Poststructuralism applies nonreferential language and semiotic reversal strategies that equate "reality" with "materiality" when convenient. It then defends such transpositions in the name of
jouissance or "play" with the text. As a result, the nonhuman world is exiled to an unreachable, if only because imperceptible, status that renders it finally ineffectual, if not irrelevant. The very biosphere is then enthusiastically kept imperceptible through scholarly and experiential neglect, so that it disappears beneath the spread of anthropomorphism, the theory claims to have proven itself, creating its own evidence of "absence" by contributing to loss. To the Baudrillardian, the environment is merely a consumable plaything, and ecology an oppressive warning label stuck on the product by some faceless hegemonic (and by default American) manufacturer. The nonhuman world's agency and presence may certainly be incomprehensible to us (ask an ecologist), but they exist before, outside of, and beyond our invention. They infuse us and the tools of our invention. And they not only may be but must be approached, because we can't avoid them. We are always already present, in and with them.
This is precisely why a study of the ghost wolf's role in literary discourse has to include poststructuralism's tendencies both to anthropocentrize and to render the physical apparitional. (p. 192)
. . .
This does not mean we
invent the form of The Wolf; adamantly to the contrary, we always find that The Wolf, if it exists, is a mystery like any other god—an encoded faith—and we inherit it. We find that the world was once and could be full of individuals within a species, and that the form of The Wolf lives unattainable in that space between intraspecies behavior and individuality. So we must go to wolves, the real animals of the biosphere's own creation. The material world is the attainable, the form the unattainable. And if we cannot go to them, or if they do not come to us, then our burden is greater to understand how the real world functions outside our manipulations and exterminations, and perhaps the more important. At the very minimum, the base of ethics, we must let them live. Otherwise the wolf we imagine is only the shadow, the repressive warping of real wolves, and a notion that will come back on us with the energy of chaos and damage. We see the evidence of such repression and the shadow's activity now in our desperate efforts to return wolves and heal the land, just as we see it in our historic cruelty to them, just as we see it in our readings and applications of literature.
The monstrous beast image is a manifestation of our inability to reconcile our inner, human selves with the outer, nonhuman world. For all of its symbolic value in Jungian analysis, the animal is not ultimately a symbol any more than a human psyche can
be a symbol; symbols are tools of psyches, and wolves live. Indeed, Jung entertained the possibility that other animals could
have, not just be, archetypes.
What we have done to the wolf can be explained in large part through how we have handled its archetypal standing. Coleman's questions in
Vicious about our motivations for torturing wolves are to a great degree answered when we see what we have done to the wolf in our minds in parallel relation to what we did to wolves with our hands, our guns and poisons, our traps and machines. The archetype explains the myriad ways we approached the real and mythic animal in such an explosion of natural and cultural chaos that we could not recover our senses for a thousand years, over the cascade of a thousand books, from the vantage points of a thousand actual plateaus.
The more wolf images we find in American literature, the more we find them to be a fluctuating combination of wolves' real biological selves and the false intellectual constructs of a highly synthetic and uncomfortable fabric. Allow me to sustain the metaphor: This fantastic cloth was woven from Scandinavian, Celtic, Germanic, British, and French thread spun out of ancient Indo-European (particularly early southern Russian) legends that were themselves tailored to our human fantasy. The wolf transformed and transported over the Atlantic was not only draped over the shoulders of Nordic travelers, not only interlaced into the unconscious of the European mind, but also tied to those cultures' deepest collective consciousness—archetypal robes for mythic selves. After centuries of slow spellcraft and transmutation, what crossed the great sea to America was the World-Wolf, the Lupus Mundi, but only a fine thread was left of Fenris himself. The more efficacious, if more secret, symbol that crossed was Gleipnir, the rope. (pp. 200-201)
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Kisota
)
