In an elegant essay of perhaps forty years ago, Aldous Huxley, responding to a young man who aspired to become a writer and had turned to him for advice, recommended that he purchase a pair of cats, observe them, and describe them. He told him, if I’m not mistaken, that animals, and especially mammals, and domestic animals in particular, are like us, but “with the lid off.” Their behavior is similar to what ours would be if we were free of inhibitions. Therefore, observing them can be invaluable for a novelist who is preparing to probe the deepest motivations of his characters.
Perhaps matters are not quite so simple. Since then, the science of ethology has come into being and rapidly attained maturity, showing us that animals are different one from another and from us, that every animal species follows laws of its own, and that these laws, to the extent that we are able to understand them, are in close accord with evolutionary theories—which is to say, they favor the preservation of the species, though not always that of the individual. Ethologists and Pavlovians have sternly warned us not to attribute human mental mechanisms to animals, not to describe them in anthropomorphic language. For the most part, their demands have been accepted and, if anything, the opposite tendency has taken root—that is, the tendency to describe humans in zoological terms, to seek and find at all costs the animal inside the man (just as Desmond Morris has done, somewhat summarily, in The Naked Ape). I think that not all human actions can be interpreted in these terms, and that the method doesn’t take us very far. Socrates, Newton, Bach, and Leopardi were not naked apes.
That said, I should add that Huxley might have had his explanation wrong, but he was triumphantly correct in offering this advice to his pupil. There’s more: if you look closely at his best known works, you can hardly fail to see that he himself must have been a careful and brilliant observer of animals, in whose behavior he had trained himself to discern hypostases and symbols of the virtues, vices, and passions of man. No doubt his closeness to his brother Julian, a famous biologist and a scientific popularizer with real flair, must have helped him in this direction.
If I could, I would eagerly obey Huxley’s recommendation and fill my house with all the animals available. I’d make every effort not only to observe them but also to communicate with them. I would have no scientific objective in mind for so doing (I have neither the culture nor the training); my reason would be an instinctive affinity, and because I’m sure it would bring me an extraordinary spiritual enrichment and a more complete view of the world. For lack of something better, I read with constantly renewed enjoyment and astonishment any number of books both old and new about animals, and they seem to give me vital nourishment, entirely apart from their literary or scientific worth. They can even be riddled with lies, like Pliny the Elder: it makes no difference; their value lies in the inspiration they provide.
It is an age-old observation, ancient even in the time of Aesop (who must have been quite familiar with these matters), that it is possible to find all extremes in animals. There are animals both enormous and minuscule, extremely powerful and extremely weak, audacious and elusive, fast and slow, clever and dull, magnificent and horrible. A writer need only choose, he can overlook the truths set forth by scientists—it is enough for him to draw liberally on this universe of metaphors. It is precisely by leaving the human island that he will find every human trait multiplied a hundredfold, a forest of prefabricated hyperboles.
Of those, many are tired, worn out by use in all languages: the too well known qualities of the lion, the fox, and the bull can no longer be employed. But the discoveries of modern naturalists, so abundant and wonderful in recent years, have opened to writers a treasury of ideas whose exploitation is merely at its timid beginnings. In the archives of Nature and Scientific American, in books by Konrad Lorenz and his followers, lurk the seeds of a new style of writing, which is still to be discovered, and awaits its demiurge.
We’ve all listened to crickets singing duets on summer evenings. There are various species of crickets, and each one sings at its own rhythm and on its own note; the male calls and the female, who may be as far as two hundred meters away, and completely invisible, responds “in tune.” The duet, patient and chaste, goes on for hours and hours, as the two partners come slowly closer until, finally, they meet and mate. But it is essential that the female respond accurately: a response that is out of tune, even by as little as a quarter tone, will break off the dialogue, and the male will go in search of another companion more in keeping with his innate model. Apparently this requirement of an exact acoustic match is a way of preventing couplings between different species, which would be sterile and therefore would not serve the aims of “increase and multiply.” The same purpose is thought to be served by the complicated, graceful, or grotesque rituals of courtship that are observed among a diverse array of animals, such as spiders, fish, and birds (we might point out here that the ethologists were forced to incorporate the term “courtship” into their language, though it’s a human metaphor).
Now, one clever experimenter has observed that there is a way of altering to a predictable and reproducible degree the tonality of the cricket’s song: its frequency (which is to say, the tone of the note emitted) depends to a very great extent on the environmental temperature.
Obviously, in a natural setting, the male and the female are at the same temperature; but if we heat the female (or the male), even by as little as two or three degrees Celsius, the song rises in pitch by a semitone, and the other cricket stops responding: he no longer recognizes in her (or she in him) a potential sexual partner. One tiny shift in an environmental factor results in an incompatibility. Isn’t that the seed of a novel?
Spiders, in particular, are an inexhaustible source of wonder, meditations, ideas, and chills. They (though not all of them) are methodical and fanatically conservative engineers: the common garden spider, the diadem spider, has been building its radial, symmetrical web for tens of millions of years in accordance with a rigid model. It will not tolerate imperfections. If the web is damaged, it won’t fix it; it destroys it and spins a new one. During a research project on the effects of drugs, a biologist administered a tiny dose of LSD to a spider. The drugged spider did not remain idle and, following the customs of its species, immediately set about making a web, but it wove a monstrous, distorted, deformed web, much like the visions of human beings on drugs: dense and tangled in some areas, broken by gaps in others. When the work was completed, the tripping spider took up its position in a corner of the web, waiting for an unlikely prey.
It is well-known that many female spiders devour the male, immediately following or, in some cases, even during the sex act; for that matter, so do female praying mantises, and bees massacre with meticulous ferocity all the drones in the hive after one of them sets out for the nuptial flight with the future queen bee. These are all ideas filled with a shadowy significance of their own, and they stir muffled echoes deep in our civilized conscience.
The murder of one’s mate is practically normal among spiders. The female is generally bigger and stronger than the male, and as soon as fertilization is complete, she tends to treat him as she would any other prey. The male does not always try to defend himself or get away: in various species, it almost seems that he accedes to nature’s cynical evolutionary plan, according to which, once the task of reproduction has been performed, his reason for existence ceases and the instinct for self-preservation is therefore extinguished. But when the male spider instead tries to defend himself, we enter a dramatic and contorted world, which finds its human counterpart only in the criminal or psychopathic fringes of society; or perhaps there is no counterpart, but one is tempted to invent one, to describe situations never imagined even by our tragedians.
There are spiders that begin their courtship by offering the female a gift: a living prey, paralyzed by their venom, and bound and gagged by a wrapping of threads. It’s not a selfless gift. The female accepts it, eating her fill while the male waits patiently, and, once her hunger is sated, their coupling will not end in murder. Other males, dancing around the female in a ritual courtship, gradually trap her in a net of strong threads, and fertilize her only when this violent partner, ambivalently desired and feared, has been immobilized. There are still others (and here who could resist the temptation of a no doubt unfair and baroque human interpretation?) that behave with uncanny farsightedness and despicable duplicity.
During the season when the eggs hatch, they set out on raids to capture immature, and therefore still weak, females; each male abducts and imprisons one. He binds her with his prodigious thread, good for a thousand uses, and holds her captive, feeding her only grudgingly (to keep her from becoming too strong) and defending her against all possible aggressors, until she attains sexual maturity; then he fertilizes her and abandons her. Once she has attained the fullness of strength, the female has no difficulty escaping her bonds. Here we are on the vague boundary between crime reporting and opera buffa. It is hard not to be reminded of the ambiguous and stereotypical relationship between guardian and ward, tutor and student, between the scheming jailer Don Bartolo, swollen with late-life lusts, and the tender young Rosina, enclosed between four walls but a future “viper”: “tutti e due son da legar” (“both of them need restraining”).1
Many animals, structurally quite diverse, are bright colored, and yet their flesh is disgusting to the taste, or they are poisonous; for example, goldfish and ladybugs, or, respectively, wasps and certain snakes. The bright colors serve as a signal and a warning, to ensure that predators recognize them from a distance and, trained by previous experience, refrain from attacking them. Are there parallels in human behavior? In general, dangerous men tend to blend in with the crowd, in order to elude identification, but they behave otherwise when they are or believe themselves to be above the law.
We should think a little more carefully about the appearance of the bravos, as Manzoni describes them; the use of aggressively colored military uniforms (widespread until 1900); and certain distinctive manners of dress and speech that make it easy to distinguish members of particular levels of organized crime (the “apache,” the mafioso). Aside from these examples, I’d like to invent and describe a ladybug character, identifiable perhaps in certain passages of Gogol: a hypochondriac, dissatisfied with himself, his neighbor, and the world around him, unpleasant and a whiner, who dons a livery that can be recognized from afar (or a catchphrase, or a speech defect), so that his fellow man, whom he reviles, becomes quickly aware of his presence and makes sure not to get underfoot.
1. In Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville.