Just a Couple of Dudes
by zunguzungu
After he was done being President, Teddy Roosevelt decided to unwind by going on safari in East Africa and blasting the living bejeezus out of everything he could find. Ostensibly, he was there to get natural history specimens for the Smithsonian, but his heart was really in the simpler pleasures of hunt. Whatever else TR was, he was a man who like to shoot things. A lot.
He also took his son Kermit with him, but other than dedicating African Game Trails to “My Side-Partner,” he’s interestingly reluctant to frame the trip as the big father-son picnic it was. Instead, he displaces the problem of the father-son relationship (which is a problem for him for various reasons) onto the African landscape itself. Teddy’s epigram kind of says it all: “He loved the great game as if he were their father.” Because nothing says paternal love like a bullet to the brainpan.
Anyway, I find this photograph of the pair incredibly great:
There’s so much to say. They sit like manly men, legs folded to leave plenty of room for their genitalia, and they present their guns to us like the manly man phalli that they so clearly are. Their heads stick into the empty whiteness of the sky, stark against the background of a staged African emptiness that stretches out into the far horizon. Manly men in Africa, the place where manly men go to be men, manly-ly.
There’s also a clear gendered hierarchy within their manliness: Kermit’s hat is like a sun-bonnet, open and wide like his collar and posture, while TR’s hat is (like his face, closed off by glasses and mustache) tight and constricting. His gun is more phallic than Kermit’s, which is held at arm’s length, and TR’s wall of teeth (much beloved of caricaturists) has been displaced onto the bull itself, since his own lips are pinched closed and his gaze lowered and remote. And while Kermit has his leg braced against the animal, indicating that TR must be putting his weight against his son, the surface composition has TR floating unsupported, a towering tower of towering masculinity.
The bull itself… Shooting African animals brings these dudes together, and even though they sit in classic man-style (phalli carefully pointed in different directions to avoid the embarrassment of “crossing the streams”), the line between their bodies is both a point of contact and an impermeable barrier, both the point where they cleave together and where they cleave apart. But the horns of the dead bull they’ve shot resolves the problem, curving and embracing them in a single grisly familial body. Posed in an “action” pose — emphasizing not a scientific curiosity but a trophy — the Buffalo bull is the object on which their masculinity can be expended, and in doing so, bring them together. As TR writes:
“Kermit put his first barrel into the second bull, and I my second barrel into one of the others, after which it became impossible to say which bullet struck which animal, as the firing became general.”
Not much I can say about that. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But sometimes a hunting rifle is a phallus. And this is one of those times.
zunguzungu 
this is a brilliant photograph–and the description equally so! My favorite of the “let’s kill animals” is Meinertzhagen, who loved to kill male animals and would complain if he killed a female animal.
Sorry for being a bad netizen–I really should comment more, but 3rd world internet is really 3rd world.
this is a brilliant photograph–and the description equally so! My favorite of the “let’s kill animals” is Meinertzhagen, who loved to kill male animals and would complain if he killed a female animal.
Sorry for being a bad netizen–I really should comment more, but 3rd world internet is really 3rd world.
Yup, just _look_ at that there empty landscape, bereft of any people or societies or traditions and just waiting for someone to come colonize it, fill it up, make it useful. Makes me wonder who exactly was taking this picture, eh?
There’s a wonderfully horrifying painting somewhere … can’t remember what context I saw it in … of Victoria and Albert off at their country hunting estate and being presented with all of the dead animals they killed. Just a bizarre abundance and performance of empire, with the strangest expressions on everyone, not least the dead animals.
Hmm. The similarities you point out between their symmetrical postures brings their differences into relief. TR is, as you say, withdrawn and self-contained; he also doesn’t grip his
phallusrifle. He doesn’t need to. Arms folded, he seems to be resting. While Kermit both grips his rifle and gazes actively into the camera, TR’s gaze is directed fondly downward, as if with paternal pride — directed toward the dead bull.If the bull is tying Kermit and TR together in a family photo, as you say, it’s not quite clear who’s who in this family. The bull, dead, and TR, at rest and satisfied, seem to be in harmony.
Kermit provides the balance to TR, as you described so well; he’s a crucial part of the organic whole. But he’s also the wild card, the piece that might break off, or get up, as his braced leg might allow him to do. His left arm is precariously balanced, not at rest, and his right hand, resting on the rifle, is poised to lever him out of the sitting position. Unlike TR with his downward gaze or the dead bull with no gaze, Kermit squints at the camera, as if poised to come our way — or rather, the way of the invisible photographer.
The two men sit on the bull with their phallic rifles, but their own postures also mimic the pair of horns on the bull’s head. They and their phallic rifles supersede the horns on the head of the bull that they have just killed, as TR gazes lovingly down at the son he has just castrated.
Kermit’s position is unstable. What if one of the horns were to break off…?
Keguro, fear not; it’s been a long time since I’ve commented over at your place, and I’ve been enjoying your stuff enormously (and would note that 3rd world internet has not prevented a prohibitive posting schedule!). I liked this description of Meinertzhagen on wikipedia: “His passion for birdwatching (and shooting) was encouraged by a family friend, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who, like another family friend, Charles Darwin, was an ardent empiricist and who took young Richard on walks, urging him to study the natural world: “Observe, record, explain!”
Sisyphus, exactly, re: the emptiness. I suspect there’s a moment in the late 19th C where the tide turned between preferred fantasy of Africa, where the “dark heart” fantasy got replaced by a “wide open empty,” correlating to when the Victorians started to think that colonizing Africa was going to work really well (and then maybe the tide turned back in the fifties). Such generalizations are totally irresponsible, of course, but the way the European imagination got less fixated on West Africa and more on East has got to have something to do with that; if you’re looking for wide open panaramas (good for shooting!), you can’t get much better than a place like the SErengeti. And if you go to p172 of this googlebook, you’ll see a TR version of the death spectacle: http://books.google.com/books?id=Q41Oony9asgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=african+game+trails&ei=Gi0oSaeYN6WQkASgs8CCDQ#PPA172,M1
Natalia,
That’s nicely put; I hadn’t noticed the parallel between the guns and the horns. And as you put it, the father needs to hide his dependence on the son, which makes the son a peculiar kind of threat. And the bull is also (by the very act of being a displacement object for violence against the son) a representation of the mother’s structuring absence, practically a leitmotif for TR.
This was fun. Also, for what it’s worth, it inspired this.
John,
That’s fantastic. And it wasn’t until I looked at the picture at your place that it hit me why it’s a Buffalo in that picture. Doh!
This was great. (I really took note of your blog very recently. A lot of great reading. Thanks.)
This post was merely an excuse to write “phalli” all over the internets.
As if I needed an excuse.