White Logic: Jack London’s Short Stories by James I. McClintock

Abstract

Reviews 331 “failing” to give us another wilderness epic, Green has presented us with a book of scrappy little poems, capturing enough of humanity-in-the-elements to make it worthwhile. GARY PAUL NABHAN, Tucson, Arizona White Logic: Jack London’s Short Stories. By James I. McClintock. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wolf House Books, 1975 xii + 206 pages, $10.00 hard­ bound.) Hi-yu skookum! Here is a fine critical source for anyone who has ever taught or ever plans to teach the philosophical ideas underlying Jack London’s short stories. For once we have commentary on something besides Call of the Wild and “To Build a Fire,” and it is insightful commentary, salted with 308 footnotes and an excellent bibliography. Of special interest is the opening chapter, which traces the artistic evolution of the modern short story form, from London’s essay-exemplum introduction and intrusive moralizing narrator, to the frame story which embodies a tale within a tale, to the streamlined story of dramatic action. In subsequent chapters the reader is treated to a discussion of contemporaries who influenced London’s thought — notably Herbert Spencer, Rudyard Kipling, and Carl Jung. An unmistakable highlight is the chapter on the Malemute Kid, whom McClintock calls “the true priest of the Northland morality.” Through the Kid, London asserts his masculine code of violent action and mastery, certainly an important contribution to modern American fiction as later developed by Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Mailer (though we must some­ times wonder how much positive value this coding has for the present generation). The Kid takes on an additional dimension as a trickster figure, and the author helps us see the mythic texture of many London stories — an archetypal pattern of the hero as an omniscient, omnipotent god who passes final judgment on those “misfits” who fail to live up to the code. McClintock does not attempt an exegesis of all 188 tales in the London canon, but focuses on about a dozen which he feels are representative of the others. Most of these chosen “quality stories” have an Alaskan setting, yet we are left to wonder why he skips over such masterpieces of comic irony as “The Unexpected” and “The One Thousand Dozen” while laboring over others as maudlin as “The Law of Life.” McClintock conveniently 332 Western American Literature neglects to discuss three volumes of London’s “pot boilers.” Is this justified? Perhaps, but we should still like to know what is contained in these long out-of-print and hard-to-obtain volumes. Two surprising omissions from this dissertation study are a thesis and a title index of the stories under discussion. Another fault is the cursory handling of London’s literary style, especially his adept handling of dialect — the French Canadian spoken by Black LeClere in “Batard,” the Spanishinfluenced syntax of Manuel de Jesus Patino in “The Madness of John Hamed,” the prospector’s jargon in “Too Much Gold,” tlje Irish brogue of Lon McFane in “The Men of Forty Mile,” and others. At the same time, we wonder how “the evocative language” of London’s Athabascan Indians, who invariably speak Elizabethan English, can give the Alaskan stories “stylistic strength.” The term “white logic” used in the title is something London equated with “the argent messenger of truth beyond truth. . . .” The nonsense of this logic is that man can learn truth, but that it does not in any way improve his spiritual health or happiness. Consequently, the theme of high adventure and masculine dominance in the early stories is transformed into a theme of loss in the middle years, which in turn gives way again in the final years to the notion that man and nature are evil — bestial, irrational, and grotesque. Trapped as he was between the apocalyptic and the demonic, to use Northrop Frye’s language, it is amazing that London still proves himself to be so critically magnetic. But like Melville, perhaps he speaks to the armchair scholars in the same way as Jaws and The Exorcist speak to the masses. CRAIG MISHLER Anchorage Community College University of Alaska The Eskimo Storyteller: Folktales from Noatak, Alaska. By Edwin S. Hall, Jr. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975. Illustrated with...