Realism Fin de Siécle

 In the last decade of the 19th century a sudden and swift cultural change can be
experienced. The end of the century also marks the end of an era.
 Realism, naturalism combated the dying romanticism.
 The literature of the age undertook the task of giving expression to life.
 The end of the century is the era of experimentation and uncertainty.
 Little by little the ties between the American and British writers were loosing whereas
there was a closer bond between the American and European writers
Dostoyevsky,
Zola,
Hauptman,
Turgenev,
Tolstoj,
Balzac,
Zola,
Marx,
Nietzsche
all had an impact on the American literature.

 The end of the century also was the great day of science and of the experimental
techniques.

 William James (Henry James’s brother) laid the foundation of modern psychology,
 Edward Bellamy, a sociologist devised a system for controlling capitalism through
social morality,
 Henry Adams, a historian explained quite scientifically the American tradition as a
phrase of cosmic evolution.

 Bellamy accepted the pragmatic method of the new science without giving up
traditional American faith in human integrity and perfectibility.
His urban Utopia of the year 2000 was an idealization of industrial capitalism which
man’s sense of social responsibility controlled the extension of being.

 Frank Norris,
Stephen Crane were also much influenced by the analytical psychology.
Crane succeeded in producing a few short tales and novels which have the perfection
of classics: The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
The Open Boat
The Blue Hotel

The forces of these stories are deep inside the heroes,

inside their subconscious.

The powers of the external nature,

the primitive force of organic life just as well as
the subconscious direct the actions of the individuals.

Crane’s masterpieces follow the theme and the four of Poe’s and Hawthorne’s tradition and
bear imprints that will lead in the direction and method of Hemingway, and Faulkner.
The pitfalls (unsuspected danger) of naturalism as well as its powers are fully revealed in the
career of Jack London (1876-1916)

 Who achieved a greater popularity than Norris and Crane, but like them,
 he burned himself out with the fire of his own violence:
 at the age of 40 he committed suicide.
J
Jack London personified the most crucial transition in American cultural history.

His generation was the last to embody the “restless nervous energy’ and
that dominant individualism which was shaped by the frontier experience on the one hand.

 Jack London as a child experienced the frontier experience:

he was honest, vital, optimistic,
but finally he became the man of the 20th century: complex, sensitive, frustrated.

In his own rise and fall he dramatically epitomizes the contradictions of the American dream.

 Jack London himself is a self-made legend.

 He was born in the poorest district of San Francisco literally a “natural” child.
 His paternity has never been definitely established.
 Jack London spent his early years under threat hardship and poverty.
 He was a work-beast,
 his life was a toil: he performed various jobs:
1. enterprises at sea, gold-rush,
2. observing the Russia – Japanese War for the press,
3. campaining for socialism,
4. 3 years hoboing,
5. he served even a prison,
6. went to college but after one semester by lack of finances he gave it up.

 The sea provided London with his real undergraduate education,

 his graduate degree was earned in the Northland.
 Without mining an ounce of gold in Alaska. London made his fortune there for
 when he returned to California in 1898 he took up writing as a serious career.
 Within a year he had sold his first story and within five years Jack London he had
published many books drawn from the Northland adventure.
 With the publication of the Call of the Wild in 1903 he became world famous.
 He was the first writer to earn a million dollars from his pen.

“The Call of the Wild” and “The White Fang”

are two sides and edge of a single coin: they are dog stories, they are fables.
(=short story not based on fact, often with animals as characters that conveys a moral)

Each present a different facet of reality London abstaining from commentary,

leaves the reader to choose that view which suits him best.

Read superficially, the story of the great dog Buck and his transformation from ranch pet to
Ghost Dog of the Wilderness is entertaining escape literature,
but to read the novel on this level is equivalent to reading Moby Dick as a fisherman’s yarn.
(ja:n)=story, traveller’s tale, esp. one that is exaggerated and invented.
Mere escape novels do not become world classics.

The Call of the Wild

is not a novel at all, but a prose poem with underlying rhythms of epic and myth.

Its central theme is the Myth of the Hero and interwoven with this are such myth motifs as
initiation, the perilous journey (= full of risk, dangerous), a return to the life source as “world
navel”, transformation and apotheosis.
On this level Buck is no mere animal but a symbolic projection of the reader’s essential
mythic self, “… it is the depth of his nature.. it is going back into the womb of time.”

“The Call of the Wild” is London’s version of “The Heart of Darkness” which lies beneath
and superego within all men.
John Thornton’ “represents the same dream world which is the timeless landscape of myth.
It is a world of unconscious (the Jungle is the collective unconsciousness) a primordial
(existing from the beginning) world against which modern man has erected the inhibiting
barriers of intellect but nonetheless real world to which he would return in dreams to find his
soul.
Within this wilderness “through the pale moonlight” “flashes the Ghost Dog, a symbol of
libido, elan vital (kéj vagy nemi vágy) the essential life force.
And it is to this call - the faint but clear music of life’s ultimate mystery – that the reader
unconsciously responds.

In 1904 London wrote: - after the immediate success of The Call of The Wild he
decided to compose a “complete antithesis” and comparison piece”: “I’m going to reverse the
process. Instead of the devolution or decivilization of a dog, I’m going to give the evolution,
the civilization of a dog – the development of domesticity faithfulness love morality and all
amenities (kellemesség, rokonszenves vonás, comfort, ami az életet kellemessé teszi) and
virtues.

Two years later White Fang however is a completely different from The Call of the
Wild. Critics say that it is more artificial – a well written book but less artful than The Call of
the Wild. White Fang is structured upon ideas not myth. It is a good novel but not a great
book. The influence of Darwinism and of the naturalistic philosophy is relevant in this novel.
Nature is seen as vast intransigent (=unwilling to change one’s view or be co-operative:
stubborn) comic force, the kind of impersonal Force described by Spencer who profoundly
influenced Jack London’s philosophical attitude. (He declared himself a materialist monist.)
“The central tension of the novel is Life, Love, Civilization, South-land. Applying the theory
of environmental determinism, London demonstrates that given by proper care and climate
the most savage beast may be transformed into gentle housedog.

The autobiographical parallels between White Fang and his creator have been pointed
out by many critics. There are obvious similarities psychological rather than literal between
the dog hero’s violent initiation and London’s….. the end own agonizing childhood and
subsequent struggle to escape the cold wilderness of poverty. More important is the revelation
of London’s optimistic humanism: what had been achieved with White Fang could also be
achieved with man: in one of his letters he wrote: ”My ideal …has been that of a cleaner,
better, nobler world, more immediately accessible for all humanity than you could ever hope
for.”

The Odyssey of the North is continued in the following works: In the Far Country, The Law
of Life, and Love of Life. London produced a dozen Northland volumes. The major themes of
the sage are: primitivism, atavism, evolutionism, brotherhood and the eternal conflict of man
versus cosmos.
Jack London is
1. an American legend of success.
2. How well he worked the success formula is evident when we realize that London is
neither a great thinker, nor a great literary artist, nor a great man in the moral sense.
3. The key to his legend, which is the key to the American dream, is his sheer vitality.
4. If vitality is the key to the London legend, it is also the key to London’s tragedy.
5. The supreme irony of his life was that after breaking out from the underworld of the
work beast, London succeeded in working himself to death.
6. He got old very early. He was dead before he reached the age of 41.
7. The circumstances of his death as well as of his birth are clouded by mystery and befit
the legendary hero.

Jack London’s literacy achievement was closely related to his life. Three biographical factors
accounted mainly for his success as a writer:

1) the poverty which generated ambition

2) the wanderlust that provided the rich matrix of human experience from which his
fiction is drawn
3) the omnivorous appetite for reading that gave him philosophical background and a
sense of artistic balance.

He imposed a synthesising force and a keen sensibility upon the raw stuff of life.

His craftsmanship is a hard-earned one.

Martin Eden is an account of the young writer’s self-imposed apprenticeship.

He had hardly written any formal statements on the craft of fiction, but in his letter to the
younger writers he indicates and proves that he thoroughly understood the fundamentals of his
trade. “Put all those things, which are yourself into the stories … eliminating yourself.”
Atmosphere stand always for the elimination of the artist that is to say the atmosphere is the
artist …Don’t narrate – paint! Draw!

He produced about 50 novels.

Other novels: 1909 Martin Eden (autobiographical novel)

1913 John Barleycorn (anti-alcoholic propaganda against alcoholism)

Jack London was the first working-class writer before Dreiser.

He wrote about the war of the social classes as well:
1905 The War of the Classes
1910 Revolution
1903 The People of the Abyss – studies of the East London slums
1907 The Iron Heel – the clash of capital and labour, the rise of the fascist power.

A man of great controversies: he believed in socialist ideals but at the same time he praised
the individualism through which one could reach what he desired. He idealised the winner
who survived and conquered (of Darwinistic ideas).