Read Online Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles - Free Book Online

likely places: incarnated in the resourceful boy hero of a current manga (
Insectival Crime Investigator Fabre
) in the top-selling biweekly omnibus
Superior;
as an anime character (in the series
Read or Die
, he is cloned as an evil genius with the power to turn insects loose against civilization); as a free promotional plastic figurine (a
souvenir entomologique
)—along with models of the cicada, the scarab beetle, the hairy
Ammophila
, and other favorites—in any of the thousands of 7-Eleven convenience stores throughout the country; and in luxury advertising, as a marker of male cosmopolitanism, intellectual curiosity, and a certain spiritual yearning. 43
    But it is not just in schools, nature centers, and Japan’s vibrantly commodified popular culture that Fabre’s presence is felt. While his writings are available in English only in haphazard and elderly translation, a recent tally calculated that Japanese scholars produced forty-seven complete or partial editions of the
Souvenirs
alone between 1923 and 1994. 44 Okumoto Daizaburo, literature professor, insect collector, and founder-director of Tokyo’s new Fabre Museum, points out that the early history of these translations is especially interesting. 45 It was, after all, Osugi Sakae, the famous anarchist and author of the memorably subversive aphorism “Beauty is to be found in disarray,” who completed the first systematic translation of Fabre into Japanese and whose plan—cut short by his brutal murder in the police repression that followed the great Kanto earthquake of 1923—was to translate the entire
Souvenirs.
In 1918, around the time he first read Fabre, Osugi wrote: “I like a spirit. But I feel a repugnance when it is theorized. Under process of theorizing, it is often transformed into a harmony with social reality, a slavish compromise, and a falsehood.” 46
    Though a committed Darwinian (he had already translated the
Origin of Species
), Osugi felt he had found a kindred spirit in Fabre. Captivated bythe energy of Fabre’s prose and by the pedagogical possibilities of popular science, Osugi was also drawn strongly to Fabre’s hostility to theorizing. The problem of theory, the charismatic writer-activist believed, lay less in its ability to explain than in its desire to order, less in its ambition to make sense of the world than in its appeal to the analytic over the experiential. The ordering impulse was a constraining impulse, one driven by the desire to dominate, to master, both intellectually and practically. The elevation of the rational, he asserted, impoverished the possibilities of apprehension. “To desire collapsing the universe into a single algorithm and to master all of reality with the precepts of reason” was, Fabre had written, a “grandiose enterprise,” not a grand one. 47 It didn’t seem tomatter to Osugi that this suspicion of global explanation arose from Fabre’s constant rediscovery of God’s hand in nature, a very different basis for wariness than his own. 48

    I don’t know whether Okumoto is correct in his argument that Fabre’s appeal for Osugi lay in their shared nonconformity, but I like where it leads us. As Okumoto tells it, the revolutionary labor leader took inspiration from the schoolteacher-naturalist’s rejection of authoritarian pedagogy, his insistence on teaching girls as well as boys, and above all, his attitude toward categorization. (“A fig for systems!” Fabre exclaims in the
Souvenirs
when discussing taxonomists’ refusal to classify spiders as insects.) 49 Fabre’s celebration of the sensuality of inquiry, his rejection of authority, and his democratic accessibility fascinated Osugi—as it does Okumoto, who places Fabre alongside the celebrated naturalist and folklorist Kumagusu Minakata (1867–1941), another household name in today’s Japan and another figure honored for his nonconformity and independence: “These two idiosyncratic autodidacts never simplified their own thoughts