the European Jews. Szyk’s drawing, used
prominently in the group’s materials, displays his gift for distilling programmatic politics into complex yet visceral imagery. The Wandering Jew—that enduring and ambivalent icon of antisemitism, who mocked Christ on his progress to the cross and was condemned to roam the earth until the Second Coming—had been reclaimed by Jewish artists, and Szyk drew from at least two prominent versions. One—a late-nineteenth-century image by Shmuel Hirszenberg in which a stripped and panic-stricken Ahasuerus, victimized to the point of derangement, flees the grisly horrors of the 1881 pogroms—circulated throughout Jewish Europe on postcards and posters. The second, a sculpture, is by Alfred Nossig.

With its assertive response to suffering, Nossig’s statue transforms Hirszenberg’s traumatized vision. It is an image of Jewishness that—in an awkward irony that will soon become clear—fit well with Szyk’s taste for the heroic.
⁵

Lice are parasites (as are Jews). They suck our blood (as do Jews). They carry disease (as do Jews). They enter our most intimate parts (as do Jews). They cause us harm without our knowing it (as do Jews). They signify filth (as do Jews). They are everywhere (as are Jews). They are disgusting. There is no reason they should live.