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<p style="margin-bottom:0in">The Hero as Werwolf</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">“The Hero as Werwolf” appeared in
1975 in The New Improved Sun and is reprinted in <i>The Island of
Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories</i>.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">SUMMARY:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">SETTING:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> 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”.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">LITERARY REFERENCES:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur
belled --</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> Once, twice and again!</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">And a doe leaped up, and a doe leaped
up</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">From the pond in the wood where the
wild deer sup.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">This I, scouting alone, beheld,</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> Once, twice, and again!</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur
belled --</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> Once, twice and again!</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">And a wolf stole back, and a wolf stole
back</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">To carry the word to the waiting Pack,</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">And we sought and we found and we bayed
on his track</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> Once, twice and again!</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">As the dawn was breaking the Wolf-Pack
yelled</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> Once, twice and again!</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><b>Feet in the jungle that leave no
mark!</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><b>Eyes that can see in the dark -- the
dark!</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><b>Tongue -- give tongue to it! Hark! O
Hark!</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> <b>Once, twice and again!</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">THE UPPER AND UNDER CLASS:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">According to Emmitt Pendleton’s
words, the story is set just before 2060.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">GENETICS AND THE STORY:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">JUXTAPOSITION AS NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE:<br><br>
</p>
<div style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</div><div style="margin-bottom:0in"><br></div><div style="margin-bottom:0in">Wolfe's tendency to place two unrelated things together in narrative continuously sometimes creates a tenuous symbolic relationship.</div>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">WOLFE’S COMMENTS:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">“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.”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">NAMES:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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”.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">COMMENTARY:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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?
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">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?
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Do these new humans foreshadow the
Green Man in any meaningful way, being able to survive without
farmland and animals?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> 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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORKS:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">The cannibalism is obvious, seen in
“Tracking Song”, “A Traveler in Desert Lands”, <i>New Sun</i>
… 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.</p>
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