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 contem- porary 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 natural- ism’s depictions of white subjects reverting to prehistorical embodi- ment 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 liter- ary 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 es- say shifts focus to how one strain of primitivist naturalism is reshaped in the context of contemporary neoliberalism. I argue that, for natural- ist authors responding to the putatively corrupting influences of mo- dernity, 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 histori- cal 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 popu- lations (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 anthropo- genic 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 pri- mordial 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 primi- tive 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 Mexican island. Wilbur and Moran then lead the Bertha’s Chinese sai- lors in a battle against a crew of stranded Chinese beachcombers— dark-skinned “anthropoid apes” attempting to seize the schooner and its stores. In her groundbreaking analysis of Norris’s representations of Chinese “coolies,” Colleen Lye argues that they serve as displaced fig- ures for broader anxieties about both the degradation of labor and the “disenchantment of nature” under monopoly capitalism (93). Throughout the plot, Wilbur is confronted by—and frequently subor- dinated to—a series of racialized or feminine authority figures: the Bertha’s rough-spoken “red” captain, the physically formidable Moran, the Chinese cook, and the crew of Chinese beachcombers. The novel’s plot also evokes a broader threat to public health, insofar as the Chinese schooner is hunting for shark liver oil to pass off as higher- quality cod liver oil for urban consumers interested in such natural health supplies. Emasculated by his overcivilized role as a “clubman and college man,” Wilbur at first responds to these conflicts with a neurasthenic “nervousness he could not overcome” (213, 29). Wilbur’s racial integrity and manhood are both at stake in these encounters: Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 5
“dressed in Chinese jeans and blouse, with Chinese wicker sandals on his bare feet,” he wonders: “Am I a right-minded man and a thorough- bred, or a mush-head, or merely a prudent, sensible sort of chap that Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 values his skin and bones?” (175). Wilbur’s introspective question con- flates gender with race, contrasting “thoroughbred” Euro-American manhood with the specters of miscegenation and racial degeneration. During the first struggle between the Bertha’s crew and the Chinese beachcombers, Wilbur is merely a stunned bystander: “How it hap- pened, just who made the first move, in precisely what manner the ac- tion had been planned, or what led up to it, Wilbur could not afterward satisfactorily explain” (195). When Moran tortures the beachcombers’ leader, Wilbur cannot bear to stand by. Yet just a few chapters later, Wilbur is issuing commands to Moran and planning a filibustering expedition to Cuba. The novel’s plot—structured by a se- ries of racial and gender inversions—pivots upon Wilbur’s coming into his ancestral inheritance as a dominant white man. Wilbur’s development from a passive “clubman” to a virile “thoroughbred” is catalyzed by two decisive, one-on-one contests. Although he initially balks at the prospect of fighting against “barbarous” Chinese beachcombers, Wilbur eventually finds himself in a struggle to the death with a “Chinaman.” After he kills his assail- ant, Norris suspends the novel’s external plot to present a paleo- narrative detailing a profound internal transformation of Wilbur’s muscles, nerves, and blood: 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. His nerves, stretched tense as harp-strings, were vibrating to a new tune. His blood spun through his veins till his ears roared with the rush of it. Never had he conceived of such savage exultation as that which mastered him at that instant. (214–15) Life-or-death struggle—a central concept in both Hegel’s dialectic of the master and slave and Darwin’s theory of evolution—paradoxically precipitates not character development or increased autonomy but an atavistic descent into “savage exultation.” Instead of achieving mas- tery, Wilbur finds himself “mastered” by savagery. That savagery, in turn, is channeled into a narrative of sexual and racial regeneration: “All that was strong and virile and brutal in him seemed to harden and stiffen in the moment after he had seen the beach-comber collapse limply on the sand under the last strong knife-blow” (222–23). 6 ISLE
Tumescent with blood and nerves, Wilbur’s “aroused” physicality sig- nals that the act of killing has somehow regenerated his sexual and re- productive fitness. Wilbur’s symbolic erection—along with the sexual Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 fecundity it stands for—come as a direct result of participating in racial violence along the Pacific frontier. Wilbur’s masculine regeneration through violence recalls the devel- opmental theories of psychology and pedagogy professor G. Stanley Hall, who argued that educators should encourage boys to express their “savage” instincts because the development of those impulses would counteract the vitiating influences of overcivilization and neur- asthenia. Perhaps the US’s first “disease of civilization,” neurasthenia was a common (at times “near epidemic”) diagnosis that associated the excessive physical and sexual restraint of middle-and upper-class white people with “weak nerves” (Bederman 85). Drawing on recapit- ulation theory—which posited that individuals relive ancestral stages of evolutionary development—Hall argued that “Civilized boys...still had access to the powerful emotions of their savage ancestors. By fully reliving their ancestors’ vibrant passions...little boys could incorpo- rate a primitive’s emotional strength into their adult personalities” (Bederman 95). In his fight with the “Chinaman,” Wilbur undergoes a similar education in savage instincts. But his newly discovered vigor is only fully realized in the following scene, when Wilbur is suddenly attacked by Moran. Moran, too, has reverted to a more primitive version of herself: “Once more she had lapsed back to the Vikings and sea-rovers of the tenth century—she was Brunhilde again, a shield-maiden, a Valkyrie, a Berserker and the daughter of Berserkers, and like them she fought in a veritable frenzy, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, every sense exalted, every force doubled, insensible to pain, deaf to all reason” (216). If her Nordic ancestry provides Moran with resources in battle, it also marks her as inferior to Wilbur’s Anglo-Saxon blood. Whereas Moran experi- ences a frenzied and “doubled” strength “deaf to all reason,” Wilbur undergoes “a sudden quadrupling of all his strength, moral and phys- ical” (222). Unlike his fight with the “Chinaman,” Wilbur’s encounter with Moran becomes a struggle for recognition: “It was not Moran whom he fought; it was her force, her determination, her will, her splendid independence, that he set himself to conquer ... . It was a question now as to who should master the other” (218–19). Whereas Wilbur’s earlier fight established his racial supremacy over the “Chinaman,” his fight with Moran secures his newly acquired virility. Moran loses her initiative and aggression after yielding to Wilbur: “It was Wilbur who was now the master, it was Wilbur who was aggressive” (222). One of Wilbur’s first actions as the new leader is to Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 7 explain to the beachcombers’ leader, Hoang, the lesson in what has transpired: “don’t try to fight with white people. Other coolies, I don’t say. But when you try to get the better of white people, you are out of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 your class” (231–32). Whereas much of Moran describes a world in which hierarchies of race and gender seem overturned by Wilbur’s overcivilization, Moran’s assertiveness, and the empowered status of Chinese men, Wilbur’s atavistic experience of “stone age” vitality on the edges of civilization reestablishes the authority and power of Anglo-Saxon manhood. Rather than return to San Francisco with their newly acquired wealth, Wilbur plans a filibustering expedition to Cuba7—a decision that provides a blueprint for enhancing US imperial manhood through atavistic violence during the nascent years of the American Century. While critics have noted that Jack London reworked the plot of Moran (which he had praised as “well done” in an 1899 letter) in The Sea-Wolf (1904), there are also striking parallels between Moran and The Call of the Wild (1903). London’s story of a tame dog’s gradual “decivilization” in the northern frontier, may have been directly influ- enced by Norris’s mobilization of primitivism for the purposes of racial and national remasculinization in Moran (which London had read and praised as “well done”8). But if Call revisits the paleo-narrative that plays a pivotal role in Norris’s novel, it also considers how eating—as well as physical combat—can provide access to primal vitality. Call tracks the atavistic development of Buck, a mongrel dog who begins the novel enjoying a pampered life “at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley” (17). When the gardener’s assistant treacherously sells Buck to dog traders, he is transported to Alaska to work as a sled dog. In addition to being brutally beaten by a dog-breaker and attacked by less civilized dogs, Buck must adapt to a colder climate and the hard labor of “trace and trail” (123). In an early passage that anticipates contemporary arguments for running barefoot, London describes the hardening of Buck’s maladapted feet: Buck’s feet were not so compact and hard as the feet of the huskies. His had softened during the many genera- tions since the day his last wild ancestor was tamed by a cave-dweller or river man. All day long he limped in ag- ony, and camp once made, lay down like a dead dog. [T]he dog-driver rubbed Buck’s feet for half an hour each night after supper, and sacrificed the tops of his own moccasins to make four moccasins for Buck. This was a great relief, and Buck caused even the weazened face of Perrault to twist itself into a grin one morning, 8 ISLE
when Franc¸ois forgot the moccasins and Buck lay on his back, his four feet waving appealingly in the air, and re-
fused to budge without them. Later his feet grew hard Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 to the trail, and the worn-out foot-gear was thrown away. (77) Despite its humorous tone, this portrait of Buck receiving foot mas- sages and waving his feet in the air emphasizes how generations of do- mestication have rendered him a pampered and emasculated version of his “wild ancestor,” unfit for running on harsh terrain (77). Following the logic of the paleo-narrative, however, this passage con- cludes by affirming that Buck’s softness was eventually remedied by prolonged exposure to the agonies of the trail. London’s reference to the eventually discarded “mocassins” here anticipates the racial logic of the novel’s ending, in which Buck’s Euro-American version of primi- tive vitality is shown to be superior to that of the region’s indigenous inhabitants. Eventually, however, Buck’s strenuous experiences in the Yukon awaken his primal instincts, and he becomes the pack leader after defeating a bullying, “snow-white,” Norwegian dog named Spitz (37). Rather than experiencing labor and environmental obstacles as hard- ships, Buck is liberated by the struggle for survival. Among the novel’s most lyrical passages are its descriptions of procuring and consuming “living meat”: There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and be- yond which life cannot rise .... This ecstasy, this forget- fulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf- cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each sepa- rate muscle, joint, and sinew .... (90–91) Echoing Norris’s account of Wilbur being “mastered” by savagery, London makes the paradoxical claim that being “mastered by the sheer surging of life” can be a liberating experience. London’s prose trans- forms the hard work of procuring food into an experience of “ecstasy,” as Buck’s instinctive “blood lust” offers him a way to access his deepest Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 9 self (90). By associating hunting with both war and art, London aesthe- ticizes the violence of the hunt. This argument that the visceral experi- ence of the chase can cultivate effects similar to art echoes Roosevelt’s Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 prescription in The Wilderness Hunter (1893) of hunting as a cure for overcivilization: “The chase is among the best of all national pastimes; it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can possibly atone” (xxxi).9 Much of Buck’s new-found strength is attributed to his carnivorous diet. Whereas bread served as the nineteenth century’s paradigmatic symbol of a conventionally feminized middle-class domestic space, meat symbolized the virility conventionally associated with frontier spaces.10 Meat and grains were racialized as well as gendered: for ex- ample, Samuel Gompers and Herman Gutstadt’s anti-Asian pamphlet Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism (1902) equates relatively costly meat with white American manhood and a diet based on cheaper “rice” with the perverse domestic habits of undifferenti- ated, effeminate Asiatic masses. London offers an extensive—and rhe- torically excessive—account of the effects of Buck’s carnivorous diet: living on a straight meat diet, he was in full flower, at the high tide of his life, overspilling with vigor and viril- ity. ...Every part, brain and body, nerve tissue and fibre, was keyed to the most exquisite pitch; and between all the parts there was a perfect equilibrium or adjustment. To sights and sounds and events which required action, he responded with lightning-like rapidity .... He per- ceived and determined and responded in the same in- stant ... . His muscles were surcharged with vitality, and snapped into play sharply, like steel springs. Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and ram- pant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy and pour forth generously over the world. (208–09) London’s descriptions of the ecstasy and physical perfection that come from ingesting meat invoke meat’s symbolic value as a substance that, according to anthropologist Nick Fiddes, “tangibly represents human control of the natural world” and serves as “a potent statement of our supreme power” (2). Procured through active hunting, Buck’s “living meat” symbolizes a worldview that equates violence with masculinity, power, and freedom.11 The description of “sheer ecstasy [pouring] forth generously over the world” in the concluding lines of this passage adds an evolutionary perspective on meat’s putative tendency to 10 ISLE enhance sexual vitality, foreshadowing the rapid dissemination of Buck’s traits among the timber wolf population described in the novel’s final lines. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 Although humans cannot help deviating from Buck’s “straight meat diet,” London’s fascination with meat and hunting extended well beyond his dog stories. According to London’s biographers, the author claimed to have been deprived of meat during his childhood, and later became notorious in Bay Area taverns “for his consumption of ‘canni- bal sandwiches’ of raw meat and onions, or duck that had barely been passed over a flame before being pressed, and occasionally getting into fights” (Haley 198).12 Meat remained a prominent theme in London’s later fiction. In “A Piece of Steak” (1909), Tom King’s defeat in a boxing match is attributed not to his own merits, but to the agency of food: “Ah, that piece of steak would have done it! He had lacked just that for the decisive blow, and he had lost. It was all because of the piece of steak” (317). King fails to support his family with prize money from the match because he could only afford to eat bread and “flour gravy,” not steak, before the fight (279). London’s 1912 novel Smoke Bellew—in which the word “meat” occurs seventy-one times—presents meat not only as a material vehicle for assimilating the natural world (as when Bellew eats “a couple of pounds of uncooked bacon”) but also as a fig- ure of speech: “old Isaac Bellew, and all the other Bellews, had done things like this in their westward march of empire. What they had done, he could do. It was the meat, the strong meat, and he knew, as never before, that it required strong men to eat such meat” (24, 50). Meat-eating thus becomes a metaphor for internalizing the wilderness: when passing through perilous rapids, Bellew’s friend simply exclaims, “Meat! Meat! [...] We eat it raw! We eat it alive!” (51). As these parallels between meat-eating dogs and humans suggest, London’s anthropomorphizing descriptions of dogs present a prescrip- tion for Euro-Americans’ physical and racial regeneration. Buck’s story is steeped in racial overtones. Call begins by contrasting Buck with other dogs at Judge Miller’s estate who are described in both racialized and feminized terms: the narrator assures us that these other dogs “did not count” because they “lived obscurely in the recesses of the house after the fashion of Toots, the Japanese pug, or Ysabel, the Mexican hairless” (17). Buck is then sold by one of the gardener’s assistants—a presumably Hispanic man named “Manuel”—so that Manuel can in- dulge his addiction to the “Chinese lottery” (19). Later on, Buck is befriended by two other dogs in Alaska: “Skeet was a little Irish setter .... Nig, equally friendly though less demonstrative, was a huge black hound ...with eyes that laughed and a boundless good nature” (162). The descendant of an Alpine St. Bernard and a Scotch shepherd dog, Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 11
Buck is frequently contrasted with other dogs representing ethnic types associated with effeminate, depraved, or servile characteristics.13 The implicit contrast between Buck’s European ancestry and the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 devalued ethnic markers of other dogs is physically enacted in the Indian massacre that represents the culmination of Buck’s atavistic growth. When he finds his beloved companion John Thornton mur- dered by a group of Yeehat Indians, Buck draws on his newly acquired speed and instincts to enact revenge: There was no withstanding him. He plunged about in their very midst, tearing, rending, destroying, in con- stant and terrific motion which defied the arrows they discharged at him. In fact, so inconceivably rapid were his movements, and so closely were the Indians tangled together, that they shot one another with the arrows; and one young hunter, hurling a spear at Buck in mid- air, drove it through the chest of another hunter with such force that the point broke through the skin of the back and stood out beyond. Then a panic seized the Yeehats, and they fled in terror to the woods, proclaim- ing as they fled the advent of the Evil Spirit. (221) Like Wilbur’s fight with the Chinese beachcomber, this scene stages Buck’s natural superiority to the Yeehats. The latter are not only incom- petent in physical combat, but intellectually and spiritually con- founded by Buck’s speed: they unwittingly slaughter each other, give way to panic, and then come up with a supernatural explanation for their shortcomings.14 A second indigenous massacre soon follows: Buck kills several native timber wolves before their pack recognizes him as their new leader. These massacres of indigenous Northland men and dogs appear to contradict the novel’s claims about the strengthening qualities of fron- tier experience: if struggling in this extreme environment is what makes Buck so physically virtuosic, then why hasn’t it had a compara- ble effect on the Yeehats and timber wolves who have spent genera- tions there? Rather than deriving entirely from his changed environment, Buck’s abilities are the product of heredity and environ- ment. London describes Buck as the only Southland dog imported to the Yukon who had ever “shown up worthily in camp and on trail. They were all too soft, dying under the toil, the frost, and starvation. Buck was the exception” (80). Buck’s European stock (which, based on his breeding, could be read as an allegory for Swiss and Scottish immi- grants to the US) makes him a racial exception, and that exceptional white atavism is what enables him to defeat indigenous men and 12 ISLE wolves once the Northland climate has awakened his primal resources. Despite London’s interest in environmental determinism, these con- cluding scenes suggest that the influence of ancestry is even stronger, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 as extreme environments call forth Buck’s superior hereditary resour- ces. The novel’s dramatization of racial struggle—along with the novel’s repeated references to “the dominant primordial beast” (67)— echo Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of an atavism—“the splendid blond beast [that] has to get out again and go back to the wilderness”— available only to specific “noble races” ranging from the Romans, Arabians, and Japanese nobility to the Vikings (476–77).15 Whereas nineteenth-century anthropologists depicted women, in- digenous populations, racialized immigrants, and African Americans as living fossils prone to irrational, brutal tendencies, the climactic scenes of Moran and Call stage an exceptional white atavism in which Euro-American heroes access their own primitive resources. Unlike the atavistic states attributed to women and racialized groups, however, atavistic white males retain their reason and self-restraint: Wilbur is never “deaf to all reason” like the frenzied Moran; even after his “development (or retrogression)” into the dominant primordial beast, Buck displays “a certain deliberateness” that restrains him from “rashness and precipitate action” (61, 67). In these novels, Paleolithic episodes involving physical struggle, barefoot running, hunting, and wilderness survival counteract racialized and gendered threats of “race suicide” by calling forth primal resources imagined to be the ra- cial inheritance of white American men. As John Taliaferro has suggested, the racialized primitivism of Call may have been an important source for one of our culture’s most popu- lar paleolithic plots: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1912 bestseller, Tarzan of the Apes.16 Tarzan translates London’s naturalist paleo-narrative into a pulp adventure plot—one that, as Gail Bederman explains, is set “explicitly at the most primitive moment of human origins, when ‘nat- ural man’ appeared in his purest, most primal form” (220). The figure of Tarzan echoes Buck’s dreams about a primal human companion who appears shorter but physically much stronger and quicker than nineteenth-century men—a “hairy man [who] could spring up into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground, swinging by the arms from limb to limb, sometimes a dozen feet apart, letting go and catch- ing, never falling, never missing his grip ...” (112–13, 198–99).17 From its fascination with the boundary between human and animal to its ac- count of the hero’s insatiable desire to consume meat and its exagger- ated descriptions of his physical virtuosity, Tarzan echoes central elements of London’s novel. Significantly, the racialized life-and-death battles featured in Moran and Call are repeated in Tarzan’s African Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 13 setting: citing the moment when Burroughs’s protagonist introduces himself as “TARZAN, THE KILLER OF BEASTS AND BLACK MEN” and a scene in which Tarzan hangs an African warrior who has killed Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 Tarzan’s adoptive ape mother, Bederman characterizes him as “a one- man lynch mob” who draws on his primal physicality to murder African men (224, 223). Tarzan’s virility, like Buck’s, derives from both his European (in this case, aristocratic and Anglo-Saxon) ancestry and his education in the wild (he is raised by apes). Like London, Burroughs suggests that, after being exposed to a suitably primitive en- vironment, a white man is capable of greater physicality and virility than either apes or indigenous nonwhites. The resonances between these early paleo-narratives indicate a line of influence stretching from the naturalist novels of Norris and London to Tarzan and, eventually, to the twenty-first century paleo practices I will discuss below.
II. Neoliberal Paleo-Narratives Over a century after the publication of Moran and Call, health practi- ces inspired by Paleolithic humans have given rise to a quickly grow- ing international (though largely US-centered) community through workshops, camps, blogs, cookbooks, and online forums.18 The full range of these practices includes synchronizing sleep patterns with the sun, co-sleeping with infants, running barefoot, and exercising in ways that emphasize intensity and diversity of movements.19 But the most prominent and rapidly growing paleo practices are diets that attempt to simulate the eating patterns of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers by cutting carbohydrates and processed foods in favor of free-range meats, vegetables, nuts, and fruits. To the extent that they aim to recre- ate only selected, advantageous aspects of primitive environments, “paleo” practices are implicitly grounded in narratives about the sig- nificant experiences of primitive humans (hunting, gathering, sprint- ing, eating at odd intervals, and sleeping at sundown, but without giving up cell phones, desk jobs, and private property). However, to say these practices are grounded in narrative is not to discount them as mere “fantasy.” Whereas debates and research concerned with paleo practices tend to focus on the scientific and empirical validity of their claims,20 I am less interested in the factual evidence than in under- standing the cultural and historical aspects of these practices: Why have they become so prominent in the last decade? What social func- tions do they serve? How do they configure relationships between race, health, and environmental risk factors? I argue that these twenty- first century paleo practices build on—and significantly diverge from—the paleo-narratives first popularized in naturalist fiction by 14 ISLE reframing primal experience through narratives of individual resil- ience. They thus offer a version of paleo-narrative that assuages anxi- eties about environmental risks, racial inequality, and contemporary Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 “diseases of civilization” by assuring us that the primal blueprint of op- timal human health remains available to every member of the species—even if only a small segment of the population can afford to realize it. The narratives of white atavism I have traced in naturalist novels have had some influence on contemporary primitive health practices. Paleo-dieters often invoke the figure of Tarzan21 and sometimes cite London22 in online forums. There is even a grain-free brand of pet food called “Taste of the Wild,” which references London’s novel to market a product consisting only of meat, vegetables, and fruits to cat and dog owners.23 Bruce Braun’s concept of historical “citationality”—a process by which contemporary adventure culture draws on the racial norms of nineteenth-century wilderness discourse without necessarily citing specific events or texts—provides a helpful model for understanding indirect but powerful lines of influence grounded in broad cultural nar- ratives and image repertoires (187). But beyond questions of influence, naturalism and paleo-practitioners share profound interests in the con- cepts of evolution, wilderness, and environmental determinism. Most importantly, the two discourses share a fantasy of atavistic self- remaking, in which a subject suffering from the effects of modernization—whether these take the form of late-nineteenth- century urbanization and monopoly capitalism or proliferating envi- ronmental risks and cuts to social services under contemporary neoliberalism—reverts to a regenerative primal vitality. Online “success stories” often echo the scenes of primal revitalization in Norris & London’s fiction: for example, one commentator on the popu- lar website Marksdailyapple.com writes, “My mind fired in phenomenal ways, my energy exploded and I was resurrected as an entirely new be- ing. My ... shoulder injury that was giving me trouble felt amazing” (Nathan). Whereas violent interracial confrontations and wilderness adventures were the definitive features of paleo-narratives in the 1890s–1910s, contemporary paleo-discourses feature personal narra- tives of resilience and self-care. While they share with London and Norris trope of self-regeneration through an activation of primal resources, books about paleo diets and barefoot running articulate a form of white atavism grounded in quotidian activities that purport- edly enable individuals to reconfigure their relation to nature and their vulnerability to a range of environmental risk factors. The two bestselling books I’ll examine here—Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 15
Designed to Eat (2002) and Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009)—share a belief that humans have strayed from the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 “natural” environments and practices for which evolution has adapted them. An exercise physiology scientist and nutritionist and the owner of the trademark “The Paleo Diet,” Cordain claims that “our Paleolithic ancestors ... were lean, fit, and free from heart disease and the other ailments that plague Western countries” (5–6). He argues that, because humans are not biologically adapted to digest many agricultural prod- ucts, a diet heavy in lean meat, vegetables, and fruit and very low on grains and legumes ensures a “healthy, fit, strong, and vivacious” body (6). While its concern with overcoming health problems and “diseases of civilization” such as obesity, heart and blood vessel dis- ease, high blood pressure, cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes (57, 5) is shared by many contemporary diets, the Paleo diet is distinguished by its emphasis on “Nature”: “Our genes are well adapted to a world in which all the food eaten daily had to be hunted, fished, or gathered from the natural environment—a world that no longer exists. Nature determined what our bodies needed thousands of years before civiliza- tion developed, before people started farming and raising domesti- cated livestock” (10). Adapting the rhetoric of an ecological jeremiad, Cordain calls on readers to cleanse themselves of the unnatural foods and diseases he associates with overcivilization: “with all of our prog- ress, we have strayed from the path designed for us by nature” (10). His appeals to a concept of “Nature” that can be distinguished from human activity—a concept that has been roundly critiqued by histori- ans, philosophers, and ecocritics24—may help explain the particular enthusiasm with which paleo practices have been embraced by Americans whose ideas of nation, race, and class have long been entangled with the mythical “wilderness.” McDougall makes a similar argument about straying from the intentions of “Nature.” Born to Run recounts the author’s time spent among the reclusive Tarahumara Indians in Mexico, many of whom are superb distance runners. Although his main points of reference are indigenous groups oriented towards distance running, McDougall’s broader evolutionary argument aligns with the logic of paleo- narratives by suggesting that a return to pre-modern practices can pro- vide access to humanity’s optimal evolutionary resources. Drawing on his observations and conversations with runners, exercise physiolo- gists, biologists, and anthropologists, McDougall argues that humans evolved to be distance runners.25 The theory he presents—that humans evolved to engage in persistence hunting, or the practice of running down faster mammals over long distances—suggests not only that 16 ISLE we’re “born to run,” but also that we evolved distance-running adapta- tions specifically to kill animals for meat (220–23, 225). In addition to increasing popular interest in distance running, Born to Run popular- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 ized the “barefoot running” movement. If humans evolved to be dis- tance runners, then the human foot is already optimally adapted for running, and requires no technological correction. Running shoes, McDougall argues, have caused rather than reduced injuries by en- couraging people to run with an unnatural heel-strike rather than the supposedly safer mid-foot or toe-strikes that a barefoot runner would employ.26 One of McDougall’s sources, the biological anthropologist Daniel Liebermann, thus argues that running shoes have contributed not only to running injuries, but to humans’ vulnerability to a range of health conditions: “If running shoes never existed ... more people would be running. If more people ran, fewer would be dying of degen- erative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, hypertension, blocked ar- teries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world” (McDougall 168–9). Recovering ancestral long-distance running tech- niques thus becomes a proxy for other modes of health care—a way to make our bodies resilient to the “deadly ailments” of Western moder- nity. McDougall’s book thus juxtaposes his discovery of Tarahumara running practices and his renunciation of cushioned running shoes with the restoration of his own distance running abilities as he over- comes a persistent running injury; throughout the book, he inter- sperses accounts of other runners who have had similar experiences recovering from injuries that turn out to be inflicted by their unnatural running shoes. Like The Paleo Diet, Born to Run equates the health of individuals and the entire “Western world” with a selective return to ancestral practices: running farther, barefoot. Mediating between these books’ contemporary, implicitly Western readers and their premodern subject matter are a diverse set of indige- nous populations: Tarahumara Indians, Kalahari Bushmen, Greenland Inuit, the Yanomamo Indians of Brazil, and Paleolithic Africans. Despite their emphasis on scientific findings and empirical results, both Cordain and McDougall present foundational narratives of racial and cultural appropriation. The Paleo Diet begins with Cordain’s ac- count of perusing early “descriptions of hunter-gatherers,” “examin[ing] thousands of early-nineteenth and twentieth- century photographs of hunter-gatherers,” and reading studies of Inuit and other contemporary hunter–gatherers (6). Without considering the co- lonial provenance of many of these sources, Cordain deploys them to support his central claim that hunter–gatherers are generally health- ier than humans living in agricultural societies. Whereas Cordain relies on documentary evidence, McDougall’s first-person account Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 17 unapologetically idealizes the Tarahumara as exotic noble savages un- touched by modernity:
Left alone in their mysterious canyon hideaway, this Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 small tribe of recluses had solved nearly every problem known to man. Name your category—mind, body, or soul—and the Tarahumara were zeroing in on perfec- tion. It was as if they’d secretly turned their caves into incubators for Nobel Prize winners, all toiling toward the end of hatred, heart disease, shin splints, and green- house gases. (14) Underlying McDougall’s scientific discussions of evolution and the physiology of running is a familiar redemptive paleo-narrative in which a jaded white man discovers truths about human nature among primitive groups in exotic locations supposedly untouched by “civilization.” Yet McDougall’s characterization of “the peaceful Tarahumara” (29) erases their history of anti-colonial resistance: before they adapted the survival strategy of isolation, the Tarahumara orga- nized three bloody uprisings against Spanish colonials in the 1690s.27 By approaching indigenous groups primarily as bodies of evidence for the practices of humans’ primitive ancestors, both Cordain and McDougall dehistoricize a range of hunter-gatherers; in doing so, they temporally distance the Tarahumara, Inuit, Bushmen, and others as “natural” populations insulated from the effects of modern history.28 At the same time that they imagine hunter-gatherers as temporally or geographically distant from modernity, paleo discourses produce narratives of self-care and individual overcoming that marginalize existing indigenous and racialized populations who frequently have limited access to both health information and non-processed foods. While authors like Cordain attempt to mimic indigenous hunter– gatherer diets, western nations have eroded the food sovereignty of ac- tual hunter-gatherers by displacing them from ancestral lands, intro- ducing new hunting technologies that dramatically alter animals’ interactions with humans, and prohibiting subsistence practices such as indigenous whale hunting.29 Although Cordain does not address how settler colonialism has affected indigenous people’s capacity to procure traditional foods like whale and buffalo meat, the epigraph to his chapter on “Food as Medicine” quotes the Baffin Island Inuit Malaya Kulujuk’s observation that “We never used to be so sick. The white man’s food is not good for us” (83). Along with the prevalence of grains and legumes in many nonwhite food cultures, structural factors such as the relatively high cost of protein, uneven access to safe run- ning spaces, and the uneven availability of leisure time30 make it 18 ISLE difficult for poorer people—including many indigenous and racialized subjects—to engage in paleo practices. As the animal rights advocate Carol Adams argues, both in its metaphorical significance and its ma- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 terial distribution “The hierarchy of meat protein reinforces a hierarchy of race, class, and sex” (30).31 Framing structural inequalities in moral terms, race-blind paleo discourses effectively refashion white atavism as “Tak[ing] responsibility for your body!” (Singelmann). Paleo books and media are filled with testimonial narratives in which authors de- scribe how they overcame diseases, running injuries, obesity, and other health conditions. While Cordain’s book maintains a prescriptive tone (“by adhering to the dietary guidelines of your Paleolithic ancestors, you will reduce your risk of developing these illnesses” [86]), McDougall includes several stories of runners overcoming injuries by adapting more “natural,” shoeless techniques; more recently, the web- site marksdailyapple began posting weekly “Success Stories” with before-and-after photographs and titles such as “Going Primal Helped Me Recover From Anxiety” and “Going Primal Helped My Aspberger’s.”32 The recasting of paleo-narratives as stories of individ- ual self-care rather than as adventure fiction reflects contemporary neoliberalism’s shift from state interventions to individual “responsibility” as the preferred means of governing public health.33 If naturalist novels served as allegories prescribing white atavism as a re- source for national rejuvenation, today’s paleo-inspired dietary and ex- ercise regimes shift the focus from racial and national identity to the (apparently) more universal scale of species inheritance: humanity’s universal genetic blueprint. In these accounts, primitive vitality is attained not through a struggle to the death against racialized others, but through austere practices of self-discipline: resistance to grain, sugar, preservatives, and fancy running shoes. Injunctions such as Cordain’s appeal to “reduce your risk of the diseases of civilization” rhetorically transmit responsibility for health inequities from political and economic processes to individual choices, obscuring the histori- cally sedimented environmental and economic inequities that impose differential burdens of disease risk across spaces and populations (57). As the sociologist Jonathan Metzl writes of Pepsi’s campaign to market healthier foods to inner city populations, “calling it health allows for a language of betterment that skillfully glosses over the structural vio- lence done to minority and lower-income Americans, while at the same time suggesting that social and economic misfortune results from poor food choices” (4). Whereas Norris and London dramatize white atavism through physical confrontations between whites and non- whites, success stories in which paleo dieters and barefoot runners spectacularly overcome their physical limitations through self-care Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 19 channel atavism into a moralizing discourse of individual responsibility.34 If black and brown bodies are no longer directly targeted by impe- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 rial violence as they were in Moran and Call, they nevertheless tend to disappear as a result of the considerable leisure and economic privilege required to sustain paleo practices. Despite their reliance on appropri- ated hunter-gatherer practices, both the major authors and the models featured in paleo media are overwhelmingly white. The relative ab- sence of black and brown practitioners from the paleo community has been so marked that one black commentator notes, “I’ve yet to see a credited African American RD, PHD, Paleontologist or even Nutrition Therapist endorse the paleo diet and lifestyle, let alone promote it whole heartedly. I have been unable to find one mentor in Paleo who was Black! [...] I don’t want to say this ...But has being paleo become trendy and a social club ran by white backpacking nature loving cross- fitters[?]” (PaleoPrince). The online Primitive Health community at marksdailyapple.com has devoted a nineteen-page forum of 184 com- ments to the question, “Where are all the black people”?35 In the place of Paleolithic Africans or contemporary hunter–gatherers, paleo blogs and cookbooks typically feature photographs of lean white bodies, of- ten in pristine kitchens well stocked with organic grass-fed meats. In addition to cultural and economic factors, the relative absence of black, brown, and indigenous practitioners may be a product of the dynamics of white atavism that underlie Western paleo-narratives. In his analysis of the racializing role of contemporary wilderness adventure media, the geographer Bruce Braun has argued that, “within the discursive terrain of ‘adventure’ in the United States today, the figure of the black or Latina adventurer has no proper place” (178). For Braun, the structur- ing absence of black and brown adventurers is an ideological phenomenon—one he explains by analyzing the historical discourses that mobilized wilderness as a means of distinguishing virile white bodies from passive and objectified nonwhites. Building on Braun’s work, the literary critic Sarah Jacquette Ray argues that Progressive era “wilderness ideology was internalized in the form of disciplines of the body that merged the health and appearance of individual bodies with the health of the national body politic” (49). Internalized as physical “fitness” during a period when that term was often linked to eugenics, the atavistic ideal of wilderness became an important underpinning of what Ray calls “environmental exclusion,” or the marginalization and denigration of groups whose gender, sexuality, race, class, or disability are viewed as unnatural. As a version of wilderness ideology that equates “Nature” with the fit body, paleo narratives elide the historical and social determinants of 20 ISLE health. 36 By appealing to what some evolutionary psychologists call the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness”—a pre-agricultural moment for which they believe humans are optimally adapted—paleo Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 writers seek a universal species being that takes priority over histori- cally sedimented differences (Zuk 57).37 Their focus on “natural” health practices abstracted from historical and cultural context at once erases racial difference and reproduces it by obscuring the uneven dis- tribution and accessibility of healthy food, garden spaces, recreational areas, leisure time, health education, and environmental toxins. As Noah Herringman has argued, these practices of “evolutionary nostal- gia” have the effect of “substituting nature for history” (75). Thus, McDougall redefines “history” itself as an undifferentiated, ahistorical species being terms when he deploys a quotation from William Faulkner commonly associated with the repressed legacies of US slav- ery to refer to how barefoot running reactivates ancient human potenti- alities: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (245). What McDougall, Cordain, and other paleo advocates fail to recognize is the increasing irrelevance of “Nature” as a concept that can be separated from anthropogenic factors. In a world saturated by uneven and in many cases irreversible environmental risks, what we need is not a nostalgia for “Nature” but a nuanced understanding of the environ- ment as a material determinant of racial health disparities.
Situated in historical moments marked by financial recessions and im- perial wars, the two bodies of literature I have examined illustrate the flexibility of paleo-narrative as an imaginary structure that resolves anxieties about economic crisis, imperialism, race, gender, immigra- tion, and environment. In addition to these anxieties, today’s paleo practices share with literary naturalists a fascination with environmen- tal determinism or what Kevin Trumpeter, in a recent study of the con- ceptual kinship between literary naturalism and the new materialism, calls “the agency of the inanimate.” Naturalist novels and paleo health manuals are finely attuned to how urban spaces, climate, furniture, food, chemicals, and even artificial lighting can profoundly influence people’s health, affect, and social relations. But rather than turning to political reform or social satire in the tradition of naturalists such as Norris, London, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright, paleo health prac- titioners endeavor to simulate—in their own bodies and everyday practices—a pre-Anthropocene world purged of radiation, food addi- tives, pesticides, climate change, and sedentary lifestyles. In their at- tempt to immunize themselves against modernity’s unevenly distributed and often unpredictable tolls on human health, however, practitioners overlook the fact that the high meat content makes paleo Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism 21 diets unusually unsustainable in terms of water and land use and greenhouse gas emissions.38 Seeking to reproduce primal human bod- ies without addressing anthropogenic environmental changes, con- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 temporary paleo practices neglect the complex environmental questions and ethics that arise from humanity’s many entanglements and “trans-corporeal” involvements with the more-than-human world.39 If the paleo-narratives of the 1890 s were based in an optimis- tic vision of the regeneration of white American masculinity through wilderness adventure and imperial violence, contemporary paleo prac- tices are profoundly dystopian: they respond to environmental crisis and the diseases of civilization not by attempting to transform environ- mental realities but by transforming individual bodies—often through great cost, strenuous effort, and considerable environmental externalities—into microcosmic simulations of an “environment of evolutionary adaptedness.” While they reiterate the plot of paleolithic self-regeneration popularized by Norris and London, contemporary paleo practices diverge from naturalism’s formal interest in aggregate populations by taking recourse to a moralizing discourse of individual willpower and self-care. But whether the focus is on Euro-Americans’ racial regeneration or individual resilience, both these versions of paleo-narrative channel atavism into the revitalization of whiteness while obscuring the racially uneven distribution of the determinants of health.
NOTES
1. Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860; Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad; on Romanticism and American wilderness discourse, see William Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting back to the Wrong Nature,” (69–90) . 2. Pizer, Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation; Giles, The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America: Encounters with the Fat Man; and Howard, Sand in Your Mouth: Naturalism and Other Genres (92–103). 3. Ibid., xv. 4. See de la Pena,~ The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (18); Kaplan, Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s, (659–90); Punzalan Isaac, Moral Sentences: Boy Scouts and Novel Encounters with Empire, (48– 78); Bederman (170–215). 5. See Zola, “The Experimental Novel” (1880). Norris’s own theorization of naturalism was strongly influenced by Zola—see Norris, Zola as a Romantic Writer, 3. 22 ISLE
6. Although Rossetti notes that “the primitive was conceived as a positive alternative to civilization,” she focuses on the negative “reassessment of the primitive” that associated it with workers, immigrants, and racialized bodies. On naturalism’s plots of degeneration, see also Fusco, “Brute Time: Anti- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 Modernism in Vandover and the Brute,” (22–40); Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (94–128); and Rossetti, “Things Fall Apart: Degeneration and Atavism in American Literary Naturalism,” (172–81). 7. Although Wilbur’s filibustering plans are left uncertain at the end of the novel after Hoang ends up killing Moran through treachery, the novel’s am- bivalent ending seems to leave Wilbur’s newly discovered physical and moral superiority unshaken; indeed, Moran’s death can even be read as an allegory in which Anglo-Saxons inherit and supersede the less rational mastery of vio- lence once wielded by the Norse. 8. Jack London, Letter to Cloudesley Johns (30 April 1899), excerpted in The Book of Jack London, vol.1, edited by Charmian London (Century Co., 1921), 290. Regarding The Sea-Wolf, Cooper writes: “Jack London’s Sea Wolf is another Moran of the Lady Letty, without Frank Norris’s epic strength, and with much more grimness and brutality” (Frederic Taber Cooper, “The Man’s Novel and Some Recent Books,” The Bookman, vol. 20 [Nov 1904], 219). 9. Roosevelt’s writings about game hunting are important precursors of the contemporary popularization of wild game meat: see Tomb, “Roosevelt Sheds Light on Paleo Lifestyle,” online forum post (7 Dec 2007)
Tarzan possesses ‘the best characteristics of the human family from which he was descended and the best of those which mark the wild beasts’” (Taliaferro, Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs Creator of Tarzan ( 93)). 17. London’s descriptions of Buck’s dreams—like his later novel about pri- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 mal hominids, Before Adam (1906–7)—draw on the findings of nineteenth- century paleoanthropology, a new branch of science that became the object of considerable public interest and discussion after 1856, when the discovery of the Neanderthal provided “the first fossil evidence of primordial humans” (Schrenk and Mu¨ ller, Neanderthals, (2, 10)). On Before Adam and anthropologi- cal accounts of hunter–gatherer culture, see Crow, “Ishi and Jack London’s Primitives,” (46–54). 18. For useful overviews of paleo practices, see Goldstein, “The New Age Caveman and the City,” and Zuk, Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. 19. There is significant crossover between practitioners of paleo-oriented diets and CrossFit—a fitness program created by Greg Glassman and Lauren Jenai that has quickly expanded to over 10,000 certified gyms worldwide (but primarily in the US). According to John Durant, CrossFit’s philosophy of exer- cise combines three ideas that are frequently lacking in traditional exercise regimes: “(1) high intensity interval training, (2) constant variation, and (3) functional movements” (Durant, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health (169)). 20. For example, the evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk argues that paleo practitioners misconstrue evolution as teleological rather than as an aleatory, ongoing process fueled precisely by mismatches between species and envi- ronmental forces (Marlene Zuk, Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live; a panel of diet and health experts convened by U.S. News ranked the Paleo Diet last in a review of thirty-two popular diets, giving it low marks for “Weight Loss,” “Easy to Follow,” “Nutrition,” “Safety,” “Diabetes,” and “Heart Health” (“Best Diets Overall: The Data,” U.S. News [2014]
36. Cf. Ray: “if alienation from nature is understood as alienation from our own bodies—both notions that originated in Progressive Era environmen- tal thought—then reconnecting with nature means having a fit body” (31). 37. Zuk explains that, whereas evolution is an aleatory, ongoing process Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isz010/5371113 by guest on 08 March 2019 consisting of arbitrary mutations, “paleofantasies” tend to see evolution as a teleological process that intentionally designed humans for a particular, hunter-gatherer environment and has since come to an end. 38. In an assessment of the climate impact of different diets, Tamar Haspel claims that “a beef-and-leaf paleo diet is the worst choice going, environmen- tally speaking” (“Vegetarian or Omnivore: the Environmental Implications of Diet,” Washington Post [10 Mar 2014],
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