The Call of the Wild and White Fang (2 page)

The World of Jack London,
The Call of the Wild, and White Fang

Introduction

On July 25, 1897, twenty-one-year-old Jack London lit out for the territories and followed a herd of prospectors to the “new” Northland frontier in search of gold. By the time he reached the land of hope and lore, much of the gold had already been panned out of the tributaries of the Yukon River. After a year of following the well-worn trails from San Francisco to Seattle to Alaska to the Klondike region and back, London had gained little in the way of material wealth. He returned home in the summer of 1898 poorer than he was when he left, but he carried with him a store of information about life and landscape that he would mine for years to come; his memories and experiences would guarantee both his fame and his future fortune. In the frozen Arctic, London found confirmation for his philosophical leanings, especially his penchant toward Socialism and biological and social determinism. But his experiences also taught him the value of community, of the intense bonds that a confrontation with the wild can foster in humans and in animals.

The power of the wild and the love shared by human and nonhuman are the subject of the texts brought together in this volume:
The Call of the Wild
(1903) and White Fang (1906).
The Call of the
Wild garnered Jack London immediate fame; it brought him commercial and artistic success and assured him a place in the American literary canon. Mention London’s name in a casual conversation and the unmediated, enthusiastic response is almost invariably the same: “I love
The Call of the Wild!”
This book, it seems, has come to symbolize much for many; but when asked to articulate further what makes for the lasting appeal of the book, many, like Buck, the novel’s canine protagonist, are unable to express their feelings. What, then, makes London’s often violent yet always poignant book so enduring?

London and the
Klondike

By the time London boarded a steamer for his trip from San Francisco to Alaska, he had already led a colorful and dramatic life. He was a sloop owner and oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay and a deputy for the Fish Patrol at fifteen, a sailor traveling through the North and South Pacific hunting seals at seventeen, a coal-shoveler in a power plant, a Socialist, and a tramp at eighteen. By nineteen, a weary London saw himself, with others of the working classes, near “the bottom of the [Social] Pit... myself above them, not far, and hanging on to the slippery wall by main strength and sweat” (London,
War of the Classes,
pp. 274—275; see “For Further Reading”). Al ithough London was far from relinquishing his love of the active life, he feared being ruled by it. London fought in these early years to educate himself, and by that education to get himself out of the hard-laboring classes. As his hero informs his readers in the semi-autobiographical novel
Martin Eden,
writing offered a way to stoke the fires of both the body and the imagination, and so with characteristic determination, London set himself to the task of becoming a professional writer. By 1896, however, he realized that writing alone could not support a hungry family. The following year, London and his brother-in-law Captain James H. Shepard decided to try their luck panning for gold in the recently discovered strikes along the Yukon River in the Klondike.

After disembarking in Juneau, Alaska, London, Shepard and their companions made their way to Dyea, the principle departure point for the gold fields of the Yukon and the Klondike. Buck travels the same trails that London covered—leaving Dyea, making the arduous climb over Chilcoot Pass, and pushing on to Lakes Linderman and Bennett before making the waters of the Yukon River. From here, the party traveled downstream, toward Dawson City, where they navigated the dangerous White Horse and Five Finger Rapids before reaching the relative safety of Split-Up Island, 80 miles from Dawson between the Stewart River and Henderson Creek. London staked a claim near here and made a brief visit to Dawson City to record the claim. He returned to the island, where the group passed the winter in an old miner’s cabin. These long five months proved difficult for London, who contracted scurvy by the spring from poor diet and lack of exercise.

Upon his return to San Francisco in 1898, London began his writing career in earnest. Clearly, the Klondike turned London into a writer of note, not only because he was able to tap into a ready market for all things Gold Rush, but more important, because the landscape offered London a barren theater for his characters to work out their paths in life. If, as London believed, environment determined the course of an individual’s life, then the austere and brutal, yet ultimately simple environment of the North tested the capacities of the individual (and by extension, the species) to adapt to the environment.

London’s intellectual experiences during the winter spent on Split-Up Island are as important as his physical ones; he spent his time reading, rereading, and sharing with his friends the two books he carried with him to the wilderness: Milton’s
Paradise
Lost and Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species.
Less than a year after his return to San Francisco, London summed up his understanding of Darwin in a letter to his friend Cloudesley Johns: “Natural selection, undeviating, pitiless, careless alike of the individual or the species, destroyed or allowed to perpetuate, as the case might be, such breeds as were unfittest or fittest to survive” (Labor, p. 101). Such struggle characterizes human and animal life in
The Call of the Wild
and
White
Fang.

The Origins of
The Call of the Wild

Most of London’s readers were familiar with Darwin’s evolutionary theories, in which the great biologist argues that over time species adapt to their environment and that the process of that adaptation involves a series of struggles for existence. Natural selection, adaptation, and chance are the mechanisms that govern the evolution of a species. The operation of Darwinian evolution is obvious in both
The Call of the Wild
and
White Fang,
as virtually every sentence in these texts palpitates with the deadly threats confronting human and animal in the silent, frozen world of Alaska. London sets the scene for this struggle most explicitly in the opening pages of
White Fang:
“A vast silence reigned over the land,” he writes. “The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness.... It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild” (p. 91). As a team of dogs, carrying two men and a coffin bearing a third, cross the scene, London continues his narration:

It is not the way of the Wild to like movement... and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man (p. 92).

The animals (human and dog alike) in London’s fiction are propelled through the landscape by “the law of club and fang,” by the constant war against predators, famine, and cold, against stupidity, brutality, and viciousness. Buck and Spitz fight to the death for command of the team and hence for supremacy in the pack; a baby White Fang eats ptarmigan chicks, narrowly escapes being killed by their mother, then watches in fear as the ptarmigan hen is snatched up by a raptor.

In
The Call of the Wild,
Buck’s new life as an Arctic sled dog initiates him into this struggle. Before his abduction, Buck was used to a life of comfort and security, a “lazy, sun-kissed life ... with nothing to do but loaf and be bored.” Upon his arrival in the North, Buck senses that he “had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial” (p. 15). Buck finds himself unprepared to deal with this foreign environment; significantly, he must learn about the world around him before he can begin to use it to his advantage. Indeed, both
The Call of the Wild
and
White Fang
can be read as accounts of the education of a being thrown into a testing environment. Just as White Fang must first learn to become domesticated before he can become a dog, Buck must first “learn to be wild” before he can become a wolf. Weakness, Buck quickly learns, equals death in this land of the “law of club and fang,” a lesson he learns as he witnesses Curly, the good-natured Newfoundland, torn to pieces by the pack. “So that was the way,” Buck concludes. “No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you” (p. 16).

The “fittest” species—those that are most successful in the struggle for existence—survive and reproduce. For Buck, this law translates to “Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten” (p. 60). In an interesting move, London translates these evolutionary principles into a brief Socialist tract he wrote in 1899, entitled “What Communities Lose by the Competitive System.” Darwin, along with Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx, not only confirmed London’s belief in Socialism, but also gave him a way to comprehend the communities of humans and dogs he encountered in the Klondike. In his essay, London declares, “[H]is strength lay in numbers, in unity of interests, in solidarity of effort—in short, in combination against the hostile elements of the environment” (Foner, p. 419). Labor equals survival, and labor is a collective effort. It does not matter if the laborer is human or animal, if he toils in a factory in California, delivers mail in the frozen Arctic, or stalks food on the “trail of meat.”

The “struggle for existence” that characterizes these efforts to survive and reproduce takes many forms—animal (human and nonhuman alike) versus animal, plant versus plant, and all against the forces in the environment that seek their destruction. London agrees with Darwin, who argues that the long-term survival of the species, not the survival of an individual, is the focus of this struggle. Darwin cautions his readers “to constantly bear in mind” that “heavy destruction inevitably falls” on every single organic being “at some period in life” and consequently “to never forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers” before that destruction occurs (Darwin,
Origin,
p.119).

The chilling opening of
White Fang
demonstrates both the absolute compunction to reproduce despite the threat of destruction and the “solidarity of effort” among laborers necessary to mitigate the effects of a hostile environment. Two communities are pitted against each other in this opening scene: one formed by Henry, Bill, and their sled dogs; the other composed of the ever-present Arctic wolf pack. Henry and Bill attempt to keep their group together—lit—erally to maintain a critical mass sufficient to ward off predation by the pack. The wolf pack possesses a logic and a system of its own: Divide and conquer. The she-wolf, the “decoy for the pack” as London calls her, plays her part well in this drama. She lures each sled dog, one by one, away from the safety of the camp and fire by the promise of the chance to mate with her. Since the propagation of the species is a drive that inexorably compels animals to act, each dog responds to this primal urge and answers the she-wolf’s call, only to meet death at the teeth of the ravening wolf pack (p. 101). The wolf pack kills Bill and is about to turn on Henry before chance, in the form of another party, steps in and saves him.

Unlike the human community, reliant upon its nonnative dogs and burdened by the accoutrements of culture, the wolf pack has successfully adapted to its environment. Its social structure is defined yet malleable. In times of famine, the pack travels together to give it the advantage over any other animals it may find. In times of plenty, the pack splits up: Male and female pair up and bear a new generation. All work performed by the wolves ensures the survival of the pack. In contrast, the work performed by Bill and Henry, who labor to bring the body of a rich man back for a “long-distance” funeral, satisfy no such essential function. These characters are weighed down and very nearly destroyed by a class structure that demands the fruit of labor not for the self, but for another. The system is absurd, unnatural, and ultimately deadly; the body in the coffin, which should, perhaps, be the first to go to the dogs, is preserved from harm while the bodies of the laborers—both human and canine—who support that body are destroyed.

At the same time, however, something more is at stake than just a “pitiless” battle for brute survival. In
Origin,
Darwin imagines these struggles in a “large and metaphorical sense
including dependence of one being on another”
(Darwin,
Origin,
p. 116). In his other major investigations into the coevolution of humans and animals,
The
Descent of Man
(1871) and
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872), Darwin continues his reorganization of the map of the natural world. In the process, he gives nonhumans standing—specifically, moral standing—as equal participants in the communities of nature. In
Descent,
Darwin argues that a moral scheme rooted in evolutionary terms levels the playing field not only by giving all organisms equal status, but also by emphasizing that each is a part of and a participant in distinct yet interrelated communities.

Evolutionary principles replace a traditional conception of morality based on “selfishness” and the instinct for self-preservation with one that derives from social instincts. Darwin explains this concept in his definitions of “moral sense” and “social instincts,” which he argues have developed for the “general good of the community.” “As the social instincts both of man and the lower animals have no doubt been
developed by the same steps,”
he writes, “it would be advisable... to use the same definition in both cases” (Darwin,
Descent,
pp. 97-98). Humans are not the only ones with a moral sense, according to Darwin, who notes that “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become developed... as in man”
(Descent,
pp. 71-72).