The Job of the Wasp

The setting of Colin Winnette's The Job of the Wasp is immediately striking for its eerie detachment.  Our first-person narrator, of no known age and unnamed until the end, arrives at an equally unnamed school/orphanage, located in no identifiable country and at no identifiable time period (although a reference to the Beat poets puts it in the late twentieth century, at least).  We do not know why he has gone or been sent there; indeed, he seems to manifest for the first time when he walks in the orphanage door.  Throughout the novel, he will learn names belatedly or not at all, and he is frequently incapable of recognizing other boys even after he is told that he has spent considerable time with them.  The passage of time in the narrative is equally difficult to measure: months apparently go by, and yet the narrator rarely marks their passing; as he muses near the end, "[i]t was as if I had just arrived at the facility, though I had been therefore for months, living with these boys whose faces I had failed to even register" (152).  The narrator both has and fails to have a memory, just as he experiences time passing yet seems to live in a perpetual present.  This odd temporality is further underlined by the narrator's verbal tics and physique.  We are told early on that he has a "grown man's waist" (9), and despite his indeterminate youth, he speaks in a slightly stilted, pedantic fashion suitable for someone much older (e.g., "justice at the hands of the uninvolved simply wouldn't satisfy the days I'd spent living in phase two of the boy's evolved cruelty, wherein, though he'd technically done nothing, things had taken a sinister turn" [20]).  It is just as difficult, however, to identify how old the other boys in the novel are supposed to be, as they are similarly given to speeches that one might just plausibly expect of, say, a successful undergraduate philosophy major, but sound rather strange coming from characters who otherwise act like singularly unpleasant children.  Not that the narrator is any more pleasant.  During his first night at the orphanage, he entertains himself by drawing things that were "violent and bloody," like "ghosts and soldiers" (7); when a boy stabs him for no apparent reason (apparent, that is, at the time--the reason appears at the novel's end), he fantasizes about violent retribution in the night (13); when some kids sneer at him, he spontaneously thinks "You will die by my hand" (27).  By the end of the novel, he will have killed one boy (accidentally) and seriously injured another (deliberately), registering both events with an almost total lack of affect--much as he responds to the discovery of the corpse of his teacher, "whose name I should really have taken the time to learn" (37).   

As it's impossible to say too much more without giving away some key spoilers, I shall put the rest below the fold.
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If you write a novel in which a group of schoolboys, orphaned or otherwise, are left primarily to their own devices while they wreak havoc, then the reader will probably say "oh, it's Lord of the Flies."  At one level, the reader probably should say that: our rather pretentious narrator, who yearns to control the narrative, has some similarities to Piggy, and there are SamnEric-style inseparable twins.  Moreover, the orphanage is red in tooth and claw: "Civilized boys are barbaric in their play," reflects the narrator, "and, to me, every single one of them seemed murderous" (31).  As I have said, though, the weird indeterminacy about character ages suggests not so much a novel of boyish decline into brutality, as brutality born out of an infinite loop of fear and suffering.  The orphanage is mechanized, as it were, with the boys subjected to tedious, unending manual labor--dishwashing, for example (a kind of parodic assembly line), or weeding a permanently overgrown garden that, on occasion, only produces inedible vegetables.  The stereotypical boarding school approach to team sports--"they build character!"--here generates neither team spirit nor intellectual growth. More ominously, however, there appear to be ghosts, who, when they manifest, murder five people--certainly a different take on the kind of group power dynamics in LOTF.  In fact, one of the novel's key questions turns out to be whether or not the narrator is a ghost--ghosts, in the novel, being material enough to eat, drink, and otherwise be indistinguishable from living people, aside from a lack of blood.  This explains why the narrator gets stabbed behind the ear: the other boy, Fry, is trying to see if he bleeds.  The answer, as it happens, is apparently no, and it is impossible to determine whether or not the narrator's chin bleeds after he hits the floor (he notes that his chin is "wet" [29], but the adjective leaves it unclear if it's from water or blood).  To make matters worse (if they can get worse), the ghosts are variously described as a "boy like any of us," or "an old man or an old woman in a green shawl"--the former describing the narrator and any number of other characters, the latter the Headmaster and, as we discover in the final chapter, his suspiciously witchy wife. (After a while, the reader begins to wonder if anyone in this novel is alive, or if the ascription of ghostliness is just a matter of anomie.) 

About midway through, a boy named Nick, with whom our narrator has formed a temporary (and illusory) alliance, pointedly comments apropos of the ghosts that "I also believe in the need to thoroughly and honestly examine one's beliefs and the true nature of oneself" (87)--and this declaration further highlights one of the  narrative's key absences.  Early on, the narrator receives an invitation to "confess" from the Headmaster (32), but the narrator's mental landscape is weirdly empty.  Confession implies a past, a sense of the weight of sin, yet the narrator's past exists at most as negative fragments.  He endlessly speculates about other characters, their pasts and their desires, but never does the same for himself.  He concludes that the Headmaster must have been conducting an affair with Ms. Klein, becomes interested in Nick after "reflecting briefly on the sadness of his existence" (52), and imagines a brutal trajectory for Fry, the "natural bully" (135).  Our narrator thus perpetually spins stories about other characters' "true natures," explaining their behavior and granting them interiority, while himself moving through the novel as a figure whose interiority is, paradoxically enough, almost all exterior.  Even his memories of the past at the school are warped: at the end he imagines himself into the communal "we" (140) of the other boys, even though we have seen that he remained persistently on the community's margins.  His non-recognition of the other boys, who remain perpetually nameless and faceless to him until they are forced on his attention, mirrors his own lack of identity.  

At one point, after some of the boys set him up to be stung by wasps to avenge his similar attack on Nick, the narrator muses that they were just doing "the job of the wasps.  I had disturbed the equilibrium of the facility, and they had been trying to set things right, just as Anders and his cronies had done by leaving me here to get stung" (105).  The wasps' "job," that is, is to maintain the group's stability by forcibly removing outsiders--or, in the case of the narrator, those who persistently refuse to integrate.  Our narrator tries to stabilize himself by generating endless conspiracy theories about the orphanage's workings, positing new heroes and villains at each step while casting himself in the role of perpetual fall-guy.  Yet part of the novel's strangeness lies here: the narrator's disruptive otherness cannot simply be ascribed to his status as ghost, as we are quite seriously informed that the teacher, Ms. Klein, was a ghost, and see for ourselves (or do we?) that the twins are also ghosts.  Nor can it be that the narrator refuses to know himself, as Nick and the Headmaster's wife warn him, as the non-disruptive Ms. Klein was "clueless to the nature of her predicament" (177) and the twins equally unaware of their undeath until almost the moment of their disappearance.  Nor is it even that the narrator has violent tendencies, as everyone in the orphanage has violent tendencies; in fact, a different boy had been murdered the previous year under suspicion of being the resident ghost (122).  And given the narrator tells his story in the past tense, the Headmaster's wife's solution to his problem may have been no solution at all.  It is a ghost story in which everything and everyone, at the end, are hollow, so that even recognition of the other simply means their end...