The Will to Chance: Necessity and Arbitrariness in the Czech Avant-Garde

Prologue

The Seahorse Hail! Hail to the handsome hippocampus, Equine seafarer, horse of the water, Which no jockey has ridden, Which no coach has harnessed. Hip, hip, hooray! For the hippocampus. Hail! Hail to the handsome hippocampus, In a pocket, on his belly, He carries and hatches his eggs. There, his little ones are quite at home. Hip, hip, hooray! For the hippocampus. Prologue L'Hippocampe Cloire! Cloire au bel hippocampe, Cheval marin, cheval de trempe, Qu 'aucun jockey n'a chevauche, Qu'aucun cocher n'a harlUlche. Hip! Hip! Hip! Pour l'hippocampe. Cloire! Cloire au bel hippocampe. Dans une poche, sur son ventre, II porte et it couve ses aufs. La, ses petits sont bien chez eux. Hip! Hip! Hip! Pour l'hippocampe. -Robert Desnos1 Shortly after the publication of his Chantefables pour les enfants sages, in which "The Seahorse" appears, the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos was arrested, deported to Buchenwald, and then marched, with many anonymous others, to the "model camp" Terezm. or Theresienstadt, in the Nazi "protectorate" of Bohemia. A few days after witnessing the liberation of the camp, Desnos died of typhus. Chantefables was to be the final publication of his lifetime. The seahorse is a baffling creature. Among the hippocampi, it is the male that undergoes pregnancy. And it is definitively the male of the species that is pregnant and undergoes "labor," as it is he who produces sperm and nary an egg. It is not a matter of sex-switching among hippocampi . After a mating ritual wherein the female uses an ovipositor, or egg duct, to insert ripe eggs into the male's brood pouch-where the eggs are fertilized - the eggs embed into the male's pouch wall and the pouch seals itself shut. The pregnancy can last anywhere from ten days to six weeks, depending on hippocampus species and ambient water temperature . After gestation, the male goes into labor, flailing for hours to discharge the miniature seahorses. There seem to be no evolutionary links to this behavior. Unusual among fishes, the male seahorse's small pouch and relatively lengthy gesatation period certainly curtail the number of offspring that can be pro1 Robert Desnos, "L'hippocampe," in Orantefables et chantefleur: A chanter sur n'importe quel air (Paris: Grund, 1955), 58. Among each of his lovers, it has been told, Desnos assigned analogue sea creatures. He left the hippocampus for himself. 2 THE WILL TO G lANCE duced at one time. Seahorses, then, would appear to pay a dear price in "lost reproductive opportunities" by enjoining males as carriers of the young. Such behavior could be explained away by the logic of evolutionary "motivation" with an inversion of normative sex roles, wherein it is then the female who competes for male attention. Yet this turns out not to be the case. On the contrary, males compete with one another to become impregnated by females more than females do with one another for the privilege of delivering their ova to a male. The explanation for this anomalous animality seems to lie in something more curiously detached from evolutionary logic than even the male pregnancy: the seahorse abides by a strict fidelity to one sexual partner.2 In Ernst Mayrs masterful What Evolution Is, the author wonders at such difference, returning- as scientists of evolution often do- to the controversy over necessity and chance in the theory of natural selection. There are incidents, many and varied, where differences in order seem utterly unnecessary for a sense of sound adaptedness. When one studies the differences in the basic body plans of the 35 or so existing phyla of animals (out of the 60 or so available at the beginning of the Cambrian era, approximately 543-490 million years ago), "one does not get the impression that they are necessities. Many or even most of their unique characteristics may have had their origin in a developmental accident that was tolerated by selection, while the seeming failure of those that became extinct may have been the result of a chance event (like the Alvarez asteroid extinction event).,,3 Here, the notion of "chance event" might be conceived as the outcome of the question: "Why, by what inner workings, is there evolutionary change?" Teleological concerns dominate the story that unfurls from such a question, although it would appear that "chance event" is a stopgap formulation for the enquiry concerning purpose. Wonderment at why, at the purpose of design, positions meaning at the center of perceptions of accident . That...