The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review
http://chronicle.com/article/For-EO-Wilson-a-Lifetime-of/65680/
May 30, 2010
For E.O. Wilson, a Lifetime of Science Feeds Into Fiction
By Peter Monaghan
Throughout his fabled and often controversial career, the biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson has harbored a secret ambition.
While publishing some two dozen books about the diversity and intricacies of life forms, the social lives of animals (particularly ants), and the urgency of preserving the ecosystem, the Harvard University emeritus research professor imagined writing fiction.
"I always thought I had a good novel in me," he says by telephone from his Boston-area home. "It has been in the back of my mind, but it was just a fantasy as much as anything, because I had so much else to do."
That his ambition was not just wishful thinking is evident from Anthill (W.W. Norton), a novel as distinctive as Wilson has been as a scientist.
Sales-wise, the novel has been a success since it was published in April. It made the New York Times best-seller list, peaking at 32.
Wilson, who will turn 81 this month, finally undertook his novel after completing another book for Norton, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, in 2009, his third volume in collaboration with the biologist Bert Hölldobler.
There, Wilson explains, "we set out just about everything known about ants, with some additional material on other social insects." Then Robert Weil, Wilson's editor at Norton, suggested he write a novel from ants' points of view. "That," Wilson recalls, "seemed a very interesting exercise in fiction."
But he soon broadened his scope and set the activities of ants within a more-conventional human tale: the story of Raphael Semmes (Raff) Cody as he comes of age in Alabama, fascinated by the natural world he encounters in nearby woods and swamps. Eventually, Raff becomes a Harvard-educated lawyer who fights for conservation causes back in the South.
But at the center of the novel remains the kind of project that Wilson and his editor envisaged, a sort of novella—the 73-page "Anthill Chronicles"—about ants' titanic struggles to build and battle for their nests.
Reviews of Anthill have not all been glowing. In The Washington Post, Molly Gloss, a novelist, complained of an excess of exposition, "clumsily handled" and laden with "many teacherly digressions."
Still, in subject matter and approach, Wilson's novel is often strikingly original. Powered by his rare knowledge of his subjects, Wilson deploys the resonant names of species in an often-incantatory style:
The space between the pines was filled with bunches of wire grass and a veritable garden of ground plants—croton, bluestem, dogfennel, threeawn, beargrass, Florida dogwood, and many more, all bestowed delightful names by English-speaking settlers. Pond pine, myrtle-leaved holly, titi, tall gallberry, and pond cypress clumped together.
In such passages, Wilson deploys with the ear of a poet words that lie hidden from biologically green readers just as mounded earth conceals from their view the wonders of ants' lives.
Wilson says that writing accurately about the natural world was both a goal and a cause. He hoped the vivid, scientifically accurate details would encourage a greater embrace of such writing, in fiction.
He also intended Anthill as a novel about "the key issue in the South, in my homeland, so to speak, which is today not race, not racism, although that remains a problem, but rather the management and conservation of the land. I wanted that to come out clearly by the drama of the fictional story."
The results have many literary echoes. Some of Raff's story recalls Huck Finn's adventure quest. And the "Anthill Chronicles" section harks, as the novelist Margaret Atwood noted in an appreciative review in The New York Review of Books, to classics such as Homer's Iliad. She called the ant novella "part epic-inspired adventure story, part philosophy-of-life, part many-layered mid-century Alabama viewed in finely observed detail, part ant life up close, part lyrical hymn to the wonders of the earth, part contribution to the growing genre of eco-lit."
Reckoning that "all first novelists rely more on autobiography than in later novels," Wilson says Raff's childhood closely resembles his own in many respects. He, too, stalked the woods in search of frogs, indifferent to snakes and other perils. Still, much about Raff and the young Wilson differs. Wilson grew up not to study law, of course, but to study ants, and to win numerous accolades for his pioneering work in evolution and genetics: new species, biodiversity, ant communication via pheromones, the evolution of social behavior.
He says it came to him as an insight about effective science communication that "people want a story, and you get a much larger audience when you tell a story, and the best way to tell a story is with fiction, a novel." But it was challenging for the life-long scientist to tell one.
"Mastering dialogue—that's hard for a scientist to do," he says. "We never write in dialogue, for heaven's sake."
Characterization was another challenge, he says, but a gratifying one: "In the end I knew Raphael Semmes Cody, and all his relatives, better than all my own relatives in Alabama."
His accomplishments in those regards have not deflected some critics' memories of the controversies that surrounded his book Sociobiology (1975) and its follow-up On Human Nature (1978). In those landmark books, Wilson famously analyzed human behavior from an evolutionary perspective and earned himself countless detractors in the process. Many considered him grossly reductionist in construing human behavior with claims like "genes hold culture on a leash."
Now, in the novella within his novel, Wilson returns to that battleground. When he portrays the ants slashing, severing, and cannibalizing their way into rival nests with a savagery that makes even the American Civil War seem, well, civil, his command of his subject matter makes for riveting reading. But he has rhetorical points to make, too: "This swarm attack, in which a crowd of fighters rush a formidable opponent simultaneously, was the same as used by wolves circling a moose, or infantrymen attacking an enemy firebase."
Here, the old foes of sociobiology's claims about the adaptive value of cooperative behaviors — killing, for example — might well pause.
Indeed, Wilson says that he certainly intended to liken ants and humans: "In a sense, the ants are a metaphor for us, and we for the ants. Their advanced social behavior, their constant competition, group against group, has parallels in human behavior. I did not distort the ant story or the human story in a way to get a deliberate and obvious match, but it emerged."
At the same time, Wilson says that he intended to underscore sociobiological themes: "One is that conflict between groups seems somehow associated with the origin of advanced social behavior."
For Verlyn Klinkenborg, reviewing Anthill in The New York Times, the implications of those loose parallels—those "somehows" that are in some way sociobiologically didactic—are worrying.
Echoing criticisms heaped earlier on Wilson, Klinkenborg asks: What is a reader to make of his parallels? What to make, for example, of his likening an ant supercolony that arises due to a chance genetic mutation to the human supercolony that is destroying natural ecosystems?
In Anthill, humans eradicate the ants, with pesticides. Klinkenborg asks: What does the parallel then mean? "That the human Supercolony is the result of a chance genetic mutation? That we should be gassed?"
"For all the beauty of 'The Anthill Chronicles,'" writes Klinkenborg, "it sets up an open-ended correlation between ant and human societies ... that spins out of control."
