Novels And Social Writing Of Jack London - Case Study Example

Novels And Social Writing Of Jack London Thesis Statement The Sea Wolf is novel with different interpretations and a combination of naturalistic story and the sentimental romance. The Sea Wolf of Jack London is one of America’s most famous novels. The novel is a sea tale which was written in 1904. The novel, inspired in part by London's own adventure on a sealer at the age of 17, is set aboard a sailing schooner called the Ghost in the Northern Pacific at the turn of the century. The story records the conversion of a bookish shipwreck victim into a powerful and clever sailor at the hands of a bright skipper, Wolf Larsen. (Walker 1-7) A ship, Martinez, is wrecked. The castaway and the survivor, Humphrey Van Weyden or Hump, is plucked to safety from the hazy waters of San Francisco Bay by the outward-bound Ghost. Short one man because of the unfortunate death of a crewman who had the boldness, or perhaps the luck, to die at the very start of the ship's journey, Larsen orders Hump pressed into service as a cabin boy, despite his objection, instead of ferrying him back to shore. (Raskin 11-12) From this point on, the literary Van Weyden serves as a thwart for Larsen, a self-taught philosopher taken by the current intellectual trends of his era, most remarkably the rise of Social Darwinism. Larsen shares with Melville's Ahab a changed obsession for the ideal, and each is finally rendered a “grotesque,” to reference from Sherwood Anderson's “Book of the Grotesques,” by their distorted pursuit of personal truths. (Pizer 9-10) In Larsen’s ease, this distortion of thought is portrayed symbolically by the brain tumor that ultimately destroys him. Until that stage, the story's plot revolves in good part around the struggle between Wolf Larsen and Hump over whose viewpoint about life is correct. (Pizer 31-33) Ironically, the struggle manifests itself through repeated physical clash in which Hump is forced to develop his own physical powers. As an added twist, engineered to convince popular readers, Hump and Wolf also compete for the affections of Maud Brewster, a woman survivor from the Martinez hauled aboard soon after Hump. In the end, Wolf dies of sickness, the Ghost is wrecked, and Hump and Maud are rescued. (Stasz 3-4) It is the competition between Wolf and his brother, Death, also the skipper of a sealer. The historical disagreement between sail and steam, played out in the contest on the sealing grounds between Wolf's schooner and the steamship Macedonia, captained by Death, has until now been overlooked. Nevertheless, when looked at closely this fight, which ends with the triumph of the Macedonia, can be said to both eclipse and undermine the novel's obvious primary concern with the ideological struggle between Van Weyden's idealism and Larsen's Social Darwinism, of which so many critics have made note. London himself, quoted from a letter to Mary Austin in Phillip S. Foner's Jack London: American Rebel, referred to The Sea-Wolf as an "[attack] on Nietzschean philosophy" (63). But a cautious exploration of the contest between the Ghost and the Macedonia will illustrate how this apparently minor thread in the narrative actually betrays the novel's deeper preoccupations. (Labor 1219) The novel was published in 1904, when the age of sail was coming to a close in terms of commercial enterprise. (Wichlan 131) In an actual sense it was already past. Although large numbers of vessels in the maritime continued to carry sail, the steamship had already laid irreversible claim to the high seas, and the next decade or so would see large numbers of sailing vessels scuttled or converted to steam. (Day 113-119) The reasons for this are plain: steamships traveled faster, were more reliable, and required much smaller crews. In the sealing industry, where profits often approached 40 per cent, the vessels of choice were schooners and sloops, boats easily “managed by one or two men” while the hunters were out on the sea (Busch 137, 140). Still, some sealers were converting to steam as early as the 1880s. Since the sealing industry as a whole, at least in the north Pacific, was effectively finished by the end of the 19th century, complete domination by the steamship was never achieved, and most sealers remained sailing vessels. (Chapelle 220) The sailor Johnson, one of Wolf Larsen's crew, praises the virtues of the Ghost under sail. She is “considered the fastest schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets,” and was “once a private yacht ... built for speed” (London 47). Given that the key sealing ports in North America at the time were San Francisco and Victoria, British Columbia, the claim carries weight. But the Ghost is still no match for the Macedonia, whose steam engines render her able of “pounding through the sea at a seventeen-knot gait” (London 189). Ironically, though the Macedonia symbolizes the new age of steam and mechanical propulsion on the high seas, we never get a clear sighting or a detailed description of her. (Kershaw 133) In fact, the crew of the Sea Wolf never sees anything of the Macedonia but “smoke” on the horizon (173). For the moment, the encroaching steam era, with its dependence on mechanical ability and rational thought, qualities at odds with both Wolf's Social Darwinism and the romance of sail, remains a distant, if inevitable, threat. (Kingman 1-3) The sarcasm is that the Macedonia, propelled by great engines and capable to traverse the sea at will, should receive such ephemeral treatment in the story, while the Ghost, a vessel driven by sail and dependent upon the vagaries of the wind, is described in real detail: “The Ghost is an eight-ton schooner of a remarkably fine model. The beam, or width, is twenty-three feet, and her length a little over ninety feet. A lead keel of fabulous but unknown weight makes her very stable, while she carries an immense spread of canvas. From the deck to the top of the maintopmast is something over a hundred feet, while the foremast with its topmast is eight or ten feet shorter.” (48) Such an explanation contradicts the real meaning of her name, which suggests she is no longer a material force in the world. In reality, the Macedonia, ever hidden beneath the horizon's rim but for the smoke from her stacks, is the more ghost-like of the two vessels. But it is in this very disagreement between expectations and reality that the nature of the historical disagreement is made clear. Wolf Larsen's time is about to be eclipsed by a new one that he knows nothing of, an era in which the world will be run by men like his brother, Death, who, except for his rough nature, remains a mystery even to Wolf. “Death Larsen," (Hump) involuntarily cried. "Is he like you?” “Hardly. He is a lump of an animal without any head. He has all my--my—” “Brutishness,” (Hump) suggested. “Yes--Thank you for the word--all my brutishness, but he can scarcely read or write.” “And he has never philosophized on life,” (Hump) added. “No," Wolf Larsen answered with an incredible air of sadness. "And he is all the more happier for leaving life alone. He is too busy living life to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening up books.” (84) Wolf’s brother, in his mechanical steamship on the horizon, is the new twentieth-century man. Death is more brutal in his rational mechanistic approach to life than Wolf, in his animalism, can ever be. There is no room, and no need, for philosophy or poetry in Death Larsen's world. (Perry 10-11) The evolution from sail to steam at this same moment in history only serves to reinforce this assault on the intellect and the soul. (Watson 5-6) Faster passages under steam mean less time at sea, and less time for reflection and the kind of deep thoughts that lends itself not only to the philosophizing of Wolf Larsen, but also to the poetic gleanings of Melville's Ishmael atop a mast-head of the Pequod. (Sinclair 15-16) The conventional sea voyage, since the time of Ulysses “a natural vehicle for the human imagination exploring the unknown, whether it be discovering new continents [or] finding out the truth about oneself” (Carlson 5), is about to be transformed into a wholly technical endeavor, with no goal other than the fast and efficient transfer of cargo or passengers for one port to another. Analyzed in this way, any reading of the novel as a romance suffers a strange twist. (Pattee 1-2) While many critics see Hump as the romantic hero, a case can now be made for Wolf assuming that role if we focus on the historical moment under discussion here--the displacement of the 19th century and the era of sail by the 20th century and the era of steam. In the new era, man will no longer look outside of himself to nature for spiritual deliverance, as Wolf comes close to doing on the Ghost one “blazing tropic night”: “Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all time were running through me, as though all powers were mine. I know truth, divine good from evil, right from wrong. My vision is clear and far. I could almost believe in God ....” (London, 62) The potential capability of a long passage under sail to persuade religious or mystical feelings in a man, even one as cruel as Wolf Larsen, simply by immersing him in the natural rhythms of life at sea, is about to be lost. (Labor 16-17) In their obsession with the novel as a clash between Wolf Larsen's materialism and the idealism of Humphry Van Weyden, and with the transformation of Hump from a bookish kind of gentleman to a lion-like hero, critics have neglected the historical conflict between Wolf and his brother, Death. (Lundquist 9-10) The competition between Wolf and Hump is only one conflict in the text, and the two, far from being opponents, are in fact unknowing victims of the new age represented by the Macedonia's smokestack on the horizon. (London 1-2) The coming era is a threat both to Hump's moral idealism – it has no use for books and ideas – and to Wolfs adoration of physical strength, which Hump finally comes to appreciate in his own way: “Once more the Ghost bore away before the storm, this time so submerging herself that for some seconds I thought she would never reappear. Even the wheel, quite a deal higher than the waist, was covered and swept again and again. At such moments I felt strangely alone with God, alone with him and watching the chaos of his wrath. And then the wheel would reappear, and Wolf Larsen's broad shoulders, his hands gripping the spokes and holding the schooner to the course of his will, himself an earth god, dominating the storm, flinging its descending waters from him and riding it to his own ends. And oh, the marvel of it! The marvel of it! That tiny men should live and breathe and work, and drive so small a contrivance of wood and cloth through so tremendous an elemental strife.” (135) The old saying that wooden ships make iron men can perfectly be applied here. (Labor 22-23) The new vessels will not need men with the strength nor the courage to climb the rigging, haul in the sheets, or wrestle with the wheel or tiller on deck in a blow. (London 39-33408) Instead, the sailor so bravely depicted in this passage will soon become nothing more than a slave to a machine, imprisoned below decks to stoke the burners and tend to the engines of the new vessels. There will be no more men like Melville's Bulkington, who struggles with the ship’s wheel in a blow to get her free or a lee shore. The age of Melville, London, Dana, and Slocum has come to a close. (Kershaw 1-8) That Hump is in association with Wolf in decrying what is to come is obvious in his use of the word “enemy” to explain the Macedonia and her crew in his account of Wolfs attempt to shanghai some of his brother’s men: “Even the (Ghost’s) hunters were pulling, and with three pairs of oars in the water they rapidly overhauled what I may appropriately term the enemy.” (181) Hump has become, for better or worse, an associate of the “little floating world” (48) that the Ghost represents, and his solidarity with it, against the larger threat of the new machine age, whose influence the sea has so far resisted, is clear. (Hamilton 12-13) If the new age has no time for the romantic: musings of Humphrey Van Weyden, it also undervalues physical strength. An individual's capability to physically enforce his will upon others, upon which Wolfs idea of Darwinism is based, no longer means anything. For Wolf, power resides mainly, if not solely, in a man's capability to impose his will on the world and on others through pure physical strength. We see this demonstrated over and over again in the story. The first example is in Wolfs early assault on the cabin boy, Leach, at Leach's refusal to take on duties he had not contracted for when he signed up for the journey: “Then came another stirring of Wolf Larsen's tremendous strength. It was utterly unexpected, and it was over and done with between the ticks of two seconds. He had sprung fully six feet across the deck and driven his fist into the other's stomach .... The cabin boy--and he weighed one hundred and sixty-five at the very least--crumpled up. His body wrapped limply about the fist like a wet rag about a stick. He lifted into the air, described a short curve, and struck the deck alongside the corpse . . . where he lay and writhed about: in agony.” (28-29) Hence, Leach falls in line, and accepts his newly acquired duties as a puller, leaving Hump to serve, however reluctantly, as the new cabin boy: “What was I to do? To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps, would not help my case.” (30) It might be argued that to suppress Hump vehemently is no special feat, that Wolfs physical power here is no real asset. But over and over again we see Larsen challenge the sailors physically and defeat them. He frequently battles Leach on deck, and at one point he manages to fight off a good portion of the crew single-handedly when he is jumped by them in the forecastle (109-11). Even at the end of the text, when Hump has become much stronger than the day he was fished cold, wet, and terrified out of the sea by Wolf, he still fears, and rightly so, Larsen’s marvelous physical strength, in spite of the fact that the captain of the Ghost at that stage is blind and near death. But Wolfs’ strength serves him only on board the Ghost, whose decks represent an age which, if it is not fully past, is in its final moment. Against Death and his ship, Wolf does not even try to try his strength. Instead, he drives the Ghost into the fog banks, fleeing the bright “sunshine, the clear sky..., the sea breaking and rolling wide to the horizon” in order to escape from the Macedonia, which “vomiting smoke and fire and iron missiles” is “rushing madly upon” his ship (189). Larsen knows the Ghost cannot hope to win against the mechanically powered ship, so he sails her into the mist in an anxious attempt to deny the reality bearing down upon him. The symbolic implications of this maneuver are not lost on Hump: “The mind recoiled from contemplation of a world beyond this wet veil which wrapped us around. This was the world, the universe itself, its bounds so near one felt impelled to reach out both arms and push them back. It was impossible that the rest could be beyond these walls of gray. The rest was a dream, no more than the memory, of a dream.” (189) In the beginning of the text the fog is expressed in similar terms during Hump's trip across the bay on the Martinez. At that time Hump finds fault with another passenger's annoyance at the fog and its undue effect upon the ferry's progress: “I felt quite amused at his unwarranted choler, and while he stumped indignantly up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog. And romantic it certainly was – the fog, like the gray shadow of infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of the earth. ...” (10) For Hump, the fog, with it sense of anonymity, reflects the dreamier side of his own nature; for Wolf, the reduced visibility represents a safe haven from his brother's ship. For both, the fog serves as a place to hide from the coming era. That Hump's romantic thought in the fog on board the Martinez should be put to an end by a collision with a steamship seems appropriate. That the pilot of that same ship should appear so emotionless at the moment of collision – he ran a calm and tentative eye over (the Martinez), as though to decide the exact point of the accident, and took no notice whatever when (her) pilot, white with rage, shouted, “Now you've done it!”(11) – further accents the fact that the new era holds no place for Hump or Wolf, men who, whatever their shortcomings, are fervent about the ideas they espouse, and ill-fitted for a rational and reasoned world in which passion no longer has a place. Wolf Larsen would rather run than tackle the Macedonia, but more must be said about the dynamics of the; disagreement between the Fao sealers. Some might argue that Wolf and his men do physically confront the men of the Macedonia when Larsen sends his hunters out to capture some Death's men by force. The attack is successful. However, a number of qualifications are in order concerning this episode. First, Wolfs men do not confront the Macedonia outfight, but attack her boats individually when they are spread out and away from the ship, when it is most safe to do so. In the sealing industry, individual boats, propelled by sail and oar, were often fairly far from the main ship, and were often lost when they strayed too far to be found or were overtaken by bad weather (Busch, 133). Second, and more important, it is economic need, that drives Wolfs men to assault the Macedonia's crews, not Wolfs physical threats. The Macedonia, with her great speed and dependability, and her large number of boats, is a direct threat to the business of all on board the Ghost: “Having passed several miles behind our line of boats, the Macedonia proceeded to lower her own. We knew she carried fourteen boats to our five . . . and she began dropping them far to leeward of our last boat, continued dropping them athwart our course, and finished dropping them far to windward of our first weather boat. The hunting, for us, was spoiled. There were no seals behind us, and ahead of us the line of fourteen boats, like a huge broom, swept the heard before it .... Each man felt that he had been robbed ....” (London, 175) Such an attack on the men is a literal threat to their lives, as Wolf makes clear: “Who steals my purse steals my fight to live” (175). For Wolf to complete such a statement negates the value he places on physical strength, since brute force alone no longer decides a man’s endurance. In the new era men must live by the purse, by their capability to accumulate capital, and in a capitalist society men are relieved of their purses every day by men physically weaker than them; men they often never see. Economics, not the threat of Wolfs physical strength, pushes the Ghost's hunters, at some risk to their lives, to catch hold so some of Death’s men and press them into service on Wolfs ship. The economic incentive to the men here is double. Not only do they improve their own chances by thinning out the hunters who travel ahead of them, but they are also promised “a dollar a skin for all the skins shot by our new hunters” (191). In reality, when Wolf is finally overtaken by Death he is relieved of his crew not by violence, but economics. Death just buys off Wolf's men: “Hunters went back on me. He gave them a bigger lay. Heard him offering it. Did it right before me. Of course the crew gave me the goby. That was to be expected. All hands went over the side, and there I was, marooned on my own vessel.” (238) Wolf's physical power, however extraordinary, is of no use to him in his conflicts with the new age which Death and the Macedonia represent. When his implausible body and mind are later destroyed by the ravages of disease, the Ghost too is symbolically emasculated when the great masts, designed to stand against any storm (48), fall after their rigging is cut by one of the sailors leaving the vessel. The Ghost, and with it the era of sail, is finished. Some might dispute that Hump's refitting of the Ghost on Endeavor island, and his successful venture out to sea in her at the story's end, suggest that the era of sail, and all that it implies, is not yet finished, and that men like Hump and Wolf, creatures of intellect and passion, are not yet obsolete, that Darwinism and Romanticism both are alive and well at the story's close. To this objection, two final points will be made. Number one, Hump's refitting of the Ghost is based less on physical strength (and not at all upon armchair idealizing) than upon the application of practical mechanical reasoning, on which the new age, that of Death and his like, is based. Hump is successful in doing what no man could achieve single-handedly only by employing a number of simple technologies, such as the shears and the windlass. Without the windlass, Hump could not complete his task at all. Wolf realizes this and tries to destroy it. To his credit, Hump manages to repair the windlass but it is not easy. He is not a true soldier of the mechanical age: “Three days I worked on that windlass. Last of all things was I a mechanic, and in that time I accomplished what an ordinary' machinist would have done in as many hours. I had to learn my tools to begin with, and every simple mechanical principle which such a man would have at his finger ends I had likewise to learn.” (261) Number two, after making a successful bid for the open sea in the Ghost, Hump and Maud Brewster finally spot a revenue cutter and are rescued by it. That they sight the cutter, a steamer, immediately upon burying Larsen at sea – “dragged down by the weight of iron” (283) – points to the final triumph of one age over another. The Ghost, crewless, is left deserted on the swells, and Hump and Maud are carried back, or rather forward, to the world on a steamship. In the end, the Macedonia's victory over the Ghost evidently demonstrates the way in which both Humphrey Van Weyden and Wolf Larsen exemplify ideas whose time has already passed. Works Cited Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. New York: Penguin, 1976. Busch, Britton Cooper. The War Against the Seal. Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1985. Carlson, Patricia Ann, ed. Costerus 52. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986. Chapelle, Howard I. The History of American Sailing Ships. New York: Norton, 1935. Day, A. Grove. "Jack London and Hawaii". in Bob Dye. Hawaii Chronicles. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1996 [1984] pp. 113-119. Foner, Phillip S., ed. Jack London: American Rebel. New York: Citadel, 1947. Hamilton, David. The Tools of My Trade: Annotated Books in Jack London's Library. University of Washington. 1986 Kershaw, Alex. Jack London. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1999 Kershaw, Alex. Jack London: A Life. St. Martin's Press. 1999, p. 133 Kingman, Russ, A Pictorial Life of Jack London (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.,) 1979 Labor, Earle (ed.). The Portable Jack London. Viking Penguin. 1994 Labor, Earle, Robert C. Leitz, III, and I. Milo Shepard: The Letters of Jack London: Volume Three: 1913-1916 Stanford University Press, p. 1219, 1988 Labor, Earle. Jack London. Boston: Twayne,. Praises London ’s convincing portrayal of Wolf Larsen and of Humphrey’s transformation from a weak, rich socialite to a dynamic he-man. 1974 London, Jack. Novels and Stories. Notes and chronology by Donald Pizer. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982. London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf. 1904. New York: Signet, 1964. London, Joan. Jack London and His Times. Doubleday, Doran. Library of Congress 1939, 39-33408. Lundquist, James. Jack London: Adventures, Ideas, and Fiction. New York : Frederick Ungar, 1987. Pattee, Fred Lewis. The New American Literature, 1890-1930. 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