american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 171woods--preferably in the company of one or more male companions. "Whatis done for the lady, need not be done with her," Zweig notes. Indeed,from Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad to Cervantes's Don Quixote andSancho Panza-to say nothing of numerous examples up to the presentthesame motif "recurs in the literature of adventure":uprooting himself from women, the adventurer forms a masculine friendshipso intimate, so passionate, that it reasserts, in male terms, the emotionalbond which formerly anchored him within the world of the city .... Theadventurer, in his desire to reinvent himself as a man, reinvents his emotions,so that they may be served wholly by male pleasures: the rooted society ofwomen superseded by the mobile society of men. 67Such relationships, to modern observers, often are viewed in a homoeroticlight. Zweig is ambivalent on the point, and it is not of particularimportance in the context of this discussion, except to the extent that inthe Christian versions of this literature, at least, the consciously idealizedlife of the adventurer not only is adamantly non-homosexual, it is determinedlynon-sexual in every possible respect. It is, and must be, determinedlyso, however, because carnal temptation lurks externally at everybend in the road, as well as deep within the Christian's imperfect self.Indeed, once on the march against the beasts of the forest or the enemiesof God and civilization, this most noble of the Church's non-ordained representativesconstantly has to contend with the fact that the most abhorrent(because salacious) characteristics of both the wild man and the devilinwhatever guises they may appear-are perpetually latent within thedarkness of even the finest Christian's own heart.In sum, the wild man and his female companion, at their unconstrainedand sensual worst, symbolized everything the Christian's ascetic contemptusmundi tradition was determined to eradicate-even as that traditionalso acknowledged that the wild man's very same carnal and uncivilizedsinfulness gnawed at the soul of the holiest saint, and (more painful still)that it was ultimately ineradicable, no matter how fervent the effort. Thefact that failure was inevitable in the quest to crush completely such festeringinner sinfulness was discouraging, of course, as we saw in the dramatictestimonies of the Church's early ascetic hermits; but as those testimoniesalso revealed, to the true Christian believer discouragement wasonly prelude to ever more zealous and aggressive action.As Richard Bernheimer and others have shown, the very notion ofwildness, to the European mind at this time, suggested "everything thateluded Christian norms and the established framework of Christian society,referring to what was uncanny, unruly, raw, unpredictable, foreign,uncultured, and uncultivated." 68 However, the wild man, in that sense,was only the outer personification of the beast-like baseness that existed