Boys Flying Like Bees: Guy Davenport's Fetish of Precision continued


Davenport is certainly not the first to try to unite precision and Eros. Any number of attempts have degenerated into sexual fascism and masochism. But Davenport chooses as his precursor the man he calls "the only philosopher of happiness," Charles Fourier. Fourier was a utopian socialist at the time of Napoleon. He saw the marketplace and the nuclear family as two enemies of the freedom of the passions, and set out to remedy this - with quasi-military organization and much justification via arithmetical formulae, all in the service of freeing the emotional and sexual self. As Davenport put it: "Charles Fourier concocted an elaborate philosophy to discover human nature and invented a utopian society to accommodate it, a society of children organized into hives and roving bands."[6] (And adults present a falling away from the intelligence of children, although some adults keep from falling away. In Davenport's story "Da Vinci's Bicycle," for example, where Da Vinci invented the bicycle to delight his young apprentice, Salai. Da Vinci is as captivated by the boy and by the structure of grasses; the boy is captivated by the precision works of the new invention, "the pedals, the wicker spokes, the saddle, the toothed wheels around which the chain would fit. . . ."[7] )

Davenport moves the precision of Fourier's thought out of his math and quasi-military organization, and invests it in descriptions of surrounding nature - while always remaining mindful of Fourier's notion of hives. One of the drawings Davenport created as part of the story (his drawings are never simple illustrations, rather integral parts of the narrative), includes one of Fourier's thoughts about the harmonies of proportion and attraction, "La série distribue les harmonies: les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées," words escorted on the page by a trio of dancing bees (or perhaps wasps, I can't say), which serve his purposes better than Fourier's own parades on ponies and children with flags (though he uses them elsewhere). Bees and wasps are in fact Davenport's totem animals, and he has seen deep into their personalities: "Apples and Pears" offers the aphorisms "A bee is a Dutch wasp," and "A wasp is a Japanese bee."[8]  In the fourth stanza of his essay "Balthus," Davenport writes that the painter's "adolescents are Rilke's 'bees of the invisible,' taking in from books, from daydreaming, from as yet ambiguous longing," sustenances that will later ripen in their hearts.[9] As Balthus's adolescents, so Davenport's.

In the story "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" much of the fetishistic precision that elsewhere is apparent (and unsettling) in tales of masturbating boys swapping briefs is invested in wasps - not as self-censorship, but as a means of pointing out a harmony. This makes it easier to see how much of the fiction's erotic charge arises from Davenport's precision.

        Wasps fly backwards in figure eights from their paper nests memorizing with complex
        eye and simple brain the map of color and fragrances by which they can know their way
        home again, in lefthand light that bounces through righthand light, crisscross."[10]

Which sounds like the action of a fetish itself, even if we can't say why. Is it because from an overhead view underpants are a figure eight, and exchanged underpants are two figure eights doing a figure eight? More likely, it's because to experience a fetish is always to approach a sensory overload - a fetish is the dark star of sensuality, where the inward pressure is in multiples per square inch. And the precise depiction of things offers a similar density. The pressure of one recalls the pressure of the other, and makes us smile.

        He zips in for a squinny, mucin in his ringent jaws, buzzing. She hums. He rimples his
        golden crissum, sprag for a hump. He brushes her antenna with his forelegs, she his.
        They dance, a jig, insect of ictus, in linked orbits, more wiggle than step. [11]