The Call of the Wild and White Fang (3 page)

London also sees the process of evolution as a “moral” one that relies on proper action across communities. London wants to display this process, the opposite of the one narrated in
The Call of the Wild, in White Fang.
Evolution, he writes in a letter to his publisher, George Brett, brings with it “faithfulness, love, morality, and all the amenities & virtues.” In this letter, London explains the genesis of White Fang’s story:

I’m dropping you a line hot with the idea. I have the idea for the next book I shall write.... Not a sequel to
Call of the Wild....
I’m going to reverse the process. Instead of the devolution or decivilization of a dog, I’m going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog.... And it will be a
proper
companion-book—in the same style, grasp, concrete way. Have already mapped part of it out. A complete antithesis to the
Call of the Wild.
And with that book as a forerunner, it should make a hit. What d’ye think?” (Labor, pp. 454—455).

Although London’s Klondike days were well past him by 1906, he returns to this landscape precisely because, more than any other, the Klondike scene is “primordial.” It is an “earlier” setting, a place where the “social instincts” and the “moral sense” are not yet well developed. Simply put, the Klondike exhibits the “primordial” precisely because it offers a safe haven for an individual like Beauty Smith, White Fang’s vicious tormentor.

The letter quoted above, however, reveals a contradiction at the heart of London’s narratives, since it is clear in both texts that the “devolution” to wolf status does not necessarily mean that the now wolf-dog loses his or her social instincts or moral sense; it just changes the definitions of the terms a bit. In other words, the human community in the Arctic resembles an early stage of human civilization while the wolf pack represents the apex of wolf society. The one cannot yet survive successfully in its environment, while the other can.

Life in London’s North is openly marked by constant warfare, but Darwin stresses the fact that survival depends precisely upon this kind of interaction within and between communities. His descriptions of the interrelations of beings in nature must have resounded with London as he beheld his Klondike companions, the men and dogs with whom he shared his experiences. Darwin writes:

How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being been perfected? We see these beautiful coadaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world (Darwin,
Origin,
pp. 114-115).

Coadaptation is a key term in Darwin’s description of the natural world; beings in nature live in distinct yet essentially interacting communities. Every organism, from the tiniest to the grandest, is equal and equally necessary to the health of the whole. Humans are not greater than animals, they are simply different from them, and each is equally well-adapted to survive in his or her environment.

Darwin’s notion of the “beautiful adaptations” that occurs among organisms begins to explicate the centrality of the relationship between humans and dogs in London’s texts. Wolves have long held a special, if complex, place in the human imagination. Romulus and Remus, the mythical twin founders of ancient Rome, were said to be suckled by a wolf. The Brothers Grimm vilified wolves in their fairy tales, and the full moon brings the fear of the hybrid werewolf. Settlers hunted wolves to near extinction in the lower United States from the first moment of contact, and even recent wolf recovery programs are hampered by deep prejudice against the species. In myth and in reality, wolves are despised and persecuted. Yet the wolf also represents the initial bridge between the ancient human community and the larger nonhuman world. This willingness of the ancient wolf to come into the human home scene hints at the deep, inarticulate, yet ultimately expressible love that London’s dog and human characters exhibit for each other. The wolf, as the human community’s first animal companion, coevolved with it and became the domestic dog; as a result, dogs have long been considered part of the family. We love them because they offer us unconditional love ; we love them because the “Wild” in them has been tamed. By making them part of our home space, we have truly domesticated them. But don’t we, at the same time, perhaps feel a little bad that we have bred that wild nature out of these creatures?

London and His Dogs

The complicated relationship of humans to dogs is what makes Buck and White Fang’s narratives so profound. Buck, in particular, has become the representative Dog. He has been described as an archetype of the collective unconscious, as a “supercanine” (in the vein of Nietzsche’s
Übermensch),
and as the mythic “Hero,” but also as a lowly mail carrier. He is said to devolve in the text, to evolve into myth, and to represent the yearning of
man
to free himself from his bonds. Only occasionally do critics speak about Buck (and White Fang, by extension) as a dog. And he is, indeed, a dog, as are all of London’s canine protagonists: Batard, Buck, White Fang, Husky, Brown Wolf, and That Spot.

But the question remains: What is it about the
dog
and the relationship between the human and the dog that is so powerful? The
Call of the Wild and White Fang
are not simply narrative expositions of instances of struggles in the natural world. Nor can London’s obvious reliance on the then-popular literary conventions of naturalism and realism—the desire to represent the “real,” unmediated experience of an individual in the environment—explain the overwhelming appeal of these books. London’s “dog-loving public” simply devoured them. The first edition of 10,000 copies of The Call
of
the Wild sold out in the first day, and the book remains one of the most popular novels by an American author in the world.

The normally loquacious London himself had a hard time articulating the impulse that led to the creation of The Call of the Wild. Material facts are easy to come by: London both wanted to capitalize on the popularity generated by other recently published dog books, notably Egerton Young’s
My Dogs in the Northland,
and to write a companion piece to his previously published short story “Bâtard.” But in letters to Brett and his close friend Anna Strunsky, London reveals that
The Call of the Wild
exerted a strange pull on him. To Brett, he wrote, “On my return from England I sat down to write it into a 4000 word yarn, but it got
away
from me & I was
forced
to
expand
it to its present length.” He reiterates the point to Strunsky and adds, “it got away from me, & Instead of 4000
words it ran to
32000
before I could call a halt.”
(Labor, pp. 351, 352). As these statements suggest, some inexplicable quality of the story he was telling compelled him to continue writing; in relating this moment to his friends, London seems to wonder at the cause of it. Something about the story of a dog who thrives, despite being torn from an overcivilized world and thrust into an undercivilized (or precivilized) one enthralls him. In a way, the story, like Buck at the end of the narrative, escapes the control of the author.

Despite the fact that Buck’s story grew almost organically from the author’s pen, London did not realize the huge best-seller he had just completed. After the
Saturday Evening Post
serialized
The Call of the Wild
(June-July 1903), London sold the rights to the book to Brett outright for two thousand dollars. London imagined Buck simply as a counterpart to the dog character he had created in “Bâtard,” which was first published in
Cosmopolitan
magazine in June 1902. This powerful tale details the “exceeding bitter hate” that existed between the evil sled driver, Black Leclère, and his equally evil dog, Bâtard (“Bâtard, ” p. 387). Dog and man, drawn together by some inexplicable force and tied together by their mutual hatred, are products of biology and environment. Like Buck and White Fang, B ^atard is a mixed breed—the son of a “great gray timber wolf” and a “snarling, bickering, obscene, husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a cat-like grip on life, and a genius for trickery” (“Bâtard,” pp. 387—388).

Leclère, himself the product of violence, fosters Bâtard’s innate evil until “the very breath each drew was a challenge and a menace to the other. Their hate bound them together as love could never bind” (“Bâtard,” p. 389). Equals in violence and vileness, neither can “master” the other, and throughout the story, each bides his time, assesses the other’s weaknesses, and plots the other’s destruction. At the end of the text, man and dog die together. Leclère, who has been falsely accused of murder, stands on a box with a rope around his neck, while Bâtard sits grinning at his feet. When his executioners hastily leave to assess new evidence in Leclère’s case, Bâtard exacts his own revenge and knocks the box out from under his tormentor. The executioners, who return to free the innocent man, find Bâtard clinging by his teeth to Leclère’s dead body. They shoot him for it.

After detailing this anatomy of hate, London undertook to reen-vision the relationship between human and dog, and specifically between sled driver and sled dog. Native American tribes long used dogs to pull sleds, and dogs in the Arctic performed essential functions. Without them, the delivery of supplies, mail, and other necessities would have been nearly impossible. Despite the real function of dog as work animal, however, there exists between man and dog in London’s Klondike a deep and passionate love—nowhere is this more apparent than it is in the profound relationships between Buck and John Thornton and between White Fang and Weeden Scott. London loved his own dogs; he even fought a bitter custody battle with his first wife, Bessie Maddern, over their husky, Brown Wolf. Buck loves Thornton with a “love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness” (p. 58). White Fang loves Weeden Scott with an emotion akin to religious devotion. London saw in the relationship between a man and a dog a sentiment so raw and so powerful that it can arrest an animal’s irresistible call to roam the trackless wilds or draw that wild animal away from freedom and into bondage.

The intense love exhibited between the human and the dog in these texts is both positive and affirming and dangerous and destabilizing. On the one hand, this love confirms the greater connection between the two animals; it reiterates the initial connection that drew the wolf into the human home in the first place. But at the same time, such all-powerful love displaces the fundamental command of nature to preserve the self and the species. Such a love demands a loss of borders between the self and the other, a loss that can potentially enact the destruction of the self. Consider, for instance, Buck’s willingness to throw himself off the cliff at Thornton’s command, all for the love of a man; or, more to the point, White Fang’s near-fatal impulse to protect Weeden’s family.

Love equalizes. It dismantles the hierarchy that places humans above “lesser” animals and, as a result, forces us to envision moral codes in a profoundly different way. Love makes operative this new vision of morality—the one based on social instincts and a concern for the “general good of the community.” Naturally, some found this portrait hard to ingest. Theodore Roosevelt called London a “nature faker” and accused him of shamelessly humanizing dogs in his novels and stories. London published a scathing reply to these charges in an essay entitled “The Other Animals”; in this piece, he argues that denying the reasoning and emotive capacities of animals denies the obvious kinship of creatures in the natural world. The final passage to these charges is worth quoting at length:

Let us be very humble. We who are so very human are very animal ... No ... though you stand on the top of the ladder of life, you must not kick out that ladder from under your feet.
You must not deny your relatives, the other animals.
Their history is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself. By them you stand or fall. What you repudiate in them you repudiate in yourself.

There is a lot at stake in this argument. The dogs in London’s world are kin to us, struggling with others to get out of the pit. London reminds humans that their success and survival depends on the success and survival of the entire system. Each must recognize its roles in the larger community, and all must work for the “general good of the community.”

Love: This is the mysterious element that compels London to write his dog stories, and it is the element that keeps people reading them. Perhaps we love Buck’s story because the pull of the wild, of “the pleading of life,” of the “song of the huskies... pitched in minor-key” is ultimately greater than the pull of the “love of a man.” Perhaps we respond to White Fang for the opposite reason. London’s companion piece does more than explain how the wolf first came into the human home. It restores an upset balance and confirms the coadapted community. Perhaps we love these dogs because they have agency, they have choice. In a world where humans have beaten nature—even wild nature—into submission, these dogs stand out. Buck wrests control of his narrative away from the human telling the tale, and in the end, he truly does “get away” from Jack London.

Tina Gianquitto received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the Colorado School of Mines, where she teaches courses on literature and the environment. She specializes in the intersections of nature and science in American literature and has published on nineteenth-century women and their representations of the natural world.