Wild Humans: The Culture/Nature Duality in Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Abstract

This, too, was myself. Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886 Jungian analysis has the virtue of stating for us in a new way the problem of the nature and origin of evil. It warns us that, when we finally return to Ithaca, we will find evil there too. --Roger Bartra, The Artificial Savage, 1997 The part-human, part-animal character refers to a semi-bestial being that lives between the human and the natural world. This hybrid creature shares characteristics of two different realms. Since the character is composed of two different and contrasting tendencies, each corresponding to a specific disposition and environment, the human/animal character is caught between two personalities. Be it female or male, the character lives a life of negotiation between two worlds drawn in conflict against each another. The Wild Human is a mythological figure that serves as undercurrent for the human/animal characters featured here. The figure has been recognized as a mythical subtext through literary history, from antiquity (the hairy Enkidu) through the biblical tradition (Nebuchadnezzar, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene), the Middle Ages (Merlin, Mary the Egyptian), and the Renaissance, as well as in romantic literary characters (Spenser's Sir Satyrane, Ariosto's Orlando, Shakespeare's Caliban, Rousseau's Noble Savage, Frankenstein's creature, and Kipling's Mowgli). The Wild Human is a place of contingency where the human realm encounters the animal one. The figure is made up of two essences which he or she internalizes from abstract notions of that which is conventionally considered human (culture) and that which is conventionally considered animal (nature). The human and the animal are then organized within the figure in a false binary opposition. The pair is falsely opposed because, as has been well established already, more recently by the ecological sciences, the human element coincides with the animal. (1) Indeed, the culture/nature binary in its civilization/wilderness form is at the heart of the figure of the Wild Human and thus the human/animal character. The civilization/wilderness binary derives from the timeless culture/nature binary, focusing on the antagonism between the human environment and the nonhuman one. The aspect of civilization brought forward here is that of an ordered community based on human interaction and cooperation and providing the individual all that is needed in order to lead a satisfying life, including protection from chaotic external forces. On the other hand, wilderness, exemplified by the desert or the forest, is nature in its most frightful guise. Uncultivated and peopled with all kinds of mysterious beasts, the wilderness is dangerous, out of human control or influence, incapable of sustaining human life--the world untamed. Wilderness differs from nature in that, because the latter has been molded and altered by the human will, it is now useful and complementary to society, not detrimental to it, and thus has become part of civilization. The opposition between civilization and wilderness can thus only be understood hierarchically, for both cannot be seen as desirable simultaneously; one is always preferred to the other. (2) Like the human/animal character the Wild Human engenders, this personage is defined by his or her duality of essences. Richard Bernheimer, who has studied the figure of the Wild Man in detail through the Middle Ages, (3) describes him: It is a hairy man curiously compounded of human and animal traits, without, however[,] sinking to the level of an ape. It exhibits upon its naked human anatomy a growth of fur, leaving bare only its face, feet and hands, at times its knees and elbows, or the breasts of the female of the species. Frequently the creature is shown wielding a heavy club or mace, or the trunk of a tree; and since its body is usually naked except for the shaggy covering, it may hide its nudity under a strand of twisted foliage worn around the loins. …