The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

THE CALL OF THE WILD
martial contexts, emphasizing qualities such as muscularity, physical
endurance and brotherly camaraderie. As Rotundo has argued, even
men’s ‘animal nature’ was re-evaluated towards the turn of the century
as ‘just as useful — and just as necessary to their manhood — as
reason’. 35 Indeed, in the context of fin de siècle pessimism about the
Enlightenment project, the animal state was even to be preferred; as
the werewolf in Mary Catherwood’s short story of 1893, for example,
mused: ‘And what must a loup-garou do with himself? … I should take
to the woods, and sit and lick my chaps, and bless my hide that I was
for the time no longer a man.’ 36
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have theorized this impulse in
relation to Freud’s case of the Wolf-Man. Along similar lines to Ginzburg,
they pick up on the powerful mythic resonances within the case
that Freud failed to explore, proposing that ‘Freud obviously knows
nothing about the fascination exerted by wolves and the meaning of
their silent call, the call to become-wolf.’ 37 Here, the ‘call to becomewolf’
emerges as the opposite of the need to repress the ‘beast within’
that the case of the Wolf-Man was so instrumental in popularizing. The
‘monstrous’ connection with the wolf that has animated theorizations
of subjectivity is thus shown to pull the Self — and particularly the
masculine Self — in competing directions.
Soon after the turn of the century, a pair of novels by Jack London
inscribed these competing constructions of the masculine psyche.
An adept weaver of American myths about masculinity, even the
name of this writer compresses differing expressions of manhood:
‘Jack’, the rugged, plain-talking frontiersman, and ‘London’, a city,
a seat of hegemonic patriarchal civilization. Significantly, London
was known as ‘Wolf’ among his friends, an apt summation of the
tense arbitration between nature and culture encapsulated by his
public name. As Jonathon Auerbach notes, London’s Call of the Wild
(1903), in which a domestic dog becomes the leader of a wolf-pack,
and White Fang (1906), in which a wolf is domesticated, complement
each other, offering different perspectives on the same theme. 38 Both
stories are analogies of human (and particularly male) nature; as John
Sisk argues, Buck in Call of the Wild is no mere dog — ‘he is, in fact,
105