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

PETER T. OKUN John Barleycorn's Body Here am I, a little animal called a man—a bit of vitalized matter, one hundred sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerves, sinew, bones, and brain, all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible, and frail ... a bit of pulsating jelly-like life—it is all I am. The Cruise of the Snark 'hen John Barleycorn was published in 1913, Jack London was on the way up and the way down simultaneously. The highest paid author in the land, London was America's gilded wharf-rat, a Horatio Alger myth in the flesh. And yet, ironically, it was precisely in the flesh that Jack London's success was coming apart. As his career soared, his flesh sank; and by 1913, at the age of thirty seven, London's body was as low as his teputation was high: his teeth were gone, his kidneys diseased, his liver poisoned, his once hard and athletic body soft and bloated. And every bit as impressive as London's discorporation was his preoccupation with it: My lean runner's stomach has passed into the limbo of memory . The joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they once were, when in wild nights and days of toil and frolic, 1 strained and snapped and ruptured them. Never again can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a single rope-clutch in the driving blackness of storm. ... I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born 1 carry a skeleton; that under this rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony, noseless death's head. (JB 191) Arizona Quarter^ Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004-1610 64Peter T. Okun It is a morose confession, and yet characteristic of a text that refigures corporeal rot as a literary trope. Generation and decay, flawless rind and rotten core: London's metonymy of the body is a puzzling, and yet persistent feature ofJohn Barleycorn—so persistent, in fact, that we might do well to focus our attention there: on the "body" of the text, rather than the life of its authot. Autobiographical veracity is always an unstable zone: "What needs to be stressed, however, is that this contradictory situation is a social as well as a private, familial, or 'psychoanalytic ' one" (Jameson 180).1 Barleycorn's body is clearly a crowded site: of private contraries in opposition, certainly, but of social disciplines in operation, as well—Foucault's "'new micro-physics' of power" in the confused and conflicted flesh. In the final analysis, then, it may matter less whether John Barleycorn's body "belongs" to Jack London than whether it can contain so effulgent a mass oferuptive discourses—without bursting. The temptation remains to read this text as autobiography , and on one level, of course, it is that precisely. Yet clearly, Barleycorn 's high/low body is something more than the provocative figure of one man's simultaneous rise and fall; it is also the grid through which an otherwise inchoate set ofcultural messages passes into the text, and becomes readable. What Barleycorn's bi-directional membrane (autobiographical experiences "out," cultural messages "in") cannot restrain, however, is the textual drunkenness that has always proven such an embarrassment among critics and biographers. And for all its voluptuousness, Barleycorn continues to excite a rather flat body of criticism. In part, this paucity ofcritical attention can be attributed to the nodal position Barkycom occupies relative to conventional interpretive categories. As autobiography it is fragmented and unreliable, as fiction disconcertingly self-referential. Neither naturalism nor realism nor yet modernism, John Barleycorn deploys an arsenal of narrative sttategies and commits to none. To be fair, then, London's Alcoholic Memoirs has never been an easy text to fix, and unlocatable texts make us uneasy. One critical solution has been to simplify the questions it raises: hence, is this a wotk of autobiography or of narrative fiction? The answer—any answer— folds us back into the familiar soup ofJack London mythogenesis: was the author...

pdf

Share