"Never Travel Alone": Naturalism, Jack London, and the White Silence
Author(s): Jeanne Campbell Reesman
Source: American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Winter, 1997), pp. 33-49
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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"Never Travel Alone":
Naturalism,
theWhite
and
Jack London,
Silence
Jeanne Campbell
Reesman
afternoon wore on, and with the awe, born of theWhite
Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to their work. Nature has
many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity,?the
ceaseless flow of the tides, the furyof the storm, the shock of the
earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery,?but the most
tremendous, themost stupefying of all, is theWhite Silence. All
The
movement
ceases,
the
sky clears,
the
heavens
are
as brass;
the
man becomes timid,
slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and
own
at
the
Sole
sound
of
his
voice.
speck of life jour
affrighted
a dead world, he trembles at
across
wastes
of
the
neying
ghostly
his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot's life, nothing more.
Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of things
strives for utterance. And the fear of death, of God, of the uni
verse, comes over him,?the hope of the Resurrection and the
Life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the impris
oned essence,?it is then, if ever,man walks alone with God.
-The Son of theWolf (1900)1
Silence represents the
theWhite
of theWhale,
Like theWhiteness
"dumb blankness" on the face of reality encountered by a writer as well as
his characters. In Jack London's famous "White Silence" passage, as else
where in his fiction, the immensity of the Silence of Nature occasions a
on the part of London, his narrator, and
correspondingly powerful impulse
travelers
in
the
the
reader; though
passage themselves remain bent and
33
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American LiteraryRealism 29,2
34
voiceless, the narrator is not "affrightedat the sound of his own voice," but
allows "strange thoughts [to] arise unsummoned" in order to give utterance
to "the mystery of all things." The blankness coupled with multivalence
that thrilled Ishmael into speech has a similar effecthere. London called
his reply to theWhite Silence "spirit-groping." And by the time of his last
story,"TheWater Baby," he has his wise old fisherman, Kohokumu, speak
directly of seeking the truth that lies within, "from the deeps of me that
are
as
deep
as the
sea." Kohokumu
tries
to voice
his
sense
of wonder
at the
strange conjunctions of inner and outer realities:
"Why have I thought this thought of my return to my mother
and ofmy rebirth frommy mother into the sun?You do not know.
I do not know, save that,without whisper ofman's voice or printed
word, without prompting from otherwhere, this thought has
arisen
from within
me....
I am
not
a
god.
I do
not make
things.
Therefore I have not made this thought. I do not know its father
or itsmother. It is of old time before me, and therefore it is true.
ifhe be not blind, only recog
Man does not make truth.Man,
nizes truthwhen he sees it."2
Kohokumu's description of his beliefs echoes the passage in the Gospel
of St. John thatwas important to London, Jesus' advice to the Pharisee
"That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and thatwhich is
Nicodemus:
born of the spirit is spirit.... The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou
it cometh, and
hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence
whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit" (John 3: 6-8).3
Yet somehow these metaphysical insights do not seem in keeping with
the sort of naturalism we have been taught to associate with Jack Lon
don.
That naturalism itself is more than pessimistic materialistic deter
minism has long been recognized, thanks to the work of Donald Pizer,
Charles Child Walcutt, Lilian F?rst, Sydney Krause, and others. Pizer refers
to naturalism's "affirmativeethical conception of life,"noting thatwhether
the naturalist depicts the new and discomforting truths he or she has dis
covered in themodern city or the dangers which are to be encountered in
the natural world, the naturalist also portrays compensating humanistic
values
in the
characters.4
Indeed,
as
June Howard
has
noted,
the
affirma
tive ethical and humanistic inconsistencies cited by Pizer and others "are
so common in naturalist novels that one begins towonder just where one
finds
the novels
How
naturalism
that define
the form...."5
odd, then, that given the general agreement upon this view of
as a kind
of tension
between
environment
and
character,
mat
ter and spirit, the best-known of all the naturalists has never really escaped
the most reductive sort of analysis. Examples are legion, but two from the
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Essays
35
(Reesman)
same source will suffice.The headnote to the section on Jack London
the Chelsea House Library ofLiterary Criticism concludes:
in
London was a prolific writer, authoring over 400 pieces of non
fiction, 200 short stories, and more than fiftybooks. Among his
laterworks, The Iron Heel (1907), a dystopian novel containing
premonitions of Fascism, zn?john Barleycorn (1913), a semi-auto
biographical portrait of an alcoholic, are notable. His final years
were marked
by various unsuccessful projects of a non-literary
nature; during this time, despite his doctors' warnings, he con
tinued to drink heavily and consume his regular diet of rawmeat
and raw fish.He died on November 16,1916.
The three paragraphs that precede this one mention only a few of Lon
don's other words- The Road (1907), The Call of theWild (1903), The Sea
say almost nothing
Wolf (1904), and The People of theAbyss (1903)?and
about them, instead sensationalizing various aspects of his life.6Although
this summary of Londons career does not exhibit the sort of emotional
attack one sometimes finds, it is fairly typical inwhat it stresses (Fascism,
raw meat,
self-destruction).
is in the
There
of the excerpts of articles on Jack London,
same
a
volume,
however,
in one
fully realized assault:
[London] was never able to root his ideas in his emotions; he
never
deepened attitudes into personality; he left his own soul
unexamined while he mapped out the minds of others, until his
life (with its sea voyages, alcoholism, and money grubbing) took
on the aspect of an obsessive flight from self that he had never
explored and that he finally came to fear and abhor.... London
was a free thinker who raided the
philosophies of Nietzsche,
once
as
and
Kidd
he
raided
the
oyster beds of San Fran
Spencer
cisco Bay.What he read he wrote, what he stole he sold, with
out any of the ideas he used tincturing his system; his mind was
a faculty divorced from his
a
personality, sponge that he regularly
squeezed
for the
popular
magazines.7
Thief, brawler, drinker, sponge, grubber, obsessive, depressive: Itmust seem
to the reader of such naively naturalistic descriptions that ifLondon ever
managed towrite a good story itwas merely by accident. Certainly he could
not have meant towrite anything but trash, and he could not have had the
talent and energy to do otherwise. Itwould have come as a shock to him
to learn
that he
spent
the
latter
part
of his
career
on
"various
unsuccessful
a
projects of non-literary nature," since during the last years of his brief
career he continued towrite his 1,000 words a day and, among other proj
ects, run a large and complicated ranching operation; and during this period
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36
American Literary Realism 29,2
London produced some of his richest and most challenging works, includ
ing The Star Rover (1915), The Red One (1918), and On theMakaloa Mat
(1919). Although the critical tide has turned in London's favor, and inter
est in his craft is replacing the biographical fascination, one still encoun
ters in headnotes to anthologies and elsewhere a need to see London?per
sonally?as a brute.We are still treated to criticswho write Jack London's
life as the naturalist saga he never wrote, and then use that life story to
read theworks he did write; thus has the autobiographical emphasis served
to draw
attention
from
away
the
writing
that was
the central
always
activ
itywithin his life. Portraying London as atavistic lone wolf, critics manu
facture and sell a version of Jack London that attempts to silence themul
titude of beliefs in his work which, as Pizer would put it, "assert the value
of all life."8
Another revision of naturalism is going on, but unlike the revisions
of Pizer, et al., ithas shed little light on London's work. Mark Seltzer's 1992
book Bodies andMachines, for example, typically objectifies authors, narra
tors, and characters instead of examining how these agents resist objecti
fication by the forces surrounding them. Seltzer and others are reviving the
limitations of a deterministic naturalism by describing its representation
of "bodies' instead of people, characterizing those bodies as "machines."
His book "traces the relays"between the natural and the technological that
make up what might be called "the American body-machine complex" in
which nature becomes a "naturalist machine" and human beings "statistical
persons.nHe includes in his survey the "mass literature of boyhood, ado
lescence, and the making of men." He focuses for part of a chapter called
"The Love-Master" on "the best-selling wilding' stories of Jack London,"
bestowing upon his treatmentof London a title he must have thoughtwitty:
"Men
in Furs."9
In "Men in Furs," we learn that in portraying the "violent confronta
tions" between the "life of motion and the threat of the cessation of life
and
motion,"
London's
work
"reduces
these
conflicts
to
their most
rudi
mentary forms." Life is "eating and being eaten" in "the great white male
North," and it is figured by the "miscegenation of the natural and the cul
tural
London's
...
apparent
characters
...
of the
and other men
wolf-dog
figure
moved
around
merely
by the "dispassionate
in the
are
in furs."
laws
of
force" behind the "twin principles of gold and themachine.10 For example,
Seltzer finds that
London's
writings,
particularly
his
accounts
of
the
zero-degree
white North, thus take the mathematical form of a count-down
or calibrated
a closed system. For
dissipation of energy within
a Fire" (1908) ...
in
the
"To
Build
well-known
story
example,
one by one
are
and
the
motion
for
heat, energy,
capacity
depleted
as the system?the natural body or its technological proth?ses?
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37
(Reesman)
Essays
or entropy.The
approaches degree-zero
plot of such storiesmight
be plotted on a graph or reduced to the calculations "n-1, n-2,
n-3...n-n."
The
internal
relations
between
writing/calculating
and the body- machine complex could not be more clearlymarked.11
We are also to understand that "the disciplines of Systematic Man
agement are bound up with another form of S/M in the Klondike." As
"interior
states
and
natural
bodies:
of London's
"masters
of time
and
space"
are transformed into
"supervisable and finely calibrated spatial movements,"
so are
bodies,
"working
times,
spaces,
and
functions"
segregated.
rigorously
This notion evolves into a discussion of the "erotics" of discipline and bond
ing in theworkplace inwhich the desire for and fear of contact with the
"Love-Master"
predominate
in the hero's
tortured
For
imagination.
exam
ple, according to Seltzer,White Fang learnsmodern sexuality and becomes
acculturated by learning to love pain. Seltzer moves from "men in furs" to
con
a
quick peek at what he calls "naturalist skingames' in The Sea- Wolf,
the
book
with
Artaud's
remark
that
"Under
the
his
skin,
body is
cluding
an over-heated
In contrast
factory."12
to the mechanistic
Seltzer
"erotics"
sketches,
London's
nat
uralism consistently contains and implies manifold beliefs?Transcenden
tal, Romantic, mythic, religious. From his reading ofHerbert Spencer and
Ernst Haeckel, London evolved a scientific rationale for subscribing to a
as he called it,which has its place in
high order of "thought, mind, soul,"
the
natural
order.13
He
was
thus
able
to
reject
a materialism
that
denied
the existence of spirit and to reject spiritualism that dispensed with the
notion
of matter:
"matter
cannot
exist
and
be
operative
without
spirit,"
wrote Haeckel, "nor spiritwithout matter."14This idea accounts, in James
McClintock's words, for the "seemingly bizarre situation of a literary nat
uralist saying that, 'I am an agnostic, but with one exception: I do believe
"
in the soul' a belief that accounts for the thread of optimism that runs
was
typical of London's times,
through London's works.15 Such thinking
Dale H. Ross reminds us, and of other naturalist writers:
The age inwhich London lived and wrote was the age of Dar
winism applied to society, of pragmatism and instrumentalism,
of Freud, of Veblen, of Henry Adams, ofMarx, Jung, Pavlov,
Nietzsche. It is not surprising, therefore, that novelists like Lon
don, Norris and Dreiser display in theirwork a kind of eclecti
at others
to be behaviorists,
determin
sometimes
seeming
when
at
Thus
times
neo-romanticists.
almost
other
and
still
ists,
cism,
London is concerned for espousing conflicting and contradictory
ideas and causes, his judges are, unknowingly perhaps, charging
him with no greater error than being the representative of the
world inwhich he lived.16
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American Literary Realism 29,2
38
But there ismuch more here than eclecticism: Numerous critics, includ
ing Earle Labor, Charles N. Watson, Jr.,JayGurian, and Terry Whalen,
have underscored the profound dualities in London's thought, especially
his dialogic treatment of spirit and matter.17 As James G. Cooper has
out,
pointed
"London
as
emerges
case
a classic
of
the writer
con
whose
scious mind says one thingwhile the reader, using thewriter's work as the
voice of his unconscious, hears just the opposite."18
Even inJohn Barleycorn,when London describes one possible response
to theWhite Silence, theWhite Logic brought on by alcoholism, as "the
antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen
as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of
irrefragable logic and unforget
table fact...,"19 the response is equivocal. Under the spell of theWhite
we
Logic
"brother
at our
look
...
to the dust,
fellow
man
a cosmic
as
joke,
a mere
a
"appearance"
sport of chemistry,
or
a
"mirage,"
as
garmented
beast" (318-19), and at our own face that hides a nothingness that seems
the very core of our being:
I am aware thatwithin this disintegrating body which has been
was born I carry a skeleton; that under the rind of
dying since I
fleshwhich is called my face is a bony, noseless death's head. All
ofwhich does not shudder me. To be afraid is to be healthy. Fear
of death makes life. But the curse of theWhite Logic is that it
does not make one afraid.The world-sickness of theWhite Logic
makes one grin jocosely into the face of theNoseless One and to
sneer at all the phantasmagoria of living. (315)
But London's narrator enters into dialogue with thisNoseless One, seek
ing to understand. He turns to his books as antidotes to hopelessness, even
as
"Boglights, vapors ofmysticism,
though theNoseless One scoffsat them
overtones,
psychic
soul
orgies,
wailings
among
the
shadows,
weird
gnosti
cisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, groupings and
mere
maunderings, ontological fantasies,"
"phantasms of hope" that "fill
your bookshelves," the "sadwraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels?
your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches." The
White Logic would teach us that we may not understand anything of
or
enduring value in human life, represent it in art: life is simply "unthink
able." "Come," theWhite Logic murmurs, "Your glass is empty. Fill and
forget" (329-30).
was an attempt to combat theWhite Logic
Every word London wrote
and to reply to theWhite Silence; the belief in spirit (meaning) is inLon
don's mind a belief first in himself and his effortsand second in humanity
as a vast
man's
among
time and space, artist and
spanning
search for
London's
community
plan."
and
racialism,
socialism,
agrarianism;
community
"form union,
them
audience
took many
he never
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inWhit
forms,
stopped
Essays
39
(Reesman)
a
cen
or
surprising degree, his work
journeying, physically
spiritually.To
ters on humans trying to talk theirway into community, not on the strug
on
gle to dominate. This urge is present from his first story, "To theMan
Trail" (1899) to his last, "The Water Baby" (1919). London was always an
outsider?poor
boy,
hobo,
socialist,
Westerner,
correspondent,
wayfarer
in
because he wanted to belong he vigorously entered into
many worlds?but
he
encountered by describing it convincingly in his fiction,
any community
whether the elite of San Francisco or the headhunters ofMelanesia. This
does not mean he admired a particular community, just that he wanted to
know it fromwithin.
With relationships functioning as epistemologies, London's perspec
tive on theWhite Silence evolved not through pitting himself or his heroes
against nature as individual survivors,but rather,as Earle Labor has empha
sized, "London's Northland code demands not only physical but spiritual
and moral adaptability, and the greatest 'strength of the strong'... is com
munal rather than individual." The "ego-centered, loveless individualist,"
such asWolf Larsen, "incapable of loving the fellow creatures of this earth,"
is doomed to fail.20 In London's work one hardly encounters a naive notion
of the "self."The self is individually and socially constructed, and survival
depends upon imagination, plasticity, and tolerance: The ultimate survivor
in his canon, as Scott Malcolmson
notes, isDarrell Standing, who man
over
to
the
individual
self
time, "creating an imaginary collec
ages
spread
tive of selves unhindered by geography, liberating himself for adventures
of identity that neither class nor racial solidarity could ever allow."21
New
approaches
to London's
work
focusing
on
gender
and
race
are
helping to reveal radical patterns of thought regarding Self and Other,
especially in the late South Seas and Sonoma fiction,where London invokes
masculinity and femininity aswell as constructions of race to generate new
narrative forms,dialogic and polyphonic. These forms are enacted through
out his career to represent subjects as diverse as theNorthland code of fair
play and brotherhood in the Klondike stories and novels; the rhetoric of
socialism inThe IronHeel (190$); the treatment of racism in the South Seas
stories-within-stories of The House ofPride (1912) and On the
Makaloa Mat
(1919); and the revision of sex roles inworks as different as The Sea Wolf
(1904) and The Valley of theMoon (1913). Part of the reason for London's
enormous popularity was his facility forbringing new subjects to themag
azine-reading public and letting these subjects speak for themselves. In
these works the notion ofWhite
Silence takes on its fullest racial and
but
London
connotations,
insisted, "Itwas in theKlondike that
monologic
I found myself. There you get your perspective. I got mine."22 For "per
we may read voice as the
rejoinder to the awfulWhite Silence
spective" here,
within and without.
Indeed, even inLondon's most "classic" naturalist storieswe find these
three important elements: the search for spirit, the desire for community,
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40
American LiteraryRealism 29,2
and the need to address theOther. "To Build a Fire" is a fine example. Crit
ics have mistakenly characterized thiswell-known tale as London's most
pessimistic story,one whose determination, as Lee Clark Mitchell has it,
makes the status of narrator and protagonist "of little or no concern" since
they are demonstrably not "card-carrying persons." Charles E. May goes
so far as to
say that
the
story
is a "naturalistic
version
of
Everyman...,
sim
as a
body," and that London, "like his protagonist, iswith
ply Everyman
out imagination in this story,because he too is concerned here only with
the things of life and not with their significance.... [N]othing in the story
leads ... [the reader] to the metaphysical conjectural field of immortality
and man's
place
in the universe."23
Let us read the story anew. "To Build a Fire" operates on a grim con
trast between the kind of knowledge the unnamed hero possesses and the
kind he needs, a discrepancy that costs him his life. "To Build a Fire" shares
with "Bartleby the Scrivener,"Moby-Dick, "The Blue Hotel," and "The
as
as the
epistemological theme. From
Open Boat" its symbolic power well
the opening paragraph onward, the reader's imagination is invited to take
an active role; through a negative building of suspense, through ambigu
ity,allusion, and symbolism the narrator guides the reader along the jour
ney to knowledge the hero, in contrast, is unknowingly embarked upon.
London interweaves throughout the belief that finding a correct use of
an individual to the fullest human potential. Attaining
knowledge elevates
not lead to a higher quality of life,but the essential
will
alone
knowledge
elements of character teach how to use the knowledge gathered about life:
sur
Knowledge without thewisdom to apply it as useless. This philosophy
vived all the intellectual conflicts that recurred throughout London's pro
fessional life.As he wrote toAnna Strunsky: "Mankind ismy passion, and
in the search after potentiality and the realization thereof,my hobby."24
In 1907, while sailing from San Francisco toHawaii on his boat, the
Snark, London completely revised and rewrote this story from the version
to the infinitely richer tale that
published in Youths Companion (1902)
in
Lost
Face (1910). There is a sharp
and
then
in
(1908)
Century
appeared
and
between
narrative
style
epistemology: The much briefer
discrepancy
1902 version presents a prescriptive, univocal knowledge by having the nar
rator simply state itsmoral, "Never travel alone," whereas the 1908 story
offers a very different hermeneutics. The reader's active role in the 1908
version works well with the key structural element lacking in the 1902 ver
sion: relationships between the man and the dog, the man and "the boys"
in the camp, the man and the old timer on Sulphur Creek. These rela
tionships deepen and complicate the theme of "man against nature" by
redefining nature as human nature. The story is about human beings in
nature and also in or out of community. Instead of a basic dichotomy
between simply knowing and not knowing how to survive, there are at least
three separate forms of "survival knowledge" presented, and all of them
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41
(Reesman)
Essays
involve the concept of knowing in relation to someone or something else:
the hero's abstract theorizing about his environment that fails at close obser
vation; the dog's instinctual knowledge; and the old timer'swisdom. The
man in the story needs the other kinds of
as well as his own,
knowledge
but he is "traveling alone" without them.
In the first two or three paragraphs, we have already left the realm of
for the narrator's
naturalism,
"pure"
language
gives
Nature
a human
face:
"the hair-line trail," the "intangible pall over the face of things," the sun a
"cheerful orb" thatwill "peep" over the horizon. However, theman does not
think of himself as quite human; that is,when he tires and has to pause for
breath after climbing the snowbank, he "excus[es] the act to himself by
looking at his watch."25 His instinctual knowledge of survival in nature (as
his tired body warns him) and his civilized knowledge ("what time it is")
sharply contrast. The discrepancy illustrates both his prideful dishonesty
with himself and his assumed distance from "Nature," which will bring
about his downfall.
And community (or lack of it) is also subtly invoked when a few para
man crosses a "wide flat of niggerheads" (69) and notes the
graphs later the
of
"snow-hidden
ice-skin" (72). The snow's "skin" is of course "pure
layers
and silent and solitary, like the "inevitable white
white" (64).White?white
man" afterwhom London titled a later story.The protagonist, we learn, is
a
a newcomer in this territory,there for gold. His alien Anglo
chechaquo,
Saxon identity is not specifically an issue in the story, since there is no
mention of the Indians who people most of London's other Klondike tales.
But the association between whiteness and silence points away from the
community of the living, rather in theway that theweird Antarctic topog
a work
raphy connotes death in Poe's The Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym,
that
overtly
race.
invokes
In London's
story, when
the
snow-laden
spruce
branches release their burden above the man's fire, a terrifyingwhiteness
literally obliterates the protagonist's efforts to survive.
The unnamed protagonist may be said to reflect the Kiplingesque
stereotype of the lone white man out to dominate the land and force it to
produce for him, for his is the "insatiable blind will" of Nietzsche's ?ber
mensch,
one who
does
not
see himself
in relation
to the universe
nor
com
to a given universe instead of attempting to
prehend the value of adapting
overcome it.At the man's side is the dog, whose aloof but recording con
sciousness, as Arnold Chapman describes him, provides a sense ofwhat is
enslaved as well as dramatic irony as the human intruder is expelled. As
Chapman notes, London would have been confrontedwith many examples
ofNordic explorers of Polar regions, such as Roald Admunsen, forcing the
limits of their physical world.26 London's particular explorer is doomed by
his inability to place himself among the rest of us. How ironic that theman's
desire to be among "the boys" in the camp is thwarted by his belief that he
is better
than
they
are.
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American LiteraryRealism 29,2
42
Toni Morrison has recently examined this sort of exclusivity through
the image of "whiteness" inAmerican literature in its relation to literary
"blackness."
understand
thinking
was
Such
figurations,
to be
themselves
rarely
"race-free";
she argues,
"universal"
on
are
or
the contrary,
even
in works
that
present
"race-free."27
Jack London's
race
one of the most
he was
conscious writers of his day.Morrison's thesis that "the major and cham
as "individualism,
pioned characteristics of our national literature," such
an obsession
with
the
thematics
of
innocence
masculinity, [and]
coupled
with figurations of death and hell" are "responses to a dark, abiding, sign
ingAfricanist presence" can be transferred to "To Build a Fire" to suggest
a response to an Indian presence in
particular and the presence of theRacial
Other?black,
Indian, Polynesian?in
general.28 It is often through glar
this case, a blinding Whiteness?Morrison
argues, that
ing omission?in
the Other is felt. In Pym, Morrison notes how the "extraordinary power,
pattern, and consistency" of the novel's images of whiteness "function as
both antidote for themeditation on the shadow that is companion to this
whiteness," a haunting dark presence "fromwhich our early literature
seemed unable to extricate itself."Turning to otherworks of "Young Amer
ica,"Morrison wryly notes that though theAmerican Dream would seem
to promise a flight from oppression to freedom and possibility, encounters
with the Dream in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century are
often occasions for terror in the face ofwhat Melville called "the power of
blackness." In the writings ofMelville
and Hawthorne this blackness is
racialized in the sense that the American
imagination played upon an
enslaved population in order to project its fears of boundarylessness, of
"nature unbridled and crouched for attack."And later artists such as Twain,
Faulkner, and Hemingway also "transferred internal conflicts to a 'blank
darkness.'"29
Images
of blackness,
Morrison
concludes,
are
self-reflexive;
they can be "evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desir
of the self-contradictory features of the self." But in contrast,
able?all
"whiteness,
alone,
is mute,
meaningless,
unfathomable,
pointless,
frozen,
is "inarticulate." The examples
veiled, dreaded, senseless, implacable"?it
of suchwhiteness Morrison mentions closely parallel London: the snow at
the end ofAbsalom, Absalom!, "the wasteland of unmeaning"; the "great,
high, and unbelievably white in the sun'" mountaintop at the end of "The
Snows of Kilimanjaro"; the image of thewhite boat closing To Have and
Have Not?Q The racialized possibilities of "To Build a Fire" are powerfully
implicated in the story's overall exploration of the theme of community.
This emphasis is also present elsewhere inLondon's corpus, as is thework
ing out of the oppositions of slavery and freedom in The Call of theWild,
White Fang, "B?tard," The Sea-Wolf and The House ofPride, to name but a
few.31
As in the story "In a Far Country," the theme of Brotherhood in "To
Build a Fire" is figured negatively. For example, obsessed as he iswith
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43
(Reesman)
Essays
quantification, like many of Hemingway's heroes, the man maintains his
emotional distance. The fixationwith measurable details is a clue inmany
of London's
stories
to a character's
allegiance
to deterministic
forces, most
notably in the story "The Apostate." The timeless quality of "To Build a
Fire" is ironically counterpointed by its great attention to how many miles
theman must travel (locales are even named "SixtyMile," and so on); how
cold it is; and what time of day it is.The storybegins at 9 o'clock and pauses
at 10.The zenith of the sun is noted, and theman pauses for lunch at 12:30,
planning to be in camp by 6 o'clock. Degree fluctuations are closely fol
lowed. One of London's greatest strengths is his narration of action, but
here,when the action is related from the protagonist's point of view, action
confines itself towhat the man can measure (how many twigs, how many
matches). Perhaps such a fixation is a defense against painful knowledge as
a futile defense
well as against emotional contact with other people?and
we
death
is
clearest
when
read
that theman
itself.
The
made
against
irony
builds his firewith "twigs the size of his finger" then "branches the size of
his wrist," having to look down to know whether he has hold of a twig or
not, for "thewires were prettywell down between him and his finger-ends"
(81). Although he may think inmechanical or technological images, he is
not separate fromNature and able to
quantify it: his body isNature, as
branches/wrists.
Such
twigs/fingers,
irony is one of London's best tech
and
niques,
one most
often
missed.
In contrast to the epistemological confusion of the hero, the dog epit
omizes instinctual knowledge. As Earle Labor and King Hendricks have
noted, the dog is aficelle thatmakes us see the protagonist as a "hollow man
whose inner coldness correlates with the enveloping outer cold," and fur
nishes "subtle counterpointing" between the dog's "natural wisdom" and
the man's "foolish rationality."32 The man's crystal beard of spittle and
tobacco juice contrasts early in the storywith the dog's "proper"wolf-coat,
and so his knowledge seems inferior to that of the dog, whose point of view,
though not anthropomorphized, is handled as though he is a sentient char
acter.The dog's instincts state that it is too cold to travel, and the dog feels
the "vague but menacing apprehension" around the pair that theman ignores
(68). All the dog's ancestry knew cold, "and it had inherited the knowl
edge." But because there is no intimacy between the dog and the man?
the dog is the "toil-slave" of the man?the
dog makes "no effort to com
municate
its
apprehension"
to him,
and
the man
does
not
attempt
to "read"
the dog (77). The man does not share the dog's instincts, and when his
powers of observation and his theorizing fail him, he is resourceless. The
man fails to capture the dog when he attempts to use itsbody to keep warm
because he forgets how their relationship works (harsh words, erect pos
ture).
dog,
the man
Significantly,
as his trail-mate,
and
has
there
chosen
is no
a non-human
companion,
only
them. Of
love between
course,
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the
since
44
American
Literary
Realism
29,2
theman has his "muzzle of ice" and "crystal beard" the color of amber from
the tobacco juice (69), speech is impossible, if therewere anyone to talk to.
He does, however, return again and again to one figure, the old timer on
Sulphur Creek who warned him, "Never travel alone." In effect the old
timer is his companion, like the teller in the tale, sitting by his fire and
relating his Northland lore.Unlike theman, he does have imagination, and
whereas
the
temperature
strikes
the man
as
"uncomfortable,"
but
"did
not
lead him tomeditate upon his frailtyas a creature of temperature, and upon
man's frailty in general,... and from there it did not lead him to the con
jectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe" (64-65), the
old timer'swisdom must teach him otherwise. The man thinks, "Well, here
he was; he had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself.... All
a man had to do was to
keep his head, and he was all right" (81). The point
that
his
head
is freezing! In using this particular image to
is, of course,
same passage upon the dis
in
isolation?and
dwelling in the
emphasize
tance between theman and his control of his hands and fingers?London
asks what is needed to compose identity.As the protagonist's body freezes,
so his consciousness eventually undergoes a change; he first thinks that "the
boys" will take care of him, but eventually, "He did not belong with him
self anymore, for even then he was out of himself, standing with the boys
and looking at himself in the snow. It certainlywas cold, was his thought"
(97).
In the end, losing control of his senses, the man runs blindly, like "a
winged Mercury," unable to feel the ground (94). From thismessenger of
the gods, he learns that he is at last a man among other men, for,when he
a
finally decides to "take it decently," his notion of propriety resembles
social one. And with his "new-found peace of mind" comes a final vision
of the old timer "warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe" (96-97). The
old timer had warned him, "onemust not be too sure ofthingsn (76). Like the
man in the conclusion of the story, the reader is taught to see things in
relation to other things and accept the resulting epistemological contin
gencies:
never
to "travel
alone."
Of the half-dozen times the protagonist thinks of thewise old man
on
once his specific thought is that the old man was
Sulphur Creek, all but
on the trail lacks,
man
represents thewisdom that theman
right.The old
and his power ismost clearly alluded to by the several kinds of fire that
accompany him: his warm fireside, his wreath of pipe smoke, his home at
to the "stars that leaped
a place called
"Sulphur" Creek. He is also connected
and danced" at the man's death, as the flame of the man's first fire earlier
"danced." Life = fire; death = cold. But fire also = knowledge, especially the
wisdom of the old timer, shared by the narrator and reader, listeners as we
are by the fireside. The vision of the old man replaces the hero's conscious
man apologizes: '"You were right,
knowledge of his surroundings, and the
old hoss; you were right'" (97). This unbidden image with the statement
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Essays
45
(Reesman)
in response to it is his last thought and his truest one. In spite of his
arrogant determination to travel hisway, the man at last has not traveled
alone, if only in his dying moment. In this version of the story,no longer
made
is there
a
simple
"moral";
tionship between Hero
collective
knowledge
rather,
one
encounters
the
assertion
of a rela
and Other, youth and old timer, and, in turn, of a
the narrator
and
reader
share.
But the old timer'swarning transcends theman's individual case and
takes on a mythic dimension, characteristic of London in that itgrows out
of a naturalistic detail. Sulphur, or brimstone, is the stuffof hell, and after
the gold it is the "other" yellow mineral of the story.The burning brim
stone flares up in the man's nostrils as he lights his second fire (interest
on
ingly,when ithappens, he immediately thinks, "The old timer
Sulphur
Creek was right..." [87]). Later, when he picks up the entire seventy sul
phur matches and scratches them against his leg, holding them until his
flesh burns, he can feel it "deep down below the surface" (88). Indeed, not
unlike the damned "below the surface" in hell, despite his effortshe is iso
lated from the community of the blessed awaiting him at the camp.
The ancients believed sulphur to be the father of the elements. A
telling reference occurs inParadise Lost, where Mammon, one of the fallen
angels in hell, is the leader of a band of "pioneers" who dig into the sul
phuric earth for gold and other minerals fromwhich to build Pandemo
nium:
led them on:
Mammon
the least erected Spirit that fell
Mammon,
From Heav'n, for ev'n inHeav'n his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
the riches ofHeav'n's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine of holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific: By him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the center, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of theirmother earth
For treasures better hid. (I.678-88)33
The word "Mammon" in Syriac meant "wealth" and became familiar in the
New Testament throughMatthew's use of it: "Thou canst not serve both
God andMammon"
(4:24). In Pandemonium, three plans are put forward:
Moloch desires war, Belial hopes to staywhere they are "in peaceful sloth,"
and Mammon wants to build a rival kingdom, to
rather
Our
own
good
from
ourselves,
and
from
our
seek
own
Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess,
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American Literary Realism 29,2
46
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp. (11.252-57)
For Mammon heaven is only a place of golden pavements and hand
some, jewel-encrusted buildings; his eyes sparkle as he contemplates build
even more
ones can
ing his rival kingdom to be
magnificent: The fallen
work with earth's resources and "thrive under evil and work ease out of
can Heaven show more," he
pain/Through labor and endurance." "What
than
"This
desert
soil/Wants not her hidden
such self-sufficiency?
asks,
we
or
want
and
skill
art..."
(11.273).
luster, gems
gold;/Nor
These references inParadise Lost would be merely suggestive parallels
to "To Build a Fire," were it not that Paradise Lost was one of three books
London carried with him into the Klondike, the others being a trail guide
and a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species?AThe references toMilton rein
force the role of the old timerwho furnishes the thematic key to the story
by warning against the entire enterprise of "traveling alone" in theWhite
Is he one of the Fallen Ones who has made
Silence?seeking Mammon.
his peace, anAncient Mariner who remains at home to counsel the unwary?
His warning comes too late for theman, but not for us.With the dog by
his side, theman dies, the occasion marked only by the dog's softwhines
and throaty howls?recognition
of the need it had of theman, ifnot true
the
"stars
that
But
mourning.
leaped and danced and shone brightly in the
cold sky" (98) remind us that though Nature seems far away and uncaring,
not heavenly bodies, and notmachines. Jack Lon
people "leap" and "dance,"
don's response to theWhite Silence of the Klondike was to abandon the
search forMammon
there and to earn his gold by writing about it.
?University
ofTexas, San Antonio
Notes
1. Jack London, "The White
Silence," in The Son of theWolf($oston\ Houghton, Mifflin,
1900), pp. 6-7. Dates for all stories and novels cited in the text are first book publication,
unless noted.
2. London, "The Water Baby," in On theMakaloa Mat
1919),
(New York: Macmillan,
p. 151.
3. Charmian London noted in her diary that her husband found himself deeply affected
summer of 1916; one of the
by his reading of Psychology of theUnconscious by Carl Jung in the
verses. Charmian
passages he marked in his copy of the book was Jung's citation of these
copied
out Jung's citation, and she noted in her biography that London told of how this passage and
others in Psychology of theUnconscious affected him: "I tell you I am standing on the edge of
aworld so new, so terrible, sowonderful, that I am almost afraid to look over into it" (Charmian
London,
The Book ofJack London
[New York: Century,
1921], II, 322-23).
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Essays (Reesman)47
4. Donald
inNineteenth-Century American Literature,
Pizer, Realism and Naturalism
revised ed. (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984), p.12. See also Charles Child
Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: Univ. ofMinnesota
Press, 1956), esp. pp. vii-viii, 25-25, 29; Lilian F?rst and Peter N. Skrine, Naturalism
(Lon
don: Methuen,
1971), p.22; and Sydney Krause, "Introduction," Essays onDeterminism inAmer
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1964), p.9.
5. June Howard, Form and History inAmerican Literary Naturalism
(Chapel Hill: Univ.
of North Carolina Press, 1985), p.37.
6. Harold Bloom, ed., "Jack London," The Chelsea House Library ofLiterary Criticism'.
Twentieth-Century American Literature (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p.2,280. This head
note rushes London
into the grave a bit early; his death occurred on 22 November
1916.
7. Richard Gid Powers, "Introduction" The Science Fiction ofJack London (Boston: Gregg
Press, 1975), pp. vii-xxiv: rpt. in The Chelsea House Library ofLiterary Criticism: Twentieth
ican Literature
Century American Literature, pp. 2,286-92.
still lack a full-length critical biography of Jack London, but the
8. Pizer, p.12. We
most reliable source on his life is Russ Kingman's A Pictorial Life ofJack London (New York:
Crown Publishers, 1979; rev. and rpt. as A Pictorial Biography ofJack London [Middletown,
see
CA: David Rejl, n.d.]). For a recent study of his work that corrects major misconceptions,
London: Revised Edition (New York: Twayne,
Earle Labor and Jeanne Campbell Reesman,/^
1994). See also Russ Kingman, Jack London: A Definitive Chronology (Middletown, CA: David
Rejl, 1992).
9. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines
(New York: Routledge,
1992), pp. 3-4.
10. Ibid., pp. 167-68.
11. Ibid., pp. 224-25n37.
12. Ibid., pp. 169-72.
13. Jack London to Cloudesley Johns, 1March
1900, The Letters ofJack London, ed. Earle
Labor, Robert C. Leitz, III and I. Milo
Shepard (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988),
p. 164.
14. Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle
6c Brothers, 1900), pp. 20-21. From
as the key to individual and society
see Anthony J.Naso, "Jack London
trans. Joseph McCabe
(New York: Harper
of theUniverse,
Herbert Spencer, London drew his sense of adaptation
survival; for a useful discussion of his reading of Spencer,
and Herbert Spencer,"/#<:? London Newsletter, 14 (Janu
ary-April 1981), 13-14.
White Logic: Jack London's Short Stories (Cedar Springs, MI:
15. James I. McClintock,
character Mar
Wolf House Books, 1976), pp. 44-45). London has his semi-autobiographical
tin Eden muse: "He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One
treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignor
Both the god and the clod schools erred,
ing his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities.
inMartin's
estimation, and erred through too great singleness of sight and purpose. There
not the school of god, while
was a
compromise that approximated the truth, though itflattered
of the school of clod" (Martin Eden [New York: Macmil
it challenged the brute-savageness
lan, 1909], p. 212).
16. Dale H. Ross, "Jack London: An American Dilemma," Journal ofAmerican Culture,
5 (Winter 1982), 57.
17. See Earle Labor, "Jack London," inFifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source
Press, 1982),
book, ed. Fred Erisman and Richard Etulain
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Four Versions," Nineteenth-Century
pp. 268-79; Labor, "Jack London's Symbolic Wilderness:
Jr., "Jack London: Up From Spiritual
Fiction, 17 (Sept. 1962), 149-61; Charles N. Watson,
ism," in The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920, ed. Howard Kerr, John
W. Crowley, and Charles Crow (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1983), pp. 195-205; Wat
Press, 1983); Jay
son, The Novels ofJack London: A Reappraisal
(Madison: Univ. ofWisconsin
in Literary Naturalism:
Jack London," American Litera
Gurian, "The Romantic Necessity
"Roberts and the Tradition of American
ture, 38 (March 1966), 112-30; and Terry Whalen,
in The Sir Charles G. Roberts Symposium, ed. Glenn Clever (Ottawa: Univ. of
Naturalism,"
Ottawa Press, 1984), pp. 127-42. Whalen
emphasizes that London's capacity for "primordial
the
wonder" allowed him to represent the ambiguity inherent in the act of apprehending
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American LiteraryRealism 29,2
48
wilderness, and calls his style "an index of his religious dimension as a writer who seeks to
unmask the face of the god behind the physical world he observes" with his "imaginative recep
sense of
insists that those who are not alert to
tivity of mind" and
"agitated awe." London
"the mysterious presence of the physical worlds are ... limited, narrow and morally danger
lifewas a "tragic paradox"; London's artis
ous" (pp. 133-35). For London, according toWatson,
tic "double vision" arose out of the clash of "high art and hackwork, illusion and reality, spirit
scorned
and flesh, life and death, being and nothingness" and energized his career. London
an "adamantine line" was drawn between the
supernaturalism but agreed with Spencer that
in his fiction those moments
knowable and the unknowable: "Again and again he dramatized
of mystical rapture that permit one to burst the fetters of materiality...."
(pp. 12,14-15).
18. James G. Cooper,
"The Summit and the Abyss: Jack London's Moral Philosophy,"
Jack London Newsletter, 12 (January-April 1979), 24-27. One of London's favorite words was
protean, writes another critic, inwhich is implied "variety, change, multiplicity" to invoke a
universal response in the reader; such stories as "To Build a Fire" stress "basic elements and
their ramifying complexities"
(Edwin Erbentraut, "The Protean Imperative," Jack London
Newsletter, 2 [May-August
1972], 153-56).
19. Jack London, John Barleycorn (New York: Century, 1913). Further references cited in
text.
is reminded of B.F. Skinner's thesis
20. Labor, Fifty Western Writers, pp. 272-73. One
that "Without the help of a verbal community all behavior would be unconscious. Con
sciousness is a social product. It is not only not the special field of autonomous man, it is not
within the range of a solitary man" {Beyond Freedom and Dignity [New York, Knopf, 1971; rpt.
New York: Bantam, Vintage, 1972], p.183).
21. Scott L. Malcolmson,
"The Inevitable White Man: Jack London's Endless Journey,"
Voice Literary Supplement, 1 February 1994, pp. 10-12.
22. Jack London,
"Jack London By Myself," pamphlet quoted in Labor and Reesman,
Jack London: Revised Edition, p.16.
23. McClintock,
p. 116; Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions: American Literary Nat
uralism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 52-53; and Charles E. May, "'To Build
a Fire':
Critics," Studies in Short Fiction, 15 (1978), 22-23.
Physical Fiction and Metaphysical
comments represents a fallacy common among London's critics: he simply could not
May's
have meant to achieve the effects he in fact does. McClintock
believes that theAlaskan
land
scape in general is "identified with a naturalist logic that denies human significance"; values
or
must then be shown in the stories set there to be "the
"spirit-groping"
product of man,
himself, responding actively to the whisper calling to completion.... The external would be
actual and the internal the ideal" (pp. 50-51). But by the time of "To Build a Fire" (written
so much later than nearly all the other Klondike
stories), the landscape "has become killer.
to do in this story ... is to record the grotesque details which
What
remains for London
describe the nightmare of impaired physical activity that is the prelude to the modern man's
death." London's protagonist is "merely helpless victim of the killing landscape, [and] themys
tical light goes out of the Alaskan sky."The quest has been replaced by the "inexorable, exter
nal forces of natural and man's irrationality," and London
"retreat[s] from the 'Unknown'"
thus allows for no affirmative dimension in the story.
(pp. 118-190). McClintock
24. London, Letters, p. 137.
"To Build a Fire," in Lost Face (New York: Macmillan,
25. Jack London,
1910), p. 63.
Further references cited in text.
in Jack London and Horacio
"Between Fire and Ice: A Theme
26. Arnold Chapman,
Quiroga,"
Symposium, 24 (Spring 1970), 20-24.
27. Toni Morrison, Playing in theDark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cam
bridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992; rpt.New York: Vintage, 1993), p. xii.
28. Ibid., p. 5.
29. Ibid., pp. 33-37.
30. Ibid., pp. 58-59. Images ofwhiteness in London's work may also be seen as signifiers
of sexual repression in a character?as
in The Sea-Wolf where Wolf Larsen's white skin, as
observed by the protagonist Humphrey Van Weyden,
represents both inarticulable desire and
a
negation of complexities of all kinds.
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Essays (Reesman)49
31. As noted, nearly all of London's Yukon stories feature Indian characters and describe
the manifold problems arising from the white newcomers' racism and failure to adapt to the
Northland. Notable examples include "An Odyssey of the North" (1900), as well as aLiWan,
the Fair" (1902), "The League of Old Men"
(1902), and "The Wit of Porportuk" (1910). Race
remained a fundamental concept in London's
thinking throughout his career, surfacing most
and South Seas stories, where he examines racial and cul
dramatically in his laterHawaiian
tural collisions even more critically than in the Klondike fiction. Scott Malcolmson
writes
that early on London,
looking for categorical certainty beyond class, thought he had "found
as
as
one in an
imaginary region at least American
pitiless industrialism: race." As Malcolmson
further notes, London frequently makes "his heroes' whiteness, their understanding of it and
its requirements, the animating fact of their destinies." Whiteness
is for his characters "an
a historical force." Race gave London "the
a
inexplicable tribal imperative and
possibility of
world view unlike that of socialism, one which accommodated both firm collective identities
and human drama and tragedy on a global scale, without end. Life for London had to be a
was full of
race
struggle; and racism, racial conflict,
ultimately did not quite
promise." Yet
"deliver the happy marriage of individual and collective destiny" (Malcolmson, pp. 11-12). Thus
London's handling of race was always inconsistent; for example, his treatment of nonwhite
characters inworks such asA Daughter of the Snows (1902) and Adventure (1911) is little different
from the stock racist attitudes of popular writers of his day. But on the other hand through
out his career he often makes nonwhite characters heroic in opposition to evil and grasping
white men, and the oppositions are treated with irony,pathos, and sometimes horror: in "The
(1911), "Koolau the Leper" (1912), "The Red One"
Story of Jees Uck" (1904), "The Chinago"
(1918), and many others. For more discussion of London's contradictory ideas on race, see Earle
in Critical Essays on Jack London, ed. Jacqueline Tav
Labor, "Jack London's Pacific World,"
ernier-Courbin
(Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1983), pp. 214ff;Watson, The Novels ofJack Lon
"The Call of Kind: Race in Jack London's Fiction" diss.
don, pp. 200ff; Susan Nuernberg,
Univ. ofMassachusetts,
1990; and Andrew J.Furer, "'The Strength of the Strong': (Reform
ing the self inFin-de-siecle American Literature and Culture" diss. Univ. of California, Berke
of Contradiction
in Jack
ley, 1994), esp. chapter 5, "Man and Superman: The Construction
London's Social Thought."
"London's Twice-Told Tale," Studies in Short Fic
32. Earle Labor and King Hendricks,
tion, 4 (1967), 335.
33. JohnMilton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993).
Line references cited in text.
34. Franklin Walker, Jack London and theKlondike: The Genesis of an American Writer
(San Marino, CA: Huntington
Library, 1978), p. 135.
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