Orchid & The Wasp

She's wearing the interview shoes. No bandages. No stockings. No ointment or relief. When she put the shoes back on, the pain reminded her of a wasp sting: the sharp difference in positions of attack and defense.

In the afterword of Orchid & The Wasp, author Caoillin Hughes notes that “Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's concept of the orchid and the wasp inspired this book.” I also noted, when adding Hughes' book to my Goodreads account, that another book with a similar title – Danielle Clode's The Wasp and The Orchid, a biography of the Australian housewife who solved the mystery of orchid reproduction that had stumped Darwin – was just released this year, and it made it feel like orchids and wasps are “having a moment”. I looked into what's so fascinating about orchid reproduction (this article gives a nice example), but it felt more essential to share what Hughes was originally inspired by, which I assume is to be found in this passage from Deleuze's and Guattari's 1987 masterwork, A Thousand Plateaus:

The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata – a paralellism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can not be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying.

And that stumps me (I was bemused to read on the Wikipedia entry for A Thousand Plateaus that, while influential at the time, it has been “criticized on many grounds”; with the philosopher Roger Cruton dismissing it as "nonsense" and "unreadable".) What most stumps me is what any of this has to do with the novel that I just read, but as A Thousand Plateaus is subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I can see how that ties in: more than anything, Orchid & The Wasp is an anti-Capitalist response to the 2008 economic meltdown that tamed the Celtic Tiger, with mental illness thrown in. I can't say that I loved it. (Caveat: I read an ARC, and quotes might not be in their final forms.)

The book opens in 2002 when our protagonist, Gael Foess, is eleven years old and trying to bully her female classmates into investing in her lifetime-virginity-restoring capsules. When she and her frail little brother Guthrie are suspended over the incident (Guthrie for freaking out when his own classmates teased him about the scheme), they are sent to their father's office and we meet Jarleth: a handsome and powerful executive at Barclay's Bank. Gael is a match for her domineering father (and is this meant to be the orchid-wasp “rhizome”? Has her orchid nature learned to mimic the wasp, thus becoming one?) and we eventually see that Jarleth is more interested in holding court than being a nurturing parent. The children's mother, Sive, is the conductor of one of Dublin's two symphony orchestras – a position rare for a woman – and if she's not out on tour, she's working in her home office; not to be disturbed; no consolation for children with a hard father:

Sive's will to live now seemed gossamer-sheer, fickle as a whim. She'd become a muted rendition of herself. It was true; she'd always been what busybody misogynists bitterly described as a “hard woman,” the very oxymoron embodied. But that's the problem with gossips; they have no register for nuance. There's refusing to applaud when a Ryanair plane lands and there's neglecting to congratulate your son for coming Highly Commended in the regional watercolour championships for under-eighteens. Not all coldnesses are equivalent: a person's spirit can freeze at almost any temperature.

Each section skips ahead a few years at a time, the recession hits and Jarleth and Sive separate, and Gael is so tired of being the strong one in her family that she jumps at the chance to study in London (to where Jarleth has also relocated, though Gael refuses to see her father or take his money). Despite seeming to despise her father, Gael has learned his lessons well: she becomes a business student with a side-hustle to pay her bills, she's not above conning her way into getting what she wants, and besides some residual affection for Guthrie, she doesn't seem to want any personal relationships; engaging in anonymous sex, rebuffing friendships, and rarely going home for visits. When university ends and Gael wants time to plan her next move, she returns to Dublin and plots a master scheme that will take her to the Art Gallery world of Manhattan; so what if it involves theft, manipulation, and taking advantage of her little brother's illness? Ah, because Guthrie has always been sick: having seizures under stress since he was a child, the family allowed him to believe that it was epilepsy (and had him on a regime of placebos), when he was actually diagnosed with a somatic delusional disorder:

Even if he wanted to, Guthrie couldn't hear her. It's like a helmet – he had once explained – that mutes all familiar, consoling sounds and amplifies instead the anonymous: changes in direction of the wind, paws clicking asphalt, the lick of substances dissolving in fluid, sun salutations, whistling, gases, glass cracking, hue and cry, tides retreating, fast-food wrappers, keys, leashes, cartilage, prognoses.

Being who she is, Gael believes that what Guthrie needs is money to supplement his disability payments, and every wrong thing she does in the latter half of the book is meant to get him as much as possible. To save on expenses while she's in NYC, Gael even joins the Occupy Wall Street movement – for the free meals and campsite in Zuccotti Park – and it's hard to really see the author's point with this. On the one hand, she gives plenty of ink to the philosophy of the Occupy movement, but on the other, she has the extremely Capitalistic Gael refuting the protesters' points to their faces. And on the other other hand, when Gael is forced to meet with Jarleth in NYC, she lets him know what she thinks of his career:

It's not merit that's earned you your wealth. It's having been let in on the rules of the game, thanks to being a straight white guy born into a 'good' family. For good, read rich.

When Jarleth points out that he had spent Gael's childhood letting her in on the rules of the game, she balks that as a woman, the game would never be fair to her. Even after all of this, Gael experiences no philosophical or emotional growth: to the last page, Gael prioritises the pursuit of money over interpersonal relationships; although she will have sex with nearly anyone:

Gael's pale lips were there, and the shadows beneath her breasts, and the stubborn wishbone of her hips. The diamond hollow where her ribs met. The tongue to slip round the avocado of her sybaritic core.

I suppose there's literary irony in having a main character who embraces a belief system that the action of the book demonstrates to be flawed (this can't be read as anything but anti-Capitalist), but as Gael experiences no growth, it doesn't feel totally successful as a novel. And if it was inspired by Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of the orchid and the wasp – a connection I strained to find – Hughes might have been constrained by her high level thinking; losing the trees for the forest. There are some fine scenes here, some nice writing, but it didn't totally work for me.

Extra treat: