The Sphex of Languedoc, Jean-Henri Fabre

Taking the prey to her burrow (video)

BIOGRAPHY

He was born in 1823 in Saint-Léons, a small village 150 kilometres north of Narbonne, in Occitania. He grew up in a poor farming family, and as a child he developed a deep interest in nature and insects. He went to school for a few years, but he was largely self-taught.
He attended a teacher training school in Avignon and became a teacher at the age of 19. He married soon after and had seven children, three of whom died at a young age.
He lived in poverty until he could earn some money with his books. At a time he had serious money difficulties and Stuart Mill helped him.
He taught for four years in Corsica and then in Avignon. He taught mainly mathematics and science. This led him to develop a deep interest in plants and animals, particularly in insects. The result of this interest was, among other books, his Entomological Memories, a description of the behaviour of insects and spiders in ten volumes. He wrote his observations in a lively and colloquial style and using a lot of personification and lovely images. For this work he is considered the father of modern entomology and of ethology.
He also wrote educational books of mathematics and science, and when young, some poetry.
When he was 60, he bought some land with a country house which he converted in an outdoor laboratory for his observations.
Although he wrote with a scientific spirit, he expressed his disagreement with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin, however, praised his researches and his writings.
He died at the age of 92.

SPHEX OF LANGUEDOC
This piece of writing tells us about an insect, a hymenopteron, the Sphex, a type of wasp. (The word hymenoptera is a compound of hymen, that is membrane, and ptera, that means wings.)
The wasp we’re talking about is a very curious and, if we like to personify, cruel insect. She, because it is the female, hunts and paralyzes another insect, the ephippiger, which feeds on vine leaves, without killing it and turning it to a kind of living larder to feed her larvae after laying her egg on the prey.
However, this prey is bigger and heavier than the hunter, so it’s not easy for her to carry it flying, or very far from where it has been caught, to her nest, a burrow built ad hoc after the prey is secured.
Our text describes the enormous difficulties of this process of carrying the prey to the burrow, and the narrator does it using the literary device of prosopopoeia or incarnation, that is, attributing human qualities and behaviour to an object, an idea or an animal, as it happens in our case.
But also the narrative tells us about the adventures (if we can call thus his various mishaps) of the researcher or observer.
The author begins by comparing the scientist work in a laboratory, where the researcher has all he needs available and controlled, with the fieldwork, where the scientist has to wait for long hours in uncomfortable places exposed to a variety of weathers. And what is worse, they are the target of busybodies and curious passers-by who suspect that the observer is a poor lunatic, or even a suspect, for the forester can help thinking he is a poacher who wants to steal some grapes (remember that the ephippiger feeds on vine leaves).
However, the Sphex eventually appears with her prey. The observer has had his reward, and now can draw his conclusions, as for instance, that the Sphex is not a social insect at all, and that she has to build her nest in an improvised way due to the particular nature of her prey.

QUESTIONS
-For you, what decides your homeland: ancestors, children, work, love, chance...?
-Do you think animals can be cruel? Or loyal? Or tender?...
-Can animals have rights? Which animals can have rights and which ones can't? And what rights?

VOCABULARY
ripely, ere, laughing in his sleeve, conscripts, fallow, ferret-cage, warrens, tarsi, haulage, trowel, allay

When the Wasps Drowned, by Clare Wigfall

 

BIOGRAPHY

Clare Wigfall was born in London in 1976 and was educated in an all-girls’ school.
She graduated in English and American Literature at the University of Manchester.
She taught Creative Writing for twenty years.
In 2007, she published her only book for adults, a collection of short stories with the title The Loudest Song and Nothing.
With When the Wasps Drowned she won the 2008 BBC National Short Story Award.
She also wrote a book for children, Has Anyone Seen my Chihuahua?
She currently lives in Berlin with her three children.

SUMMARY
It’s summer and it’s extremely hot.
A girl and her younger sister and brother are left alone at home as their mother works.
One day, a swarm of wasps attacked the little girl, and the big sister rescued her by spraying water at the wasps with a garden hose.
Afterwards the two little ones spent their time smashing the drowned wasps.
Apart from this incident, however, every afternoon is very calm and relaxing: while the older sister sunbathes, the little ones dig a hole that reaches into their neighbour garden. They say they are digging his way to Australia. There they find a very expensive ring.
But who does the ring belong to?

QUESTIONS
-Why is no father in this story?
-What is the relation between the wasps attack and the finding of the ring?
-What do you know about the name Mordecai? Has it got any significance for the story? And Eveline, Therese and Tyler?
-Did you sometime find something and keep it? What was it: tell us your story (you can write it down and then read it aloud for us).

VOCABULARY
lino, toddled, polka-dot, welts, she left us to our own devices, scabs, scoured, loll, flopped, chipped, shunted, peter, sweet money, swathes, ruffle

Molly Bloom's Monologue, by James Joyce

 

BIOGRAPHY

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic born in Dublin, on the 2^nd February 1882, into a middle-class family. Joyce attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare. Despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father’s unpredictable finances, he excelled at the Jesuit Belvedere College and graduated from University College Dublin in 1902. In 1904 he met his future wife Nora Barnacle and they moved to Pola, Croatia, expecting a job that it wasn’t; then they moved to Trieste, where he worked as an English teacher. Except for an eight-month stay in Roma working as a correspondence clerk, and three visits to Dublin, Joyce lived there until 1915. While in Trieste, he published his poems, short stories, and novels. During most of World War I, Joyce lived in Zurich, Switzerland, and worked on Ulysses. After the war, he briefly returned to Trieste and, in 1920, moved to Paris, which was his primary residence until 1940. He died on the 13^th of January 1941, in Zurich.
James Joyce contributed to the modernist movement and is regarded among the most influential and important writers of the 20^th century. Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly the “stream of consciousness”. His others well-known works include the short-story collection Dubliners (1914) and the novels A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His others writings include two books of poetry, a play, correspondence, and occasional journalism.

MOLLY BLOOM’S MONOLOGUE

The story we are dealing with today is the first part of de final chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. This novel is a modernist masterpiece that chronicles the events of a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. The novel is structured around 18 episodes that loosely parallel Homer’s Odyssey, capturing the internal and external lives of its characters. One of the most famous parts of the Ulysses is the extensive (about 70 pages) Molly Bloom’s monologue. The passage explores Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness as she lies in bed on the verge of sleep, suspended in the liminal space between wakefulness and dreaming. Through the uninterrupted flow of her thoughts, memories, desires, and reflections, Joyce immerses the reader directly into Molly’s mind dissolving the boundaries between past and present, reality and imagination.
In Molly’s monologue, conventional syntax is destabilised. One of the most distinctive features of Molly’s monologue is its lack of punctuation. Her soliloquy extends for 4000 words organised into eight long paragraphs without full stops, commas, or quotation marks. Punctuation usually serves to create pauses, emphasis, and logical order, but Joyce suggests that the human mind does not actually function in such a controlled or linear way. Thoughts move unpredictably from one idea to another, following memories, sensations, emotions, and free associations.
At the end of Ulysses, Joyce gives the final word not to Leopold Bloom or Stephen Dedalus, but to Molly Bloom, the twentieth-century counterpart of Penelope from the Odyssey. This choice is significant: the Odyssey, written centuries earlier, reflects patriarchal values that present women as passive, faithful, and confined to the domestic sphere. Penelope, for example, is celebrated mainly for patiently waiting for Odysseus’s return, while male characters are associated with adventure, heroism, sexual freedom, and autonomy. But Joyce, at the ending of Ulysses, introduces a striking counterpoint to the male-dominated perspectives. Molly’s stream of consciousness and thoughts move naturally between different dimensions of experience: sexuality, love, career, jealously, memory, motherhood, insecurity, and desire. She constantly shifts between past and present, often changing subject suddenly and without explanation. Her voice can be confident, reflective, rebellious, vulnerable, sensual or contradictory within the space of only a few lines.
Another important aspect of Molly’s monologue is its bodily language. Joyce foregrounds the female body and female sexuality in a way that was extremely radical for the early twentieth century. Molly openly reflects on her desires and sexual experiences, rejecting the Victorian ideal of the passive and chaste women. She expresses forms of female sexual autonomy that challenge both social and religious expectations. This rebellion is especially significant in the context of catholic Ireland. Molly experiences a double oppression: She is subjected both to patriarchal authority and to strict Catholic morality. Throughout the monologue she questions religious authority and recognises priests as ordinary men rather than unquestionable moral figures. Joyce therefore creates a female character whose values openly contradict those promoted by Church doctrine. Through Molly, the novel challenges traditional ideas about female obedience, sexuality, and morality. Significantly, the episode begins and ends with the word “yes”. This could be interpreted from a patriarchal association between femineity and acquiescence recalling the traditional expectation that women should say “yes” to marriage and submission, however, Molly’s final “Yes” must be read as a powerful affirmation of life, desire, identity, and capacity for action.
Finally, Molly’s monologue contrast strongly with the structure of the male narratives in the novel. The journeys of Bloom and Stephen resemble modern versions of the heroic Odyssey: they move through the city and progress linearly through different experiences. Molly’s narrative, instead, is circular. Rather than following a clear progression, her thoughts return repeatedly to emotions, sensations, and associations. In this way Joyce offers a counter-narrative to the masculine model of linear adventure and rational progress. Molly’s Bloom monologue therefore represents one of the most innovative moments in modernist literature. Through stream of consciousness, the rejection of punctuation, the exploration of female sexuality and the foregrounding of a complex female consciousness, Joyce creates a voice that challenges traditional literary forms and patriarchal assumptions. Ending “Ulysses” with Molly’s “Yes”, the novel closes not with certainty or resolution, but with openness, fluidity, and affirmation.

QUESTIONS

-Do you think for a man is it possible to imagine what a woman is thinking? (Remember the film What Women Want.)
-According to your opinion, is it possible to think without words, to express ideas without words?