Jack London (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

165 Pages·2011·0.2 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
JACK LONDON
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Jack London
Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Learning
Introduction © 2011 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jack London / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-366-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4381-3640-0 (e-book)
1. London, Jack, 1876–1916—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold.
PS3523.O46Z649 2011
813'.52—dc22
2010036210
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Jack London: The Problem of Form 3
Donald Pizer
Sea Change in The Sea-Wolf 13
Sam S. Baskett
“Congested Mails”: Buck and Jack’s “Call” 31
Jonathan Auerbach
“Zone-Conquerors” and “White Devils”:
The Contradictions of Race in
the Works of Jack London 55
Andrew J. Furer
The Wires Were Down: The Telegraph
and the Cultural Self in
“To Build a Fire” and White Fang 73
Christopher Gair
Canvas and Steam: Historical Conflict
in Jack London’s Sea-Wolf 91
James A. Papa Jr.
vi Contents
Jack London’s Medusa of Truth 101
Per Serritslev Petersen
Jack London’s Evolutionary Hierarchies:
Dogs, Wolves, and Men 115
Lisa Hopkins
Jack London and Evolution:
From Spencer to Huxley 127
Lawrence I. Berkove
Chronology 141
Contributors 143
Bibliography 145
Acknowledgments 149
Index 151
Editor’s Note
My introduction grapples with London as writer and mythic figure in
accounting for his continuing appeal. Donald Pizer similarly strives to
uncover the source of London’s canonical endurance given the superficiality
of much of his work. Sam S. Baskett then pores over the author’s letters in
his reassessment of London’s intentions in The Sea-Wolf.
Jonathan Auerbach explores the narrative self-consciousness afforded
the various animal protagonists found in the novels, followed by Andrew J.
Furer’s assessment of the role of race.
Christopher Gair then suggests that the telegraph and developing com-
munications technology deeply affected journalistic and literary style in early
twentieth century. James A. Papa Jr. similarly appraises The Sea-Wolf through
the lens of the period’s historical and, specifically, nautical changes.
Per Serritslev Petersen traces London’s quest to fuse fictional with
philosophical authenticity, followed by Lisa Hopkins who joins the growing
number of critics scrutinizing evolution and eugenics in the major writings.
Lawrence I. Berkove concludes the volume by also taking up the evolutionary
call, suggesting that London’s greatest influence was Darwin.
vii
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
J
ack London died at 40 in 1916, possibly of a drug overdose. As autodidact,
the self-named Jack London worked as an oyster pirate, a seaman, and a
power plant laborer but was most himself as a vagrant and a revolution-
ary, until he became a professional writer and then a war correspondent.
A voyager, rancher, socialist politician, a permanent adventurer, an inces-
sant writer: London’s energies were beyond measure. He remains both a
phenomenon of our imaginative literature and a permanent figure in the
American mythology.
His best stories—including “To Build a Fire,” “Th e She-Wolf,” “For
the Love of a Man,” and “Th e Apostate”—surpass his novels and fantasies
in literary power. Th e realism of the stories is so extreme and intense that
they border on hallucinatory phantasmagorias. Dogs transmute into wolves,
if they are not eaten by wolves, and men struggle lest they themselves are
devoured. Death is everywhere in Jack London’s Klondike: freezing, starva-
tion, and wolves fuse into a composite menace.
Th e Call of the Wild opens with a section called “Into the Primitive,”
which is a fair motto for Jack London’s literary quest. Here I want to center
on “Th e She-Wolf,” the second story or episode of White Fang. London’s grim
sense of determinism haunts the entire book, whose opening section, “Th e
Trail of the Meat,” sums up the metaphysic of the work:
It is not the way of the Wild to like movement. Life is an off ense
to it, for life is movement; and the Wild aims always to destroy
movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it
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2 Harold Bloom
drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen in their mighty
hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry
and crush into submission man—man, who is the most restless of
life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all movement must in the
end come to the cessation of movement.
Jack London writes in the interval between Schopenhauer’s analysis of
the will to live and Freud’s uncanny apprehension that the inanimate is our
destination and origin, the vision of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Yet Lon-
don, though he gives the “Wild” his allegiance, retains a kind of last-ditch
humanism. Bill and Henry, hunted by the wolf pack, “two men who are not
yet dead,” are marked by the dignity of their mutual regard and their desper-
ate courage. Down to three bullets and six sled dogs, they are vastly outnum-
bered by the wolves. Their particular nemesis is the she-wolf, a husky sled dog
gone back to the wild and now a leader of the wolf pack.
In the next episode, Bill joins the dogs as the she-wolf’s victim, and
Henry is a solitary survivor. It is London’s peculiar power that his empathy
extends equally to the she-wolf and to her human antagonists. Among writ-
ers of children’s literature, London’s stance would be more commonplace. I
cannot think of a full analogue, in adult popular literature, to London’s affin-
ity for animals, except for Kipling, who so beautifully blurs the line between
the child’s and the adult’s imagination. Kipling was a far more versatile and
gifted writer than Jack London and had nothing in him of London’s sav-
age primitivism. But that worship of the wild still marks London’s difference
from nearly everyone else and accounts for London’s permanent appeal to
readers throughout the world.
DONALD PIZER
Jack London: Th e Problem of Form
M
ost of the significant criticism of Jack London has been devoted to
two interrelated issues: Is there a coherent center to London’s ideas or are
they indeed hopelessly confused and contradictory; and what are the sources
of London’s strength and appeal as a writer given the superficiality of much
of his work? So, for example, critics have often grappled with the relation-
ship between London’s socialism and Nietzscheanism, and they have sought
to explain how a writer who could achieve the seamless perfection of “To
Build a Fire” could also produce an extraordinary amount of trash. What-
ever the value of these efforts, almost all have been piecemeal in character.
The critic tackles a particular narrow problem or a specific work and then
extrapolates from it. At the considerable risk of moving to the other extreme
of overschematization and overgeneralization, I would like to suggest a
single dominant solution to the enigma which is Jack London. The notion
which I propose to pursue is that London as a thinker and as an artist is
essentially a writer of fables and parables.
To help clear the ground, I should note that I do not maintain that
there is a clear distinction between the fable and the parable.1 Both forms
are didactic. Th ey seek to establish the validity of a particular moral truth
by off ering a brief story in which plot, character, and setting are allegorical
agents of a paraphrasable moral. But historically, because of the association of
From Studies in the Literary Imagination 16, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 107–15. Copyright © 1983 by
Georgia State University.
3