October 2013: Grea Fantasy Roundtable Blog: What does it mean to be human?
October 2013: Great Traveling Fantasy Roundtable Blog: What does it mean to be human?
Being Human
Deborah Ross
I think we Homo sapiens have been discussing what being human is and means since we developed abstract language and probably before that. At first, the driving motivation was undoubtedly how to tell what is us and not-us. This is certainly a biological imperative at the cellular level; our immune systems must tackle the question every day, attacking foreign substances like viruses, bacteria, and allergenic proteins, and it’s also why cancer is so insidious (cells with the right molecular passwords that nonetheless behave like ravening barbarians). The same distinctions hold true at the level of the individual, family/clan, and larger, political units. Whether we’re talking about communities or nations, “us” = “human” = friendly, safe, cooperative, reliable, and “them” = “something else” = dangerous, untrustworthy, competitors for limited resources. In this way, “human” tends to be exclusionary and frictions tend to narrow the scope even further.
In science fiction and fantasy, however, we tend to use the term in a inclusionary way. Often the words “human” and “person” are interchangeable. Sf/f writers and readers pioneered the suggestions that all sapient races think of themselves as people and therefore, “human,” whatever the biological differences from Homo sapiens. I had a lot of fun with a race of giant slugs in Jaydium, who insisted that mammals were incapable of “personness.” The television series Star Trek often portrayed what Earth-humans and alien-humans have in common, rather than their unbridgeable differences. (The similarities were undoubtedly caused in part by the relatively primitive makeup and special effects, leading to the joke about aliens being actors with funny foreheads.) The creators of the series also exploited the romantic appeal of the exotic to generate love stories between members of different species, a phenomenon highly unlikely to occur in nature but one that had the effect of demonstrating the shared values of sapient beings. This is an example of broadening of the use of “human” as a term to include any beings of similar intelligence and culture that we can understand and sympathize with.
The inversion of the broadening effect comes up most commonly in horror: beings that look and sound human but which lack some trait or motivation we consider so important as to be a necessary part of the definition of human: empathy, for example, or the capacity for love. A prime example of this is the vampire, who “walks among us” as if human but differs in his essential nature. The horrific aspect arises in part from his blood thirst, but even more from the betrayal of the assumption of shared humanity.
None of this addresses the question of what it is it we feel defines human as opposed to intelligent-animal, a question not restricted to writers of speculative fiction. We can look at the biological characteristics of Homo sapiens, such as opposable thumbs or a greatly developed prefrontal cortex (the region responsible for complex moral judgments and control of social behavior, among other things). We can look at behavioral traits like language, prolonged rearing of young and care for the aged, the use of fire and cooking, tool-making, and the like. But in this larger universe we live in, is it wise to judge another entity as human or nonhuman based solely on what they look like or how they act? Is a child born with crippling, distorting defects or an adult with a deforming disease not still human? What about a person who has suffered a debilitating stroke and can no longer communicate? These and many other, similar questions highlight the difficulty of defining human by observable characteristics.
Instead, we can look to experiential qualities: the capacity for love, for wonder, for kindness; the awareness of personal mortality and the “binding” of time through personal and generational transmission of memory; abstract thought, and so forth. It may well be that animals have some of these abilities but lack the means (or perhaps the inclination!) to communicate them to us. We know, for example, that many species exhibit behavior we interpret as grief, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Certainly, cooperation is not limited to Homo sapiens, and tool- making definitely is not. So instead of emphasizing how we are different from other creatures in our world, we can focus instead on how wonderful it is that the things we value in ourselves are not exclusive to our species. Or, contrariwise, that humanity is not limited to humans.
Fantasy and What It Means to Be Human
Andrea Hosth
One of the primary preoccupations of science fiction is said to be the question of what it means to be human. Seeing ourselves through alien eyes allows us to see ourselves anew. It’s a question which is less commonly associated with fantasy, and yet the sub-genre is equally ripe for examining the question of humanity through the use of non-humans.
One of the common positions taken when depicting humans in fantasy (particularly in fantasy which uses a roleplaying game basis, but also many less structured works) is that of humans as a middle ground, a kind of neutral party capable of achieving good, but all too ready to give in to baser impulses.
Other characteristics typically awarded humanity are versatility and creativity. Humans can be all things, while other races possess extremes – age/intelligence combined with sterility. Strength mixed with a lack of imagination. Humans are portrayed as young, vigorous, spontaneous, a little naïve, courageous, capable of great love and vivid passions. It is a very common trope to have the resolution of a dire battle revolve around a human’s ability to love, or innovate, believe, or be brave to the point of stupidity. It is equally common for other races to be failing, or to “Go into the West” and leave their territories to humans territories. Who took up residence in Rivendell, once Elrond moved on? Did they drift, dowdy and out of place, among the echoes of their splendid predecessors?
This frequent positioning of humanity as a versatile and rapidly improving ‘young’ race does not appear to be a deliberate examination of what it means to be human (as seen in those novels which attempt to make a point about humanity by viewing it through alien eyes), but instead a glorification of the traits humanity currently displays. Crude and ignorant – but just because of youth! Comparatively powerless, but able to think of new solutions to old problems. Vigorous, a bit chaotic, blundering occasionally, but heading inexorably upward, natural successors to the world’s bounty.
These are the stories we write about ourselves, the flip side of the grimdark/grittygrotty species of fantasy, where the narrative itself rhapsodises about human nature as something special and true and good.
I’ll end, without further comment, with a series of quotes from Doctor Who. The Doctor is not always so complimentary, but this has been the thrust of many of the rebooted series:
" Well, you could do that. Yeah, you could do that. Of course you could. But why? Look at these people, these human beings. Consider their potential! From the day they arrive on the planet, blinking, step into the sun, there is more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than — no, hold on. Sorry, that’s The Lion King. But the point still stands. Leave them alone!" – The Christmas Invasion.
" Oh, might have spent a million years evolving into clouds of gas… and another million as downloads, but you always revert to the same basic shape: the fundamental human. End of the universe and here you are. Indomitable, that’s the word! Indomitable! Ha!" – Utopia.
" The one thing you can’t do… is stop them thinking. [He begins rising upwards angelically] Tell me the human race is degenerate now…when they can do this." – Last of the Time Lords.
“And shards of gold flecked violet split the air with sound and fury! With laughter love and tears I pressed my lips to these spirits, freed them to walk across the page,”
First Breath, Valjeanne Jeffers
What is it that drives our characters? Their humanity. And this is more important than their preternatural powers. Their strength. Or what they look like. It even takes precedence over the wondrous plots we, as writers, devise. That our characters are human and driven by the same emotions and quests that drive us as writers, and which drive our readers– even if they are sociopaths or mad men. The need for love, shelter, money. The emotions of desire, rage, melancholy…
The same qualities that make us, the writers and our readers, identify with them and love them. Or hate them.
I have created characters so loathsome that I couldn’t wait to kill them off. And others that I loved so much I used all sorts of plot machinations to keep them alive. Our characters are spirits who walk across the page: women and men who mirror our struggles.
What it means to be human
Carole McDonnell
From the beginning of time (and perhaps before time began) the question has always existed: what does it mean to be human?
Humanity lives/exists within a prescribed setting which limits knowledge, age, joy, the body, sexuality, tribe, power, authority, dominion, physical movement, movement in time.
As a writer of Christian fiction I grew up with the story of Adam and Eve which is the first encounter most Christians have with the question of What does it mean to be human. In that story, man is created but not yet settled into a specific kind of being. (And in the Christian mythos, man will not find his true “self” and “being” until the end of time when time is no more.
Adam and Eve are beings who do not die. Yet they are not really immortal. They’re in a strange nexus of creation where they are like god with (some) dominion and some knowledge. But they lack something, something God apparently thinks is not particularly important. They do not understand right and wrong.
They have consciousness but are without law or conscience. They have a blissful ignorance of evil and cannot judge/blame either themselves, others, God, or the world. For them, it is a world which is neither immoral or moral.
Despite God’s desire that they remain outside of the realm of guilt or consciousness of evil, God did make them moral beings. Their one morality: the freedom to obey or not to obey. They are aware of one thing that they lack: they do not fully understand the ramifications of evil: disease, death, cruelty, hunger, toil, meaninglessness, and the thousand ills flesh is heir to. This knowledge of death is what separates them from God, what makes them less than God.
But third agency enters the picture and challenges them to be like God. The agency tempts them with knowledge of evil, law, conscience, guilt. The humans take a wager upon themselves. It is possible that humans can understand evil and not fall into guilt. Their first response to eyes opened to evil: shame. Shme about what? Shame in their comparison to perfect God. Thus humanity falls from its own perfection as it aimed for God’s perfection.
There is so much in this story, myth, history. And all fantasy stories echo it. All these elements are found in fantasy: Humans who wish to put side emotions and become, robots who wish to be humans, humans locked way from Eden, humans betrayed by a God, humans betraying their gods, humans casting off their gods, intrusive deceiving godlike figures, humans battling death, humans defying death, humans conquering time, humans failing a task, humans striving, humans ignorant of evil, humans being dominated by the world, humans dominating the world. All the echoes are found in fantasy stories and will apparently continue until the end of time.
Carole McDonnell is the author of the Fantasy Novel , The Constant Tower
http://www.amazon.com/The-Constant-To...
Spirit Fruit: Collected Speculative Fiction an eBook available as an eBook at kindle.
What Does It Mean to be Human: Answering in Fantasy
Warren Rochelle
What does it mean to be human? This is a question I pose when I teach my science fiction lit class, foregrounding it as one of the perennial themes of the genre. I have yet to pose this same question in fantasy lit. When I was thinking about what to write for this month’s post I found myself wondering why I don’t. After all, as Le Guin says in “Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing,” “the story—from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding” (quoted in Language of the Night 27). So, why shouldn’t I consider fantasy as a tool for “the purpose of gaining understanding”—for understanding something about meaning human?
Science fiction often answers this question with aliens of one kind or another; how then might fantasy do so with werewolves, dragons, and elves, fairies, and witches, and other assorted magical beings? As Vulcans and Martians become ways of seeing and understanding humanity, through juxtaposition, comparison, and contrast, through reflection, and in metaphor and symbol, so these denizens of Faerie. Science fiction also will sometimes posit answers to this question when humans are taken out of the familiar—the green hills of Earth to the deserts of the Moon and Mars, the metal worlds of spaceships and space stations, to planets only imagined. When the background noise is gone—the background itself—then we can often see ourselves as we really are. So it is when we enter Faerie—the Golden Wood, the haunted house, the gingerbread cottage, Lantern Waste, or sometimes, the house next door, or in our own house. Facing the dangerous and/or unfamiliar, confronting the evil and/or the strange, often demands we be most our selves—or began learning what being that self means.
All right, let’s start with werewolves, which are of particular interest to me at the moment as I am finishing up The Werewolf and His Boy. Are werewolves human? Sometimes. If you prick them, will they not bleed? Yes, sometimes wolf blood, sometimes human. Depending on the legend used, they are at least in human form most of the time, or twenty-odd days out of the average thirty. But what I find telling is when we look into our reflection and we can, if the light is right, see into the dark recesses of our souls, the hidden places in our hearts, and there find the wolf, the beast, even without fangs or fur. Humans are animals, occasionally, we are beasts. Wrestling with the feral parts of our nature, recognizing they exist—that is part of what it means to be human.
For my werewolf, Henry Thorn, he has to sort out both what it means to be wolf and to be boy: that he both needs to run, to hit raw meat, to howl, and to cry and miss his mother and to love another human being. For Henry, this means loving Jamey, another boy—but that’s another essay. Henry also finds out more about who he is as a boy when he finds himself in a den of werewolves, amongst the beasts. Jamey needs protection and caring for—and Henry learns something more about human love, and thus about being human. It is through fantasy that I can explore the answers Henry finds as he also asks and begins to answer the question of who he is—human boy, wolf—Henry Thorn.
In what might be an iconic werewolf tale, American Werewolf in London, the question of what it means to be human—or rather, can a werewolf be human—is answered, no, or not quite, as the beast, the wolf, is far too strong, the call of the wild, or rather the disease, overwhelms the unlucky American tourist. He dies a beast. But then, our humanity is fragile—and the beast is never as far as away as we might like to think. My werewolf knows the beast is always present—and that if he remains in beast-form too long, he risks a difficult return to being human. Perhaps this tension between beast and human, with the beast sometimes the one in control, is an attempt to explain humans in mobs, or at war. Surely the beasts were the ones at My Lai, at so many Native American villages, at Auschwitz.
Fantasy, with its transformations, its wishes, its dreams and magical beings who are so very much like us and yet so very different, does present ways to explore answers to the question of what it means to be human. This doesn’t seem all that surprising as I write this, but until presented with this month’s blog theme, I hadn’t thought about it this concretely in connection to fantasy lit. Yet, as Henry Thorn, the werewolf, is clearly telling me, I have been thinking about it for quite some time. So, the next time I teach fantasy …
***
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has been published in such journals and collections as Icarus, Collective Fallout. The Silver Gryphon, North Carolina Literary Review, Romance and Beyond, and Aboriginal Science Fiction. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2. He is presently working on a novel about a gay werewolf and his godling boyfriend and a collection of gay-themed speculative fiction short stories.
Being Human
Deborah Ross
I think we Homo sapiens have been discussing what being human is and means since we developed abstract language and probably before that. At first, the driving motivation was undoubtedly how to tell what is us and not-us. This is certainly a biological imperative at the cellular level; our immune systems must tackle the question every day, attacking foreign substances like viruses, bacteria, and allergenic proteins, and it’s also why cancer is so insidious (cells with the right molecular passwords that nonetheless behave like ravening barbarians). The same distinctions hold true at the level of the individual, family/clan, and larger, political units. Whether we’re talking about communities or nations, “us” = “human” = friendly, safe, cooperative, reliable, and “them” = “something else” = dangerous, untrustworthy, competitors for limited resources. In this way, “human” tends to be exclusionary and frictions tend to narrow the scope even further.
In science fiction and fantasy, however, we tend to use the term in a inclusionary way. Often the words “human” and “person” are interchangeable. Sf/f writers and readers pioneered the suggestions that all sapient races think of themselves as people and therefore, “human,” whatever the biological differences from Homo sapiens. I had a lot of fun with a race of giant slugs in Jaydium, who insisted that mammals were incapable of “personness.” The television series Star Trek often portrayed what Earth-humans and alien-humans have in common, rather than their unbridgeable differences. (The similarities were undoubtedly caused in part by the relatively primitive makeup and special effects, leading to the joke about aliens being actors with funny foreheads.) The creators of the series also exploited the romantic appeal of the exotic to generate love stories between members of different species, a phenomenon highly unlikely to occur in nature but one that had the effect of demonstrating the shared values of sapient beings. This is an example of broadening of the use of “human” as a term to include any beings of similar intelligence and culture that we can understand and sympathize with.
The inversion of the broadening effect comes up most commonly in horror: beings that look and sound human but which lack some trait or motivation we consider so important as to be a necessary part of the definition of human: empathy, for example, or the capacity for love. A prime example of this is the vampire, who “walks among us” as if human but differs in his essential nature. The horrific aspect arises in part from his blood thirst, but even more from the betrayal of the assumption of shared humanity.
None of this addresses the question of what it is it we feel defines human as opposed to intelligent-animal, a question not restricted to writers of speculative fiction. We can look at the biological characteristics of Homo sapiens, such as opposable thumbs or a greatly developed prefrontal cortex (the region responsible for complex moral judgments and control of social behavior, among other things). We can look at behavioral traits like language, prolonged rearing of young and care for the aged, the use of fire and cooking, tool-making, and the like. But in this larger universe we live in, is it wise to judge another entity as human or nonhuman based solely on what they look like or how they act? Is a child born with crippling, distorting defects or an adult with a deforming disease not still human? What about a person who has suffered a debilitating stroke and can no longer communicate? These and many other, similar questions highlight the difficulty of defining human by observable characteristics.
Instead, we can look to experiential qualities: the capacity for love, for wonder, for kindness; the awareness of personal mortality and the “binding” of time through personal and generational transmission of memory; abstract thought, and so forth. It may well be that animals have some of these abilities but lack the means (or perhaps the inclination!) to communicate them to us. We know, for example, that many species exhibit behavior we interpret as grief, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Certainly, cooperation is not limited to Homo sapiens, and tool- making definitely is not. So instead of emphasizing how we are different from other creatures in our world, we can focus instead on how wonderful it is that the things we value in ourselves are not exclusive to our species. Or, contrariwise, that humanity is not limited to humans.
Fantasy and What It Means to Be Human
Andrea Hosth
One of the primary preoccupations of science fiction is said to be the question of what it means to be human. Seeing ourselves through alien eyes allows us to see ourselves anew. It’s a question which is less commonly associated with fantasy, and yet the sub-genre is equally ripe for examining the question of humanity through the use of non-humans.
One of the common positions taken when depicting humans in fantasy (particularly in fantasy which uses a roleplaying game basis, but also many less structured works) is that of humans as a middle ground, a kind of neutral party capable of achieving good, but all too ready to give in to baser impulses.
Other characteristics typically awarded humanity are versatility and creativity. Humans can be all things, while other races possess extremes – age/intelligence combined with sterility. Strength mixed with a lack of imagination. Humans are portrayed as young, vigorous, spontaneous, a little naïve, courageous, capable of great love and vivid passions. It is a very common trope to have the resolution of a dire battle revolve around a human’s ability to love, or innovate, believe, or be brave to the point of stupidity. It is equally common for other races to be failing, or to “Go into the West” and leave their territories to humans territories. Who took up residence in Rivendell, once Elrond moved on? Did they drift, dowdy and out of place, among the echoes of their splendid predecessors?
This frequent positioning of humanity as a versatile and rapidly improving ‘young’ race does not appear to be a deliberate examination of what it means to be human (as seen in those novels which attempt to make a point about humanity by viewing it through alien eyes), but instead a glorification of the traits humanity currently displays. Crude and ignorant – but just because of youth! Comparatively powerless, but able to think of new solutions to old problems. Vigorous, a bit chaotic, blundering occasionally, but heading inexorably upward, natural successors to the world’s bounty.
These are the stories we write about ourselves, the flip side of the grimdark/grittygrotty species of fantasy, where the narrative itself rhapsodises about human nature as something special and true and good.
I’ll end, without further comment, with a series of quotes from Doctor Who. The Doctor is not always so complimentary, but this has been the thrust of many of the rebooted series:
" Well, you could do that. Yeah, you could do that. Of course you could. But why? Look at these people, these human beings. Consider their potential! From the day they arrive on the planet, blinking, step into the sun, there is more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than — no, hold on. Sorry, that’s The Lion King. But the point still stands. Leave them alone!" – The Christmas Invasion.
" Oh, might have spent a million years evolving into clouds of gas… and another million as downloads, but you always revert to the same basic shape: the fundamental human. End of the universe and here you are. Indomitable, that’s the word! Indomitable! Ha!" – Utopia.
" The one thing you can’t do… is stop them thinking. [He begins rising upwards angelically] Tell me the human race is degenerate now…when they can do this." – Last of the Time Lords.
“And shards of gold flecked violet split the air with sound and fury! With laughter love and tears I pressed my lips to these spirits, freed them to walk across the page,”
First Breath, Valjeanne Jeffers
What is it that drives our characters? Their humanity. And this is more important than their preternatural powers. Their strength. Or what they look like. It even takes precedence over the wondrous plots we, as writers, devise. That our characters are human and driven by the same emotions and quests that drive us as writers, and which drive our readers– even if they are sociopaths or mad men. The need for love, shelter, money. The emotions of desire, rage, melancholy…
The same qualities that make us, the writers and our readers, identify with them and love them. Or hate them.
I have created characters so loathsome that I couldn’t wait to kill them off. And others that I loved so much I used all sorts of plot machinations to keep them alive. Our characters are spirits who walk across the page: women and men who mirror our struggles.
What it means to be human
Carole McDonnell
From the beginning of time (and perhaps before time began) the question has always existed: what does it mean to be human?
Humanity lives/exists within a prescribed setting which limits knowledge, age, joy, the body, sexuality, tribe, power, authority, dominion, physical movement, movement in time.
As a writer of Christian fiction I grew up with the story of Adam and Eve which is the first encounter most Christians have with the question of What does it mean to be human. In that story, man is created but not yet settled into a specific kind of being. (And in the Christian mythos, man will not find his true “self” and “being” until the end of time when time is no more.
Adam and Eve are beings who do not die. Yet they are not really immortal. They’re in a strange nexus of creation where they are like god with (some) dominion and some knowledge. But they lack something, something God apparently thinks is not particularly important. They do not understand right and wrong.
They have consciousness but are without law or conscience. They have a blissful ignorance of evil and cannot judge/blame either themselves, others, God, or the world. For them, it is a world which is neither immoral or moral.
Despite God’s desire that they remain outside of the realm of guilt or consciousness of evil, God did make them moral beings. Their one morality: the freedom to obey or not to obey. They are aware of one thing that they lack: they do not fully understand the ramifications of evil: disease, death, cruelty, hunger, toil, meaninglessness, and the thousand ills flesh is heir to. This knowledge of death is what separates them from God, what makes them less than God.
But third agency enters the picture and challenges them to be like God. The agency tempts them with knowledge of evil, law, conscience, guilt. The humans take a wager upon themselves. It is possible that humans can understand evil and not fall into guilt. Their first response to eyes opened to evil: shame. Shme about what? Shame in their comparison to perfect God. Thus humanity falls from its own perfection as it aimed for God’s perfection.
There is so much in this story, myth, history. And all fantasy stories echo it. All these elements are found in fantasy: Humans who wish to put side emotions and become, robots who wish to be humans, humans locked way from Eden, humans betrayed by a God, humans betraying their gods, humans casting off their gods, intrusive deceiving godlike figures, humans battling death, humans defying death, humans conquering time, humans failing a task, humans striving, humans ignorant of evil, humans being dominated by the world, humans dominating the world. All the echoes are found in fantasy stories and will apparently continue until the end of time.
Carole McDonnell is the author of the Fantasy Novel , The Constant Tower
http://www.amazon.com/The-Constant-To...
Spirit Fruit: Collected Speculative Fiction an eBook available as an eBook at kindle.
What Does It Mean to be Human: Answering in Fantasy
Warren Rochelle
What does it mean to be human? This is a question I pose when I teach my science fiction lit class, foregrounding it as one of the perennial themes of the genre. I have yet to pose this same question in fantasy lit. When I was thinking about what to write for this month’s post I found myself wondering why I don’t. After all, as Le Guin says in “Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing,” “the story—from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding” (quoted in Language of the Night 27). So, why shouldn’t I consider fantasy as a tool for “the purpose of gaining understanding”—for understanding something about meaning human?
Science fiction often answers this question with aliens of one kind or another; how then might fantasy do so with werewolves, dragons, and elves, fairies, and witches, and other assorted magical beings? As Vulcans and Martians become ways of seeing and understanding humanity, through juxtaposition, comparison, and contrast, through reflection, and in metaphor and symbol, so these denizens of Faerie. Science fiction also will sometimes posit answers to this question when humans are taken out of the familiar—the green hills of Earth to the deserts of the Moon and Mars, the metal worlds of spaceships and space stations, to planets only imagined. When the background noise is gone—the background itself—then we can often see ourselves as we really are. So it is when we enter Faerie—the Golden Wood, the haunted house, the gingerbread cottage, Lantern Waste, or sometimes, the house next door, or in our own house. Facing the dangerous and/or unfamiliar, confronting the evil and/or the strange, often demands we be most our selves—or began learning what being that self means.
All right, let’s start with werewolves, which are of particular interest to me at the moment as I am finishing up The Werewolf and His Boy. Are werewolves human? Sometimes. If you prick them, will they not bleed? Yes, sometimes wolf blood, sometimes human. Depending on the legend used, they are at least in human form most of the time, or twenty-odd days out of the average thirty. But what I find telling is when we look into our reflection and we can, if the light is right, see into the dark recesses of our souls, the hidden places in our hearts, and there find the wolf, the beast, even without fangs or fur. Humans are animals, occasionally, we are beasts. Wrestling with the feral parts of our nature, recognizing they exist—that is part of what it means to be human.
For my werewolf, Henry Thorn, he has to sort out both what it means to be wolf and to be boy: that he both needs to run, to hit raw meat, to howl, and to cry and miss his mother and to love another human being. For Henry, this means loving Jamey, another boy—but that’s another essay. Henry also finds out more about who he is as a boy when he finds himself in a den of werewolves, amongst the beasts. Jamey needs protection and caring for—and Henry learns something more about human love, and thus about being human. It is through fantasy that I can explore the answers Henry finds as he also asks and begins to answer the question of who he is—human boy, wolf—Henry Thorn.
In what might be an iconic werewolf tale, American Werewolf in London, the question of what it means to be human—or rather, can a werewolf be human—is answered, no, or not quite, as the beast, the wolf, is far too strong, the call of the wild, or rather the disease, overwhelms the unlucky American tourist. He dies a beast. But then, our humanity is fragile—and the beast is never as far as away as we might like to think. My werewolf knows the beast is always present—and that if he remains in beast-form too long, he risks a difficult return to being human. Perhaps this tension between beast and human, with the beast sometimes the one in control, is an attempt to explain humans in mobs, or at war. Surely the beasts were the ones at My Lai, at so many Native American villages, at Auschwitz.
Fantasy, with its transformations, its wishes, its dreams and magical beings who are so very much like us and yet so very different, does present ways to explore answers to the question of what it means to be human. This doesn’t seem all that surprising as I write this, but until presented with this month’s blog theme, I hadn’t thought about it this concretely in connection to fantasy lit. Yet, as Henry Thorn, the werewolf, is clearly telling me, I have been thinking about it for quite some time. So, the next time I teach fantasy …
***
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has been published in such journals and collections as Icarus, Collective Fallout. The Silver Gryphon, North Carolina Literary Review, Romance and Beyond, and Aboriginal Science Fiction. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2. He is presently working on a novel about a gay werewolf and his godling boyfriend and a collection of gay-themed speculative fiction short stories.
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