Jack London's Use of Carl Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious

Abstract

I N HIS INTELLIGENT CHARACTERIZATION of naturalism, Donald Pizer identifies a central thematic tension in naturalistic fiction between naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomforting truth which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenthcentury world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise.' For Jack London, certainly, this was the dynamic tension behind his intellectual life and fiction. In London's language, there was a struggle between white logic (the antithesis of life) and sane and normal order of truth . . . that life must believe in order to live.2 Like Martin Eden, his autobiographical hero, his literary. mission was to avoid reductive portrayals of man as either a clod or a god while admitting both human limitations and heaven-sent possibilities.3 His protagonists would challenge a stultifying environment and discover wonderful.4 Since, for London, science had dislodged idealistic concepts of man, his temperament insisted that affirmations of the human condition, too, have a scientifically justifiable rationale. Early in his career, for example, he had used his enthusiastic reading of Haeckel, Darwin, and Spencer to evoke stinging things of the spirit in his famous Alaskan fiction. A few years later he used Marxism to dramatize the energy of people in his socialist stories. It is not generally recognized, however, that in the last year of his life Jack London wrote a group of short stories whose scientific authority derived from his reading of Carl Jung's Psychology of the