Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism, 1898–2015

SCHOLARLY ARTICLE Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 HSUAN L. HSU Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism, 1898–2015 Then suddenly, at the sight of his smitten enemy rolling on the ground at his feet, the primitive man, the half-brute of the stone age, leaped to life in Wilbur’s breast—he felt his muscles thrilling with a strength they had not known before. Frank Norris, Moran of the Lady Letty My mind fired in phenomenal ways, my energy ex- ploded and I was resurrected as an entirely new being. Nathan, “Success Story,” marksdailyapple.com These epigraphs, taken from an 1898 naturalist novel and a contemporary online forum for the Primitive Health community, follow a post-Darwinian script of romantic atavism that I call paleo-narrative— an imaginary structure that invokes an idealized version of humanity’s past to envision an optimal, implicitly white body defined in terms of purity, instinct, and austere power. Although contemporary paleo- narratives frequently reference the Paleolithic era, “paleo-” (derived from the Greek palaios, “old” or “ancient”) now signifies a broader sense of vestigial primal resources frequently invoked as a counter- point to anthropogenic threats to individual and collective health. Paleo-narratives paradoxically deploy evolutionary ideas in an effort to isolate a frozen, optimal moment in time. Motivated by nostalgia, they dramatize the difference between modern human embodiment and those of hunter-gatherers imagined to be perfectly attuned to their ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 0.0 (2019), pp. 1–28 doi:10.1093/isle/isz010 VC The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] 2 ISLE environment. Linking atavistic practices to individual and collective renewal, paleo-narratives are a key point of intersection for several dis- cursive currents that run through US history: representations of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 “regeneration through violence” in the frontier, the Puritan jeremiad’s plea to purify our culture from moral crisis and social degeneration, and romanticism’s plea for the moral influence of direct communion with Nature.1 What social function do paleo-narratives serve? What anxieties do they resolve? What problems do they attune us to, and what do they obscure? How do they model the relationship between the health of human bodies and the environment? What are the racial and national implications of appeals to prehistoric practices across deep time? This essay will address these questions by considering two moments in which paleo-narratives have flourished in the US: literary naturalism’s depictions of white subjects reverting to prehistorical embodiment around the turn of the twentieth century, and twenty-first century health practices inspired by research (and fantasies) about both indigenous and Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Whereas debates about “paleo” practices tend to focus on the scientific findings of pale- oanthropologists and health researchers, my comparison of industrial era novels and health manuals draws out the social and racial fictions that underlie both these discourses. Juxtaposing naturalist novels by Frank Norris and Jack London with the contemporary health- oriented texts The Paleo Diet (2002) and Born to Run (2009), this essay considers how paleo-narratives assuage anxieties about mod- ernization, embodiment, and environment in disparate historical moments. This transhistorical approach contributes a cultural studies perspec- tive to the growing body of scholarship on “neo-naturalism,” or literary naturalism’s influences across the twentieth century. While scholars such as Donald Pizer, James Giles, and June Howard2 have traced naturalism’s influences through diverse literary genres, this essay shifts focus to how one strain of primitivist naturalism is reshaped in the context of contemporary neoliberalism. I argue that, for naturalist authors responding to the putatively corrupting influences of modernity, paleo-narratives channel atavism—a tendency frequently associated with degeneration in racialized populations—into dramas of white regeneration. While contemporary health discourses share this investment in regenerating white bodies, they re-inscribe racial distinctions by dissociating “paleo” practices from cultural and historical contexts and thus obscuring the material determinants of racialized health disparities. Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 3 I. Naturalism and White Atavism In No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920, the historian T.J. Jackson Lears argues Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 that the rapid industrial and social transformations of this period gave rise to discourses of “antimodernism” that associated industrial capi- talism, the closing of the US frontier, and middle-class urban life with “bodily and spiritual enervation” (28). As antidotes to the vitiating and emasculating effects of “overcivilization,” antimodernists projected desirable qualities such as force, vitality, passion, spirituality, and mar- tial prowess onto a range of putatively premodern figures ranging from medieval and “Oriental” cultures to children.3 Building on Lears’s work, Gail Bederman has shown how Progressive Era anxieties concerning white, middle-class male identity gave rise to widespread efforts to remake conventional, Victorian ideals of restrained “manliness” in more aggressive, “masculine” terms (12). Many of this era’s peculiar cultural developments—the rapid spread of YMCAs and other exercise facilities, the rise of overseas empire as both novelistic plot and national policy, the spread of the Boy Scouts, Theodore Roosevelt’s treatises on hunting and the “strenuous life,” and a shift from sentimental fiction to the more extreme plots of adventure fiction and naturalism4—share what Lears calls a “fascination with primal ir- rationality and instinctual vitality” as forces that could enhance health on both an individual and national scale (247). Paleo-narratives thus play a vital role in what Mark Seltzer calls the “craft of making men, [which] was the antidote to anxieties about the depletion of agency and virility in consumer and machine culture” (149). Antimodernism’s pre- scription for assuring the nation’s future vitality is eloquently summa- rized by John Myers O’Hara’s poem “Atavism” (which provided the epigraph for The Call of the Wild): “Loosen the fetters that gall,/Back to the primal scheme” (229). Naturalism—a genre whose method can be traced to Emile Zola’s reading of Claude Bernard’s medical treatise, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865)5—draws on depictions of types and populations (rather than individual “character”) to address biopolitical questions concerning the environmental shifts brought about by mod- ernization, the health of populations, and the future of the white race. Although literary naturalists were neither unilateral nor unambiguous in their views about modernity, their critiques of industrial modernity and their interest in the deep time of evolutionary history strongly res- onated with antimodernist views. As the first US literary movement to incorporate evolutionary theory, scientific method, and recent paleo- anthropological analysis of humanid fossils into its aesthetic form, 4 ISLE naturalism was preoccupied with how both “natural” and anthropogenic environmental influences interact with primordial human types. According to Gina Rossetti, naturalism produced multiple and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 “contradictory images” that represented primitive humanity “as primordial beast, as the brute working class, as the immigrant, as the modernist artist, and ...as the racial exotic” (Imagining the Primitive 5). While critics such as Gina Rosetti and Katherine Fusco have analyzed discourses of primitivism in the works of Frank Norris, Jack London, and other authors, they have tended to focus on negative depictions of atavistic degeneration in works—such as Norris’s McTeague (1899), Vandover and the Brute (1914), and The Sea-Wolf (1904)—that feature humans devolving into cruel, unthinking brutes.6 However, these authors also offered more positive, even idealized depictions of primitive types—paleo-narratives that promised to counteract modernity’s perceived threats to conventional notions to race, gender, and sexual- ity. Moran of the “Lady Letty” and The Call of the Wild respond to these perceived dangers by staging an exceptionalist white atavism that counteracts the enervating effects of modernity. In Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), Norris recounts the adventures of Wilbur, a Yale graduate and socialite who is kidnapped on the docks of San Francisco and forced to join a crew of “Chinamen” aboard the Bertha Millner, a schooner owned by the Chinese Six Companies. Shortly after the Bertha rescues Moran—an androgynous young woman dressed as a male sailor—aboard the wreck of the Lady Letty, the Chinese crewmen desert the ship and the Bertha is beached ashore a

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