`Oh Hideous Little Bat'

Reaktion Books of London has been publishing an enormously attractive series called “Animal.” Each of its 21 titles, with another eight in the works, is devoted not to a species but a genus, family or order, including Rat, Oyster, Whale and Swan. I learned of the series last year from an Eric Ormsby review of Parrot in the New York Sun. The volumes are generously illustrated and focus less on hard biology than on the history of human relations with the animal, including its depiction in literature and other arts. Thus far I have read Cockroach, Snake, Bee and, most recently, Fly, by Steve Connor, a literature professor at Birkbeck College, London. The first chapter of Fly begins with a nursery rhyme-like quatrain from Blake’s “Little Fly”: “Am not I/A fly like thee?/Or art not thou/A man like me?” Picking up Blake’s theme of kinship or cross-species mirroring, Connor writes:

“More than the rat, the cat, the dog or the horse, the fly is our familiar. Flies accompany human beings wherever they go, and have probably done so since the first development and spread of animal husbandry among early humans. Flies are, as one of their rare celebrants has written `the constant, immemorial witness to the human comedy.’”

The “rare celebrant” is the French poet and novelist André Bay, in Des Mouches et des Hommes. If we were playing a literary word association game and you said “Fly,” I would answer with Gloucester’s lines from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ Gods/They kill us for their sport.” Connor quotes this and comments:

“Flies are the enemy of the human. And yet, because they are such an intimate enemy, human beings can readily identify with the weakness and vulnerability of flies. God-mimicking man finds it easy to feel fly-like in the face of abstract divine power…”

True enough, but are strangely powerful, with their gift for spreading disease-causing bacteria. Here’s where my second response to the word association comes in, a source Connor does not cite – the first verse of Karl Shapiro’s “The Fly”:

“Oh hideous little bat, the size of snot,
With polyhedral eyes and shabby clothes,
To populate the stinking cat you walk
The promontory of the dead man's nose,
Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan Phyfe
The smoking mountains of my food
And in a comic mood
In mid-air take to bed a wife.”

The next literary echo of a fly on my list is not so well known. It comes from Thomas Traherne’s Centuries – a work of joyousness and reflection (Traherne is surely one of literature’s profoundly happy men) and of beautiful 16th-century prose. Traherne observed a “curious and high stomached” fly under an early microscope, and wrote:

“The infinite workmanship about his body, the marvellous consistence of his limbs, the most neat and exquisite distinction of his joints, the subtle and imperceptible ducture of his nerves, and endowments of his tongue, and ears, and eyes, and nostrils; the stupendous union of his soul and body, the exact and curious symmetry of all his parts, the feeling of his feet and the swiftness of his wings, the vivacity of his quick and active power…”

Traherne so loved creation, he troubled to observe and pay homage to the nostril of a fly. Blake saw “a heaven in a wild flower,” but Traherne saw it, a century and a half earlier, in a mere fly.