Leinengen Versus the Ants

For the last few days I have found myself thinking about a story I read long, long ago, when I was a boy. It is called “Leiningen Versus the Ants", written by Carl Stephenson in 1938. I have no idea if this is still commonly assigned in elementary schools any more, but I suspect that for those of us of a certain age, this story might still be stored away on the hard-drives of our grey matter.

The story is about a man, “Leiningen” who owns a plantation in some “wild” part of the Amazon River basin. At any rate, Leiningen, with all the pluck of Colonialists everywhere and at all times (as portrayed in sympathetic literature) refuses to flee with his fellow plantation-owners in the face of a vast swarm of voracious ants, which wash forward like "an elemental--an act of God! Ten miles long, two miles wide--ants, nothing but ants!"

This army of ants, each approximately the size of a man's thumb, marches forward like an unstoppable tide, devouring anything and everything that falls in its path. Leiningen will not be chased off of his property though – not by God or ants ort anything else! He stays to fight.
For those of you who are not haunted by the ghosts of yesterday’s English teachers, the following is a bit of a summary from Wikipedia:

“Unlike his fellow settlers, all of whom have either fled or are preparing to flee, Leiningen is not about to give up years of hard work and planning to "an act of God." He assembles his workers, who are all or mostly Indians, and informs them of the inbound horror. Though the natives are a naturally superstitious and frightened lot, their respect for and trust in Leiningen enables them to remain calm and determined: "The ants were indeed mighty, but not so mighty as the boss." Later in the story, despite suffering setbacks and being given an offer of dismissal with full pay, none of the laborers desert Leiningen.

Much of the rest of the story is taken up with the days-long struggle in which Leiningen attempts to hold off the huge swath of ants. He uses an ingenious system of levees, moats and "decoy" fields to keep the ants at bay. For example, he draws off some of the ants to a valueless fallow field, while keeping a large portion of the others off of the central compound with a system of defensive canals. The ants are initially unable to cross over, but soon manage to build bridges on the bodies of ants who mindlessly sacrifice themselves to the waters. As the bridges of ant corpses begins to reach the near side of the canals, Leiningen opens a series of sluice gates, greatly increasing the flow of water, and washing away the prior ant bridges. He also employs gasoline and other petroleum flammables to great effect; the chemicals not only burn the ants when ignited, but also interfere with their chemically-based tracking and sensory organs.”
In the end, Leiningen floods his entire plantation, simultaneously destroying the ants and reducing his plantation to waterlogged rubble and ruined crops. The ants are defeated, and Leiningen lives on to rebuild. He is indomitable.

To this day, when I think of this story, I can still hear the disembodied voice of some long-forgotten English teacher saying, “And this is a perfect example of the “Man vs. Nature” (or possibly Man vs. God) genre of literature.” Oh the strange things we remember…

It has been a VERY long time since I thought about this story. As a kid, I loved the sense of heroic resistance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It seemed to me to be a very profile of the kind of courage I hoped I would someday be capable of. That’s what I thought when I was nine or ten, anyway.

But this week I have been thinking about this story a lot, and I have been struck by a question that is both intriguing and disturbing. Who are “We” in the story?

For so many years I uncritically assumed that We, “human beings”, “Men”, “Civilized People” – were represented by Leiningen himself, while the Ants represented the frightening forces of Nature, Chaos and all the unknown forces that threaten our sense of control and remind us of how precarious life can be.

This week, however, someone emailed me a link to a fascinating website. It is a collection of artwork by an artist named, Chris Jordan, and can be found here: http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

In this show, Jordan strives (and often succeeds) in trying to capture the seemingly uncountable, unquantifiable and incomprehensible in forms and images that we can make sense of – images that allow us to take in things on a scale that normally makes our minds simply switch off like old fuses in a power surge.

He focuses his attention primarily on consumption. Our consumption. Jordan constructs vast fields of trees used to make the junk-mail catalogues we throw out without reading, gargantuan expanses of the blowing and unrecyclable plastic bags we generate every five seconds, and immense carpets made of the cigarettes smoked by new teenage addicts every day.





I have looked at this website several times now, and have never made it all the way through in one go. Even with Jordan’s effective constructions, my mind starts to falter and sag after just a few images. Not only that, but the scale of consumption is so vast and so clearly destructive, that I my chest inevitably starts to tighten with panic.

Which brings me back to the question I have been pondering this week: “Who is the ‘We’ in Leiningen Versus the Ants?”

Looked at through Chris Jordan’s eyes, we sure look like a tide of mindless, ravening insects – possessed of little more than appetite. But I suspect it is more complex than that.
Are we not also Leiningen? Arrogantly defying Nature, and in doing so, god? Wasn’t Leiningen also driven by appetite? The hunger for control, power, ego and wealth?

In this way, “We” are both the ants and Leiningen fighting the ants. We are the consumer and the consumed. Just as Leiningen destroys his own plantation in order to save it, so our own appetites (so vividly captured by Chris Jordan) drive us to consume and consume and consume until nothing is left except ourselves and one another – which we will then consume as well.

Lest this post sound too dark, there are some positive readings here as well. The fact that we are consumer and consumed; appetite and that which struggles against appetite – this fact also gives us the ability to change direction and to behave mindfully, with intention. We do not have to be mindless, although we often act as if we are.

In the end of the story, Leiningen is left standing in the devastated ruins of his plantation. But the world has not ended, and nothing is beyond hope. With patience and hard work, it may be that Leiningen can rebuild from scratch – and perhaps this time, things can be different. Perhaps Leiningen can be different and so, perhaps - can we.