(urth) Short Story 63: The Hero as Werwolf

[Marc Aramini]

The Hero as Werwolf

“The Hero as Werwolf” appeared in 1975 in The New Improved Sun and is
reprinted in *The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other
Stories*.

SUMMARY:

In approximately 2060 with the divergence of humanity into a telepathic and
peaceful master upperclass and a bestial and predatory “unraised” human
class, Paul hunts the masters for food. Sitting in on a meeting in the park
in which he blends in with the Masters, Paul fails to understand the
lecture but dwells instead on watching his prey. He selects a fat man and
his date for the night, a girl with pearl eyes dressed in vines “the color
of love” with “a serpent of gold support[ing] her breasts.” Hoping to use
his disguise and bell to attract them, they are prematurely attacked by an
old man and his daughter, who wields a knife. The female master uses her
telekinetically controlled unliving serpent to trip the girl while the
vines loosen and decay to allow her to run. Paul snaps her necks and argues
with the other “true” humans over who will keep their food for the night.
He takes the dying female to his house turret; she continues to talk after
her neck is snapped. He denies that she is dead and toys with her a bit.
After a few telekinetic attempts on him such as animating his blankets and
raising her body to try to escape, she succumbs to death, but throughout
the discussion thoughts of the girl and getting food for her in a predatory
domestic partnership consume Paul.

He finds the family of two nearby, living in a bus. After some hostile
exchanges, the father begins trying to talk of his daughter's many fine
qualities, though she cannot speak and is feral. He speaks of his family's
misfortunes and hereditary problems which prevented them from being changed
and accepted as masters, and reveals how sickness has killed most livestock
animals and the farmland been destroyed by the masters (Paul had never
conceived that people could even live off the land). He tells why he hasn't
found a man for Janie yet, but seems keen on the idea that Paul take her.
He does, but the father tells him he will take her back if Paul is not
pleased.

Later, Janie and Paul disguise themselves as masters and hunt down a boy,
splitting up to catch him in the air shafts. After Paul breaks the boys
neck, they are detected and detained by the building. A lecture on optimal
development begins, and he manages to pry open the door. Janie escapes and
Paul almost does, but the dying boys mental powers make the rod slip,
catching his foot in the door. He tells the boy he is dead, at which point
the rod falls tot he ground, and he exhorts Janie to take action; she bites
off his foot, her tears washing away his blood.

SETTING:

With the animals raised to semi-consciousness and the branching of the
human species into several evolutionary tracks as well as the disappearance
of hard currency and credit, this seems to me the same world found in
“Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee”, or one very similar. This time, men
return to an animalistic state when their resources are destroyed, or are
raised to psionic awareness, with metalinguistic discourse and
psychokinetic powers.

Why the loss of valid farmland? This is revealed in the callous treatment
the “humans” receive at the hands of the master as Emmitt Pendleton
describes. His family, suffering from genetic defects like diabetes and
mental problems which have manifested in his daughter Jane, have been
denied the “change.” After the widespread genetic modification of humanity,
it is clear that old style food is no longer necessary. Farm lands are
destroyed by machines (“They had forgot about us, you see”), medicine
production such as insulin stops, and livestock perishes after a “sickness”
strikes. Certainly terraforming of the moon continues apace, via details
revealed at the end: “The boys and girls you see are attending a model
school in Armstrong. Notice that no tint is used to mask the black of space
above their air tent”.

In the opening scene, Paul does notice that “the moon was up” in the sky –
so we have to ask ourselves if the story is set on Earth or if Paul does
not understand that he might currently be on the changed moon. In either
case, there are rockets and lunar colonies of the masters by this point.
There are “canyons between the buildings” – this doesn’t seem like a normal
alley description. There is a noon and a sun that enters Paul’s house
turret from eight windows. However, Paul describes how he escaped the
master's ghost house by overturning the machine testing him for genetic
aberrations and jumping out the sixth floor of a building, saved by landing
in a tree. I imagine chances of surviving a jump from a sixth floor window
are higher on the moon than on earth. The flora in the park include night
blooming flowers and trees which glow with a self-generated blue light.

LITERARY REFERENCES:

The story begins with the epigraph from Kipling’s “Hunting Song of the
Seeonee Pack” from The Jungle Book . While Mowgli must leave his pack at
that point in the book, Paul has just found a pack to hunt with in Wolfe’s
story.

As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --

Once, twice and again!

And a doe leaped up, and a doe leaped up

>From the pond in the wood where the wild deer sup.

This I, scouting alone, beheld,

Once, twice, and again!


 As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --

Once, twice and again!

And a wolf stole back, and a wolf stole back

To carry the word to the waiting Pack,

And we sought and we found and we bayed on his track

Once, twice and again!


 As the dawn was breaking the Wolf-Pack yelled

Once, twice and again!

*Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!*

*Eyes that can see in the dark -- the dark!*

*Tongue -- give tongue to it! Hark! O Hark!*

*Once, twice and again!*

Of course this poem occurs after the first section of the Jungle Book, in
which Mowgli, raised by animals and living his life as one of them, is
confronted with the fact that he is a man and his pack consists of dogs. He
leaves the pack after Shere Khan’s disapproval is given voice: “I am weary
of this man-wolf folly.” This man-wolf talk is evoked in the spelling
werwolf, of which Wolfe says: “I reverted to the original spelling to point
up the meaning of the word: ‘manwolf.’ We would be more apt to say
‘wolfman,’ though the ideas conveyed are distinctly different. … the
manwolf envisioned by the Anglos and Saxons was a man to be feared as
wolves were feared, and for the same reasons.” Thus the predatory figure of
Paul as the viewpoint character. The story is to some degree how he comes
to have his own family pack and create a meaningful unit in an extremely
predatory and unkind existence.

THE UPPER AND UNDER CLASS:

According to Emmitt Pendleton’s words, the story is set just before 2060.

In discussing the text, it might be useful to determine if the upper class
with their “genetic heritage revised for intellection and peace” are
actually distinct in origin from the “humans” – Paul and his newfound
family, the predators. The policeman who walks around has been raised from
something like a dog: “the policeman bobbed his hairy head, grinning,
basking in the recognition, the approval, of those who had raised him from
animality. .. the policeman was too stupid, too silly, to be deceived by
appearances as his masters were.” With these beasts given psuedosentience
to do menial tasks, the masters can focus on books and abstract ideals
(Pendleton recounts how his fathers pleas for food result in him being hit
with a book).

Of course the narrative slant towards Paul as “human” creates relativistic
statements like “His own place was that in which his mother had borne him,
a place high in a house built when humans were the masters.” It is clear
the masters consider themselves humans as well, and Paul and his genome
just a bad dream to be repressed and forgotten. Paul claims they are afraid
to raze the old buildings for fear of bringing back to conscious memory and
life the old, degenerate times.

The statements of the woman with her broken neck are sometimes a bit
cryptic: “I didn’t think you really existed . … I’m dead, you know. … Dead.
Never, never, never. Another year, and everything would have been all
right. … I thought you were all gone … all gone long ago, like a bad dream.”

He becomes angered when she says “Strange evolution. Man become food for
men,” - the concept and vocabulary of evolution is foreign to him. What do
the masters eat? Is the raspberry powder that freezes, taken from its moon
shaped box, solely a drug which can be inhaled with no nutritive
properties? Clearly the masters consider themselves human and the old style
genome something better forgotten.

GENETICS AND THE STORY:

The primary question in the text becomes one of the actual genetic process
that allowed the “masters” these psionic powers, to live after their necks
are broken, to survive without crops or animals to eat. Interestingly
enough, at the end of the story, a four dimensional picture of Hugo de
Vries appears, showing his development until death, and then back to
rebirth as a fissioning cell. De Vries work with the Evening Primrose was a
bit different than Darwinian gradual evolution in that it posited rapid
change through mutation. (He also worked with plant hybridization and
polyploidy, which I believe are vital to understanding Wolfe’s Short Sun
universe in any meaningful way). De Vries work deals in some degree with
Saltation – very large changes from one generation to the next, which we
see at work here in the story, where the under and upper class both believe
themselves to be human but are so different as to be practically different
species.

The trees have also been modified now to exude their own light: “night
blooming flowers scented the park air, and the trees lining the paths
glowed with self-generated blue light … in the city, beyond the last hedge,
the great buildings new and old were mountains lit from within.”

Joan Gordon's study on Wolfe seems to conclude that humans have mixed with
alien DNA in the story, though from textual evidence I don't feel there is
enough support for this. If we could feasibly tie this to a continuity that
included “Blue Mouse”, “Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee”, and
“Silhouette” with its bizarre planet of dark foliage, then we might be able
to make this claim, but in the story itself there is little indication of
actual alien alteration: humans took a technological leap at roughly the
same time that the planet's resources were depleted and ruined (there is
some evidence that technology changed very rapidly, however).

JUXTAPOSITION AS NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE:

 This story shows Wolfe's tendency to join non-sequitur events in one scene
– when Paul taunts the dying female master, his thoughts gravitate to his
excitement over meeting Janie and her father, though the confrontation is
marked with hostility. He imagines a domestic life with her as he boasts
and teases the dying female master. When Janie and Paul are trapped in the
elevator shaft after killing the boy, “optimal development” is reviewed:
affection for one's mother, replaced by a peer-group, culminating in
finding a life purpose. The example used is that of physician, and during
this time Paul implores Janie to bite through his foot, as a wolf would
escape, since he cannot do it himself, serving as a physician that cuts
away a diseased portion with her primitive teeth.

Wolfe's tendency to place two unrelated things together in narrative
continuously sometimes creates a tenuous symbolic relationship.

WOLFE’S COMMENTS:

“I was trying to get the reader to think about the real nature of love
between man and woman. In the first place, the girl in "The Hero as
Werewolf" is retarded and cannot speak. And, secondly, in the end she has
to damage very badly the man she loves in order to set him free. I think I
was trying to say, first, that you must not think that the person you love
has to be a whole lot like you in order for that love to be real and
working. And second, that we all, if we are going to be honest, have to
hurt people in order to do them good. We have to tear away parts of them in
order to do them good.”

NAMES:

Pendleton means overhanging settlement, for whatever that is worth. I could
find no real meaning for the unusual last name Gorous except its similarity
to the French term for werewolf, “loup-garou” – which is a redundancy to
some degree, as garou seems related to the german garoul - werewolf.

If Wolfe was actually considering “love” as his primary theme here, then
Paul might reference the St. Paul’s rather infamous diatribe on
Love/charity … it might hope all things and endure all things, but he
forgot “Love bites off legs when necessary”.

COMMENTARY:

Authorial sympathy is sometimes a dangerous thing, and as an artist I think
this is one of those stories where the viewpoint character creates a false
sense of authorial endorsement. Of course the title, “The Hero as Werwolf”
does imply that Paul is “heroic”, but it cannot be an unqualified
assessment. The problem with the masters is that they do not love
imperfections and seek to stamp them out completely. The problem with the
“humans” is of course that they have become bestial and ignorant in their
quest to survive. As far as Wolfe is concerned, the underclass predator is
a more compelling viewpoint: to make one sympathetic for a cannibalistic,
ignorant, and animalistic group is only possible in light of the oppression
they have suffered. Physically worthless versus mentally atrophied – there
cannot be a true endorsement except for the base ability to survive and
possibly love: “Evan a bad man can love his child. You remember that,
because it’s true.” Have the masters forgotten love? Would they be a
worthwhile step in evolution, concerned as they are with the desuetude and
destruction of the planet's resources, if they cared for those who were
deemed unfit instead of simply “forgetting” about them?

Perhaps the most heroic thing about Paul is that he hasn’t given up on his
dreams and fantasizes about returning with food for his woman.

The love in the story is feral, and the kindness the father advises cruel:
if you let her play with her food before it dies, the girl will come to
like you. To help him escape, she eats his foot off. The question is if
this act symbolically mirrors what the masters have done to escape their
base mortality: cut off the id, the primitive, and what they perceive to be
flaws – is there any difference in these two acts? The blood of his leg is
washed away by her tears – thus the real feeling of affection she has for
him. Here, cannibalism is a form of escape from an inescapable situation –
there simply is no other way.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

Have the masters hybridized with foreign or alien DNA to achieve the
psionic mastery, or is this purely human? Will everything be fine “in a
year” because the masters are leaving in their rockets to the moon and
beyond? Are we actually on the moon here?

Do these new humans foreshadow the Green Man in any meaningful way, being
able to survive without farmland and animals?

I am fairly certain on the last page the optional development pattern
mentioned by the tutoring voice is a typo, because the voice immediately
says “it may be useful for us to review what is meant by 'optimal
development'”. Typos happen even in Wolfe. Optimal should have been used in
both cases.

RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORKS:

The cannibalism is obvious, seen in “Tracking Song”, “A Traveler in Desert
Lands”, *New Sun* … but in particular the raising of animals to something
more, carried out to the next level, elevating humans to ones who clearly
do not have to subsist on regular food, immune to viral infections like
warts, living for a time as long as they believe that they are alive, with
money just a dim memory, takes the pseudo socialist explorations of his 70s
fiction just a bit further into the future. “Tracking Song” could be an
example of further animal species raised to complete sentience, or even a
vastly divergent evolution on a colonized satellite or planet – we will be
confronting this soon, and that story also asks what is truly human. The
predatory survival of humanity will be echoed years and years later in the
short story “King Rat”, but thematically “Tracking Song” and “The Hero as
Werwolf” seem to be closely related: exploring that forgotten animal part
of humanity from the top and bottom, respectively, and asking what humanity
should ultimately entail.
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