Jack London's Quest for Salvation

Abstract

IT is true that in his writing Jack London deliberately sought popularity and money, and achieved both to an inordinate degree, but a substantial portion of his fiction is nevertheless a fairly straightforward dramatization of political and philosophical concepts. Even his most blatant potboilers are likely to be set within a framework of crude but earnest Darwinism. Thirty years ago Fred Lewis Pattee, in his The Development of the American Short Story, was writing that, serious as his faults were, London had occupied the whole middle of the literary road in this country for over a decade; and even recently the Literary History of the United States quite properly praised him for his eager interest in new ideas. The ideas London dramatized, however, were sometimes highly inconsistent. Not unnaturally, critics differ as to what he really believed, and hold opinions ranging from a conviction that in his eyes man was a mere animal and life only a brawl,' to the nearly opposite persuasion that his philosophy was essentially not a brutal individualism but a social-minded collectivism.2 Both these views have a basis in fact; at the same time, London was too intelligent to have missed the contradictions, in spite of his evident lack of a habit of systematic thought. This puzzle indicates another and a more generally significant problem, the function of these abstract ideas in the specific structure and images of London's fiction. The purpose of this study is to try to reach an understanding of what he was effectively saying to readers of his fiction