Lycanthropy, Apples, and Utahraptor: How societies reflect fear
Just as chefs innovate for a repetition-weary palate, so too I try to offer today’s sophisticated readers something novel for their money. Turns out entertaining you all is hard when everything’s been done.
When inspiration fails — which is most of the time (don’t wait for it) — my weapon of choice is INVERSION. I take something you know and turn it on its head.
Like Vernal Wort, my scoundrel from FANTASMAGORIA. (Yes, his name is a play on venereal wart. Because that’s what he is.)
We’re all familiar with the basic werewolf story, which, like its analogs Jekyll and Hyde and The Invisible Man, is an adventure-study of the beast within. So here, a fair man gets bit by a foul creature, becomes infected, and carries out wanton acts of lust and barbaric revenge.
As an aside, good Victorians in the time of cholera were both fascinated and terrified by two great evils: contagion and sin, which they believed were synonymous — sinful acts could corrupt like disease.
This belief is the origin of the aphorism “one bad apple spoils the bunch,” which came about in the days before refrigeration when apples were a key foodstuff, particularly in the country, because they would keep through winter.
However, the mold that ruins them spreads by contact, so each apple had to be inspected before being put away for the season. Otherwise, as the saying goes, one day you would open the larder to find that one bad apple really had spoiled the bunch. (And you couldn’t just run to the store to get more.)
In a world full of contagion and sin, you can see where there would be a kind of constant, low-level anxiety about “bad people,” and how you wouldn’t want your son or daughter (but let’s be honest, particularly your daughter) to hang around them lest some of their wickedness spread. Like wearing dresses that revealed her ankles.
We see remnants of this belief today in the popular fear of homosexuals in places of worship or positions of authority (camp counselors, troop leaders) because if there’s too much contact then little Jimmy might contract the gays.
(As an aside to my aside, you can blame the advent of refrigeration and the freewheeling 70s — Donny and Marie in particular — for popularizing the reverse phrase “one bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch,” which, while philosophically palatable, is technically complete horseshit. Don’t get your wisdom from pop music, kids. Get it from me.)
The werewolf, then, is a wonderfully Victorian fear, namely that a good, sexually repressed man (because women were angels, you see) might contract an erection– I mean lycanthropy and lose control to the sinful beast within.
Thankfully, the Victorian worldview is in decline (although still not dead), and few contemporary readers will find that fear very compelling. Hence in popular literature the werewolf has morphed into a kind of uber-human, like a vampire-hunter. Or a pet.
I think today the problem we have is not keeping hold of the beast but rising above it — the anxiety of not measuring up, of feeling we could always be better.
Enter Vernal, who contracts a form lycanthropy where laughing (instead of a full moon — Oh, wretched sign of woman!) triggers his erectio– I mean, change. But instead of a basically good man becoming beastly, Vernal is a bad apple who becomes benign. He’s a scoundrel who turns into a unicorn, and, whilst afflicted, is “filled with pleasant thoughts!” The beast is his noble self, let loose by mirth, the release of anxiety.
I only bring it up because ol’ Vernal came to me in the shower this morning. I had a vision of him running through a fern-filled jungle holding a precious artifact — Indiana Jones-style — while being chased by a tribe of razor-toothed cannibal cherubs wearing cloth diapers and hurling spears from the backs of blue-and-red-feathered raptors.
He, of course, betrays his companion to her death in order to secure his own escape from the jungle-covered back of the mountain turtle.
He thinks.
Anyway, back to Episode Four.
