The Fly Trap (15 page)

This was different.

Moreover, it soon became clear that the book was mostly about sex.

The story begins with the author and his wife, Vera, out driving somewhere in the countryside outside Paris. They have just decided to spend the night in an old chateau that lies nearby, on the banks of the Seine, and on their way there they sit and chat about the reckless rush of the traffic, and about the way everyone is in a hurry and impatient, and about death. Like so many other French chateaux, this one has been turned into a hotel and has added a conference hall and a swimming pool since the last time they stayed here. But before they arrive, the story has already dissolved into at least two time schemes, and one of them takes place in the eighteenth century—to be precise, in and around Vivant Denon’s erotic short story “No Tomorrow.”

This is all a little hard to follow, and it gets even worse when Kundera starts pursuing a third trail, which is really a satire on French intellectuals, or, as mentioned earlier, a comedy where dancers enter the action. “The dancer differs from the politician in that he seeks not power but glory; his desire is not to impose this or that social scheme on the world (he couldn’t care less about that) but to take over the stage so as to beam forth his self.” As far as I can judge after many readings, this is the main theme of
Slowness
. The title alludes principally to the drawn-out arts of seduction that a certain Madame T. and her lover devote themselves to in Denon’s short story. In any event, that book is about orgies very different from the ones I’m accustomed to conducting in the bushes. I understood that much when I was still on the dock in the shade.

But the morphology of ambition is as good a subject as any, I thought, and the dancers seemed to me strangely familiar, so I read on—and very nearly fell in the lake from astonishment when suddenly, without any warning at all, an old acquaintance strode right into the plot. Now it got exciting.

Oddly enough, the chateau, now a conference hotel, where Milan Kundera and his wife have just eaten their dinner and enjoyed a magnificent Bordeaux, is at this very moment hosting an entomological seminar. This meeting promptly melts into the fiction and becomes the scene of the dancers’ and the seducers’ tragicomic circus tricks, but at least one of the conferees is disguised so thinly that I recognized him at once. “The room fills gradually; there are many French entomologists and a few from abroad, among them a Czech in his sixties…”

The novel tells us that this man, whose fate resembles Kundera’s own, was a very successful scientist in Prague, a professor who worked exclusively with flies, until he fell into disfavour following the Soviet invasion of 1968, and after that, like so many other intellectuals, was forced to support himself as a construction worker.

He has now been away from his research for two decades, but he is nevertheless going to present a short paper on a fly,
Musca pragensis,
that he discovered and described in his youth. Nervously he waits his turn, thinking his lecture doesn’t amount to much, but as soon as the moderator introduces him as the next speaker and he starts walking to the podium, he is gripped by a completely unexpected impulse. With tears in his eyes, he decides to follow his spontaneous urge and tell the group, briefly, about his fate—just a few introductory words about how happy he is to be back among his old friends. Not that he hadn’t made friends in the building trade—but he missed the passion, the entomological passion.

And his audience is moved. They stand, applaud, film cameras are turned towards the Czech scientist, who weeps with joy. “And he knows that right now he is living the greatest moment of his life, the moment of glory, yes, of glory, why not say the word, he feels grand and beautiful, he feels famous, and he wants his walk to his seat to be long and never-ending.”

He is so moved, this man, that he forgets to deliver his paper.

Milan Chvála! In the book he’s called something else, but the character must be modelled on Milan Chvála. For a long time, Prague was a sort of capital city for European entomology, and Chvála was one of its really prominent figures, world famous among experts, the uncontested master of flies of many kinds ever since the 1960s. I myself have a number of his books on my shelves—his 500-page monograph on the European horse flies (family
Tabanidae
) and several volumes that treat what is perhaps his foremost specialty,
Empidoidae,
the family of flies that remarkably enough are called dance flies in Swedish.

“Every meeting has its deserters who gather in an adjoining room to drink.” Yes, the whole thing falls apart quite quickly, and since Kundera is Kundera, one of his dancing narcissists manages the utterly improbable (believe me) trick of conjuring up a woman to seduce from among this relatively ordinary gallery of fly-conference participants, “because the real victory, the only one that counts, is the conquest of a woman picked up fast in the grimly unerotic milieu of the entomologists.”

I can vouch for that last part. Normally no women take part at all. And the few who do happen to show up are usually the better halves of the biggest crackpots, wives who could easily pass as personal assistants from a psychiatric open ward. Well, maybe that’s unfair. But the fact is that unattached women could hardly find a better hunting ground than entomological societies. Unusual men, no competition. Just a suggestion.

Where was I? Of course—slowness.

A theme granted me by nature.

Which is probably just an unjustifiable simplification, a mental wild-goose chase, a poetic paraphrase meant to make a virtue of, or hide, a genetic inability to deal with choice. There is no need to question the fact that what the fly-collector does is for purely practical reasons slow and sometimes stationary, but in the final analysis, the concentration and obliviousness that give him peace of mind have nothing to do with slowness. He could just as well be riding a motorcycle.

The art of limitation is altogether different, and probably not much of an art. All that’s required is the courage to see your own mastery in actual life size. Some people see only flies, or certain flies, in a certain place, for a certain time. It’s only a starting point, or a fixed point, but it is a point. That’s all it is.

Chapter 14

The Island That Sank in the Sea

The history of biology has many stars, and two of them shine brighter than all the rest together—Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin. I don’t know what kind of breakthrough it would take for someone, sometime, even to approach the power they exercise over the way we think about life on earth. Above all, Darwin strikes me as utterly impossible to surpass, so great is the truth he saw and described in the most complete detail. Of course, Linnaeus is also magnificent, but what makes him a megastar forever is that he managed to sell an operating system, a bit like Bill Gates. What he didn’t do was formulate an eternal truth.

Anyway, both Linnaeus and Darwin founded schools in their respective domains—classification and the theory of evolution. But their lives, too—the very chronology of their careers—became models for generations of natural scientists. First, the youthful travels. Thereafter, patient, narrowly focused research. Finally, the revolutionary ideas and the great books in repeated new editions. A myriad of biologists have managed to follow their example in the first two stages—the travels and the tunnel vision of specialized research. It’s only in the final phase that the plan goes off track. René Malaise, I’m sorry to say, was no exception to this unhappy rule.

Or was he just unlucky?

Before turning a lens on his boldest ideas, however, let’s pause for a moment with the two empire builders, if only to note another interesting similarity between them—the fact that they were not alone. Neither Linnaeus nor Darwin was as monolithically exceptional as posterity has been pleased to represent him. As regards the theory of evolution, this fact is well known. Right from the outset, Alfred Russel Wallace, the young collector working in the archipelagos of southeast Asia, was recognized as having formulated the same idea as Darwin. In certain respects, he was actually the more original of the two, but he was not as comprehensive as the old man at Down House. Moreover, he was not at home when the race was run.

Less well known is the fact that Linnaeus was not alone either. It’s a long story, and I won’t go into all of it here. Just observe that there is almost always someone else in the background. In Linnaeus’s case, his name was Peter Artedi (1705–1735). They were best friends as students in Uppsala. Peter was two years older, born in Anundsjö in Ångermanland, and knew at least as much natural history as the little man from Stenbrohult. Together they developed the great system. Not each of them separately, like Wallace and Darwin, but together, over years of intensive collaboration. And it was Artedi, I believe, who was the real genius. Tragically, however, he drowned in one of Amsterdam’s canals, only thirty years of age. He probably took his own life. The spotlight fell on Linnaeus.

René Malaise also had a companion. In the end, the hermit from the wilderness needed help pulling himself out of the deep borehole of sawfly taxonomy so he could move more freely towards the open spaces of a general synthesis. The companion’s name was Nils Odhner, and he was a palaeozoologist, an expert on fossil plankton, a man who didn’t make a lot of noise. Malaise, however, did.

Of course, many taxonomists are completely satisfied to sit at their microscopes and fiddle. Mastering something small, whatever it may be, is stimulation enough for them. They leave the world’s great riddles to others. Systematizers in particular often know themselves well enough to stick to their lathes, but we need to remember that Malaise worked at a time when buttonologists swung their arms more freely than they do today. Why is a matter for discussion, but I think one of the reasons that rather narrowly specialized entomologists and botanists speculated as freely as they did was that they were involved in natural history in the true sense of the word. What’s more, both plant and animal geography—that is, the history of the distribution of flora and fauna—were something of a Swedish specialty within the biological sciences. One of the leaders in this area was Eric Hultén. Based on his Kamchatka experience and on other, later travels, he had built a respected position in the sensitive debate about which areas of the globe had been covered by ice during the most recent period of glaciation. Similarly, beetle expert Carl H. Lindroth had been able to make important contributions to the more distant history of the northern hemisphere.

So Malaise was only one in a line of biologists who read nature’s footnotes as a key to the great riddles. And naturally he chose one of the greatest—Atlantis, the island that sank into the sea. It was no myth. He had proof. In the mid-’30s at the latest, perhaps earlier, he got on to the track of the solution, and he never gave up. The last pamphlet he wrote on the question—“Atlantis, a Verified Myth”—came out as late as 1973, when he was more than eighty years old. But by then no one was listening.

The background to this obsession is that our friend Malaise, now a global authority on sawflies, had begun to ponder the fact that someone in Patagonia, of all places, had caught a sawfly whose closest relatives were found in Europe. It was a classic zoogeographic problem, a mystery of the kind that scientists had previously tried to solve with the help of various hypothetical land bridges between the continents but that since the 1940s they increasingly tended to explain with the theory of continental drift. This is the one we believe in today—the idea that the continents were once clumped together in a single landmass, Pangaea, that later broke into several parts, roughly the way an ice floe breaks up in the spring. If only the animals or plants were sufficiently ancient, continental drift could explain even the strangest dispersions.

Like Gregor Mendel’s discoveries about the labyrinthine ways of heredity, the theory about the continents’ journey across the globe had lain on the table for a long time before acquiring any consequence. Its originator, the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), was not, of course, the first person to notice that Africa’s west coast and South America’s east coast fit together like pieces in a puzzle, but it was he who first formulated the theory that they had actually once been joined. That was in 1912. But since he could not explain where the force that moved the continents came from, hardly anyone paid him any attention. It was only several decades later that more and more scientists began to take his theory seriously. Biologists in particular liked the idea, while geologists remained doubtful for some time. The real breakthrough came only in the 1960s.

When, after many years of hard work, Malaise finally presented and published his doctoral dissertation on Asian sawflies—the year was 1945—biologists had begun getting used to the notion that all the world’s continents came from a single ancient land mass. But not Malaise. For him, Wegener’s theory was humbug. The earth’s crust, he insisted, was far too thick. No force on earth could be strong enough to propel such a sideways migration. Never. He found particularly ridiculous that piece of the theory that said the Indian subcontinent had come whizzing along from the south with such force that the collision with the rest of Asia had pushed up the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. Not a chance. And so it came about that this apparently narrow dissertation about hymenoptera in faraway places grew into a frontal attack on a theory that had a real future. When you read his book, which is no easy task, you get the impression that sawfly research was something of a capacious booster rocket beneath a warhead of pure geology, targeted on the new creation narrative.

Wegener was wrong. Nils Odhner was right.

And what was Odhner’s theory?

Before we go into that, we need to observe that at about this time Malaise became involved in a protracted, implacable conflict with his boss in the entomological department, Professor Olof Lundblad. The origin of the feud is shrouded in darkness, but the archive of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences contains an impressive bundle of written complaints about purely trivial matters, indicating that the conflict quite quickly became one of those pianos that play themselves. For example, neither one of them hesitated to turn to the highest authority in a dispute about how many minutes Malaise was allowed to take for his daily lunch. My guess is that Lundblad simply got sick and tired of the no doubt insufferably independent Malaise, especially since he spent more and more time with Odhner in the palaeozoological department, deep into speculations about matters that by no means fell within his professional purview.