The Call of Jack London

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By showcasing the esteem that London has enjoyed among foreign critics, Nuernberg's survey lends support to the claim that London should be taken seriously as a thinker. Auerbach disagrees. In his view, London may have studied Darwin, Marx, and other heavyweights, but his grasp of their ideas was rarely profound. From this perspective, London's real strength remains that of an action writer, albeit in the sense that Jackson Pollock was an action painter: an artist whose work seethes with raw energy and emotion, thanks in part to his fast and furious (even sloppy) mode of creation.

In my opinion, the best thing about London's work lies dangerously near the worst thing: Both originate in his willingness to confront the scientific ideas of his day and make them part of his private cosmology. Few novelists have tried as hard to peel back the layers of culture, searching for some basic truth about the human animal hidden beneath our socially acquired second skins. In doing so, London anticipated many current interests: evolutionary psychology, for instance, and ethology, the study of animal behavior. At the heart of his work is a very modern understanding that humans are simply another life form, bound like all others to this island in the cosmic sea.

One of the first popular fiction writers to see the poetic beauty in modern scientific thought, he was also one of the last. Even in London's day, the scientist and the novelist had all but lost touch, veering off in search of what they assumed were different things. London had the rare intelligence--and audacity--to realize that both are storytellers seeking the same truth.

Copyright 1999 by Jeremiah Creedon.

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