Jack London's Klondike speculation: capitalist critique and the sled as heterotopia in The call of the wild

Abstract

AbstractIn 1903 Jack London (1876–1916) wrote The call of the wild. This deceptively complex adventure novel concealed the author's vision and critique of a ‘Southland’ society ensnared in a system of capitalism. To reveal the limits of capitalist constructions of knowledge and power, London took his readers from the civilised Southland of California to the frozen uncivilised ‘Northland’ of the Klondike. In this primitive Northland setting, the legacy of a Southland society that valued an individual according to economic mastery was to impede a successful response to London's exacting call of the wild. To investigate London's premise, this paper draws upon the insights of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault argued that knowledge and power can be analysed in terms of region, domain, territory, and field, and his work described how institutions ‘inscribe themselves both on a material soil and within forms of discourse.’ He reasoned that ‘one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power’ through the critical apparatus of the ‘heterotopia.’ Unlike the idealised space of the Utopia, the heterotopia is a ‘real’ social and cultural space that represents, contests, or inverts other sites found within a culture. Foucault recognised the ‘ship’ as the heterotopia par excellence: ‘a floating piece of space…that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself.’ This paper argues that in London's novel the central heterotopia is the Northland sled.