18 pages • 36 minutes read
The Fly
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Themes
Unsound Ideologies of Purity and Corruption
The speaker’s descriptions of the fly highlight the creature’s role as a disease vector: The fly is “a hideous little bat” (Line 1), “[s]hod in disease” (Line 19), “a rat” (Line 40), and has a “filth of hair” (Line 9). The fly is also associated with an “urchin” (Line 12), referring to an impoverished child or “street urchin.” Much of the speaker’s rhetoric superficially mirrors the antisemitic and racist discourse prominent in Europe and America in the 1940s. Concerns about minority groups were often veiled as discourses of poverty, corruption, and purity.
The speaker encapsulates these concerns when he states that the fly “dot[s] all whiteness with diminutive stool” (Line 13). The whiteness reflects the speaker’s notion of purity, which the fly’s “diminutive stool” contaminates. The speaker’s use of the Latinate phrase “diminutive stool,” rather than the simpler “small poop” or “tiny droppings,” establishes his sense of superiority over the fly. However, the speaker’s accusation is abstract and part of a larger list of accusations that make up the second stanza. Rather, the fly’s guts are later described as “pasty and white” (Line 36), which implies the fly has an internal purity that the speaker is unable to see beyond the insect’s shabby appearance. This emphasis on the fly’s guts also directly contradicts the binary between whiteness and the fly’s “diminutive stool” (Line 13).
The speaker’s concern about “all whiteness” being “dot[ted]” better reflects the concrete image at the end of the poem. The speaker describes a collection of fly “corpses strewn like raisins in the dust” (Line 42) of his kitchen floor. The corpses of the speaker’s declared enemy dot his kitchen floor in the same way he accused the fly of dotting “all whiteness.” Similarly, the “dust” on the floor suggests that the speaker’s home is already dirty.
Life, Death, and the State of Nature
Shapiro’s poem does not shy away from the stakes of the conflict it presents. The struggle between humanity and disease-carrying pests, though complicated, often results in the death of one or the other. Whether the speaker is justified in believing the fly is a disease vector, he surrounds the creature with morbid imagery to associate it with death. The fly walks along a “dead man’s nose” (Line 4), “populate[s] the stinking cat” (Line 3), and lays its young in the “tight belly of the dead” (Line 14).
These associations also draw connections to the ways that living things must feed on the dead. The fly, like the speaker, is drawn toward food (Line 6), though in the fly’s case it is made up of dead plant and animal matter. This cycle of the living eating the dead is part of the state of nature. The fly must “inlay maggots” (Line 16) in the “tight belly of the dead” (Line 14) to ensure its offspring have food to eat. The speaker indicates this purpose, in part, by imagining the fly “hungry” (Line 15) during the process. The fly creates life from death through this cycle of consumption in the same way the “green sweet decay” (Line 11) of the speaker’s compost turns decay to new growth.
The speaker recognizes the cycle’s necessity only at the end of the poem. He notes the flies’ “corpses strewn like raisins” (Line 42), directly connecting the dead creatures to human sustenance. The flies themselves are called “the narrow dead” (Line 43), suggesting that many of them have died from hunger. Upon the titular fly’s death, the speaker also witnesses “three cannibals” (Line 48) surround it, reinforcing the primacy of the cycle of life and death. The fundamental drives to eat and reproduce also serve as a major bridge connecting the speaker with the fly.
Patriarchal Masculinity: Provision and Violence
A sense of patriarchal masculinity is one of the main sources of sympathy between the speaker and the fly. The drive to reproduce is one of the major consequences of the cycle of nature mentioned above: Both the flies and men have wives (Lines 8, 27), and while men have “[c]hildren” (Line 26), the fly has “maggots” (Line 16). The speaker also states that he, as “a man, must swat [the fly] with [his] hate” (Line 33). Framing this action as a masculine necessity, the speaker suggests that he is antisocially obligated to perform the action rather than subjectively compelled.
An element of paternity, too, may be just perceptible when the speaker describes the fly’s maggots as “jewel[s]” (Line 16) (See: Poem Analysis), implying the speaker’s recognition that offspring are precious and, perhaps like jewels, in need of protection. Moreover, “Gargantua” (Line 41) is the father of Pantagruel, which translates to “all-hungry”; though the man-eating giant’s hunger is predominantly a nod to humanity’s violence, the idea of hunger obliquely evokes the paternal duty of provision. While the poem never specifies that the speaker is a father or even married (the poet was neither at the time of the poem’s publication), some of this imagery subtly accords with fatherhood, which augments the poem’s masculine tenor. Additionally, the speaker calls himself a “hunter” (Line 22) in pursuit of the fly, calling back to old family structures where sons and fathers would hunt. These masculine impulses appear abstracted in the speaker’s words and actions, and often amount to violence. The speaker states that he must “[s]lap” (Line 34), “mangle” (Line 35), and “[k]nock [the fly’s] head sideways” (Line 37), accentuating the warlike nature of not just mankind but humankind. The contrast between provision and violence—life giving and life taking—ties into the poem’s core irony.
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