I'm reminded of two other texts, Emily Dickinson's "I heard a fly buzz – when I died" and Wilhelm Jensen's short novel
Gradiva (1903).
The last two of four stanzas in Dickinson's poem treat the fly as something that interrupts the speaker's will at the moment of death:
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
A bit like the mosquito in your fable of a fable, the fly is connected to vision and the failure of vision (and in light rather than darkness). Readings of the poem tend to note that the synesthetic "Blue -- uncertain stumbling Buzz" suggests what eludes perception because it's broader than what the individual senses can register. It intervenes in this Platonic scene of vision (as knowledge and successful will), interposed between the seer and the source of lucidity/knowledge. We might say that the fly comes from outside the speaker, but at the same time produces itself within the speaker or signifies precisely the failure of this central distinction in Platonic/Aristotelian metaphysics. The last line mimes the inevitably inadequate attempt to represent the senses' failure and the death of the speaker. The poem could be thought of as a kind of thought-experiment in what language would look like at its limit, when noncontradiction (imagined as the separation of the senses, but also the ability to distinguish what is mine, and can be "assigned away," from a world outside me) gives way to a non-Aristotelian logic where "P-and-not-P" is the normal state of affairs. This is imagined as possible only at the moment of death -- recalling the long tradition of blind seers and knowledge incompatible with life or sight (e.g. Oedipus). Yet the effort is not aimed at negation: by imagining death, the speaker produces a language of contradiction, albeit one fractured by dashes and syntax that tends toward parataxis.
I haven't tried explicitly to align this brief reading with your story, but the problem of representing the singular is very much present here (and seems to be an important concern throughout Dickinson's work). If Dickinson's fly is a transitional object mediating or collapsing the space between self and world, it does this by being both absolutely singular (to the extent that it cannot be grasped clearly) and also completely general. I would go so far as to suggest that the "Buzz" suggests this generality, as a particular sort of noise that is continuous rather than punctual, but also a background drone. Maybe this seems fanciful, but I think similar sounds elsewhere in the poet's work would support the point.
One difference: your mosquito hides in, or becomes indistinguishable from, the blinding light, while the fly is both the darkening of the senses and their opening.
Since I've devoted a couple of paragraphs to this perfunctory, but more or less philosophically inclined, reading, I'd like to briefly note something about the effect the poem has on me. While it seems to me very rich in its poetic ambition, it also strikes me as a bit too theoretical and bloodless. Fables run this risk too, as opposed to other sorts of story like the novel. The problem almost reproduces the situation your story proposes regarding the eclipse of the singular. The singular places certain affective demands on us, even if it's only the
relatively singular.
***
I won't discuss
Gradiva so much. But maybe you'll find the following quotation suggestive:
Thus Norbert Hanold, contrary to all expectations and intentions, had been transported in a few days from northern Germany to Pompeii, found the "Diomed" not too much filled with human guests, but on the other hand populously inhabited by the
musca domestica communis, the common house-fly. He had never been subject to violent emotions; yet a hatred of these two-winged creatures burned within him; he considered them the basest evil invention of Nature, on their account much preferred the winter to the summer as the only time suited to human life, and recognized in them invincible proof against the existence of a rational world-system. [...] From the common house-fly, however, there was no protection, and it paralysed, disturbed and finally shattered the psychic life of human beings, their capacity for thinking and working, every lofty flight of imagination and every beautiful feeling. Hunger or thirst for blood did not impel them, but solely the diabolical desire to torture; it was the "
Ding an sich" in which absolute evil had found its incarnation. (34-36)
The story is remembered mainly because Freud devoted a study to it, in which (if my memory isn't too faulty) Hanold's profession of archeology represents the psychoanalytic activity itself, and the passage about flies is one of several ways the story marks the return of the repressed. But I like that the fly here is called the
Ding an sich ("the thing in itself," Kant's term for the inaccessible essence of a thing as distinguished from its appearance to the senses). As in your fable and Dickinson's poem, the fly becomes a kind of paradoxical or even perverse thing, or a failed object.
***
Thanks for posting your story. I wonder what you would do with it now, after rediscovering it. I would say that there's a problem with length and genre; although it's about a fable or parable, it isn't quite a fable (yet). The paragraph works as a spur for other reflections, but it also seems incomplete -- like an image without a context to make it more significant. Part of this has to do with the way it moves immediately to interpreting its own fable, but I think this would still work very well if there were some kind of frame. So it strikes me as a kind of thought-experiment, like Dickinson's poem; but it's non-trivial that Dickinson is writing a poem, and even a poem in recognizable form. It seems to me that this form not only mediates between her and the reader, but also tries to make the poem into an instance of language that is not strictly communicative or utilitarian. (Here I apologize for compressing, poorly, a whole theory of poetry.) I don't suggest that this is necessarily the direction your story should take. I think also of Kafka's use of parable and of the work that the narrative frame does there. Of course there are short texts that succeed, but even Adorno's aphorisms take on a different and more important meaning when read together. But all this is just to say that I think there's a certain value for the writer in the labor of writing (though I find this extremely difficult), and that I would be interested to see how you might now develop the event you narrated.
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