Grasshopper

The Grasshopper is the improvising, pleasure-seeking figure in Shaun’s embedded fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, introduced as an emblem of motion and appetite and then driven by want to seek help from his industrious opposite. His encounter with the Ondt reverses their positions: the former idler arrives hungry and exposed, while the Ondt sits secure amid abundance and the female insects the Grasshopper had courted. Yet the fable does not end in simple defeat. The Grasshopper forgives the Ondt, asks him to care for their shared companions, and answers the experience with a long, densely patterned meditation on time, difference, and the possibility of keeping pace with one another.

Identity and Introduction

Shaun introduces the fable as a story about the Ondt and the Gracehoper, a comic pairing whose names make their contrast audible even before their conduct unfolds. The Grasshopper is defined by movement: he is “always jigging ajog,” buoyed by joy and eager to turn nearly every encounter into play. He carries a pair of stilts, a prop that magnifies his restless mobility, while the fable’s proliferating insect language makes him both a particular creature and a figure for appetite that cannot settle.

His liveliness is social as well as physical. He makes overtures to Floh, Luse, Bienie, and Vespatilla, inviting them into games and eroticized courtship. The account moves rapidly among play, desire, flirtation, and a joking vocabulary of marriage and burial; its exuberant verbal motion makes his social world seem as crowded and changeable as his own attention. The Grasshopper is not merely a solitary idler: he seeks company, and his pleasures depend on other creatures joining his games and answering his advances.

The fable also surrounds him with an older generation and seasonal, ceremonial imagery. Its extravagant descriptions of dances, insects, and festivities place his play within a world where bodily appetites recur alongside time’s passage. The contrast that will later govern the tale is therefore established not just as a difference in work habits, but as a conflict between ways of inhabiting time: immediate enjoyment and deliberate provision.

Pleasure, Exhaustion, and Need

The Grasshopper’s way of life becomes precarious when the pleasures and expedients that sustain him run out. After moving through a “jungle of love and debts” and a “jumble of life in doubts,” he is described as sick, poor, and unable to find food or shelter. The fable’s comic wordplay does not soften the material fact: he is hungry, and he has no money with which to buy what he needs.

His depletion is connected to a startling history of consumption. He has eaten paper, swallowed lustres, devoured flights of staircases, chewed up tables and chairs, and consumed records and ephemera; the account stretches this appetite until he seems to have devoured the very time and place around him. The escalating catalogue turns his improvidence into more than a missed meal. He has consumed the records and materials of the world, but this voracity has not secured a future; it has left him with nothing dependable to eat.

The turning point comes at Christmas, when the branches are bare and the Grasshopper leaves his cottage, Tingsomingenting. He walks in circles, taking a round stroll and then another, while the cold and snow intensify the contrast between his wandering and the shelter he lacks. The repeated circling is both a concrete pattern of movement and a figure for an existence that keeps moving without arriving at security. Surrounded by wintry weather and bodily hunger, the creature whose life had been organized around play confronts the consequences of having made no provision.

The Encounter with the Ondt

Despite his apparent blindness, the Grasshopper retains his knowledge of insects and his instinct to move toward the place where relief might be found. He tosses himself into the road and onto his buzzer, uncertain where luck will carry him, then reaches the Ondt’s house. This arrival is a reversal of the earlier social arrangement: the Grasshopper who once pursued company now comes as a needy outsider, while the Ondt occupies a throne-like seat in a sunny room.

The Ondt’s surroundings make the disparity visible. He smokes cigars and sits before a full plate, comfortably sated, while Floh bites his leg, Luse tugs at the other, Bienie kisses him, and Vespatilla attends him. These are the companions the Grasshopper had courted, now gathered around his rival. The Grasshopper’s exclamation at the sight registers not only envy but a recognition that the world of intimacy and provision has reorganized itself without him.

The Ondt is presented as solemn and calculating, a figure who makes “spaces” in his psyche and prides himself on wisdom and order. Earlier, he refuses to include the Grasshopper in his social world and imagines his own reign flourishing. His abundance therefore carries an edge of exclusion: the host’s comfort is inseparable from the distinction he draws between those admitted to his household and the “lopp” he keeps off his list. The encounter makes the fable’s opposition personal, bringing the general contrast between labor and play into the contested space of food, shelter, and companionship.

Forgiveness and the Fable’s Reversal

The Grasshopper’s response is not a demand for restitution. He forgives the Ondt, weeping, and asks him to teach Floh and Luse dances and show Bienie where sweetness is; he also asks Vespatilla to find rich food. The requests recall the Grasshopper’s earlier world of play and courtship, but now they are made from a position of need. Rather than reclaiming the companions or denying the Ondt’s present authority, he entrusts their care to him.

This gesture complicates the fable’s apparent moral division. The Ondt has safety, property, food, and social command; the Grasshopper has movement, pleasure, and imaginative speech, but his earlier heedlessness has left him vulnerable. At the same time, the Grasshopper’s forgiveness and generosity of address prevent his poverty from making him merely a cautionary example. He can recognize the Ondt’s rebuke as something to learn from and describe rescue as a prize whose price is the spending that produced his present need.

His final address expands beyond the immediate household. The Grasshopper imagines their kinds as twins and links them through an unsettled universe of beginnings, endings, and recurring time. He praises the Ondt’s reach and magnitude, yet closes by asking why the Ondt cannot “beat time.” The question marks the limit of the Ondt’s apparent mastery: material order may command space and provide comfort, but the fable leaves open whether it can answer time’s demands or accommodate a creature whose life proceeds by a different rhythm.

Narrative Form and Significance

The fable is spoken by Shaun, who presents it as one of the “grimm gests” of Jacko and Esaup and calls it a consideration of a case. Its narrated action is embedded inside a larger exchange: Shaun is urged to sing, apologizes, and offers this tale, then the surrounding voices praise his far-reaching folklore and vocabulary. The Grasshopper’s story is therefore both an animal fable and a performance, shaped by a teller whose exuberant language makes the contrast between the two creatures difficult to reduce to a plain lesson.

The prose continually makes meaning through sound and transformation. Names, insect terms, mock-solemn titles, and proliferating lists give the Grasshopper’s play and hunger a verbal texture that is itself restless. The catalogues of what he consumes, the wintry departure from Tingsomingenting, the sight of the Ondt surrounded by companions, and the Grasshopper’s answering poem form a sequence of reversals: mobility becomes aimless circling; appetite becomes deprivation; social pursuit becomes a request that another creature care for the beloved company.

The Grasshopper thus gives the fable its unsettled counterweight to the Ondt. He embodies pleasure and improvisation, but also the real exposure that follows when pleasure is not joined to provision. His final speech neither cancels that consequence nor simply endorses the Ondt’s values. Instead, by forgiving his rival and asking whether the Ondt can keep time, he leaves the opposition alive as a question about how distinct ways of living might coexist, and what prosperity alone cannot settle.