Jack London: The Call of the Wild

“Most of my prose writings,” Crane declared, “have been toward the goal partially described by that misunderstood and abused word, realism.” That word would not have been rejected, either, by Jack London, who, like Norris and Crane, saw reality as a naturalistic struggle for existence, dominated by what he termed – in one of his most famous stories, The Call of the Wild (1903) – the “law of club and fang.” For London, even more ruthlessly than for Crane or even perhaps Norris, life was a battle for power. “The ultimate unit of matter and the ultimate unit of force were the same,” the reader is informed in The Iron Heel (1908). “Power will be the arbiter,” the hero of that novel declares. “It is a struggle of classes. Just as your class dragged down the old feudal nobility, so shall it be dragged down by my class, the working class.” Ernest Everhard, the hero of The Iron Heel, is addressing his remarks to a member of The Oligarchy, a defensive, proto-fascist conglomeration of major trusts and their private militias. The story is set in the years 1911–1932 and is supposedly a transcription of a manuscript written at the time by Avis Cunningham, the wife of Everhard and fellow revolutionary, and edited 700 years later by Anthony Meredith, who lives in what is called the fourth century of the Brotherhood of Man. It describes a violent revolutionary struggle against the iron heel of totalitarian capitalism that ends Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 141 disastrously: Everhard is killed, Avis is apparently executed, and the revolution is crushed. The descriptive frame, however, offers not just hope but the fulfillment of the hero’s prophecy: since the reader is told that the iron heel was finally overthrown some 300 years after the events related in what is called the “Everhard Manuscript.” Like The Octopus, The Iron Heel places the specifics of political defeat within a visionary framework that proposes eventual redemption. Like The Octopus, too, it offers the reader a powerful mix of socialist message and proto-fascist feeling. A commitment to the political and economic jostles in London’s fiction with celebration of the primitive, the morally indifferent power of nature and the beauty of blond, clean-limbed heroes: Wolf Larsen in The Sea-Wolf (1904), for instance, is lovingly described as being of “Scandinavian stock,” “the man type, the masculine, and almost a god in his perfectness.” Such heroes reflect London’s overwhelming commitment to the will to power, in man, society, and nature. Even self-inflicted death can become an expression of that will, in his work. In Martin Eden (1909), for example, London’s most autobiographical novel, the hero commits suicide by forcing himself to stay below the surface of the ocean, despite the struggle his body makes to persuade him otherwise. Suicide becomes, in these terms, a triumph of the will. Martin Eden, Wolf Larsen, and Ernest Everhard are all men of genius from humble surroundings. Each has a touch of the rebel, the antichrist in him. Clearly, there was a sense in which London was presenting an idealized portrait of himself, and his rise from a humble background, in these portraits. London’s first and second novels were published in 1902; and a year later the third, The Call of the Wild, catapulted him to Figure 3.3 Portrait of Jack London.
Bettmann/Corbis. 142 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 fame. The “hero” of the story is a dog, Buck, who is kidnapped from his comfortable existence on a California estate and sold into service as a sledge dog in the Klondike. Eventually, abandoning human society and companionship altogether, Buck becomes leader of a pack of wolves. He has returned to nature, the primitive, aboriginal condition of existence. Thoreau and Twain, in their separate ways, saw nature as a fundamentally moral agency: the source of a humanly sympathetic, ethically sound life. Man, in their work, returns to nature as a means of moral instruction and regeneration. For London, however, nature is what Wolf Larsen calls it in The Sea-Wolf, “unmoral”: it is pure precisely because it is primitive, existing apart from human judgment. His characters, human or otherwise, return to it and learn there a truth that is determinately unhuman: that life is a matter of neither emotion nor ethics but “the call of the wild,” “ruthless struggle.” That truth is also learned inThe Sea-Wolf: a novel that deserves a place with The Call of the Wild, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden as one of London’s major works. Here, it is a man who is suddenly removed from civilized society. In the fog on San Francisco Bay, two ferry boats collide and Humphrey Van Weyden, the narrator, is thrown overboard. He is saved by a sealing schooner, the Ghost, whose captain, Wolf Larsen, presses him into service. The character of Van Weyden is suggested by his interests. He is a critic who has written an essay on Poe and is planning another entitled “The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.” Clearly, London intends the reader to regard Van Weyden as not only effete but suffering from a dangerous delusion: that human beings are capable of free will. The accident that propels Van Weyden out of society is plainly symbolic of the chance rhythms that govern all human existence. Van Weyden is first consigned to the water, the “mighty rhythm” of which offers a paradigm of the mighty rhythms ruling all things. He is then drawn into a new life on a ship the name of which suggests an afterlife, another form of existence, where he is given “new” clothes, a new name “Hump,” and a new job as a cabin boy. In his “new and elemental environment” in which, he reveals, “force, nothing but force obtained,” Van Weyden receives an education into the realities of power from Larsen. The lesson is learned from Larsen’s instruction and example and, not least, from the sheer brute magnificence of his appearance: in terms of physique he is, we are told, like one of “our tree-dwelling prototypes,” while he has a voice “as rough and harsh and frank as the sea itself.” Gradually, Van Weyden changes. “It seemed to me that my innocence of the realities of life had been complete indeed,” he now confesses. “I was no longer Humphrey Van Weyden. I was Hump.” His muscles grow strong and hard; and his mind grows accustomed to what London and the other Naturalists saw as the essential and unavoidable truths of life: the elemental presence of force, the ineluctable nature of power, and the daily fact of brutality. 

Preview questions:

1. How is the idea of the survival of the fittest displayed in The Call of the Wild?

2. Jack London is a prolific writer. According to themes, his writings can be classified into three categories, what are they?