“Every meeting has its deserters who gather in an adjoining room to drink.” Yes, the whole thing falls apart quite quickly, and since Kundera is Kundera, one of his dancing narcissists manages the utterly improbable (believe me) trick of conjuring up a woman to seduce from among this relatively ordinary gallery of fly-conference participants, “because the real victory, the only one that counts, is the conquest of a woman picked up fast in the grimly unerotic milieu of the entomologists.”
I can vouch for that last part. Normally no women take part at all. And the few who do happen to show up are usually the better halves of the biggest crackpots, wives who could easily pass as personal assistants from a psychiatric open ward. Well, maybe that’s unfair. But the fact is that unattached women could hardly find a better hunting ground than entomological societies. Unusual men, no competition. Just a suggestion.
Where was I? Of course—slowness.
A theme granted me by nature.
Which is probably just an unjustifiable simplification, a mental wild-goose chase, a poetic paraphrase meant to make a virtue of, or hide, a genetic inability to deal with choice. There is no need to question the fact that what the fly-collector does is for purely practical reasons slow and sometimes stationary, but in the final analysis, the concentration and obliviousness that give him peace of mind have nothing to do with slowness. He could just as well be riding a motorcycle.
The art of limitation is altogether different, and probably not much of an art. All that’s required is the courage to see your own mastery in actual life size. Some people see only flies, or certain flies, in a certain place, for a certain time. It’s only a starting point, or a fixed point, but it is a point. That’s all it is.
Chapter 14
The Island That Sank in the Sea
The history of biology has many stars, and two of them shine brighter than all the rest together—Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin. I don’t know what kind of breakthrough it would take for someone, sometime, even to approach the power they exercise over the way we think about life on earth. Above all, Darwin strikes me as utterly impossible to surpass, so great is the truth he saw and described in the most complete detail. Of course, Linnaeus is also magnificent, but what makes him a megastar forever is that he managed to sell an operating system, a bit like Bill Gates. What he didn’t do was formulate an eternal truth.
Anyway, both Linnaeus and Darwin founded schools in their respective domains—classification and the theory of evolution. But their lives, too—the very chronology of their careers—became models for generations of natural scientists. First, the youthful travels. Thereafter, patient, narrowly focused research. Finally, the revolutionary ideas and the great books in repeated new editions. A myriad of biologists have managed to follow their example in the first two stages—the travels and the tunnel vision of specialized research. It’s only in the final phase that the plan goes off track. René Malaise, I’m sorry to say, was no exception to this unhappy rule.
Or was he just unlucky?
Before turning a lens on his boldest ideas, however, let’s pause for a moment with the two empire builders, if only to note another interesting similarity between them—the fact that they were not alone. Neither Linnaeus nor Darwin was as monolithically exceptional as posterity has been pleased to represent him. As regards the theory of evolution, this fact is well known. Right from the outset, Alfred Russel Wallace, the young collector working in the archipelagos of southeast Asia, was recognized as having formulated the same idea as Darwin. In certain respects, he was actually the more original of the two, but he was not as comprehensive as the old man at Down House. Moreover, he was not at home when the race was run.
Less well known is the fact that Linnaeus was not alone either. It’s a long story, and I won’t go into all of it here. Just observe that there is almost always someone else in the background. In Linnaeus’s case, his name was Peter Artedi (1705–1735). They were best friends as students in Uppsala. Peter was two years older, born in Anundsjö in Ångermanland, and knew at least as much natural history as the little man from Stenbrohult. Together they developed the great system. Not each of them separately, like Wallace and Darwin, but together, over years of intensive collaboration. And it was Artedi, I believe, who was the real genius. Tragically, however, he drowned in one of Amsterdam’s canals, only thirty years of age. He probably took his own life. The spotlight fell on Linnaeus.
René Malaise also had a companion. In the end, the hermit from the wilderness needed help pulling himself out of the deep borehole of sawfly taxonomy so he could move more freely towards the open spaces of a general synthesis. The companion’s name was Nils Odhner, and he was a palaeozoologist, an expert on fossil plankton, a man who didn’t make a lot of noise. Malaise, however, did.
Of course, many taxonomists are completely satisfied to sit at their microscopes and fiddle. Mastering something small, whatever it may be, is stimulation enough for them. They leave the world’s great riddles to others. Systematizers in particular often know themselves well enough to stick to their lathes, but we need to remember that Malaise worked at a time when buttonologists swung their arms more freely than they do today. Why is a matter for discussion, but I think one of the reasons that rather narrowly specialized entomologists and botanists speculated as freely as they did was that they were involved in natural history in the true sense of the word. What’s more, both plant and animal geography—that is, the history of the distribution of flora and fauna—were something of a Swedish specialty within the biological sciences. One of the leaders in this area was Eric Hultén. Based on his Kamchatka experience and on other, later travels, he had built a respected position in the sensitive debate about which areas of the globe had been covered by ice during the most recent period of glaciation. Similarly, beetle expert Carl H. Lindroth had been able to make important contributions to the more distant history of the northern hemisphere.
So Malaise was only one in a line of biologists who read nature’s footnotes as a key to the great riddles. And naturally he chose one of the greatest—Atlantis, the island that sank into the sea. It was no myth. He had proof. In the mid-’30s at the latest, perhaps earlier, he got on to the track of the solution, and he never gave up. The last pamphlet he wrote on the question—“Atlantis, a Verified Myth”—came out as late as 1973, when he was more than eighty years old. But by then no one was listening.
The background to this obsession is that our friend Malaise, now a global authority on sawflies, had begun to ponder the fact that someone in Patagonia, of all places, had caught a sawfly whose closest relatives were found in Europe. It was a classic zoogeographic problem, a mystery of the kind that scientists had previously tried to solve with the help of various hypothetical land bridges between the continents but that since the 1940s they increasingly tended to explain with the theory of continental drift. This is the one we believe in today—the idea that the continents were once clumped together in a single landmass, Pangaea, that later broke into several parts, roughly the way an ice floe breaks up in the spring. If only the animals or plants were sufficiently ancient, continental drift could explain even the strangest dispersions.
Like Gregor Mendel’s discoveries about the labyrinthine ways of heredity, the theory about the continents’ journey across the globe had lain on the table for a long time before acquiring any consequence. Its originator, the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), was not, of course, the first person to notice that Africa’s west coast and South America’s east coast fit together like pieces in a puzzle, but it was he who first formulated the theory that they had actually once been joined. That was in 1912. But since he could not explain where the force that moved the continents came from, hardly anyone paid him any attention. It was only several decades later that more and more scientists began to take his theory seriously. Biologists in particular liked the idea, while geologists remained doubtful for some time. The real breakthrough came only in the 1960s.
When, after many years of hard work, Malaise finally presented and published his doctoral dissertation on Asian sawflies—the year was 1945—biologists had begun getting used to the notion that all the world’s continents came from a single ancient land mass. But not Malaise. For him, Wegener’s theory was humbug. The earth’s crust, he insisted, was far too thick. No force on earth could be strong enough to propel such a sideways migration. Never. He found particularly ridiculous that piece of the theory that said the Indian subcontinent had come whizzing along from the south with such force that the collision with the rest of Asia had pushed up the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. Not a chance. And so it came about that this apparently narrow dissertation about hymenoptera in faraway places grew into a frontal attack on a theory that had a real future. When you read his book, which is no easy task, you get the impression that sawfly research was something of a capacious booster rocket beneath a warhead of pure geology, targeted on the new creation narrative.
Wegener was wrong. Nils Odhner was right.
And what was Odhner’s theory?
Before we go into that, we need to observe that at about this time Malaise became involved in a protracted, implacable conflict with his boss in the entomological department, Professor Olof Lundblad. The origin of the feud is shrouded in darkness, but the archive of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences contains an impressive bundle of written complaints about purely trivial matters, indicating that the conflict quite quickly became one of those pianos that play themselves. For example, neither one of them hesitated to turn to the highest authority in a dispute about how many minutes Malaise was allowed to take for his daily lunch. My guess is that Lundblad simply got sick and tired of the no doubt insufferably independent Malaise, especially since he spent more and more time with Odhner in the palaeozoological department, deep into speculations about matters that by no means fell within his professional purview.
There’s a story still told today about how Malaise came sauntering in after lunch one afternoon, unquestionably late, and there by the lift stood Lundblad in a rage, staring pointedly at his wristwatch. Whereupon Malaise remarked, casually, “Timing an egg?”
Anyway, Odhner had worked out a whole theory of his own about how the earth came to look the way it does. This intellectual construct, which came to be called the constriction theory, was, if we’re to believe Malaise, ingenious in its simplicity. And it explained everything. In rough outline, constriction theory maintains that high mountains and deep valleys, both on land and under the seas, are created when the planet’s skin develops folds under the pressures that arise from differences in temperature, not from mystical currents in the earth’s interior. In short, climate, or at least temperature, controls the whole process. It’s true that even in Odhner’s model, the earth’s crust is divided into plates, separated by unstable zones with earthquakes and volcanoes, but in contrast to Wegener’s more mobile entities, Odhner’s do not move laterally to any marked degree. They just expand or shrink depending on temperature. The continents lie where they lie, and if the climate is warm, the plates expand, whereupon mountain chains crumple upwards and ocean trenches fold down. More or less like corrugated sheet-metal.
I’m reluctant to go into all of this in greater depth. Constriction theory is not exactly crystal clear, and my knowledge of geology is not striking. On top of which I don’t think we need to know so much more than that—from this moment on—René Malaise was fully invested in an idea that almost no one else took seriously. The sawflies had been nothing but a conveyance. Now he had arrived. That he would soon land out in the cold was something understood by everyone but Malaise himself.
He made a great mistake. Instead of using Odhner’s theory as a resource in addressing his zoogeographic questions, which would have been an honourable position in other people’s eyes, he dropped the sawflies abruptly and threw himself headfirst into the tangle of legends and essentially fruitless speculation that begins with Plato’s story of the sunken Atlantis. His enthusiasm was as boundless as always. He seems to have been utterly unaffected by the laughter behind his back. For all I know, he was remembering his trap. That too had been dismissed as wishful thinking. But perseverance carried the day that time. Why not now again? Although what’s more likely is that he didn’t think about it at all, at least not about what other people thought. He had endured inhospitable climates before. Loneliness too, for that matter.
With his popularly written book Atlantis, a Geological Reality, which appeared in Swedish in 1951, Malaise burned his last bridge to serious science. The situation could still have been rescued, and his reputation saved for posterity, if he had only restrained himself a bit. Odhner’s ideas about plate tectonics were a theory as good as any other, and its originator possessed impressive knowledge about the dispersion of the planet’s fauna. A sunken continent in the Atlantic, perhaps at about the latitude of the Azores, was not such a big deal. It was a wild hypothesis, of course, but still only a hypothesis, supported by facts from solid research in many disciplines. He might have got away with it.
But no. Why limit yourself?
Sometimes I think it was his experiences as a young man that led him astray. The memory of earthquakes and devastating tsunamis. There was probably no other scientist on earth who had felt the power released when the sea bottom suddenly falls several hundred metres—not the way he had, in his very bones. A hundred thousand people had died in the Japanese catastrophe in 1923. He was there.
The catastrophe that legend tells us did away with Atlantis could very well have had its equivalent in reality. The principal settlement could have experienced a sudden drop with subsequent flooding, caused by an abrupt settling of the bedrock as the result of marginal constriction. We have examples from Japan of the way large areas have suddenly sunk in connection with an earthquake. As noted earlier, parts of Sagami Bay outside Tokyo sank by as much as 400 metres. If the narrow, culture-bearing coastal belt with its principal settlements was subjected to this kind of widespread destruction, it could very well have meant ruin for the entire nation and its culture. The tsunami waves that followed in the wake of the disaster could have contributed to the elimination of the coastal populations. Once the coastal inhabitants and cultural centres were gone, the remaining people may have emigrated or gradually gone under.
So ends the final chapter of the Atlantis book of 1951. It is not long, just ten pages, but long enough to upset the entire apple cart. The chapter’s title is “Atlantis’s Significance for Human Culture.” The man holding the pen does not say in so many words that human beings lived on Atlantis, nor that they had contact with the Egyptians, nor that they were the globe’s most daring and powerful seafarers. Not explicitly. And he does not say that he knows for certain that these Atlanteans built Stonehenge in England, nor that they provided all the bronze we find in the earth from our own Bronze Age, nor that it is their ships we find depicted on innumerable Swedish rock carvings from the same period.
And yet the whole book radiates a belief that these things are true.
A long time later, in 1969, the book came out in English, now under the trickier title A New Deal in Geography, Geology and Related Sciences. He had to publish it at his own expense. Much had happened during those years. The continental drift theory had emerged victorious, Odhner was more anonymous than ever, and Malaise himself must have seemed a living fossil. Fifty years had passed since he went to Kamchatka. Who had ever heard of that expedition? Maybe it’s not so strange that, in the English edition, the chapter about the culture of Atlantis had grown to almost sixty pages.
Atlantis was now the cradle of human culture, the very pulsing heart of a vanished golden age. Reading it today, I find it all touching and rather exhilarating. After all, René is my friend. That his narrative can be seen as a treasure trove for New Age fantasists doesn’t bother me in the least.
On the other hand, I was particularly struck by something he wrote in his preface. It gave me an idea.
Scient
ists of to-day, be it geologists, geophysicists, or oceanographers, are so overspecialized that they master only a limited sector of their own branch. Outside this sector they hardly dare to express an opinion. The fundamental theories on which, for instance, geology is based have mostly been in use for generations and have in their mind ceased to be theories and have attained almost the standing of axioms.
…
I managed with some difficulty to get my hands on a copy of this book about Atlantis, and the same day it arrived in the mail I sent it off to a geologist I know who lives in Madrid and whose expertise I trust—ever since we crossed the Ural Mountains together. That was towards the end of the 1980s. We were on our way to a large gas field on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia for reasons that were anything but clear, and we were taking the train east from Moscow with some energetic Russians. We sat up all night drinking and singing the way you do in Russian train compartments, and when morning dawned without our even having noticed our passage through the mountains, my friend the geologist said, “I wonder if maybe the Urals are a fraud.”
Of even greater importance for his credibility and temperament is the fact that he has been working in the oil industry for a long time. Self-interest doesn’t lie. Academic prestige and sloppy thinking vanish quickly in a world where a single wrong guess about where the oil is can cost hundreds of millions. Now I was asking him to comment on Malaise and the long-forgotten constriction theory.
The Fly Trap Page 12