<div dir="ltr"><div>I meant to respond long ago, I apologize. This scene is one in which a sinful woman anoints the feet of the Theoanthropos (let's go with High Christology here, though we are still in the synoptic gospels) and, even though she has great sins, is forgiven, as verses 47 and 48 imply:</div>
<div><br></div><div>"I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”<p><span id="en-NIV-25244">Then Jesus said to her, <span>“Your sins are forgiven.”</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>It is not that Paul in the story is sinless, but that this act is one of a debased and depraved individual achieving that great love, and making them human. Thus, Paul and Janie can love, and the masters are more like the Pharisees who want to forget and shun those who are seen as "lesser" and "sinful." Paul, imperfect, can care for Janie with all her feral and mental problems, and she, too can love him enough to eat his foot off when necessary. </span></span></p>
</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 10:32 AM, Fernando Gouvea <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fqgouvea@colby.edu" target="_blank">fqgouvea@colby.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
Tears washing feet is probably an echo of Luke 7:38, though I'm
hard-pressed to see how it fits the story.<br>
<br>
I suspect that Wolfe is more sympathetic to Paul than most of us.
The "masters" strike me as deeply dehumanized, having set aside many
of the features of human embodiment. Better to be feral?<br>
<br>
Fernando<div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
<div>On 5/9/2014 3:16 PM, Marc Aramini
wrote:<br>
</div>
</div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div class="h5">
<div dir="ltr">
<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>
</div>
<br>
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<br>
<pre cols="72">--
=============================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea <a href="http://www.colby.edu/~fqgouvea" target="_blank">http://www.colby.edu/~fqgouvea</a>
Carter Professor and Chair
Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics
Colby College Editor, Carus Mathematical Monographs
5836 Mayflower Hill Editor, MAA Reviews
Waterville, ME 04901 <a href="http://www.maa.org/publications/maa-reviews" target="_blank">http://www.maa.org/publications/maa-reviews</a>
The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. This means that only left handed people are in their right mind.
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