In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Calls of the Wild on the Page and Screen: From Jack London and Gary Snyder to Jon Krakauer and Sean Penn
  • Jonah Raskin

The wild seems to have come already packaged in the American DNA, and American writers can’t help but hear its call and walk on the wild side, too. In fact, the wilderness—as friend, foe, rough beast, and sacred place—has long provided American writers with a sense of place and distinguished them from their English literary cousins. Classic American literature, as D. H. Lawrence and others understood, would hardly exist without Natty Bumppo in the forest and Captain Ahab at sea. Moreover, as the United States has become, increasingly, a land of malls, Prozac, and iPods, American writers have gone on bounding into the beyond. It’s as though, as a culture, we need to reconnect to that sense of awe, wonder, and fear our earliest ancestors felt when they set foot on a continent that struck them as virgin wilderness.

Christopher McCandless, the twenty-something anti-hero in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) and Sean Penn’s 2007 movie of the same name, dies alone in Alaska, a victim of his own illusions. Like the book, the movie struggles to understand why a college-educated young man from a prosperous, but emotionally troubled middle-class white family, would throw away his privilege. Reviewers have hailed Into the Wild as a mystery, but there’s little that’s mysterious about McCandless and his behavior. Young men like him, in real life and in the pages of fiction, have been doing much the same since the days of the Roman Empire. There’s nothing like a dose of imperial ennui to prompt young men and young women to flee from urban and suburban confines, run with wolves, go native, and embrace “the barbarians,” as they’ve been called since ancient times.

The real McCandless went to extremes. He gave away his inheritance, rejected his name, and called himself “Alexander Supertramp.”1 He also [End Page 198] embraced the life, as he perceived it, of his literary hero, Jack London, who extended, more than anyone else, at the start of the twentieth century the tradition of American literature that Cooper and Melville initiated in the nineteenth. “Jack London is King,” McCandless wrote tersely while in Alaska (9); those four electrifying words appear in Krakauer’s book, thoush not in Penn’s movie. McCandless also proclaimed, “I now walk into the wild” (134), as though he was the first man to do so, and as though he was making history. He seems also to have had in mind John Thornton, the one really heroic human character in The Call of the Wild (1903), since Thornton, London writes, “was unafraid of the wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased” (66). McCandless might have taken that passage with a grain of salt. He might also have come to his senses and realized that the wild was not just or only an idea but a real place with a history and inhabitants. Of course, London linked himself to the wild, but he never did what his character Thornton did. He did not take a rifle and a handful of salt and plunge alone into the wilderness. Moreover, his most eloquent piece of non-fiction on the subject of the Yukon—“From Dawson to the Sea” (June 1899)—describes how he got out of the wild, not how he got into it. It was far more difficult than getting in.

The only passage from The Call of the Wild that McCandless selected for special attention—and that Krakauer repeats in Into the Wild—is a description of Buck after he has killed Spitzbergen, the dog who had led the pack. London calls Buck “the dominant primordial beast” (31). McCandless tweaked the phrase and wrote, “All hail the Dominant Primordial Beast!” (38), which makes it sound like a hymn to brute conquest.

McCandless couldn’t have picked a popular writer more fascinated with the wild than London. The author of The Call...

pdf

Share