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Uncovering the Child in Timothy Treadwells Feral Tale

Ellen Brinks

When I became a man, I put away childish things. King James Bible He would rather lie down with the animals than stand up with the men. Franz Kafka

Timothy Treadwell has quickly become the stuff of (American) legend, inspiring several books and short films, as well as a feature-length documentary by Werner Herzog, entitled Grizzly Man (2005). Treadwells is the story of an individual who lived with Alaskan wild bears for thirteen summers, until his and a companions death by a bear in 2003. The narrative arc recalls other stories of young men who shun civilization and seek a more authentic existence in the wild. Early incarnations include real-life figures such as Daniel Boone to more recent ones such as Alex McCandless (in Jon Krakauers and now Sean Penns Into the Wild).1 Beyond a fascination with the psychic dilemmas and desires that shape the unique contours of these lives, lies a collective, cultural uncertainty and controversy regarding the place of wilderness in (North American) life and different styles of masculinity, all constituted in relation to Nature as Other. What is missing from discussions of Timothy Treadwells story thus farespecially its discursive constructions in Herzogs Grizzly Man (2005), Treadwells own autobiography, Among Grizzlies (1996), and Nick Janss bestselling The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwells Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears (2005)is the centrality of childhood and so-called childlike

The Lion and the Unicorn 32 (2008) 304323 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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or childish behaviors and longings to its ideological meanings, including the texts understandings of Treadwells demise. Most obviously, the adult Timothy positions himself as a boy-child. Herzogs Grizzly Man, for example, contains films within a film by another director, namely, a large amount of video footage that Timothy Treadwell himself shot, narrated, and intended for use in his advocacy work on behalf of Alaskan bears.2 In this footage, Treadwell projects a child-like persona, conveyed in part by his abundant energy (when he is being chased by Timmy the fox, the mood is breathless, buoyant, and joyous); by his Prince Valiant haircut (which, as one friend recalls, utterly disguises his receding hairline); by his diet of peanut butter sandwiches, candy bars, and Coke; and by the presence of his childhood teddy bear as tent-mate. His narration casts him as a boy surviving alone on a grand adventure, a young hero who has animals as his closest friends: Now let the expedition continue. Now its off with Timmy the Fox. Weve got to find Banjohes missing! Further, the audiences for his films were primarily schoolchildren. During the winter, Treadwelldubbed a Pied Piper in a childrens crusade by Jans (23)used images and segments from these films in presentations he designed to educate children about the risks grizzlies face from diminished wild habitat and poaching, gleaned from the life he shared with them. While the audience, then, for much of his filmmaking is clearly children, Grizzly Mans mainly adult viewers can simply write Treadwell himself off as infantile, criticizing moments such as the one where his narration slips into a childs intonation and pitch. After filming a grizzly rearing up and scratching his back against a tree, Treadwell goes up to the spot, measures the bears size with his own body by way of comparison, and with a deep intake of breath, drawn out vowels, and a breathless intonation, asserts, Oh hes a big bear. Hes a very big bear. A very big bear. . . . Hes a big bear. Because Timothy fashions himself in his films and in his non-fiction autobiography, Among Grizzlies (1997), as someone who is essentially acting out a familiar fantasy ascribed to childrenliving in communion with wild animals, the bears and the foxes whom he knows by nameTreadwells story is clearly a feral tale, a genre of childrens literature in which a childhood lived in the wild figures prominently.3 Feral tales have mythic and folkloric roots worldwide, depicting children raised by animals or as the offspring of animals (Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf-mother, for example; Semiramis brought up by birds; Zeus nursed by the she-goat Amalthea; or in Sioux creation myth, the firstborn who talks and walks with the animals), but they exist in abundance in literary form as well. The best-known feral tales within the Western tradition are the Enkidu episode of The Epic of Gilgamesh; the scores of narratives

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about Kaspar Hauser and the Wild Boy of Aveyron, both savage boys, subjects living untouched by civilization, who, though not raised by animals, were seen during the Enlightenment as the developmental equivalents of wild animals;4 as well as modern childrens classics such as Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes and Rudyard Kiplings The Jungle Books. Scholars such as Kenneth Kidd have recently expanded the genre and its different modes of articulation from the Enlightenment to the present. He identifies a whole plethora of wild boys peopling writings as diverse as scouting manuals with their animal totems, Freuds animal-identified Rat-man and Wolf-man case studies of children, juvenile adventure fiction such as the Bomba the Jungle Boy series, as well as the narratives of urban bad boys made popular by Charles Loring Brace. For Kidd, feral tales balloon during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a major symbolic discourse about human and cultural development, childhood, the wildness of boys, and the path to manhood.5 And while feral stories, precisely because of their focus on what is marginal, alien, or subversive to the adult social order, offer an occasion for ambivalence regarding the ends of civilizations developmental narratives, in the course of the twentieth century in the United States, they have mostly been complicit with a variety of social institutions in producing the middle class white masculine subject out of the feral boy (Kidd, 57, 11, 17). My interest in the constructions of Timothy Treadwell as feral child in his own films and autobiography, as well as in its articulations by Herzog and Jans, centers on the resistances to conformity with the genres lessons, even to the dismay of Treadwells authors, Jans and Herzog.6 This essay will explore the nature of these resistances and how each, in its way, depends upon the figure of the child. First and foremost, Treadwell refuses the passage from nature to culture, from pack life to individual, adult heterosexuality. The transition from the human-animal bond to a human-human one runs aground as Treadwell forms his deepest attachments with the bears, in a reversal of the feral tales socially normative temporality. Further, he is depicted as refusing to adopt the mature masculinity of the hunter/scientist that demands men keep wild animals at a distance (in order to enable the killing of, or rational control over, animals). Instead of conforming, he seeks out physical contact and proximity, and touches, names, and speaks to the bears. Finally, the essay considers at length Treadwells persistent efforts, through a mimetic transformation of his own body, to be recognized as a bear among bears. This endeavor tells a much more radical tale about the rejection of species difference in favor of some more radically hybrid experience, one which Eurowestern culture only tolerates as a form of play during childhood. My aim is not

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to endorse romanticized strains in the narrative that Treadwell himself fashions. Indeed, though Treadwells self-construction at times articulates the pervasive ideological assumption that children are instinctively close to nature,7 the aspects of his story with which I am concerned reveal that just as children must be pushed to learn appropriate adult behaviors, Treadwell pushed himself to learn to become animal. To do so, he was compelled to adopt a number of modes of relating that are culturally denigrated as belonging appropriately only to childhood. In underscoring how Janss, Herzogs, and Treadwells narratives deviate from the standard feral tale, which recuperates the wild boy for civil society, then, I want to suggest that Treadwells feral tale tells us another, different, yet no less important, story: about the refusal to abdicate desires for deep cross-species relating, or to abandon a mode of object relating that yields unpredictable, embodied forms of knowledgedespite the consequence of being stigmatized, or dismissed, as childish for doing so. Modern incarnations of the feral narrative, as Kidd has observed, have increasingly underscored the Bildungstales developmental trajectory, emphasizing the progress or growth from feral child to civilized young man, plotted as the movement from an unsettled to a stable existence. James Dickeys poem, The Sheep Child, whose speaker is the fantasized offspring of a man and a ewe, points to the way feral tales otherness push their human readers ultimately toward normalcy:
I am he who drives Them [boys] like wolves from the hound bitch and calf And from the chaste ewe in the wind. They go into woods into bean fields they go Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me, They groan they wait they suffer Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

Treadwells feral tale, in contrast, is much less certain about these ends. It wreaks havoc with the linear progress that modern incarnations of the genre stress, with their characterization of the psychosexual maturation of the boy and, by extension, the class, race, and species with which he is affiliated. Instead of substantiating this evolutionary story, Grizzly Man is geared in reverse, evidencing a retrograde motion: Timothy Treadwell goes from being a man to becoming a man-child, and at times, to a child attempting to divest itself of humanness altogether to become a bear. In Grizzly Man, Treadwell breathlessly speaks of a seamless coexistence with the animal kingdom, as his adult body reconforms into a childs in order to transform itself into a non-human animals: I run wild with the bears, . . . so wild so free so like a child with these animals.

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When Treadwell chooses to live an adult fantasy of a romantic return to nature as a child, one that he himself creates, it is presented as a rejection of an adult life not worth living.8 As he and Herzog both detail in Among Grizzlies and Grizzly Man, before his life with the bears, he eked out an existence as a waiter in southern California while he tried to break into acting. (the high-point of his professional career, which, tellingly if paradoxically, was also its low-point, was narrowly losing the role of bartender in the TV series Cheers to Woody Harrelson). A self-avowed substance abuser, lost in a series of menial, unfulfilling jobs, Treadwells retrogression to living a childs fantasy existence with Alaskan brown bears amounts to a refusal to accommodate himself to the dead-end life that the adult world offers him, and not simply because that social contract makes him a partner in his own destruction. The dangers and violence in the wilderness may in the end be more a substitute than an alternative to those of Los Angeles; yet they have a longer history of being romanticized, and Treadwell invests the Alaskan wild with a quality of kindness and nurture able to undo the toxic effects of urban misery. Rejecting the middle-class path of professional success and happiness, Treadwell substitutes another fantasy and starts all over again as a child among the animals. In Grizzly Man, the presence of his childhood teddy bear in his tent (and later by his mothers side) bespeaks this kind of psychic resistance to sacrificing, abandoning, or losing the intense affective bonds of the child with the animal. Starting over is the wrong metaphor, however, for beginnings presume goals, or movement over time toward an end,9 and in Alaska there is not only little forward momentum, but Treadwell defines his purpose negatively: to insure that things do not change, that is to say, to create the conditions for a kind of timeless idyll of childhood. Treadwell is there to assure that the bearsand Treadwell himselflive in a world largely defined by a resistance to times intrusion, by the maintenance of sameness.10 Seasonal imperatives, because cyclical, work to reinforce the sameness that the bearsand Treadwellare subject to. They spend the early part of the summer at Hallo Bay on the Katmai coast, in the tidal flats and expansive, lush, rye-grass meadows he calls the Sanctuary, before moving in late summer to the Kaflia bay area, into the so-called Grizzly Maze, with its high concentration of bears competing for food during the salmon run. Meadows and maze temporally and spatially define summertime in Alaska, each year, in the same eternal way, with the Sanctuary evoking what Gaston Bachelard has called the the image of a felicitous space, a fictional geography whose association with animals belongs especially to childhood (xxxv, 93). This is not to say that temporality is wholly absent in this magic space. In Grizzly Man and Among Grizzlies, the individual bears are often referred

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to by age and by reference to their respective family units, as cubs and parents and mates, indicating a specific past and gesturing toward futurity. And to work for the survival of the species, as Treadwell saw himself doing, speaks of desires for the future, albeit a future based on a commitment to preserving the present in an unchanging guise. Timothys own self-fashioning in both book and film, however, reveal a profound ambivalence about subjecting himself to this same generational and temporal matrix. First, he fabricates his past, suggesting that his identity is provisional at best, and in the service of the moment. He cuts himself loose from his family, presenting himself (falsely) as an orphan and claiming to be from Australia to some, and to be from the London streets to others. Second, he deliberately conceals his partner Amy Huguenards presence in his life in Alaska and elsewhere, keeping her out of the frame in his films and indeed out of the cognizance of many of his friends. Third, though he hints at his sexual prowess in his films, he ultimately confesses to a failure at sustaining relationships: I always cant understand why girls dont want to be with me for a long time. Instead, his primary libidinal attachment, and I use libidinal here in the broadest sense, remains to the bearsabout which he remains unapologetic (in Grizzly Man, he says I love you to the animals a total of twenty-three times). Indeed, by being both a chosen and a preferred love object, bears become an appropriate one, with the result that normative (e.g., human) ones, if only by default, become inappropriate.11 Jans, I think mistakenly, draws on conventional figures of heterosexual desire in describing Treadwells affection for the bears, when, for example, he sees an intense all-consuming passion (215), a tragic obsession that culminates with Treadwell dying in the arms of his own true love (79). In a much nastier tone, a blogger whom Jans quotes manages to trope Treadwells death as risky sex, aligning the inappropriateness of his attachment with same-sex desire and reveling in its deadly consequences: [that] Treadwell was killed doing what he loved did not surprise many of those who knew him. Sort of the same way people contract AIDS (150). Treadwells love for the Alaskan animals he lives with is less a copy of some unavailable or high-risk human passion, I believe, than an altogether different and unique form of eros, independent of gender and perhaps of sexuality. The intensity of his cross-species attachment, however, interferes with or even supplants his accommodation to the customary sociosexual trajectory, wherein maturity is measured by heterosexual marriage and/or reproductive sexuality. This makes it interesting ground for connections with queer forms of desire. Treadwells life choices make the bears his primary relational objects, and it is clear that in doing so, he opts out

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of generational temporality and embraces a nongenerational one. This suspension ties Treadwells story to stories of (queer) children with their animals, where the human-animal bond serves as a metaphor for a different temporal interval, a precious kind of shelter for [queer childrens] feelings and their growth, as they [swerve] from the Oedipal path (Stockton 299, 311).12 In Alaska, Treadwells strongest capitulation to conventional measures or narratives of human sexual identity and development, I would argue, is visible in the two personae he projects, one who developmentally evokes the child and one who evokes the adolescent. Further, each of these personae can be loosely affiliated with a fantasy of space. The childlike Treadwell roughly corresponds to the egalitarian geography of the Meadows, while the adolescent Treadwell belongs to the hierarchical Maze. Accompanied by his diminutive animal-alter Timmy the fox, Timothy Treadwell of the meadows lives a by-and-large felicitous coexistence in brotherhood with the bears and foxes; when he stands up to the bears there, it is not to assert his dominance but his right to share that charmed space. Treadwell develops another persona in response to the dangers of the maze, where the aggressiveness of the bears is heightened by their competition for food. In keeping with this hierarchical space, Treadwell must find the strength to claim a place among rivals in what amounts to a test of his manhood. Since Treadwells summers in Alaska follow a regulated and cyclical division of time, wherein time in the meadow is followed by time in the maze, each year Treadwell replays this psychodynamic transition from the innocent sympathy and merging within Edenic nature, coded as the fantasy space of early childhood, to a more defensive, charged rivalry within a competitive space, the space of adolescencewithout ever resolving it. Further, if we think about the annual, radical shift in Treadwells existence between the Alaskan wilderness and urbanized southern California, then we can see another recurrent developmental trajectory that is stalled or impeded: the successful conversion or transition of childish playtime in Alaska into a serious, adult profession in the lower forty-eight. The difficulty that Treadwell had in gaining national recognition from wildlife biologists for his observations about Alaskan bears, his desire for the imprimatur of scientific legitimacy for contributions that he felt were valuable was something he felt acutely (Jans 5658). This struggle with male authority figures (or rivals) psychologically replays the hierarchical interactions of the maze. To question Treadwells manliness, though, as many have done, may seem ironic. For one thing, he chose to live with Alaskan bears, animals whose large size is coupled with unrivalled physical strength. To live

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with these bears for months at a time, over thirteen summers, without firearms, required the qualities of physical endurance, determination, and courage that would seem to epitomize a familiar trope of manliness and, one would think, garner Treadwell immense respect. Yet despite these accomplishments, native Alaskans have, not infrequently, revealed their disgust with Treadwell for his flawedthat is to say, incomplete and inconsistentperformance of rugged masculinity:
Treadwell was the sort of guy most Alaskans loved to hate. You dont go around on Kodiak Island or Katmai crawling on all fours, singing and reading to bears, giving them names like Thumper. . . . You dont say things to them like Czar, Im so worried! I cant find little Booble. (Jans 10)

Further, by calling the bears Czar, Booble, and Thumper, names right out of a storybook, by talking (and singing) to them the way an adult or child does to another child, baby, or to pets, Treadwell domesticates the very animals against which normative masculinity (in Alaska) defines itself. Setting aside the question of whether it is ever appropriate to see these animals in this light, if Alaskan bears are not as dangerous as cultural myths proclaim them to be; if, indeed, at times they are teddy bears, then what does bagging a grizzly prove? Treadwell refuses to use or carry a gun, that potent signifier of manliness, and after using pepper spray once on a threatening bear, he decides he will never use it again. The peaceable kingdom of friendly bears sung and talked to violates typical adult masculine forms of self-definition established not through cross-species relating, but through cross-species violence (hunting). As Treadwell says in Grizzly Man: I would never ever kill a bear in defense of my own life. I would not go into a bears home and kill a bear. In adopting eclectic styles of interaction and communication with the animals he lived with, Treadwell resembles two legendary primotologists, Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey, whose work violated long-standing rules on how to study animal behavior without compromising objectivity.13 Challenged for the proximity they assumed with chimpanzees and gorillas, respectively, Goodall and Fossey adopted the movement styles and vocalizations of the primates they studied.14 Further, they named their primate subjects and cultivated close tiesone could say friendshipswith individual chimpanzees and gorillas in order to better understand them. The depth of those relationships was measured by the fierce grief Goodall and Fossey experienced when favorite animals were killed or kidnapped by hunters and poachers.15 Treadwells behavior with the bearsand his anxieties about illegal poachingare strongly reminiscent of Goodalls and Fosseys; similar too are the criticisms leveled at them/him by the scientific community. Critics of Goodall and Fossey charged them with

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dangerously habituating their objects of study to human presence, in effect, endangering their survival. Marc Davis, a pseudonym for a biologist interviewed by Jans, takes Treadwell to task not only for habituation, but also for violating a prime biological directivealtering the behavior of his subjects, therefore tainting any results and rendering them useless to researchers. Not to mention permanently altering the behavior of entire populations of bears (16162). What Fossey and Goodall succeeded in doing was linking women scientists study of non-human animals to a becoming animal (DeKoven 146). One wonders to what extent the scientific animus against Treadwells feralization is directed first, at his childlike (not appropriately masculine or scientific) mode of relating with animals, and second, at the threat that his study of the bears posed to the authority and authorized methods of an overwhelmingly male scientific establishment, because it might, as Goodalls and Fosseys did, achieve remarkable insights. Treadwell was notorious for adopting the bears body language and vocalizations, as evidenced in a great deal of his own testimony and of those who knew him. Some attribute his survival among the bears to his facility in understanding what the bears were communicating with their bodies, and in knowing how to mimic that language himself in his interactions with them (Jans 166).16 Treadwell seems increasingly comfortable morphing into a bear, making huffs, grunts, woofs, growls, and snapping noises, crawling on all fours, avoiding eye contact, rearing up, and stomping, dressing in black and rolling in the bears beds to look and smell more bear-like (Among Grizzlies, 9091, 144).17 Humans encountering him in the field reported that he would act like a bear; he would woof at them; he would act in the same way a bear would were he surprised (biologist Larry von Daele in Grizzly Man). While clearly serving his interest in survival, his affinity for mimicry also demonstrates the extent to which Treadwell was willing to go feral. It functions as another marker of his regression, for mimesis has long been associated in Western discourses with children and with evolutionary primitiveness (Taussig 20). In his essay On the Mimetic Faculty, Walter Benjamin describes mimesis as a childs way of knowing the world: Childrens play is permeated everywhere by mimetic forms of behavior; and its realm is in no way limited to what one person can mimic about another. The child not only plays shopkeeper or teacher but also windmill and railroad train (333). One could also add, bear or fox or wolf. For someone hoping to contribute to a scientific understanding of bears, playing at being a bearbecoming like or a part of the object under studymocks traditional protocols of objectivity as mentioned. It

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also lifts him out of his own humanness and positions him in a different relation to the object world. Treadwells mimesis lets him go into the life of the object he is trying to understand, a passage from one set of experiential body states to a radically different set. It relies above all on voice and proprioception, that inner sense of where the different parts of ones own body are in relation to one another, or in Andy Clarks definition, the sense of how your body is located in space (22). I want to stress proprioception here, because Treadwell, according to numerous accounts, desires to make his own body feel to itself like a bears body. Let me give two examples of this mode of sensing. In the first, Treadwell defends his right to share the same space, adopting the movements, stance, and voice of a grizzly: I charged, stopping just short of the bear. He reacted by standing up on his hind legs, stretching to his full ten feet. With a mouth full of foam, he tossed his head wildly while I stood my ground, growling fiercely (Among Grizzlies 68). In another example, Treadwell finds himself stranded on one side of a turbulent and dangerous mountain river that he must ford. He watches a bear swim across and summoning the power of the grizzly within [himself], [he dives] in and vigorously paddle[s] across, snarling and growling the whole way (Among Grizzlies 29). Proprioception is a sensory modality, yet it is also, as Charles Wolfe describes it, a kind of thinking through the body, a way the body can talk to itself. In Treadwells case, his body relates to the external objects/world and talks to himas a bear. Interestingly, fearful situations often prove to be the catalyst for Treadwells animal metamorphoses, as they have been for others, as the excitement born of fear leads to physiological changes, a rapid heart beat . . . a tremor that opens the body to intensity and [unmakes] the secure and fearful selfin effect, dismantling the self in experiencing animal being (Baker, 86).18 One could argue that this by definition would produce interesting and new forms of knowledge (an alternative science?). Based on mimesis, this kind of sensuous, corporeal understanding is by nature performative, and it gives us a new way of conceptualizing self/other relating. To explain this, let me take a brief detour and evoke the actor/playwright/ director Anna Deavere Smiths visceral method of creating character in her theater pieces. Because her scripts are based on and edited from the extensive interviews of the real people whom she interprets through her performance, Deavere Smith faces the daunting task of inhabiting dozens of characters in the course of an evening.19 She has developed a technique different from what she calls the self-based one (exploring ones own experiences/oneself to find the character):
I wanted . . . a technique that would empower the other to find the actor. . . . If we were to inhabit the speech pattern of another, and walk in the speech

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Instead of plumbing the depths of ones emotions and understanding to identify points of commonality with the other, Smith begins to know her characters by making her body and voice conform as closely as possible to theirs. Emotions and understanding follow from this visceral recreation. Treadwells efforts to inhabit his body and voice proprioceptively as a bears speak of a similar method, one born of his desire to incarnate the bears otherness, to speak with them on their own communicative terms.20 This is not to say that Treadwell does not engage in another kind of relatingidentificationwhich involves finding and seeing yourself in the other, with all the elements of fantasy, narcissism, assimilation, and projection that can and do comprise it. These modes of identification may help prepare for full ursine proprioception, or they may occlude that realization. Indeed, Treadwell often over-identifies with the bears, projecting what they were feeling, thinking, and suffering; in Among Grizzlies, he compares watching the bears with looking into a mirror . . . into the face of a kindred soul (10). After a bear fight, he equates his experience to theirs as he talks to Mickey: Mickey, Ive been down that street. You dont always get the chick you want. Let me tell you. . . . (to himself/audience) Hes after my own heart. He dont give up even when it looks shitty . . . Ive had my troubles with the girls, yah. Further, there are times when Treadwell uses the animals either to explore the recesses of his own wounded psyche (Im in love with my animal friends Im in love with my animal friends Im in love with my animal friendsIm very very troubledIts very emotionalIm so in love with them and theyre so fucked over), or to prop up a compromised self almost destroyed by alcoholism and drug abuse: They [the bears] become so inspirational and living with foxes too that I gave up the drinking. It was a miracle, an absolute miracle. And the miracle was animals. The miracle was animals. What seems to me more radical and interesting, however, is the way that Treadwells mimesis does not facilitate narcissistic mirroring, but instead represents a kind of unselfing. Far more than a resemblance achieved through imitation, in Treadwells feralization we might see what Guy Hocquenghem and Ren Schrer call an inhumanity immediately experienced in the body as such (in Deleuze, 123). In considering stories of feral children, they point to the impossibility of locating:

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where the boundary between human and animal lies. . . . [It] is as though, independent of the evolution carrying them toward adulthood, there were room in the child for other becomings . . . other contemporaneous possibilities . . . outside the programmed body.21

Treadwells mimesis enables him to become, or to put himself in the place of the animal other, while experiencing the animal as equivalent, yet different.22 While this capacity to recognize difference is part of most humans lives from a very early age (except those with profound relational disorders), we are not accustomed to thinking of the human-animal bond in this way (all too often, interspecial communication is categorically and facilely dismissed in our culture as projection or anthropomorphism). The kind of cross-identification, to use Jessica Benjamins term, that Treadwell engages in leads to an appreciation of the different reality that the animal inhabits. Because of the danger inherent in his proximity to the bears, of which Treadwell retains a heightened awareness, one cannot speak of it as non-differentiation or an oceanic submerging. At the same time, it establishes a shared reality between human and animal.23 What Treadwells mimetic performances remind us of is that we can approach animalsnot based on fantasy, because fantasy negates the animal others realitybut by way of a visceral and empathetic understanding. Within Eurowestern culture, children are central to retaining this memory. It often takes a feral tale to point out that children becoming animals are the guardians of this kind of sensuous knowledge. As the plethora of feral tales suggests, this exploratory science is by and large sanctioned when it is articulated by children; relegating it to a childhood phase preserves not only the human/animal divide, but also those distinctions between adult and child that constitute children as other. In this way, Herzog and Jans conform closely to the pedagogical project of much of childrens literature, insofar as it reinscribes child/adult binarisms and seeks to validate adult values and behavior.24 As the adult who refuses to give up, indeed as one who seeks to reclaim childish things, Treadwell interrogates the ideologically imposed limits on sensuous experience and knowledge, and the constructions of childhood and adulthood implicit within them. The question that the Treadwell texts pose their readers: is his crossing of species difference the violation of essential, socially crucial norms, or is it instead a socially redemptive communication, something that grasps at alternatives to constrictive habits or predictable forms of knowledge? Unfortunately, this is not a question that Herzog or Jans take seriously. Instead, both allow their texts to patrol the human/animal divide, enclosing the meaning of Treadwells mimesis within their interpretive frames and editing choices, which reinforce the demarcation between man and

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animal that has grounded a great deal of Western philosophical and religious discourseexhibited in such statements as Georges Batailles Our idea of a man is in a fundamental way opposed to our idea of an animal or Georges Louis-Buffons If animals did not exist, the nature of man would be even more incomprehensible.25 Herzogs policing of this border begins with the indeterminacy of his films title: just what is a grizzly mana hairy, burly man? A man who has a rapport with grizzlies? A human/animal hybrid? Or an impossibility, an unnatural conjunction? As narrator, Herzog early on states that Timothy wanted to leave the confines of humanness and that he crossed an invisible borderline. His film purports to weigh the experience of Treadwells decision to go feral, yet his focus dwells primarily on the consequences. One exception is Treadwells friend, the ecologist Marnie Gaede, who speaks of his longing to divest himself of humanness: he wanted to become like a bear . . . perhaps he wanted to mutate into a wild animal . . . connecting so deeply youre no longer human. Treadwell too adopts the language of mutation (in one of his letters read aloud in the film), asserting that he has to mutually mutate into a wild animal to handle the life out here, an ungrammatical turn of phrase suggesting, oddly enough, either a self already plural, or perhaps more interesting, implying that we change nature in our observation of it.26 But Grizzly Man mostly records voices that condemn his transformative urges and reinforce ontological distinctions between human and animal. The helicopter pilot Sam Egli finds Treadwell at fault for acting like he was working with humans wearing bear costumes instead of wild animals. Wildlife biologist Larry van Daele recognizes the bears calling that makes you want to come in and spend time in their world, but rejects their siren song by asserting the facts: we never can [enter their world] because we are very different than they are. Asserting that there is a line between bear and human, Herzog shores up his own authority by claiming it is something that has always been respected by native communities of Alaska. Instead of articulating what that line is or investigating the role or meaning of the countless myths of humananimal metamorphoses or shamanistic practices within native cultures,27 the film cuts to Sven Haakanson, identified as an Alutiiq, who outright condemns Treadwells behavior:
He tried to be a bear, to act like a bear and for us on the island you dont do that. . . . If I look at him from my culture Timothy Treadwell crossed a boundary that we have lived with for 7000 years; its an unspoken, an unknown boundary but when we know we crossed it, we pay the price.

Of course, the price is Treadwells horrific death, which, as the films raison detre, points up its moral and meaning: as Sam Egli suggests,

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in a startling display of Schadenfreude, he got what he was asking for; he got what he deserved. The riddle of Treadwells identity is clarified once and for all; trespassing against such natural distinctions does not go unpunished. Nick Jans The Grizzly Maze also reaffirms similar notions of unitary species identity, but only after tracing how Treadwells growing urgency to go feral is of a piece with other twentieth-century American bear-men (Stan Price, Lynn Rogers, Enos Mills). Treadwell knocks on the door of interspecies kinship as he walks on all fours [and] thinks in grunts or growls, sings to the bears, kisses one, and warns other bears of human presence (not his own) by making mother bear sounds (31). Perhaps the ultimate expressions of his desire for transmutation circle around recurring visions of incorporation or appropriation: in Grizzly Man, Treadwell rhapsodizes about the warmth of one bears fresh excrement, as what was once part of the bears body separates and becomes external to itself and therefore appropriable by him. By picking the shit up and holding it reverently in his hands, Treadwell attempts to bring it into contiguity with, or attach it to his own body. Resonating with this scene, Jans quotes from a letter where Treadwell claims that hed be honored to end up as grizzly shit (42). Yet for bear-viewing guide Gary Porter, Treadwells strange and ambiguous signals about his species confuse the bears and lead to his death (215). For Jans himself, Treadwells story is already a part of our cultural inheritance, whose admonitory purpose is clear: Fifty years from now . . . children will tell their own about the man who wanted to become a bear, and died trying (xii). In a strikingly similar way, Jans and Herzog conclude their narratives by reading the animal other in order to both frame and manage Treadwells feral alterity. For men whose narratives work to repress the rewards of interspecies communication by hyping the risks, it is a bold stroke to project their own misgivings imaginatively in the guise of the animals rejection of relating. In a close-up of a bears face, Herzog claims he sees no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. For Jans, a bear seen near Treadwells campsite makes him realize that the bear didnt need anything from us. He wasnt our friend. He had no name. All he wanted was to be left alone (219). Unlike Treadwells confirmation of each bears and foxs uniquenessconveyed by the bestowal and use of proper names, Rowdy, Mr. Chocolate, Aunt Melissa, Saturn, Iris, Downy, GhostJans insists that the animal before him had no name. Jans emphasizes this bearsor any bearslack of singularity, and in doing so, he reduces him to generic status, to the

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condition of the animal. That rhetorical move, as Jacques Derrida has argued elsewhere, reinforces the hierarchical splitting of human/animal and reasserts humans right to dominate other living creatures (37879, 38386, and esp. 41516). Janss and Herzogs cautionary tales are directed at adults, warning them of the untimeliness and the dangers risked by overstepping species boundaries. In doing so, they trivialize Treadwells desire for cross-species relating as childish, assuming it to be symptomatic of the immature developmental stage he inhabited. In Treadwells own imaginary, the feral tale is the repository for mimesis potential to validate forms of sense experience and knowledge that are integral to, but not limited to childhood, and it is in accordance with this genre that Treadwell shapes his own selfunderstanding in his films and writings. It is ultimately also conscripted by Jans and Herzog to negate that same potential. Though Jans at times deeply identifies with Treadwell, ultimately both he and Herzog capitalize on the feral tale, not for nostalgic reasons, but in order to reify species or ontological category distinctions, exploiting the (adult) audiences fears of becoming child and then animal. In consequence, they establish one legitimate mode of animal relating, namely, objective science. Indirectly, at the very least, they make a specific construction of the child serve, or be complicit with, a set of restrictive norms they authorize by identifying them as human and adult. It is tempting to read Herzogs and Janss adoption of Treadwells feral tale in terms of the long-established pedagogical project of colonialist feral tales for children, the most well-known exemplar of which is Rudyard Kiplings The Jungle Books. There, Mowglis feral childhood serves ultimately as a lesson about the proper (British) relationship with other (colonized) lands and (native) peoples, specifically, in India. The bears, wolves, tigers, and mongooses of Kiplings jungle have been decoded by critics as figures for racial and cultural others, and Mowglis fantasy of inclusion and adoption by them inevitably gives way to a recognition of his humanness (in this context, his racial and cultural superiority).28 Without the need for allegory, Herzog and Jans similarly insist on species purity and loyalty, no matter how much their narratives flirt with crossspecies metamorphoses. Treadwells tale becomes then, in their hands, a neocolonialist lessonexcept what now needs to be re-learned is the proper colonization of animal others by humans, something the subversive elements of the Treadwell narrative jeopardized. In fact, Treadwell himself falls into this role at times, when he refers to the Alaskan wilderness as the jungle, when he insists that the animals are dependent upon him for their protection, and when he claims to speak on the bears

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behalf. Further, far from being threatened by the U.S. Park Service (one of his supposed enemies), Treadwells benevolent paternalism is actually made possible by this institution; they permit him to be in the meadows and in the maze, and thus their authority ultimately bounds and encloses the spaces in which he attempts, by returning to childhood, to outrun his own humanness. Nevertheless, Treadwells feralizationhis own version of the colonizers going nativeis an attempt to reanimate or reincarnate cultural and literary constructions of the child as the permissible body for crossing-over the category divide of human/animal, and for the establishment of a shared space of mutual respect and nurturance with those radically other. He acts against strong cultural prohibitions that insist, law-like, both on the degree of ontological difference and on the necessity for a pre-scripted form of relating with wild animals. Living out a childhood fantasy as an adult male, he probes alternative forms of kinship and communication that have their foundation in childs play. His story leaves open the possibility that sciences tendency to classify and compartmentalize taxonomic differences between species, like the earlier parsing of blood purity in colonialist policies, will only tell us what we think we already know about ourselves and the wild animals with whom we have chosen not to live. Ellen Brinks is an associate professor of English at Colorado State University. Notes
In his biography of Timothy Treadwell, Nick Jans repeatedly puts this story in the realm of the literary: Treadwells story is part myth, passion play, tragedy, and cautionary tale (xii); Treadwell is a tragic hero . . . doomed to destroy not only himself but the things he cherished most (215); and his death in the arms of his own true love derives from the best nineteenth-century folk-song tradition (79).
1 2 Werner Herzog indicates in Grizzly Man that Treadwell shot over one hundred hours of film over the last five years of his life. 3 Kenneth Kidd coins the term feral tale for this genre of childrens literature.

The connection of the unsocialized (e.g., young) child with animality in our cultural discourses is discussed by Richard Mills (2628).
4

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5 6

Ellen Brinks See Kenneth Kidd, introduction.

Grizzly Man was not the first time Werner Herzog felt drawn to the magnetism of the feral child unadaptable to the social order. In 1974, he made The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (in German the title is Jeder fr sich und Gott gegen alle), a film about a tragic figure who, while not raised with animals but in virtually solitary confinement, was seen as more animal than human.
7 8

See Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reiner (87).

Judith Plotz maps out Romantic discourses that treat childhood as inextricable from Natureboth as Law and as the green world (5) in chapter one.
9

Edward W. Said 56.

The desire of the human animal for the timelessness of non-human animal life, imagined as only attainable during childhood, is beautifully evoked in Thom Gunns The Allegory of the Wolf Boy, another feral tale. Acting on semi- or unconscious impulses (loose desires hoarded against his will), the boy, still boy . . . breaks from the house, wedges his clothes between/ Two moulded garden urns, and goes beyond/ His understanding. . . . His clothes, synechdoches of his human body, are stashed between moldy urns, an image of mortality; divested of these human habiliments, the boys escape into animality is a release from times depredations.
10 11 Alice Kuzniar explores this point within the context of human-dog bonds in chapter three. 12 Eric Tribunella argues that there is an erotic component within stories of boys with their dogs that deserves to be considered as a facet of childhood sexuality (152). Further, such stories [draw] force in part from a widespread dissatisfaction with the qualities and (im)possibilities of normative human-human attachments (165).

Marianne DeKoven notes that Jane Goodall won success, despite a skeptical, often contemptuously dismissive male scientific establishment [at] Cambridge University and beyond, an establishment that for many years scorned and repudiated her findings about the complexity and sophistication of chimpanzee society (147). James Krasners essay describes the representational politics through which Goodall and Fossey were read, and how they eclipsed their status as scientists (245 and 250). For a glimpse into the bitter controversy surrounding Fosseys scientific methods during her life, see Farley Mowat, Woman in the Mists: The Story of Dian Fossey and the Mountain Gorillas of Africa (New York: Warner Books, 1987). There are other similarities between these female primatologists and Treadwell: Goodall has been beloved by schoolchildren, as was Treadwell; and Fossey, like Treadwell, was criticized for going feral (see James Krasner, 24445).
13

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14 During a U.S. speaking tour to raise environmental awareness, Jane Goodall came to my university as a featured speaker. In an auditorium of thousands, for many the most uncanny and memorable moment of the evening was when Goodall greeted the audience with the cries a (friendly) chimpanzee would use to greet another, becoming suddenly and utterly other. You could hear a pin drop. 15

See Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.

16 The highly experienced nature film-maker, Joel Bennett, who spent thousands of hours making five films with Treadwell, describes his adeptness at reading the bears: He was always paying attention, taking cues from behavior. Hed look over a bear and tell us, This ones OK, or give us orders to back off. And he was always right (166).

In the words of my colleague William Marvin, hes acquired ursine literacy.

17 18 Baker refers to self-descriptions of artistshere Dennis Oppenheimwho stress the role of fear in exploring animal becoming in their art (8089). 19 Anna Deavere Smiths plays are part of a larger project On the Road: In Search of American Character, begun in the early 1980s. Her best-known works are Fires in the Mirror, based on the Crown Heights Riots in Brooklyn, Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992, based on the Rodney King beating and its aftermath in LA. 20 Smith remarks that there is always a gap between the person she is representing and her attempt to seem like them. As she says, I try to close the gap between us, but I applaud the gap between us (xxxviii). 21 I am not claiming that Treadwell really became a bear. For Hocquenghem and Schrer, the connivance with the animal, which begins but extends beyond childhood, is primarily a rejection of Oedipality (quoted in Deleuze, 123). Steve Baker also using a Deleuzian idiom, speaks of the possibility of experiencing an uncompromising sweeping away of identities, whether human or animal through the de-territorialization that becoming animal enables (68). 22 For a theoretical model of this kind of relating to an other, see D. W. Winnicott, 8889. 23

For this kind of cross-identification, see Jessica Benjamin, 3347.

24 According to Perry Nodelman, within the dominant discourse of childrens literature, a child is a non-human in the process of becoming more human (The Other, 32); for childrens literature as the repository of adult norms and fantasies, see Jacqueline Rose.

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25 For recent philosophical attempts to weaken the force of this binarism, see Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004). 26 27

Thanks to Bruno Navasky for this idea.

See Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature (New York: Viking, 1985).
28 See Jopi Nyman, Re-Reading Rudyard Kiplings English Heroism: Narrating Nation in The Jungle Book, Orbis Litterarum 56 (2001): 20520; Michael Newton, Kipling and the Savage Child, Commonwealth 15.1 (1992): 1218; and Nandita Batra, Jungle People and Beast Folk: Darwinian and Imperial Discourse in Two Fables of the Fin-de-Sicle, Bestia 8 (2001/2002): 16573.

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