\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

OPINIONS & NOTESindeed, rife with "species-ism." Just asLévi-Strauss documents the various customsand habits of la pensée sauvage(misleadingly translated into English as"the savage mind") in order to stress thebasic commonality of all humans, so doesRosenberg elaborate upon the rituals ofanimals — particularly mating behaviour("kinship") — in order to emphasize thebasic commonality of all life forms. Beesare our most often asserted partners inthis larger pensée. But Rosenberg findscontinuities everywhere as in a scenewhere Habella attempts to seduce one ofher husband's employees by recounting tohim the various mating rituals of slugs,snails, and woodticks :"The Great Grey Slug is eight inches ofhermaphroditic charm who insinuates himselfthrough the landscape parting thegrasses with a blunt nose, oozing himselfalong the ground in the slime that is theby-product, the rheumy extension, of selfso that it is imposible to decide where thiscreature's definition lies, just as it is difficultto declare where the fish mucus becomesthe water or where the water becomesthe fish ...""Go on, go on," murmured the youngman (fascinated).The husband appears on the scene beforethe seduction is consummated, but theyoung assistant flees red-faced and pantinginto the night. Habella has a waywith words.Birds do it, bees do it, Great Greyslugs, snails, and even woodticks do it."Kinship," in Lévi-Strauss's polite anthropologicalterms. "The circulation ofwomen," in less circumspect, more androcentricterms. For Lévi-Strauss, this circulationof women becomes the "language"of human society, the phonemeupon which whole systems of rules,habits, customs, and myths can be elaborated.Again, Rosenberg extends the continuityto animals. What Lévi-Strausslimits to a universal anthropology is, inThe Bee Book, biology. More accurately,it is bee-ology.The transference from a man-basedstructure to a bee-based structure alsooccasions Rosenberg's most importantideological emendation of Lévi-Strauss.If bees become the basis for our structuringmythologies, females cannot be renderedso easily into commodities ofcultural exchange. For, of course, it is thequeen who provides continuity in thehive, the workers (female) are thequeen's labourers. It is the drones (themale bees) who circulate, who flit andpose and vie for the queen's attentions.She selects only one drone as her mate.Immediately after the act, he dies. Themetaphors (and structures) must changeto accommodate the apiary.The structuralist significance of beesociety is also attested to by the misstructuringsof the past. Bees were longviewed in human terms. Thus Renataquotes to Habella a representative passagefrom Shakespeare that celebrates, ina kind of Renaissance "sociobiology," the"rightness" of a productive society ofmale bees — a single King, busy workers,actively affirming the human status quo.Rosenberg, in contrast, does not simplyanthropomorphize the hive. Quite theopposite transference occurs. Habellagrows stronger the more she appreciatesher bee-ing. Even at the conclusion,when she flies away, she has the strengthto do so precisely because she has completedher identification with the queen.After all, seeing is bee-leaving.Ultimately, The Bee Book is a bildungsroman,quintessentially a novel ofeducation: how to become a better humanbeing (the puns are inescapable).Each section of the novel is patternedafter an apian analogue such as "Learningthe Dances," or "The Drone," or"Becoming Queen." As she progressesfrom menarche to metaphor to metamorphosis,Habella grows more stately,199