Chirinos, Dalí and Ants

I should really be asleep right now but when I turn out the lights and get into bed, my brain keeps whirring, telling me I can't get to sleep until I get to the bottom of the symbolism of ants. This probably sounds quite strange, but I've recently finished the quite exceptional El niño malo cuenta hasta cien y se retira by Juan Carlos Chirinos (which you will hear a lot about if you follow this blog as I hope to feature it in my future academic research) and one of the many things that struck me about it were the ants.

As a very short introduction (a more in depth one will come soon, possibly in the form of podcast), the story revolves around D.Jota who leaves Caracas for a journey to an exotic North. There he ends up staying with a young shepherdess named Fanny and her grandmother, near El Pueblo, where Svevo is the resident story teller. Ants figure prominently in two of his stories:

• In the first, a woodcutter is about to chop down a tree when an ant appears from inside it and asks him not to, as it is home to the ants who provide food for the humans. They agree that the ants will vacate a tree each time he needs one and that way everyone is happy. It works out well until one day the woodcutter follows the ant to an enormous tree full of food. Overwhelmed by greed, the woodcutter chops down the tree and food rains on the village. The ant chastises the woodcutter for his ignorance, as the tree was the source of the food the ants brought to the villagers and now they have nothing left to bring them. Yet the ant sticks to his word and continues vacating trees to provide wood. One day the woodcutter finds out he is having a baby and goes to tell the ant the good news; the ant replies by giving the child it's name, Derdriu, which is the name of the grandmother.
• In the second story, Svevo explains how Fanny's dog is the grandson of a dog that her grandfather Eugenio rescued from a giant ant in the middle of the forest.

Back in the present, D.Jota observes the ants storming his picnic and compares them to those back in Caracas.

Being a big fan of surrealism, I couldn't read these passages without thinking of Dalí, who made frequent use of ants in his work. I remember reading about a letter Dalí sent to Buñuel detailing the exact type of ants he wanted for Un Chien Andalou and how he imported them from Spain because the right type weren't to be found in France.

Chirinos is certainly aware of the surrealists' activities, as in one particularly touching scene D.Jota plays Exquisite Cadavers with his best friend (and more) Madaín. In this context, it's hard not to assume a link between the two, but what is the deeper symbolism?

I started googling psychoanalysis and ants, hoping Freud would have written a wonderful treatise about it somewhere. He didn't. I did however find various other mentions of ants in dream analysis. Most of them talk about ants as industrious, hard-working and patient creatures, stating that if you dream about ants you're likely to be productive the next day. That doesn't really seem to fit with either Chirinos' novel or Dalí's work. More interesting is the idea that ants symbolise death and decay, which certainly fits with the darker themes of El niño malo... I see them almost as a warning, creating a sense of foreboding, preparing the reader for the dark times ahead. I'd be very interested to know Chirinos' opinion on it though!