The Bug

Insects shall inherit the world.

Well, they might. I mean they have the strength of numbers; they could probably overrun the planet a few times over. Cockroaches have remained exactly the same since the days of the dinosaurs. The mighty lizards came and vanished but the refrigerator raiders…they’re still around. Just. The. Same. There’s something very creepy about these crawlies and it isn’t just the wriggly legs. While world domination might not be on their agenda for a couple of geological ages, insects have certainly become, through fear, loathing and reverence, abbreviations for the deepest, darkest and most terrifying recesses of the human heart.

There is a Freudian motive in all of us, the explosion of nocturnal, repugnant, pathetic and omnidextrous forces throttled inside our psyches. This motive, the unleashing of the monster, is so controlled, so tempered by culture and civilisation that we barely realise it even exists. And that’s just it. We are all insects. We just don’t know it yet. Or do we?

Very distinct is my recollection of the scene in The Idiot when Ippolit describes, in delirium, his dream. And what a dream, what a nightmare. The numbed horror of Ippolit, sedated by fever and desperation, becomes the ambiguous periscope through which the fog of unhappiness and revulsion is skewered. Indeed, the effect is very submarine, as if one, sitting in a deep, silent ocean, almost the locale of Ippolit’s spasmodic insanity, is struggling to understand the private and public psychologies and politics of the people in the novel, and more importantly, those outside.

The semiotics of the scene is charged with an intimate and shameful knowledge of despotism. And that too, by a minuscule insect. As a wasted Ippolit watches, the insect is hunted around the room by the dog, Norma before finally being manacled in her teeth and being gnashed into pieces. Despite this, the wretched creature survives.

Myshkin, the gentle, noble and beautiful protagonist of The Idiot becomes mired in the machinations and manipulations of the Russian upper classes and is, ultimately, swallowed up; his goodness lacerated by the depravity of those around him. Without that goodness, which is an integer for him, Myshkin is a pitiful, cannibalised tin man. That, of course, is part of the private intra-novel reflection of events.

In the secondary, more sinister, connotation, a funhouse mirror is set up to rarefy the power plays of the Russian aristocracy, represented by the insect, a miniature, black little thing scuttling around the ostentatious bedroom the dream Ippolit, the blue collar worker bee, finds himself in. Norma, of course, is the educated bourgeoisie, which tries so hard to rip apart this autocratic bunch of fat cats, but as hard as she might, she is unable to get rid of them completely. The insect denotes repugnance and hatred, for authority, for the system, for the weak schemers of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, and most of all, for the fanatic, the power hungry and the tenaciously greedy bastard within us all, who refuses to die or be wished away.

Even as one reads the scene, the mixed emotions of familiar realisation and self-loathing twinned with the perverse fascination of watching this ugly little beastie, so terrific, vile and elusive as it scurries around with such destructive purpose of both moral and physical nature. The wanton feeling of sadism, raging to hurt another just because; the puerile egocentricism, the attention that comes with being a hideous creature; and of course, the mad need to be invincible – the denial of those feelings is far more corrosive to the spirit than their acceptance. After all, an insect isn’t hated by other insects as it is by humans.

The pathology of the insect-human hybrid is, of course, best dissected in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa’s problem isn’t unique, even though it may appear so at first sight. A protean resonance of the evolutionary process perhaps, a residue left behind by the continuous cycles of change and transformation across millions of years, which becomes a psychosomatic locus for universal pain and pathos.

Claustrophobia, rejection, disgust, shame…who hasn’t experienced all of this? Whether on the receiving or giving end, the problems of humanity, while colossal – world hunger, poverty, disease etcetera – are also contagious, a phenomenon that both magnifies them to global proportions and also dwindles them down to very intense, concentrated personal experiences. There is such limitation in the condition of the insect – utterly alone, frugal, vagabond even…it is like living in a mobile bubble. Everything, every emotion, every little feeling is deepened, broadened, made much, much more harmful if it is focussed through that bubble…a result similar to the greenhouse effect.

Gregor Samsa inexplicably and suddenly becomes an insect; the story begins with his shocking degeneration but by the last page, no mention is made of him. Slowly, slyly he has been edited out of the story – he has decomposed, rotted into oblivion. He is no longer there. This other side of the insect is not so much despicable and abhorrent as pitiable and miserable, wretched if one will…this subversion of the insect syndrome becomes more meditative, more intellectual. There is a quiet, traumatic suicidal quality about the concept of this Byronic bug. As Gregor is distanced from and eventually disposed of by his family, the sorrow of the insect is cleared up.

A subliminal response to this disgustingly recognizable loser foments the legacy of the insect imprinted, if not in our genetic blueprint, then definitely in our spiritual one. The useless, purposeless, brainless assemblage of a head, a thorax and a tail (give or take a few legs) is consistent with some decomposing part of ourselves, as individuals and as a society. Some abyss where the most agonising, wounding and shattering projectiles of words or deeds or collective histories have been stored; a secret chute leading to that covert monster, like the minotaur in the labyrinth. Except the monster isn’t as grand, as impressive as the Minotaur…it’s a puny, disgraceful excuse for a living creature, a microbial fiend, thriving on the humid and black caves inside us. When transposed into the outside world, out of its habitat as it were, this manifestation of our inner maggot isn’t able to survive very well. The animate collation of the most deep-seated fears, hidden wounds, grotesque ideas and mutant fallacies undergoes a sort of sepsis – the real world, the shadow of which had permeated those spiritual caverns where the insect had lived hitherto, proves even more toxic in all its fury. The frail, dismal ‘monster’ of our minds is unable to wage much of a war against the true wickedness of the world. As in Metamorphosis, the insect dies. It cannot survive without the nourishment of our twilit interiors. And then comes the question – if it so horrid, do we want it to? And where? Inside, where it will gnaw away at us throughout our lives or outside where it will wreak havoc on our glass bubbles? The truth is we do not really have a choice, the insect will nestle inside us forever, and it is part of our humanity. We can only see it in the garish light of reality when some thinker surgically removes it and places it there in literature or art or film. That makes it scarier, yes, but it doesn’t make it go away. The genuine specimen is still inside us, the form is within us. Destruction of the external insect won’t make the one inside go away. Plato’s philosophy about the fatality of the outside and the eternality of the inside can be illustrated very well by the idea of the insect.

David Cronenberg’s The Fly is another grandstanding example of the ‘insect question’. An incisive look at the binary nature of man (and woman)’s crude desires and primal impulses, Dr. Brundle’s twisted Promethean revolution against the symbiotic order of man and machine yielded results that were just as twisted. The ‘normal’ facets of our wants and needs is so far removed from the mental base which anchors them that when, by artificial intervention, the cords haul those ghouls carpeting the inner layers of our mind are yanked forth, there is no way of sending them back. The insect, injected with so much that it feeds on, becomes huge and powerful and consumes the host. The parasite becomes the alter ego.

Unlike Kafka’s Samsa, this isn’t a meek, gloomy bug; it’s a full blown dreadful freak. The obvious Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde scenario in effect here is rendered all the more horrendous when one of the personas isn’t even human. Imbued with so much fascination for its protagonist, a brutal candour while visually and cerebrally holding us captive and making voyeurs out of us as the shocking realisation dawns on us that this is the biopic of every human being; The Fly is very much a forest.

Brundle’s manic ambition, immodest insistence on trying to change things, cruelty as he tortures his lover, Veronica and himself, as if uniting them in the heinous power/pleasure prowess he wields, of psychosexual control and demonic deliverance from those monastic edicts which he (and we, as a race) has been learning forever. Why is it so wrong, if one brandishes so much potency and might, to revel in it? Why does it hurt when it shouldn’t? The insect that has overtaken your heart, mind, body and soul should be numb to any feelings of guilt or shame. The dominance of culture in the end, of course, separates us from bugs, even if we somehow do evolve into nasty caricatures of those living inside us. Like Brundle, should we all become insects, we shall be tragic vermin on the edge of a nervous self-implosion, haunted by our ceaseless humanity, hormonal or historical.

I conclude neither as a cynic nor as an optimist. There is something savage and surreal about being an insect and, while we may find them filthy and nauseating on a regular basis, there is also something uneasily appealing about knowing what would happen if… Would we be despicable? Depressing? Diabolical? Perhaps neither…But let us not forget that, somewhere in the never-ending pockets of the human consciousness there lie sensations so eerie that even a gigantic roach wouldn’t come close to representing them.