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

Resentment and Revolution inJackLondon's Sociofantasy Gorman Beauchamp "Thegreatest story Jack London ever wrote," Alfred Kazin once observed, "wasthe story he lived." 1 London was one of those writers whose lives fascinatereaders as much as, or perhaps more than, their art. Indeed, his careerconsists of the stuff of old Hollywood biodramas, a sort of Horatio Algersaga of the poor boy's rise to world fame and great fortune- but with thetragic twist that makes his life a cathartic lesson in the price exacted for pursuingthe Bitch Goddess SUCCESS, as William James called our national obsession.London was the prototypic success-as-failure. Even more than with mostwriters,the now old New Criticism that eschews biography as a legitimate sourceof literary interpretation proves inadequate for evaluating London, whoselife and work seem unusually inextricable. A psychological approach tohisart thus appears unavoidable. In essaying such an approach, one must stress at the outset that Jack London was a figure of enormous complexities and contradictions. The product of a rootless, poverty-plagued childhood, he became a wealthy, spendthrift socialist, preaching revolution from his millionaire's yacht and baronialranch, surrounded by servants. A believer in the brotherhood of man, he was an avowed racist, convinced that the Anglo Saxon inevitably must engage in a struggle for domination over the numerically superior, but intellectuallyinferior Brown and Yellow races. A proponent of egalitarianism, headmired the Nietzschean superman, the blond-beastly figure who domiCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 1982 180 Gorman Beauchamp nated the servile herd. A preacher of universal peace, he was drawnirresistibly to violence, artistically at his highest pitch when projecting the apocalypse. An adventurer, a man of action, he made his mark in the sphere of the intellect, doing what he called ''brain work." Whatever, then, one mightchoose to claim about London, one would never accuse him of being consistentor of being easy to classify according to our usual categories. While ideological consistency is no doubt a virtue for the systematic philosopher, it isnot necessary for the creative artist, the power and attraction of whose creations may stem precisely from their embodying his unresolved psychic tensions. A work like Twain's Connecticut Yankee, for instance,seems almost designed as a case study of a writer at war with himself-a workall the more interesting because of its ideological confusions. At its best, London's fiction gains in depth and force from the reflected anomalies of hispersonalitv: as a thinker he was eclectic, not seldom confused, often fatuous; but as~n artist he could be bold, protean and provocative. The value of art has,of course, never depended on philosophical profundity nor on ideational con· sistency, luckily for London. In any case, while the psychic tension ismanifest throughout much of his work-for instance, in The Sea Wolf where the antagonists Wolf Larsen and Humphrey Van Weyden each concentrate certain "philosophical" positions that London variously held-it appears nowhere more conspicuously than in his sociofantasy. The term sociofantasy I have taken from Yevgeny Zamyatin's important essay on H. G. Wells.2 Wells, Zamyatin suggests, pioneered a new genre, the sociofantastic novel-the fairy tale transformed by technology, myth urbanized. The sociofantasy constructs an alternate reality, usually projected into the future, that allows "for exposing the defects of the existing social order.'' Akin to the utopia, the sociofantasy differs from it, Zamyatin says, in its emphasis upon action-the utopia, by contrast, is almost alwaysstaticand by its exploiting negative or horrific possibilities: "Wells's sociofantastic novelsdiffer from utopias as much as +A differs from -A." Still, he concludes. like utopias they are "social tracts in the form of fantastic novels." In this newly emerging genre-he is, in fact, describing the dystopian novelZamyatin places several of the works of London, in which "the influenceof Wells is felt unmistakably." My premise, then, is that the contradictory elements of London's personality are reflected most vividly in these sociofantasies -in The Iron Heel and in a half dozen or so short stories, most importantly "Goliah." These works are characterized by a fascination with violence, with conflict. with revolution. For London, struggle is the dynamic of all life, and the ideomachias of his fantasies...

pdf

Share