A. V. Marraccini, We the Parasites (Seatle, WA, Sublunary Editions, 2023), 148pp.
Reviewed by Albert Rolls
A. V. Marraccini’s We the Parasites jolts its reader, brilliantly so, into its text. The abruptness of the opening stems not from its beginning in medias res, so to say, that is, with a discussion of fig wasps and figs before an explicit connection between them and critics and texts is made, as is done when Marraccini writes shortly after the introductory section, “I’m the wasp…. I write criticism” (7) and again much later when she refers to critics, in the passage from which she takes her title, as “we the parasites, feeding on the art to make reviews and papers” (82). The abruptness is not even a result of the casual introduction of the legacy of ancient Greece, which, because of the association with spontaneous generation, some might connect to fig wasps on their own; the reader is instead jolted into Marraccini’s textual environment by the way in which that legacy comes to inhabit the opening paragraph. A few lines in, the text reads, “The now pregnant female wasps, the ones Aristotle and Theophrastus call psenes, burst out of the skin of the caprifig and go off to burrow anew into other figs. Both erroneously thought this was a kind of spontaneous wasp generation” (5). This pair of sentences fits together oddly, pointedly so as I will shortly demonstrate but not before discussing the oddness, which stays with the reader, or stayed with this one, thereafter.
The oddness derives from the relationship between the pronoun “both” and its antecedents, “Aristotle and Theophrastus.” One couldn’t really complain that the relationship is ambiguous. Determining the two figures to whom “both” refers is straightforward enough, but one might remain uncertain before reaching the word “thought” because the sentence that begins with “both” follows one about wasps and figs, which could possibly serve as antecedents. The verb “thought” and what follows remove that possibility. “Aristotle and Theophrastus” are not, however, elements of the basic sentence, and using them as antecedents might be perceived as awkward—although not necessarily as unacceptable—analogous to how the use of a possessive as an antecedent can be regarded as problematic and even, by some, wrong.[1] Why might using “Aristotle and Theophrastus” as antecedents be awkward in the present context? The two names are embedded in a nonrestrictive clause, that is, a clause that can be removed without altering the meaning of the sentence in which it appears, but transforming the names into antecedents makes the removal of the clause impossible. Removing it would make the pronoun meaningless. We thus have a clause that is simultaneously “unessential”—a word Marraccini later uses while pondering the value of what she has written about Rilke (81)—to the meaning of the sentence to which it belongs and essential to the meaning of the paragraph in which that sentence participates.
The nonrestrictive clause thus seems to reside in the paragraph as a parasite resides in a host. The relationship is perhaps closer to the one between a fish louse—another parasite that enters Marraccini’s text—and its host than a fig wasp and a fig, for the fish louse, which gnaws away at a fish’s tongue and replaces it, assuming its function in the process, is unnecessary to the fish’s survival before appearing, that is, unessential, but becomes essential once it takes up residence.[2] Similarly, the nonrestrictive clause becomes essential, because the pronoun’s meaning relies on the names it contains, but one can imagine the paragraph working without it. The two sentences could be rewritten to avoid the issue; for example, the passage could read, “The now pregnant female wasps burst out of the skin of the caprifig and go off to burrow anew into other figs. Aristotle and Theophrastus call these wasps psenes and erroneously thought their emergence from the caprifig was a kind of spontaneous generation.” Such a rewrite would not only be slightly wordier, a sign of inelegance in present-day aesthetics, but would also weaken the text’s signifying power. Putting Aristotle and Theophrastus in the nonrestrictive clause suggests the Greek legacy—the texts to which critics turn to write about ancient Greece—for which they stand survives as a parasite and has been incorporated into the guts of the book’s argument like, to reference another of the parasites Marraccini examines to build her argument, a tapeworm, which secretes “immunosuppressant chemicals” (106) (the textual equivalent being the pronoun “both” in the present context) so that it can be integrated into its host’s body without being expelled.
Marraccini may proclaim, “I’m … the tapeworm, and the wasp, and the fish louse, sucking blood and figs and gobbling up lines of oil paint and prose like sweat, like air, like water” (39), but the Greek legacy is also these things in her text. Indeed, that legacy resides in the texts of a major strand of the European tradition, something that led Jacob Burckhardt to observe, “We see with the eyes of the Greeks and use their phrases when we speak”;[3] Alfred Whitehead to remark, “the European philosophical tradition … consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”;[4] and W. B. Yeats to declare, “the tragedy began/ With Homer.”[5] The Greek texts, those of Plato, Homer and others, as well as other texts that have come to belong to the tradition, remain not as isolated artifacts but as living things, psenes from which new texts, both primary and secondary and bearing the DNA of earlier ones, will be produced. Indeed, the passage just cited from We the Parasites begins, referencing a non-Homeric text, “I’m the Achilles who dresses up as a dancing girl [and] gets hidden by his mother…. I’m her, too” (39). The primary texts become parasites enclosed in their critics even as critics become parasites within those texts, the critical psenes that will burst forth to find new hosts—artists, novelist, poets, other critics.
We must, then, imagine the parasite as potential host and the host as potential parasite. The participation of those critical psenes, for example, Marraccini’s text, in the eroticism of the criticism We the Parasites imagines, would seem to require readers to burrow into the Marraccinian fig—also, it turns out, the book we are reading—essentializing it, that is, making it influential. The concerns raised over the text’s Rilke criticism remaining unessential would seem to be a concern over its not becoming integrated into the Rilkean text, beyond the pages of the present book, as a participant in a “commensalism, a form of parasitism in which the parasite doesn’t actively harm the host” (6), and a mutualism, a form of parasitism in which parasite and host come to need each other. “The whole process … is somehow queer … generative outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge” (7) and, I think it would not be inaccurate to add, outside the two-bodied model of host and parasite.
Together, host and parasite form “the generative third body” (7),[6] a body akin to—if not perfectly aligned with—that which appears when angels, as Milton describes them, embrace and “Total they mix” (BK. VIII; l. 627).[7] This angelic sexuality is, as Stephen Guy-Bray argues in “‘Fellowships of Joy’: Angelic Union in Paradise Lost,” an “ungendered sexuality that we can only call queer,”[8] related, I want to argue—playing upon Marraccini’s text—to Guy-Bray’s theory of influence from Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (2006).[9] Guy-Bray develops his theory out of his reading of the emblem for Edmund Spenser’s “October” in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), that is, “‘Agitante calescimus illo etc.’ The editors [of the text],” Guy-Bray notes, “provide the following information: ‘part of a line in Ovid Fasti 6.5: “[there is a god in us and] when he stirs we glow”’; in his note E.K. says ‘Hereby is meant … that Poetry is a divine instinct and unnatural rage.’”[10] Guy-Bray goes on to write,
This god would normally be taken to be Apollo, the patron of poetry, but I propose that we see the god as an earlier poet, on whom the poet [as well as the critical reader, I want to add, (AR)] depends in the act of writing. In other words, we might wish to speak of poetic penetration, rather than poetic inspiration. As well, the idea of “influence” – in Latin, literally “flowing in(to)” – could have literal and sexual connotations as well as metaphorical and mental ones.[11]
One could also say, in terms of Marraccini’s argument, that earlier texts flow into later ones. The later ones, in turn, re-create the earlier ones, recasting the way they are read. Primary and secondary texts thereby interpenetrate each other, forming a mixed, ungendered body: this third body is the text as it is perceived.
To put this in terms of Marraccini’s primary metaphor, the body in the case of the wasp-fig fusion is ungendered, being so whether it is produced by the female wasp burrowing into the female fig-flower or into the male fig-flower. The fusion is so complete, so totally mixed, in one case and seems to be so in the other that distinguishing between fig or fig flower and insect becomes either impossible or near impossible. When one is eating a fig—produced when the female wasp burrows into the female fig-flower—the wasp one is technically eating is indistinguishable from the fruit, so one wouldn’t know if the wasp had been absorbed into the fig unless one had been told by someone with knowledge of the process. Similarly, when the psenes are gestating, the materiality of the eggs from which they emerge—produced when the female wasp burrows into the male fig-flower—and the flower in which they are buried is so homogeneous, the distinction between them so “hard to discern” (5), as Marraccini puts it, that Aristotle’s and Theophrastus’s conclusion that psenes emerged through spontaneous generation seems almost inevitable. Indeed, the biology of the mechanism through which psenes emerge is so difficult to perceive, Marraccini notes, that it remains a topic of discussion among modern researchers.
Strong criticism, Marraccini’s argument implies, ought to integrate with the object of its concern in such a way that primary and secondary texts become so entwined that disentangling the thought of one from the other will be as difficult as distinguishing between the wasp carcass and the fig fruit or between fig-wasp eggs and the flesh of the fig-flower. Marraccini makes a strong case, if not for the primacy of criticism, for the need of primary texts to become coupled with critical discourses. Hers is not an argument for the independence of criticism à la Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” but for the importance (and pleasure) of denying the work of art an independence separate from our critical engagement with it.
- To cite the discussion of the use of possessives as antecedents in the Chicago Manual of Style, Sixteenth Edition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010), “because possessives function as adjectives, some writers have argued that possessives should not serve as antecedents of pronouns used in the nominative or objective case,” even though, as the Chicago Manual goes on to point out, the pronouns meaning is clear and avoiding using possessives in such contexts can be infelicitous: “Mr. Blain’s background qualified him for the job” reads better than “Mr. Blain had a background that qualified him for the job” (5.29). The rule against using possessives, nonetheless, has a certain logic; a pronoun replaces a noun that it points back to, not the word modifying the noun that is positioned to be pointed back to. ↑
- The mutualism between parasite and host—the need of each for the other—is, in a sense, weaker in the relationship between fish louse and its host than in the one between the fig wasp and the fig. The figures in this latter pair could not reproduce without each other, so their species would cease to exist in the absence of the parasitical relationship. ↑
- Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, translated by Sheila Stern, edited by Oswyn Murray (New York, St Martin’s Griffin, 1999), 12. ↑
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, Free Press, 1985), 39. ↑
- W. B. Yeats, ‘The Tower’ in Collected Poems (London, Macmillan, 1978), 218–25, ll. 51–52. ↑
- One might be tempted, taking a circuitous course, to regard this “third body” as something akin to what J. Hillis Miller describes in his essay “The Critic as Host” as “the third to whom the two [variously described as ‘host and guest, host and host, host and parasite, parasite and parasite’] are related” (444). In the essay, Miller is interrogating the statement—cited from M. H. Abrams, who is, in part, quoting Wayne Booth—that the “‘deconstructionist’ reading of a given work ‘is plainly and simply parasitical’ on ‘the obvious or univocal reading,’” (439). “The two” are the univocal and deconstructive readings, while “the third” is the poem, “something before them or between them, which they divide, consume, or exchange, across which they meet” (444), that is, the food that both consume and that Miller will go on to note is “host in another sense” (445), repeating the phrase he used three pages earlier when he noted, “The word ‘Host’ is of course the name for the consecrated bread or wafer of the Eucharist” (442). The third element then is simultaneously the resource that draws the parasite to its host and the host that the two are parasitical on, hence the possibility of describing them as “parasite and parasite.” The apparent confluence of host and parasite would seem to align Marraccini to Miller. Miller, however, relies too heavily on the notion of the parasite as a destructive force, despite alluding to the possibility of a mutually beneficial relationship between host and parasite in the essay’s opening paragraph. Thus, when he turns to the notion of a literary text’s incorporating its or its author’s readings of earlier works, Miller, referencing Harold Bloom, presents the host and parasite’s relationship as antagonistic: “The previous text is both the ground of the new one and something the new poem must annihilate by incorporating it, turning it into ghostly insubstantiality, so that it may perform its possible-impossible task of becoming its own ground. The new poem both needs the old texts and must destroy them” (446–47). There is no third body in which the two converge but only a parasite that, if successful, becomes the host, the original host having become the antagonistic parasite that undercuts the poem’s apparent ambition to emerge (or be seen to have emerged) from a kind of spontaneous generation. J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host,’ Critical Inquiry, 3:3 (1977), 439-447. ↑
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by Alastair Fowler (London, Longman, 1989), Bk. VIII, l. 627. ↑
- Stephen Guy-Bray, ‘“Fellowships of Joy”: Angelic Union in Paradise Lost’ in Queer Milton, edited by David L. Orvis (Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan), 139–51, 140. ↑
- Stephen Guy-Bray, Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic, (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2006). ↑
- Guy-Bray, Loving in Verse, xi. E.K. provides notes and opening summaries of the poems in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender. His identity remains uncertain, and some have suggested that he is Spenser’s own creation. For a brief discussion of E.K.’s identity, see Lynn Staley Johnson’s The Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction (University Park, Penn State University Press, 1990), 26. ↑
- Guy-Bray, Loving in Verse, ix. ↑
