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WEREWOLVES AND SCHOLARS
Phillpotts’s skilful manipulation of the werewolf theme foregrounds
the equivocation that had come to characterize the subject of lycanthropy.
By exposing the werewolf’s unique proclivity for articulating
uncertainty about the limitations of materialist explanations, the text
also hints at the interdependence of monstrosity and modernity. A
number of scholars have considered the ‘modernity’ of monsters, arguing
that the ‘monstrous’ or ‘spectral’ element that haunted scientific
discourse despite all attempts to dispel it was due to the processes by
which rational science worked to describe ‘reality’. As the following
chapter demonstrates, the ‘real’ is seen within such frameworks to be
constructed through the denial or exclusion of certain material, which
‘returns’ in uncanny forms such as monsters, to unsettle ‘reality’. This
logic suggests that the supernatural or the Gothic is a side effect of
the process by which reality is produced.
Slavoj Žižek takes such theorizing further, by arguing that the stuff
of Gothic is in fact central to formations of the ‘real’: ‘There is no
reality without the spectre; … the circles of reality can be closed only
by means of an uncanny spectral supplement.’ 106 Following this logic,
‘reality’ is always a social fiction, incapable of wholly ‘covering’ the
real, because there is always an element that is repressed, which then
manifests in spectral form to ‘complete’ social reality (and for Žižek,
this repressed element is the only real). In this sense, the various
‘explanations’ of lycanthropy modelled competing versions of ‘reality’;
and competition between various exponents was a competition for a
‘neutral’ ground from which the real could be described and observed.
But that ground remained elusive, because the repressed real, given
shape through the supernatural, the spectre — the werewolf — remained
perpetually outside the ‘reality’ that was quested after. And as the
werewolf kept coming back, so uncertainty grew about the explanatory
power of rational science.
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