{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6546", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 6546, "subject": "Short Story 63: The Hero as Werwolf", "messages": 3, "voices": 2, "first": "2014-05-09T19:16:39+00:00", "last": "2014-05-12T16:49:33+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Marc Aramini", "address": "marcaramini at gmail.com" }, "date": "2014-05-09T19:16:39+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 63: The Hero as Werwolf", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "The Hero as Werwolf\n\n“The Hero as Werwolf” appeared in 1975 in The New Improved Sun and is\nreprinted in *The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other\nStories*.\n\nSUMMARY:\n\nIn approximately 2060 with the divergence of humanity into a telepathic and\npeaceful master upperclass and a bestial and predatory “unraised” human\nclass, Paul hunts the masters for food. Sitting in on a meeting in the park\nin which he blends in with the Masters, Paul fails to understand the\nlecture but dwells instead on watching his prey. He selects a fat man and\nhis date for the night, a girl with pearl eyes dressed in vines “the color\nof love” with “a serpent of gold support[ing] her breasts.” Hoping to use\nhis disguise and bell to attract them, they are prematurely attacked by an\nold man and his daughter, who wields a knife. The female master uses her\ntelekinetically controlled unliving serpent to trip the girl while the\nvines loosen and decay to allow her to run. Paul snaps her necks and argues\nwith the other “true” humans over who will keep their food for the night.\nHe takes the dying female to his house turret; she continues to talk after\nher neck is snapped. He denies that she is dead and toys with her a bit.\nAfter a few telekinetic attempts on him such as animating his blankets and\nraising her body to try to escape, she succumbs to death, but throughout\nthe discussion thoughts of the girl and getting food for her in a predatory\ndomestic partnership consume Paul.\n\nHe finds the family of two nearby, living in a bus. After some hostile\nexchanges, the father begins trying to talk of his daughter's many fine\nqualities, though she cannot speak and is feral. He speaks of his family's\nmisfortunes and hereditary problems which prevented them from being changed\nand accepted as masters, and reveals how sickness has killed most livestock\nanimals and the farmland been destroyed by the masters (Paul had never\nconceived that people could even live off the land). He tells why he hasn't\nfound a man for Janie yet, but seems keen on the idea that Paul take her.\nHe does, but the father tells him he will take her back if Paul is not\npleased.\n\nLater, Janie and Paul disguise themselves as masters and hunt down a boy,\nsplitting up to catch him in the air shafts. After Paul breaks the boys\nneck, they are detected and detained by the building. A lecture on optimal\ndevelopment begins, and he manages to pry open the door. Janie escapes and\nPaul almost does, but the dying boys mental powers make the rod slip,\ncatching his foot in the door. He tells the boy he is dead, at which point\nthe rod falls tot he ground, and he exhorts Janie to take action; she bites\noff his foot, her tears washing away his blood.\n\nSETTING:\n\nWith the animals raised to semi-consciousness and the branching of the\nhuman species into several evolutionary tracks as well as the disappearance\nof hard currency and credit, this seems to me the same world found in\n“Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee”, or one very similar. This time, men\nreturn to an animalistic state when their resources are destroyed, or are\nraised to psionic awareness, with metalinguistic discourse and\npsychokinetic powers.\n\nWhy the loss of valid farmland? This is revealed in the callous treatment\nthe “humans” receive at the hands of the master as Emmitt Pendleton\ndescribes. His family, suffering from genetic defects like diabetes and\nmental problems which have manifested in his daughter Jane, have been\ndenied the “change.” After the widespread genetic modification of humanity,\nit is clear that old style food is no longer necessary. Farm lands are\ndestroyed by machines (“They had forgot about us, you see”), medicine\nproduction such as insulin stops, and livestock perishes after a “sickness”\nstrikes. Certainly terraforming of the moon continues apace, via details\nrevealed at the end: “The boys and girls you see are attending a model\nschool in Armstrong. Notice that no tint is used to mask the black of space\nabove their air tent”.\n\nIn the opening scene, Paul does notice that “the moon was up” in the sky —\nso we have to ask ourselves if the story is set on Earth or if Paul does\nnot understand that he might currently be on the changed moon. In either\ncase, there are rockets and lunar colonies of the masters by this point.\nThere are “canyons between the buildings” — this doesn’t seem like a normal\nalley description. There is a noon and a sun that enters Paul’s house\nturret from eight windows. However, Paul describes how he escaped the\nmaster's ghost house by overturning the machine testing him for genetic\naberrations and jumping out the sixth floor of a building, saved by landing\nin a tree. I imagine chances of surviving a jump from a sixth floor window\nare higher on the moon than on earth. The flora in the park include night\nblooming flowers and trees which glow with a self-generated blue light.\n\nLITERARY REFERENCES:\n\nThe story begins with the epigraph from Kipling’s “Hunting Song of the\nSeeonee Pack” from The Jungle Book . While Mowgli must leave his pack at\nthat point in the book, Paul has just found a pack to hunt with in Wolfe’s\nstory.\n\nAs the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\nAnd a doe leaped up, and a doe leaped up" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "From the pond in the wood where the wild deer sup." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "This I, scouting alone, beheld,\n\nOnce, twice, and again!\n\n\n As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\nAnd a wolf stole back, and a wolf stole back\n\nTo carry the word to the waiting Pack,\n\nAnd we sought and we found and we bayed on his track\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\n\n As the dawn was breaking the Wolf-Pack yelled\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\n*Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!*\n\n*Eyes that can see in the dark -- the dark!*\n\n*Tongue -- give tongue to it! Hark! O Hark!*\n\n*Once, twice and again!*\n\nOf course this poem occurs after the first section of the Jungle Book, in\nwhich Mowgli, raised by animals and living his life as one of them, is\nconfronted with the fact that he is a man and his pack consists of dogs. He\nleaves the pack after Shere Khan’s disapproval is given voice: “I am weary\nof this man-wolf folly.” This man-wolf talk is evoked in the spelling\nwerwolf, of which Wolfe says: “I reverted to the original spelling to point\nup the meaning of the word: ?manwolf.” We would be more apt to say\n“wolfman,” though the ideas conveyed are distinctly different. — the\nmanwolf envisioned by the Anglos and Saxons was a man to be feared as\nwolves were feared, and for the same reasons. Thus the predatory figure of\nPaul as the viewpoint character. The story is to some degree how he comes\nto have his own family pack and create a meaningful unit in an extremely\npredatory and unkind existence.\n\nTHE UPPER AND UNDER CLASS:\n\nAccording to Emmitt Pendleton’s words, the story is set just before 2060.\n\nIn discussing the text, it might be useful to determine if the upper class\nwith their “genetic heritage revised for intellection and peace” are\nactually distinct in origin from the “humans” — Paul and his newfound\nfamily, the predators. The policeman who walks around has been raised from\nsomething like a dog: “the policeman bobbed his hairy head, grinning,\nbasking in the recognition, the approval, of those who had raised him from\nanimality. .. the policeman was too stupid, too silly, to be deceived by\nappearances as his masters were.” With these beasts given psuedosentience\nto do menial tasks, the masters can focus on books and abstract ideals\n(Pendleton recounts how his fathers pleas for food result in him being hit\nwith a book).\n\nOf course the narrative slant towards Paul as “human” creates relativistic\nstatements like “His own place was that in which his mother had borne him,\na place high in a house built when humans were the masters.” It is clear\nthe masters consider themselves humans as well, and Paul and his genome\njust a bad dream to be repressed and forgotten. Paul claims they are afraid\nto raze the old buildings for fear of bringing back to conscious memory and\nlife the old, degenerate times.\n\nThe statements of the woman with her broken neck are sometimes a bit\ncryptic: “I didn’t think you really existed . — I’m dead, you know. — Dead.\nNever, never, never. Another year, and everything would have been all\nright. — I thought you were all gone — all gone long ago, like a bad dream.”\n\nHe becomes angered when she says “Strange evolution. Man become food for\nmen,” - the concept and vocabulary of evolution is foreign to him. What do\nthe masters eat? Is the raspberry powder that freezes, taken from its moon\nshaped box, solely a drug which can be inhaled with no nutritive\nproperties? Clearly the masters consider themselves human and the old style\ngenome something better forgotten.\n\nGENETICS AND THE STORY:\n\nThe primary question in the text becomes one of the actual genetic process\nthat allowed the “masters” these psionic powers, to live after their necks\nare broken, to survive without crops or animals to eat. Interestingly\nenough, at the end of the story, a four dimensional picture of Hugo de\nVries appears, showing his development until death, and then back to\nrebirth as a fissioning cell. De Vries work with the Evening Primrose was a\nbit different than Darwinian gradual evolution in that it posited rapid\nchange through mutation. (He also worked with plant hybridization and\npolyploidy, which I believe are vital to understanding Wolfe’s Short Sun\nuniverse in any meaningful way). De Vries work deals in some degree with\nSaltation — very large changes from one generation to the next, which we\nsee at work here in the story, where the under and upper class both believe\nthemselves to be human but are so different as to be practically different\nspecies.\n\nThe trees have also been modified now to exude their own light: “night\nblooming flowers scented the park air, and the trees lining the paths\nglowed with self-generated blue light — in the city, beyond the last hedge,\nthe great buildings new and old were mountains lit from within.”\n\nJoan Gordon's study on Wolfe seems to conclude that humans have mixed with\nalien DNA in the story, though from textual evidence I don't feel there is\nenough support for this. If we could feasibly tie this to a continuity that\nincluded “Blue Mouse”, “Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee”, and\n“Silhouette” with its bizarre planet of dark foliage, then we might be able\nto make this claim, but in the story itself there is little indication of\nactual alien alteration: humans took a technological leap at roughly the\nsame time that the planet's resources were depleted and ruined (there is\nsome evidence that technology changed very rapidly, however).\n\nJUXTAPOSITION AS NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE:\n\n This story shows Wolfe's tendency to join non-sequitur events in one scene\n— when Paul taunts the dying female master, his thoughts gravitate to his\nexcitement over meeting Janie and her father, though the confrontation is\nmarked with hostility. He imagines a domestic life with her as he boasts\nand teases the dying female master. When Janie and Paul are trapped in the\nelevator shaft after killing the boy, “optimal development” is reviewed:\naffection for one's mother, replaced by a peer-group, culminating in\nfinding a life purpose. The example used is that of physician, and during\nthis time Paul implores Janie to bite through his foot, as a wolf would\nescape, since he cannot do it himself, serving as a physician that cuts\naway a diseased portion with her primitive teeth.\n\nWolfe's tendency to place two unrelated things together in narrative\ncontinuously sometimes creates a tenuous symbolic relationship.\n\nWOLFE’S COMMENTS:\n\n?I was trying to get the reader to think about the real nature of love\nbetween man and woman. In the first place, the girl in \"The Hero as\nWerewolf\" is retarded and cannot speak. And, secondly, in the end she has\nto damage very badly the man she loves in order to set him free. I think I\nwas trying to say, first, that you must not think that the person you love\nhas to be a whole lot like you in order for that love to be real and\nworking. And second, that we all, if we are going to be honest, have to\nhurt people in order to do them good. We have to tear away parts of them in\norder to do them good.\n\nNAMES:\n\nPendleton means overhanging settlement, for whatever that is worth. I could\nfind no real meaning for the unusual last name Gorous except its similarity\nto the French term for werewolf, “loup-garou” — which is a redundancy to\nsome degree, as garou seems related to the german garoul - werewolf.\n\nIf Wolfe was actually considering “love” as his primary theme here, then\nPaul might reference the St. Paul’s rather infamous diatribe on\nLove/charity — it might hope all things and endure all things, but he\nforgot “Love bites off legs when necessary”.\n\nCOMMENTARY:\n\nAuthorial sympathy is sometimes a dangerous thing, and as an artist I think\nthis is one of those stories where the viewpoint character creates a false\nsense of authorial endorsement. Of course the title, “The Hero as Werwolf”\ndoes imply that Paul is “heroic”, but it cannot be an unqualified\nassessment. The problem with the masters is that they do not love\nimperfections and seek to stamp them out completely. The problem with the\n“humans” is of course that they have become bestial and ignorant in their\nquest to survive. As far as Wolfe is concerned, the underclass predator is\na more compelling viewpoint: to make one sympathetic for a cannibalistic,\nignorant, and animalistic group is only possible in light of the oppression\nthey have suffered. Physically worthless versus mentally atrophied — there\ncannot be a true endorsement except for the base ability to survive and\npossibly love: “Evan a bad man can love his child. You remember that,\nbecause it’s true.” Have the masters forgotten love? Would they be a\nworthwhile step in evolution, concerned as they are with the desuetude and\ndestruction of the planet's resources, if they cared for those who were\ndeemed unfit instead of simply “forgetting” about them?\n\nPerhaps the most heroic thing about Paul is that he hasn’t given up on his\ndreams and fantasizes about returning with food for his woman.\n\nThe love in the story is feral, and the kindness the father advises cruel:\nif you let her play with her food before it dies, the girl will come to\nlike you. To help him escape, she eats his foot off. The question is if\nthis act symbolically mirrors what the masters have done to escape their\nbase mortality: cut off the id, the primitive, and what they perceive to be\nflaws — is there any difference in these two acts? The blood of his leg is\nwashed away by her tears — thus the real feeling of affection she has for\nhim. Here, cannibalism is a form of escape from an inescapable situation —\nthere simply is no other way.\n\nUNANSWERED QUESTIONS:\n\nHave the masters hybridized with foreign or alien DNA to achieve the\npsionic mastery, or is this purely human? Will everything be fine “in a\nyear” because the masters are leaving in their rockets to the moon and\nbeyond? Are we actually on the moon here?\n\nDo these new humans foreshadow the Green Man in any meaningful way, being\nable to survive without farmland and animals?\n\nI am fairly certain on the last page the optional development pattern\nmentioned by the tutoring voice is a typo, because the voice immediately\nsays “it may be useful for us to review what is meant by 'optimal\ndevelopment'”. Typos happen even in Wolfe. Optimal should have been used in\nboth cases.\n\nRELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORKS:\n\nThe cannibalism is obvious, seen in “Tracking Song”, “A Traveler in Desert\nLands”, *New Sun* — but in particular the raising of animals to something\nmore, carried out to the next level, elevating humans to ones who clearly\ndo not have to subsist on regular food, immune to viral infections like\nwarts, living for a time as long as they believe that they are alive, with\nmoney just a dim memory, takes the pseudo socialist explorations of his 70s\nfiction just a bit further into the future. “Tracking Song” could be an\nexample of further animal species raised to complete sentience, or even a\nvastly divergent evolution on a colonized satellite or planet — we will be\nconfronting this soon, and that story also asks what is truly human. The\npredatory survival of humanity will be echoed years and years later in the\nshort story “King Rat”, but thematically “Tracking Song” and “The Hero as\nWerwolf” seem to be closely related: exploring that forgotten animal part\nof humanity from the top and bottom, respectively, and asking what humanity\nshould ultimately entail." } ] }, { "message_id": "<536E629E.60401@colby.edu>", "from": { "name": "Fernando Gouvea", "address": "fqgouvea at colby.edu" }, "date": "2014-05-10T17:32:14+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 63: The Hero as Werwolf", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "header", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Tears washing feet is probably an echo of Luke 7:38, though I'm \nhard-pressed to see how it fits the story.\n\nI suspect that Wolfe is more sympathetic to Paul than most of us. The \n\"masters\" strike me as deeply dehumanized, having set aside many of the \nfeatures of human embodiment. Better to be feral?\n\nFernando" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "On 5/9/2014 3:16 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:\n\nThe Hero as Werwolf\n\n\"The Hero as Werwolf\" appeared in 1975 in The New Improved Sun and is \nreprinted in /The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other \nStories/.\n\nSUMMARY:\n\nIn approximately 2060 with the divergence of humanity into a \ntelepathic and peaceful master upperclass and a bestial and predatory \n\"unraised\" human class, Paul hunts the masters for food. Sitting in on \na meeting in the park in which he blends in with the Masters, Paul \nfails to understand the lecture but dwells instead on watching his \nprey. He selects a fat man and his date for the night, a girl with \npearl eyes dressed in vines \"the color of love\" with \"a serpent of \ngold support[ing] her breasts.\" Hoping to use his disguise and bell to \nattract them, they are prematurely attacked by an old man and his \ndaughter, who wields a knife. The female master uses her \ntelekinetically controlled unliving serpent to trip the girl while the \nvines loosen and decay to allow her to run. Paul snaps her necks and \nargues with the other \"true\" humans over who will keep their food for \nthe night. He takes the dying female to his house turret; she \ncontinues to talk after her neck is snapped. He denies that she is \ndead and toys with her a bit. After a few telekinetic attempts on him \nsuch as animating his blankets and raising her body to try to escape, \nshe succumbs to death, but throughout the discussion thoughts of the \ngirl and getting food for her in a predatory domestic partnership \nconsume Paul.\n\nHe finds the family of two nearby, living in a bus. After some hostile \nexchanges, the father begins trying to talk of his daughter's many \nfine qualities, though she cannot speak and is feral. He speaks of his \nfamily's misfortunes and hereditary problems which prevented them from \nbeing changed and accepted as masters, and reveals how sickness has \nkilled most livestock animals and the farmland been destroyed by the \nmasters (Paul had never conceived that people could even live off the \nland). He tells why he hasn't found a man for Janie yet, but seems \nkeen on the idea that Paul take her. He does, but the father tells him \nhe will take her back if Paul is not pleased.\n\nLater, Janie and Paul disguise themselves as masters and hunt down a \nboy, splitting up to catch him in the air shafts. After Paul breaks \nthe boys neck, they are detected and detained by the building. A \nlecture on optimal development begins, and he manages to pry open the \ndoor. Janie escapes and Paul almost does, but the dying boys mental \npowers make the rod slip, catching his foot in the door. He tells the \nboy he is dead, at which point the rod falls tot he ground, and he \nexhorts Janie to take action; she bites off his foot, her tears \nwashing away his blood.\n\nSETTING:\n\nWith the animals raised to semi-consciousness and the branching of the \nhuman species into several evolutionary tracks as well as the \ndisappearance of hard currency and credit, this seems to me the same \nworld found in \"Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee\", or one very \nsimilar. This time, men return to an animalistic state when their \nresources are destroyed, or are raised to psionic awareness, with \nmetalinguistic discourse and psychokinetic powers.\n\nWhy the loss of valid farmland? This is revealed in the callous \ntreatment the \"humans\" receive at the hands of the master as Emmitt \nPendleton describes. His family, suffering from genetic defects like \ndiabetes and mental problems which have manifested in his daughter \nJane, have been denied the \"change.\" After the widespread genetic \nmodification of humanity, it is clear that old style food is no longer \nnecessary. Farm lands are destroyed by machines (\"They had forgot \nabout us, you see\"), medicine production such as insulin stops, and \nlivestock perishes after a \"sickness\" strikes. Certainly terraforming \nof the moon continues apace, via details revealed at the end: \"The \nboys and girls you see are attending a model school in Armstrong. \nNotice that no tint is used to mask the black of space above their air \ntent\".\n\nIn the opening scene, Paul does notice that \"the moon was up\" in the \nsky -- so we have to ask ourselves if the story is set on Earth or if \nPaul does not understand that he might currently be on the changed \nmoon. In either case, there are rockets and lunar colonies of the \nmasters by this point. There are \"canyons between the buildings\" -- \nthis doesn't seem like a normal alley description. There is a noon and \na sun that enters Paul's house turret from eight windows. However, \nPaul describes how he escaped the master's ghost house by overturning \nthe machine testing him for genetic aberrations and jumping out the \nsixth floor of a building, saved by landing in a tree. I imagine \nchances of surviving a jump from a sixth floor window are higher on \nthe moon than on earth. The flora in the park include night blooming \nflowers and trees which glow with a self-generated blue light.\n\nLITERARY REFERENCES:\n\nThe story begins with the epigraph from Kipling's \"Hunting Song of the \nSeeonee Pack\" from The Jungle Book . While Mowgli must leave his pack \nat that point in the book, Paul has just found a pack to hunt with in \nWolfe's story.\n\nAs the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\nAnd a doe leaped up, and a doe leaped up\n\nFrom the pond in the wood where the wild deer sup.\n\nThis I, scouting alone, beheld,\n\nOnce, twice, and again!\n\n\nAs the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\nAnd a wolf stole back, and a wolf stole back\n\nTo carry the word to the waiting Pack,\n\nAnd we sought and we found and we bayed on his track\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\n\nAs the dawn was breaking the Wolf-Pack yelled\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\n*Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!*\n\n*Eyes that can see in the dark -- the dark!*\n\n*Tongue -- give tongue to it! Hark! O Hark!*\n\n*Once, twice and again!*\n\nOf course this poem occurs after the first section of the Jungle Book, \nin which Mowgli, raised by animals and living his life as one of them, \nis confronted with the fact that he is a man and his pack consists of \ndogs. He leaves the pack after Shere Khan's disapproval is given \nvoice: \"I am weary of this man-wolf folly.\" This man-wolf talk is \nevoked in the spelling werwolf, of which Wolfe says: \"I reverted to \nthe original spelling to point up the meaning of the word: 'manwolf.' \nWe would be more apt to say 'wolfman,' though the ideas conveyed are \ndistinctly different. ... the manwolf envisioned by the Anglos and \nSaxons was a man to be feared as wolves were feared, and for the same \nreasons.\" Thus the predatory figure of Paul as the viewpoint \ncharacter. The story is to some degree how he comes to have his own \nfamily pack and create a meaningful unit in an extremely predatory and \nunkind existence.\n\nTHE UPPER AND UNDER CLASS:\n\nAccording to Emmitt Pendleton's words, the story is set just before 2060.\n\nIn discussing the text, it might be useful to determine if the upper \nclass with their \"genetic heritage revised for intellection and peace\" \nare actually distinct in origin from the \"humans\" -- Paul and his \nnewfound family, the predators. The policeman who walks around has \nbeen raised from something like a dog: \"the policeman bobbed his hairy \nhead, grinning, basking in the recognition, the approval, of those who \nhad raised him from animality. .. the policeman was too stupid, too \nsilly, to be deceived by appearances as his masters were.\" With these \nbeasts given psuedosentience to do menial tasks, the masters can focus \non books and abstract ideals (Pendleton recounts how his fathers pleas \nfor food result in him being hit with a book).\n\nOf course the narrative slant towards Paul as \"human\" creates \nrelativistic statements like \"His own place was that in which his \nmother had borne him, a place high in a house built when humans were \nthe masters.\" It is clear the masters consider themselves humans as \nwell, and Paul and his genome just a bad dream to be repressed and \nforgotten. Paul claims they are afraid to raze the old buildings for \nfear of bringing back to conscious memory and life the old, degenerate \ntimes.\n\nThe statements of the woman with her broken neck are sometimes a bit \ncryptic: \"I didn't think you really existed . ... I'm dead, you know. \n... Dead. Never, never, never. Another year, and everything would have \nbeen all right. ... I thought you were all gone ... all gone long ago, \nlike a bad dream.\"\n\nHe becomes angered when she says \"Strange evolution. Man become food \nfor men,\" - the concept and vocabulary of evolution is foreign to him. \nWhat do the masters eat? Is the raspberry powder that freezes, taken \nfrom its moon shaped box, solely a drug which can be inhaled with no \nnutritive properties? Clearly the masters consider themselves human \nand the old style genome something better forgotten.\n\nGENETICS AND THE STORY:\n\nThe primary question in the text becomes one of the actual genetic \nprocess that allowed the \"masters\" these psionic powers, to live after \ntheir necks are broken, to survive without crops or animals to eat. \nInterestingly enough, at the end of the story, a four dimensional \npicture of Hugo de Vries appears, showing his development until death, \nand then back to rebirth as a fissioning cell. De Vries work with the \nEvening Primrose was a bit different than Darwinian gradual evolution \nin that it posited rapid change through mutation. (He also worked with \nplant hybridization and polyploidy, which I believe are vital to \nunderstanding Wolfe's Short Sun universe in any meaningful way). De \nVries work deals in some degree with Saltation -- very large changes \nfrom one generation to the next, which we see at work here in the \nstory, where the under and upper class both believe themselves to be \nhuman but are so different as to be practically different species.\n\nThe trees have also been modified now to exude their own light: \"night \nblooming flowers scented the park air, and the trees lining the paths \nglowed with self-generated blue light ... in the city, beyond the last \nhedge, the great buildings new and old were mountains lit from within.\"\n\nJoan Gordon's study on Wolfe seems to conclude that humans have mixed \nwith alien DNA in the story, though from textual evidence I don't feel \nthere is enough support for this. If we could feasibly tie this to a \ncontinuity that included \"Blue Mouse\", \"Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and \nKittee\", and \"Silhouette\" with its bizarre planet of dark foliage, \nthen we might be able to make this claim, but in the story itself \nthere is little indication of actual alien alteration: humans took a \ntechnological leap at roughly the same time that the planet's \nresources were depleted and ruined (there is some evidence that \ntechnology changed very rapidly, however).\n\nJUXTAPOSITION AS NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE:\n\nThis story shows Wolfe's tendency to join non-sequitur events in one \nscene -- when Paul taunts the dying female master, his thoughts \ngravitate to his excitement over meeting Janie and her father, though \nthe confrontation is marked with hostility. He imagines a domestic \nlife with her as he boasts and teases the dying female master. When \nJanie and Paul are trapped in the elevator shaft after killing the \nboy, \"optimal development\" is reviewed: affection for one's mother, \nreplaced by a peer-group, culminating in finding a life purpose. The \nexample used is that of physician, and during this time Paul implores \nJanie to bite through his foot, as a wolf would escape, since he \ncannot do it himself, serving as a physician that cuts away a diseased \nportion with her primitive teeth.\n\nWolfe's tendency to place two unrelated things together in narrative \ncontinuously sometimes creates a tenuous symbolic relationship.\n\nWOLFE'S COMMENTS:\n\n\"I was trying to get the reader to think about the real nature of love \nbetween man and woman. In the first place, the girl in \"The Hero as \nWerewolf\" is retarded and cannot speak. And, secondly, in the end she \nhas to damage very badly the man she loves in order to set him free. I \nthink I was trying to say, first, that you must not think that the \nperson you love has to be a whole lot like you in order for that love \nto be real and working. And second, that we all, if we are going to be \nhonest, have to hurt people in order to do them good. We have to tear \naway parts of them in order to do them good.\"\n\nNAMES:\n\nPendleton means overhanging settlement, for whatever that is worth. I \ncould find no real meaning for the unusual last name Gorous except its \nsimilarity to the French term for werewolf, \"loup-garou\" -- which is a \nredundancy to some degree, as garou seems related to the german garoul \n- werewolf.\n\nIf Wolfe was actually considering \"love\" as his primary theme here, \nthen Paul might reference the St. Paul's rather infamous diatribe on \nLove/charity ... it might hope all things and endure all things, but \nhe forgot \"Love bites off legs when necessary\".\n\nCOMMENTARY:\n\nAuthorial sympathy is sometimes a dangerous thing, and as an artist I \nthink this is one of those stories where the viewpoint character \ncreates a false sense of authorial endorsement. Of course the title, \n\"The Hero as Werwolf\" does imply that Paul is \"heroic\", but it cannot \nbe an unqualified assessment. The problem with the masters is that \nthey do not love imperfections and seek to stamp them out completely. \nThe problem with the \"humans\" is of course that they have become \nbestial and ignorant in their quest to survive. As far as Wolfe is \nconcerned, the underclass predator is a more compelling viewpoint: to \nmake one sympathetic for a cannibalistic, ignorant, and animalistic \ngroup is only possible in light of the oppression they have suffered. \nPhysically worthless versus mentally atrophied -- there cannot be a \ntrue endorsement except for the base ability to survive and possibly \nlove: \"Evan a bad man can love his child. You remember that, because \nit's true.\" Have the masters forgotten love? Would they be a \nworthwhile step in evolution, concerned as they are with the desuetude \nand destruction of the planet's resources, if they cared for those who \nwere deemed unfit instead of simply \"forgetting\" about them?\n\nPerhaps the most heroic thing about Paul is that he hasn't given up on \nhis dreams and fantasizes about returning with food for his woman.\n\nThe love in the story is feral, and the kindness the father advises \ncruel: if you let her play with her food before it dies, the girl will \ncome to like you. To help him escape, she eats his foot off. The \nquestion is if this act symbolically mirrors what the masters have \ndone to escape their base mortality: cut off the id, the primitive, \nand what they perceive to be flaws -- is there any difference in these \ntwo acts? The blood of his leg is washed away by her tears -- thus the \nreal feeling of affection she has for him. Here, cannibalism is a form \nof escape from an inescapable situation -- there simply is no other way.\n\nUNANSWERED QUESTIONS:\n\nHave the masters hybridized with foreign or alien DNA to achieve the \npsionic mastery, or is this purely human? Will everything be fine \"in \na year\" because the masters are leaving in their rockets to the moon \nand beyond? Are we actually on the moon here?\n\nDo these new humans foreshadow the Green Man in any meaningful way, \nbeing able to survive without farmland and animals?\n\nI am fairly certain on the last page the optional development pattern \nmentioned by the tutoring voice is a typo, because the voice \nimmediately says \"it may be useful for us to review what is meant by \n'optimal development'\". Typos happen even in Wolfe. Optimal should \nhave been used in both cases.\n\nRELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORKS:\n\nThe cannibalism is obvious, seen in \"Tracking Song\", \"A Traveler in \nDesert Lands\", /New Sun/ ... but in particular the raising of animals \nto something more, carried out to the next level, elevating humans to \nones who clearly do not have to subsist on regular food, immune to \nviral infections like warts, living for a time as long as they believe \nthat they are alive, with money just a dim memory, takes the pseudo \nsocialist explorations of his 70s fiction just a bit further into the \nfuture. \"Tracking Song\" could be an example of further animal species \nraised to complete sentience, or even a vastly divergent evolution on \na colonized satellite or planet -- we will be confronting this soon, \nand that story also asks what is truly human. The predatory survival \nof humanity will be echoed years and years later in the short story \n\"King Rat\", but thematically \"Tracking Song\" and \"The Hero as Werwolf\" \nseem to be closely related: exploring that forgotten animal part of \nhumanity from the top and bottom, respectively, and asking what \nhumanity should ultimately entail.\n\n\n\n_______________________________________________" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Marc Aramini", "address": "marcaramini at gmail.com" }, "date": "2014-05-12T16:49:33+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 63: The Hero as Werwolf", "in_reply_to": "<536E629E.60401@colby.edu>", "reply_link": "header", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I meant to respond long ago, I apologize. This scene is one in which a\nsinful woman anoints the feet of the Theoanthropos (let's go with High\nChristology here, though we are still in the synoptic gospels) and, even\nthough she has great sins, is forgiven, as verses 47 and 48 imply:\n\n\"I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven as her great love has shown.\nBut whoever has been forgiven little loves little.\n\nThen Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”\n\nIt is not that Paul in the story is sinless, but that this act is one of a\ndebased and depraved individual achieving that great love, and making them\nhuman. Thus, Paul and Janie can love, and the masters are more like the\nPharisees who want to forget and shun those who are seen as \"lesser\" and\n\"sinful.\" Paul, imperfect, can care for Janie with all her feral and\nmental problems, and she, too can love him enough to eat his foot off when\nnecessary." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 10:32 AM, Fernando Gouvea wrote:\n Tears washing feet is probably an echo of Luke 7:38, though I'm\nhard-pressed to see how it fits the story.\n\nI suspect that Wolfe is more sympathetic to Paul than most of us. The\n\"masters\" strike me as deeply dehumanized, having set aside many of the\nfeatures of human embodiment. Better to be feral?\n\nFernando\n\n\nOn 5/9/2014 3:16 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:\n\n The Hero as Werwolf\n\n“The Hero as Werwolf” appeared in 1975 in The New Improved Sun and is\nreprinted in *The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other\nStories*.\n\nSUMMARY:\n\nIn approximately 2060 with the divergence of humanity into a telepathic\nand peaceful master upperclass and a bestial and predatory “unraised” human\nclass, Paul hunts the masters for food. Sitting in on a meeting in the park\nin which he blends in with the Masters, Paul fails to understand the\nlecture but dwells instead on watching his prey. He selects a fat man and\nhis date for the night, a girl with pearl eyes dressed in vines “the color\nof love” with “a serpent of gold support[ing] her breasts.” Hoping to use\nhis disguise and bell to attract them, they are prematurely attacked by an\nold man and his daughter, who wields a knife. The female master uses her\ntelekinetically controlled unliving serpent to trip the girl while the\nvines loosen and decay to allow her to run. Paul snaps her necks and argues\nwith the other “true” humans over who will keep their food for the night.\nHe takes the dying female to his house turret; she continues to talk after\nher neck is snapped. He denies that she is dead and toys with her a bit.\nAfter a few telekinetic attempts on him such as animating his blankets and\nraising her body to try to escape, she succumbs to death, but throughout\nthe discussion thoughts of the girl and getting food for her in a predatory\ndomestic partnership consume Paul.\n\nHe finds the family of two nearby, living in a bus. After some hostile\nexchanges, the father begins trying to talk of his daughter's many fine\nqualities, though she cannot speak and is feral. He speaks of his family's\nmisfortunes and hereditary problems which prevented them from being changed\nand accepted as masters, and reveals how sickness has killed most livestock\nanimals and the farmland been destroyed by the masters (Paul had never\nconceived that people could even live off the land). He tells why he hasn't\nfound a man for Janie yet, but seems keen on the idea that Paul take her.\nHe does, but the father tells him he will take her back if Paul is not\npleased.\n\nLater, Janie and Paul disguise themselves as masters and hunt down a boy,\nsplitting up to catch him in the air shafts. After Paul breaks the boys\nneck, they are detected and detained by the building. A lecture on optimal\ndevelopment begins, and he manages to pry open the door. Janie escapes and\nPaul almost does, but the dying boys mental powers make the rod slip,\ncatching his foot in the door. He tells the boy he is dead, at which point\nthe rod falls tot he ground, and he exhorts Janie to take action; she bites\noff his foot, her tears washing away his blood.\n\nSETTING:\n\nWith the animals raised to semi-consciousness and the branching of the\nhuman species into several evolutionary tracks as well as the disappearance\nof hard currency and credit, this seems to me the same world found in\n“Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee”, or one very similar. This time, men\nreturn to an animalistic state when their resources are destroyed, or are\nraised to psionic awareness, with metalinguistic discourse and\npsychokinetic powers.\n\nWhy the loss of valid farmland? This is revealed in the callous treatment\nthe “humans” receive at the hands of the master as Emmitt Pendleton\ndescribes. His family, suffering from genetic defects like diabetes and\nmental problems which have manifested in his daughter Jane, have been\ndenied the “change.” After the widespread genetic modification of humanity,\nit is clear that old style food is no longer necessary. Farm lands are\ndestroyed by machines (“They had forgot about us, you see”), medicine\nproduction such as insulin stops, and livestock perishes after a “sickness”\nstrikes. Certainly terraforming of the moon continues apace, via details\nrevealed at the end: “The boys and girls you see are attending a model\nschool in Armstrong. Notice that no tint is used to mask the black of space\nabove their air tent”.\n\nIn the opening scene, Paul does notice that “the moon was up” in the sky ?\nso we have to ask ourselves if the story is set on Earth or if Paul does\nnot understand that he might currently be on the changed moon. In either\ncase, there are rockets and lunar colonies of the masters by this point.\nThere are “canyons between the buildings” — this doesn’t seem like a normal\nalley description. There is a noon and a sun that enters Paul’s house\nturret from eight windows. However, Paul describes how he escaped the\nmaster's ghost house by overturning the machine testing him for genetic\naberrations and jumping out the sixth floor of a building, saved by landing\nin a tree. I imagine chances of surviving a jump from a sixth floor window\nare higher on the moon than on earth. The flora in the park include night\nblooming flowers and trees which glow with a self-generated blue light.\n\nLITERARY REFERENCES:\n\nThe story begins with the epigraph from Kipling’s “Hunting Song of the\nSeeonee Pack” from The Jungle Book . While Mowgli must leave his pack at\nthat point in the book, Paul has just found a pack to hunt with in Wolfe’s\nstory.\n\nAs the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\nAnd a doe leaped up, and a doe leaped up\n\nFrom the pond in the wood where the wild deer sup.\n\nThis I, scouting alone, beheld,\n\nOnce, twice, and again!\n\n\n As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\nAnd a wolf stole back, and a wolf stole back\n\nTo carry the word to the waiting Pack,\n\nAnd we sought and we found and we bayed on his track\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\n\n As the dawn was breaking the Wolf-Pack yelled\n\nOnce, twice and again!\n\n*Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!*\n\n*Eyes that can see in the dark -- the dark!*\n\n*Tongue -- give tongue to it! Hark! O Hark!*\n\n*Once, twice and again!*\n\nOf course this poem occurs after the first section of the Jungle Book, in\nwhich Mowgli, raised by animals and living his life as one of them, is\nconfronted with the fact that he is a man and his pack consists of dogs. He\nleaves the pack after Shere Khan’s disapproval is given voice: “I am weary\nof this man-wolf folly.” This man-wolf talk is evoked in the spelling\nwerwolf, of which Wolfe says: “I reverted to the original spelling to point\nup the meaning of the word: ?manwolf.” We would be more apt to say\n“wolfman,” though the ideas conveyed are distinctly different. — the\nmanwolf envisioned by the Anglos and Saxons was a man to be feared as\nwolves were feared, and for the same reasons. Thus the predatory figure of\nPaul as the viewpoint character. The story is to some degree how he comes\nto have his own family pack and create a meaningful unit in an extremely\npredatory and unkind existence.\n\nTHE UPPER AND UNDER CLASS:\n\nAccording to Emmitt Pendleton’s words, the story is set just before 2060.\n\nIn discussing the text, it might be useful to determine if the upper class\nwith their “genetic heritage revised for intellection and peace” are\nactually distinct in origin from the “humans” — Paul and his newfound\nfamily, the predators. The policeman who walks around has been raised from\nsomething like a dog: “the policeman bobbed his hairy head, grinning,\nbasking in the recognition, the approval, of those who had raised him from\nanimality. .. the policeman was too stupid, too silly, to be deceived by\nappearances as his masters were.” With these beasts given psuedosentience\nto do menial tasks, the masters can focus on books and abstract ideals\n(Pendleton recounts how his fathers pleas for food result in him being hit\nwith a book).\n\nOf course the narrative slant towards Paul as “human” creates relativistic\nstatements like “His own place was that in which his mother had borne him,\na place high in a house built when humans were the masters.” It is clear\nthe masters consider themselves humans as well, and Paul and his genome\njust a bad dream to be repressed and forgotten. Paul claims they are afraid\nto raze the old buildings for fear of bringing back to conscious memory and\nlife the old, degenerate times.\n\nThe statements of the woman with her broken neck are sometimes a bit\ncryptic: “I didn’t think you really existed . — I’m dead, you know. — Dead.\nNever, never, never. Another year, and everything would have been all\nright. — I thought you were all gone — all gone long ago, like a bad dream.”\n\nHe becomes angered when she says “Strange evolution. Man become food for\nmen,” - the concept and vocabulary of evolution is foreign to him. What do\nthe masters eat? Is the raspberry powder that freezes, taken from its moon\nshaped box, solely a drug which can be inhaled with no nutritive\nproperties? Clearly the masters consider themselves human and the old style\ngenome something better forgotten.\n\nGENETICS AND THE STORY:\n\nThe primary question in the text becomes one of the actual genetic process\nthat allowed the “masters” these psionic powers, to live after their necks\nare broken, to survive without crops or animals to eat. Interestingly\nenough, at the end of the story, a four dimensional picture of Hugo de\nVries appears, showing his development until death, and then back to\nrebirth as a fissioning cell. De Vries work with the Evening Primrose was a\nbit different than Darwinian gradual evolution in that it posited rapid\nchange through mutation. (He also worked with plant hybridization and\npolyploidy, which I believe are vital to understanding Wolfe’s Short Sun\nuniverse in any meaningful way). De Vries work deals in some degree with\nSaltation — very large changes from one generation to the next, which we\nsee at work here in the story, where the under and upper class both believe\nthemselves to be human but are so different as to be practically different\nspecies.\n\nThe trees have also been modified now to exude their own light: “night\nblooming flowers scented the park air, and the trees lining the paths\nglowed with self-generated blue light — in the city, beyond the last hedge,\nthe great buildings new and old were mountains lit from within.”\n\nJoan Gordon's study on Wolfe seems to conclude that humans have mixed with\nalien DNA in the story, though from textual evidence I don't feel there is\nenough support for this. If we could feasibly tie this to a continuity that\nincluded “Blue Mouse”, “Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee”, and\n“Silhouette” with its bizarre planet of dark foliage, then we might be able\nto make this claim, but in the story itself there is little indication of\nactual alien alteration: humans took a technological leap at roughly the\nsame time that the planet's resources were depleted and ruined (there is\nsome evidence that technology changed very rapidly, however).\n\nJUXTAPOSITION AS NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE:\n\n This story shows Wolfe's tendency to join non-sequitur events in one\nscene — when Paul taunts the dying female master, his thoughts gravitate to\nhis excitement over meeting Janie and her father, though the confrontation\nis marked with hostility. He imagines a domestic life with her as he boasts\nand teases the dying female master. When Janie and Paul are trapped in the\nelevator shaft after killing the boy, “optimal development” is reviewed:\naffection for one's mother, replaced by a peer-group, culminating in\nfinding a life purpose. The example used is that of physician, and during\nthis time Paul implores Janie to bite through his foot, as a wolf would\nescape, since he cannot do it himself, serving as a physician that cuts\naway a diseased portion with her primitive teeth.\n\n Wolfe's tendency to place two unrelated things together in narrative\ncontinuously sometimes creates a tenuous symbolic relationship.\n\nWOLFE’S COMMENTS:\n\n?I was trying to get the reader to think about the real nature of love\nbetween man and woman. In the first place, the girl in \"The Hero as\nWerewolf\" is retarded and cannot speak. And, secondly, in the end she has\nto damage very badly the man she loves in order to set him free. I think I\nwas trying to say, first, that you must not think that the person you love\nhas to be a whole lot like you in order for that love to be real and\nworking. And second, that we all, if we are going to be honest, have to\nhurt people in order to do them good. We have to tear away parts of them in\norder to do them good.\n\nNAMES:\n\nPendleton means overhanging settlement, for whatever that is worth. I\ncould find no real meaning for the unusual last name Gorous except its\nsimilarity to the French term for werewolf, “loup-garou” — which is a\nredundancy to some degree, as garou seems related to the german garoul -\nwerewolf.\n\nIf Wolfe was actually considering “love” as his primary theme here, then\nPaul might reference the St. Paul’s rather infamous diatribe on\nLove/charity — it might hope all things and endure all things, but he\nforgot “Love bites off legs when necessary”.\n\nCOMMENTARY:\n\nAuthorial sympathy is sometimes a dangerous thing, and as an artist I\nthink this is one of those stories where the viewpoint character creates a\nfalse sense of authorial endorsement. Of course the title, “The Hero as\nWerwolf” does imply that Paul is “heroic”, but it cannot be an unqualified\nassessment. The problem with the masters is that they do not love\nimperfections and seek to stamp them out completely. The problem with the\n“humans” is of course that they have become bestial and ignorant in their\nquest to survive. As far as Wolfe is concerned, the underclass predator is\na more compelling viewpoint: to make one sympathetic for a cannibalistic,\nignorant, and animalistic group is only possible in light of the oppression\nthey have suffered. Physically worthless versus mentally atrophied — there\ncannot be a true endorsement except for the base ability to survive and\npossibly love: “Evan a bad man can love his child. You remember that,\nbecause it’s true.” Have the masters forgotten love? Would they be a\nworthwhile step in evolution, concerned as they are with the desuetude and\ndestruction of the planet's resources, if they cared for those who were\ndeemed unfit instead of simply “forgetting” about them?\n\nPerhaps the most heroic thing about Paul is that he hasn’t given up on his\ndreams and fantasizes about returning with food for his woman.\n\nThe love in the story is feral, and the kindness the father advises cruel:\nif you let her play with her food before it dies, the girl will come to\nlike you. To help him escape, she eats his foot off. The question is if\nthis act symbolically mirrors what the masters have done to escape their\nbase mortality: cut off the id, the primitive, and what they perceive to be\nflaws — is there any difference in these two acts? The blood of his leg is\nwashed away by her tears — thus the real feeling of affection she has for\nhim. Here, cannibalism is a form of escape from an inescapable situation ?\nthere simply is no other way.\n\nUNANSWERED QUESTIONS:\n\nHave the masters hybridized with foreign or alien DNA to achieve the\npsionic mastery, or is this purely human? Will everything be fine “in a\nyear” because the masters are leaving in their rockets to the moon and\nbeyond? Are we actually on the moon here?\n\nDo these new humans foreshadow the Green Man in any meaningful way, being\nable to survive without farmland and animals?\n\nI am fairly certain on the last page the optional development pattern\nmentioned by the tutoring voice is a typo, because the voice immediately\nsays “it may be useful for us to review what is meant by 'optimal\ndevelopment'”. Typos happen even in Wolfe. Optimal should have been used in\nboth cases.\n\nRELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORKS:\n\nThe cannibalism is obvious, seen in “Tracking Song”, “A Traveler in Desert\nLands”, *New Sun* — but in particular the raising of animals to something\nmore, carried out to the next level, elevating humans to ones who clearly\ndo not have to subsist on regular food, immune to viral infections like\nwarts, living for a time as long as they believe that they are alive, with\nmoney just a dim memory, takes the pseudo socialist explorations of his 70s\nfiction just a bit further into the future. “Tracking Song” could be an\nexample of further animal species raised to complete sentience, or even a\nvastly divergent evolution on a colonized satellite or planet — we will be\nconfronting this soon, and that story also asks what is truly human. The\npredatory survival of humanity will be echoed years and years later in the\nshort story “King Rat”, but thematically “Tracking Song” and “The Hero as\nWerwolf” seem to be closely related: exploring that forgotten animal part\nof humanity from the top and bottom, respectively, and asking what humanity\nshould ultimately entail.\n\n\n_______________________________________________" } ] } ] }