SOURCE: Reesman, Jeanne Campbell. “‘Never Travel Alone’: Naturalism, Jack London, and the White Silence.” American Literary Realism 1870-1910 29, no. 2 (winter 1997): 33-49.

[In the following essay, Reesman explores the naturalistic nature of Jack London's fiction.]

The afternoon wore on, and with the awe, born of the White Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to their work. Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity,—the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery,—but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot's life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of things strives for utterance. And the fear of death, of God, of the universe, comes over him,—the hope of the Resurrection and the Life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence,—it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.

—The Son of the Wolf (1900)¹

Like the Whiteness of the Whale, the White Silence represents the “dumb blankness” on the face of reality encountered by a writer as well as his characters. In Jack London's famous “White Silence” passage, as elsewhere in his fiction, the immensity of the Silence of Nature occasions a correspondingly powerful impulse on the part of London, his narrator, and reader; though the travelers in the passage themselves remain bent and voiceless, the narrator is not “affrighted at the sound of his own voice,” but allows “strange thoughts [to] arise unsummoned” in order to give utterance to “the mystery of all things.” The blankness coupled with multivalence that thrilled Ishmael into speech has a similar effect here. London called his reply to the White Silence “spirit-groping.” And by the time of his last story, “The Water Baby,” he has his wise old fisherman, Kohokumu, speak directly of seeking the truth that lies within, “from the deeps of me that are as deep as the sea.” Kohokumu tries to voice his sense of wonder at the strange conjunctions of inner and outer realities:

“Why have I thought this thought of my return to my mother and of my rebirth from my mother into the sun? You do not know. I do not know, save that, without whisper of man's voice or printed word, without prompting from otherwhere, this thought has arisen from within me. … I am not a god. I do not make things. Therefore I have not made this thought. I do not know its father or its mother. It is of old time before me, and therefore it is true. Man does not make truth. Man, if he be not blind, only recognizes truth when he sees it.”²

Kohokumu's description of his beliefs echoes the passage in the Gospel of St. John that was important to London, Jesus' advice to the Pharisee Nicodemus: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. … The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit” (John 3: 6-8).³ Yet somehow these metaphysical insights do not seem in keeping with the sort of naturalism we have been taught to associate with Jack London.

That naturalism itself is more than pessimistic materialistic determinism has long been recognized, thanks to the work of Donald Pizer, Charles Child Walcutt, Lilian Furst, Sydney Krause, and others. Pizer refers to naturalism's “affirmative ethical conception of life,” noting that whether the naturalist depicts the new and discomforting truths he or she has discovered in the modern city or the dangers which are to be encountered in the natural world, the naturalist also portrays compensating humanistic values in the characters.⁴ Indeed, as June Howard has noted, the affirmative ethical and humanistic inconsistencies cited by Pizer and others “are so common in naturalist novels that one begins to wonder just where one finds the novels that define the form. …”⁵

How odd, then, that given the general agreement upon this view of naturalism as a kind of tension between environment and character, matter and spirit, the best-known of all the naturalists has never really escaped the most reductive sort of analysis. Examples are legion, but two from the same source will suffice. The headnote to the section on Jack London in the Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism concludes:

London was a prolific writer, authoring over 400 pieces of nonfiction, 200 short stories, and more than fifty books. Among his later works, The Iron Heel (1907), a dystopian novel containing premonitions of Fascism, and John Barleycorn (1913), a semi-autobiographical portrait of an alcoholic, are notable. His final years were marked by various unsuccessful projects of a non-literary nature; during this time, despite his doctors' warnings, he continued to drink heavily and consume his regular diet of raw meat and raw fish. He died on November 16, 1916.

The three paragraphs that precede this one mention only a few of London's other words—The Road (1907), The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea-Wolf (1904), and The People of the Abyss (1903)—and say almost nothing about them, instead sensationalizing various aspects of his life.⁶ Although this summary of London's career does not exhibit the sort of emotional attack one sometimes finds, it is fairly typical in what it stresses (Fascism, raw meat, self-destruction). There is in the same volume, however, in one of the excerpts of articles on Jack London, a fully realized assault:

[London] was never able to root his ideas in his emotions; he never deepened attitudes into personality; he left his own soul unexamined while he mapped out the minds of others, until his life (with its sea voyages, alcoholism, and money grubbing) took on the aspect of an obsessive flight from self that he had never explored and that he finally came to fear and abhor. … London was a free thinker who raided the philosophies of Nietzsche, Spencer and Kidd as he once raided the oyster beds of San Francisco Bay. What he read he wrote, what he stole he sold, without any of the ideas he used tincturing his system; his mind was a faculty divorced from his personality, a sponge that he regularly squeezed for the popular magazines.⁷

Thief, brawler, drinker, sponge, grubber, obsessive, depressive: It must seem to the reader of such naively naturalistic descriptions that if London ever managed to write a good story it was merely by accident. Certainly he could not have meant to write anything but trash, and he could not have had the talent and energy to do otherwise. It would have come as a shock to him to learn that he spent the latter part of his career on “various unsuccessful projects of a non-literary nature,” since during the last years of his brief career he continued to write his 1,000 words a day and, among other projects, run a large and complicated ranching operation; and during this period London produced some of his richest and most challenging works, including The Star Rover (1915), The Red One (1918), and On the Makaloa Mat (1919). Although the critical tide has turned in London's favor, and interest in his craft is replacing the biographical fascination, one still encounters in headnotes to anthologies and elsewhere a need to see London—personally—as a brute. We are still treated to critics who write Jack London's life as the naturalist saga he never wrote, and then use that life story to read the works he did write; thus has the autobiographical emphasis served to draw attention away from the writing that was always the central activity within his life. Portraying London as atavistic lone wolf, critics manufacture and sell a version of Jack London that attempts to silence the multitude of beliefs in his work which, as Pizer would put it, “assert the value of all life.”⁸

Another revision of naturalism is going on, but unlike the revisions of Pizer, et al., it has shed little light on London's work. Mark Seltzer's 1992 book Bodies and Machines, for example, typically objectifies authors, narrators, and characters instead of examining how these agents resist objectification by the forces surrounding them. Seltzer and others are reviving the limitations of a deterministic naturalism by describing its representation of “bodies' instead of people, characterizing those bodies as “machines.” His book “traces the relays” between the natural and the technological that make up what might be called “the American body-machine complex” in which nature becomes a “naturalist machine” and human beings “statistical persons.” He includes in his survey the “mass literature of boyhood, adolescence, and the making of men.” He focuses for part of a chapter called “The Love-Master” on “the best-selling ‘wilding’ stories of Jack London,” bestowing upon his treatment of London a title he must have thought witty: “Men in Furs.”⁹

In “Men in Furs,” we learn that in portraying the “violent confrontations” between the “life of motion and the threat of the cessation of life and motion,” London's work “reduces these conflicts to their most rudimentary forms.” Life is “eating and being eaten” in “the great white male North,” and it is figured by the “miscegenation of the natural and the cultural … apparent … in the figure of the wolf-dog and other men in furs.” London's characters are merely moved around by the “dispassionate laws of force” behind the “twin principles of gold and the machine.¹⁰ For example, Seltzer finds that

London's writings, particularly his accounts of the zero-degree white North, thus take the mathematical form of a count-down or calibrated dissipation of energy within a closed system. For example, in the well-known story “To Build a Fire” (1908) … heat, energy, and the capacity for motion are depleted one by one as the system—the natural body or its technological protheses—approaches degree-zero or entropy. The plot of such stories might be plotted on a graph or reduced to the calculations “n-1, n-2, n-3 … n-n.” The internal relations between writing/calculating and the body- machine complex could not be more clearly marked.¹¹

We are also to understand that “the disciplines of Systematic Management are bound up with another form of S/M in the Klondike.” As “interior states and natural bodies: of London's “masters of time and space” are transformed into “supervisable and finely calibrated spatial movements,” so are “working bodies, spaces, times, and functions” rigorously segregated. This notion evolves into a discussion of the “erotics” of discipline and bonding in the workplace in which the desire for and fear of contact with the “Love-Master” predominate in the hero's tortured imagination. For example, according to Seltzer, White Fang learns modern sexuality and becomes acculturated by learning to love pain. Seltzer moves from “men in furs” to a quick peek at what he calls “naturalist skin games” in The Sea-Wolf, concluding his book with Artaud's remark that “Under the skin, the body is an over-heated factory.”¹²

In contrast to the mechanistic “erotics” Seltzer sketches, London's naturalism consistently contains and implies manifold beliefs—Transcendental, Romantic, mythic, religious. From his reading of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, London evolved a scientific rationale for subscribing to a high order of “thought, mind, soul,” as he called it, which has its place in the natural order.¹³ He was thus able to reject a materialism that denied the existence of spirit and to reject spiritualism that dispensed with the notion of matter: “matter cannot exist and be operative without spirit,” wrote Haeckel, “nor spirit without matter.”¹⁴ This idea accounts, in James McClintock's words, for the “seemingly bizarre situation of a literary naturalist saying that, ‘I am an agnostic, but with one exception: I do believe in the soul’” a belief that accounts for the thread of optimism that runs through London's works.¹⁵ Such thinking was typical of London's times, Dale H. Ross reminds us, and of other naturalist writers:

The age in which London lived and wrote was the age of Darwinism applied to society, of pragmatism and instrumentalism, of Freud, of Veblen, of Henry Adams, of Marx, Jung, Pavlov, Nietzsche. It is not surprising, therefore, that novelists like London, Norris and Dreiser display in their work a kind of eclecticism, seeming sometimes to be behaviorists, at others determinists, and at still other times almost neo-romanticists. Thus when London is concerned for espousing conflicting and contradictory ideas and causes, his judges are, unknowingly perhaps, charging him with no greater error than being the representative of the world in which he lived.¹⁶

But there is much more here than eclecticism: Numerous critics, including Earle Labor, Charles N. Watson, Jr., Jay Gurian, and Terry Whalen, have underscored the profound dualities in London's thought, especially his dialogic treatment of spirit and matter.¹⁷ As James G. Cooper has pointed out, “London emerges as a classic case of the writer whose conscious mind says one thing while the reader, using the writer's work as the voice of his unconscious, hears just the opposite.”¹⁸

Even in John Barleycorn, when London describes one possible response to the White Silence, the White Logic brought on by alcoholism, as “the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact …,”¹⁹ the response is equivocal. Under the spell of the White Logic we look at our fellow man as a mere “appearance” or “mirage,” as “brother … to the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast” (318-19), and at our own face that hides a nothingness that seems the very core of our being:

I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born I carry a skeleton; that under the rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony, noseless death's head. All of which does not shudder me. To be afraid is to be healthy. Fear of death makes life. But the curse of the White Logic is that it does not make one afraid. The world-sickness of the White Logic makes one grin jocosely into the face of the Noseless One and to sneer at all the phantasmagoria of living.

(315)

But London's narrator enters into dialogue with this Noseless One, seeking to understand. He turns to his books as antidotes to hopelessness, even though the Noseless One scoffs at them as “Boglights, vapors of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, groupings and maunderings, ontological fantasies,” mere “phantasms of hope” that “fill your bookshelves,” the “sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels—your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches.” The White Logic would teach us that we may not understand anything of enduring value in human life, or represent it in art: life is simply “unthinkable.” “Come,” the White Logic murmurs, “Your glass is empty. Fill and forget” (329-30).

Every word London wrote was an attempt to combat the White Logic and to reply to the White Silence; the belief in spirit (meaning) is in London's mind a belief first in himself and his efforts and second in humanity as a vast community spanning time and space, artist and audience in Whitman's “form union, plan.” London's search for community took many forms, among them socialism, racialism, and agrarianism; he never stopped journeying, physically or spiritually. To a surprising degree, his work centers on humans trying to talk their way into community, not on the struggle to dominate. This urge is present from his first story, “To the Man on Trail” (1899) to his last, “The Water Baby” (1919). London was always an outsider—poor boy, hobo, socialist, Westerner, correspondent, wayfarer in many worlds—but because he wanted to belong he vigorously entered into any community he encountered by describing it convincingly in his fiction, whether the elite of San Francisco or the headhunters of Melanesia. This does not mean he admired a particular community, just that he wanted to know it from within.

With relationships functioning as epistemologies, London's perspective on the White Silence evolved not through pitting himself or his heroes against nature as individual survivors, but rather, as Earle Labor has emphasized, “London's Northland code demands not only physical but spiritual and moral adaptability, and the greatest ‘strength of the strong’ … is communal rather than individual.” The “ego-centered, loveless individualist,” such as Wolf Larsen, “incapable of loving the fellow creatures of this earth,” is doomed to fail.²⁰ In London's work one hardly encounters a naive notion of the “self.” The self is individually and socially constructed, and survival depends upon imagination, plasticity, and tolerance: The ultimate survivor in his canon, as Scott Malcolmson notes, is Darrell Standing, who manages to spread the individual self over time, “creating an imaginary collective of selves unhindered by geography, liberating himself for adventures of identity that neither class nor racial solidarity could ever allow.”²¹

New approaches to London's work focusing on gender and race are helping to reveal radical patterns of thought regarding Self and Other, especially in the late South Seas and Sonoma fiction, where London invokes masculinity and femininity as well as constructions of race to generate new narrative forms, dialogic and polyphonic. These forms are enacted throughout his career to represent subjects as diverse as the Northland code of fair play and brotherhood in the Klondike stories and novels; the rhetoric of socialism in The Iron Heel (1908); the treatment of racism in the South Seas stories-within-stories of The House of Pride (1912) and On the Makaloa Mat (1919); and the revision of sex roles in works as different as The Sea Wolf (1904) and The Valley of the Moon (1913). Part of the reason for London's enormous popularity was his facility for bringing new subjects to the magazine-reading public and letting these subjects speak for themselves. In these works the notion of White Silence takes on its fullest racial and monologic connotations, but London insisted, “It was in the Klondike that I found myself. There you get your perspective. I got mine.”²² For “perspective” here, we may read voice as the rejoinder to the awful White Silence within and without.

Indeed, even in London's most “classic” naturalist stories we find these three important elements: the search for spirit, the desire for community, and the need to address the Other. “To Build a Fire” is a fine example. Critics have mistakenly characterized this well-known tale as London's most pessimistic story, one whose determination, as Lee Clark Mitchell has it, makes the status of narrator and protagonist “of little or no concern” since they are demonstrably not “card-carrying persons.” Charles E. May goes so far as to say that the story is a “naturalistic version of Everyman …, simply Everyman as a body,” and that London, “like his protagonist, is without imagination in this story, because he too is concerned here only with the things of life and not with their significance. … [N]othing in the story leads … [the reader] to the metaphysical conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe.”²³

Let us read the story anew. “To Build a Fire” operates on a grim contrast between the kind of knowledge the unnamed hero possesses and the kind he needs, a discrepancy that costs him his life. “To Build a Fire” shares with “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Moby-Dick, “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Open Boat” its symbolic power as well as the epistemological theme. From the opening paragraph onward, the reader's imagination is invited to take an active role; through a negative building of suspense, through ambiguity, allusion, and symbolism the narrator guides the reader along the journey to knowledge the hero, in contrast, is unknowingly embarked upon. London interweaves throughout the belief that finding a correct use of knowledge elevates an individual to the fullest human potential. Attaining knowledge alone will not lead to a higher quality of life, but the essential elements of character teach how to use the knowledge gathered about life: Knowledge without the wisdom to apply it as useless. This philosophy survived all the intellectual conflicts that recurred throughout London's professional life. As he wrote to Anna Strunsky: “Mankind is my passion, and in the search after potentiality and the realization thereof, my hobby.”²⁴

In 1907, while sailing from San Francisco to Hawaii on his boat, the Snark, London completely revised and rewrote this story from the version published in Youth's Companion (1902) to the infinitely richer tale that appeared in Century (1908) and then in Lost Face (1910). There is a sharp discrepancy between narrative style and epistemology: The much briefer 1902 version presents a prescriptive, univocal knowledge by having the narrator simply state its moral, “Never travel alone,” whereas the 1908 story offers a very different hermeneutics. The reader's active role in the 1908 version works well with the key structural element lacking in the 1902 version: relationships between the man and the dog, the man and “the boys” in the camp, the man and the old timer on Sulphur Creek. These relationships deepen and complicate the theme of “man against nature” by redefining nature as human nature. The story is about human beings in nature and also in or out of community. Instead of a basic dichotomy between simply knowing and not knowing how to survive, there are at least three separate forms of “survival knowledge” presented, and all of them involve the concept of knowing in relation to someone or something else: the hero's abstract theorizing about his environment that fails at close observation; the dog's instinctual knowledge; and the old timer's wisdom. The man in the story needs the other kinds of knowledge as well as his own, but he is “traveling alone” without them.

In the first two or three paragraphs, we have already left the realm of “pure” naturalism, for the narrator's language gives Nature a human face: “the hair-line trail,” the “intangible pall over the face of things,” the sun a “cheerful orb” that will “peep” over the horizon. However, the man does not think of himself as quite human; that is, when he tires and has to pause for breath after climbing the snowbank, he “excus[es] the act to himself by looking at his watch.”²⁵ His instinctual knowledge of survival in nature (as his tired body warns him) and his civilized knowledge (“what time it is”) sharply contrast. The discrepancy illustrates both his prideful dishonesty with himself and his assumed distance from “Nature,” which will bring about his downfall.

And community (or lack of it) is also subtly invoked when a few paragraphs later the man crosses a “wide flat of niggerheads” (69) and notes the layers of “snow-hidden ice-skin” (72). The snow's “skin” is of course “pure white” (64). White—white and silent and solitary, like the “inevitable white man” after whom London titled a later story. The protagonist, we learn, is a chechaquo, a newcomer in this territory, there for gold. His alien Anglo-Saxon identity is not specifically an issue in the story, since there is no mention of the Indians who people most of London's other Klondike tales. But the association between whiteness and silence points away from the community of the living, rather in the way that the weird Antarctic topography connotes death in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a work that overtly invokes race. In London's story, when the snow-laden spruce branches release their burden above the man's fire, a terrifying whiteness literally obliterates the protagonist's efforts to survive.

The unnamed protagonist may be said to reflect the Kiplingesque stereotype of the lone white man out to dominate the land and force it to produce for him, for his is the “insatiable blind will” of Nietzsche's Übermensch, one who does not see himself in relation to the universe nor comprehend the value of adapting to a given universe instead of attempting to overcome it. At the man's side is the dog, whose aloof but recording consciousness, as Arnold Chapman describes him, provides a sense of what is enslaved as well as dramatic irony as the human intruder is expelled. As Chapman notes, London would have been confronted with many examples of Nordic explorers of Polar regions, such as Roald Admunsen, forcing the limits of their physical world.²⁶ London's particular explorer is doomed by his inability to place himself among the rest of us. How ironic that the man's desire to be among “the boys” in the camp is thwarted by his belief that he is better than they are.

Toni Morrison has recently examined this sort of exclusivity through the image of “whiteness” in American literature in its relation to literary “blackness.” Such figurations, she argues, are present even in works that understand themselves to be “universal” or “race-free.”²⁷ Jack London's thinking was rarely “race-free”; on the contrary, he was one of the most race-conscious writers of his day. Morrison's thesis that “the major and championed characteristics of our national literature,” such as “individualism, masculinity, [and] the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell” are “responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” can be transferred to “To Build a Fire” to suggest a response to an Indian presence in particular and the presence of the Racial Other—black, Indian, Polynesian—in general.²⁸ It is often through glaring omission—in this case, a blinding Whiteness—Morrison argues, that the Other is felt. In Pym, Morrison notes how the “extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency” of the novel's images of whiteness “function as both antidote for the meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness,” a haunting dark presence “from which our early literature seemed unable to extricate itself.” Turning to other works of “Young America,” Morrison wryly notes that though the American Dream would seem to promise a flight from oppression to freedom and possibility, encounters with the Dream in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century are often occasions for terror in the face of what Melville called “the power of blackness.” In the writings of Melville and Hawthorne this blackness is racialized in the sense that the American imagination played upon an enslaved population in order to project its fears of boundarylessness, of “nature unbridled and crouched for attack.” And later artists such as Twain, Faulkner, and Hemingway also “transferred internal conflicts to a ‘blank darkness.’”²⁹ Images of blackness, Morrison concludes, are self-reflexive; they can be “evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable—all of the self-contradictory features of the self.” But in contrast, “whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, dreaded, senseless, implacable”—it is “inarticulate.” The examples of such whiteness Morrison mentions closely parallel London: the snow at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, “the wasteland of unmeaning”; the “‘great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun’” mountaintop at the end of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”; the image of the white boat closing To Have and Have Not.³⁰ The racialized possibilities of “To Build a Fire” are powerfully implicated in the story's overall exploration of the theme of community. This emphasis is also present elsewhere in London's corpus, as is the working out of the oppositions of slavery and freedom in The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “Batârd,” The Sea-Wolf, and The House of Pride, to name but a few.³¹

As in the story “In a Far Country,” the theme of Brotherhood in “To Build a Fire” is figured negatively. For example, obsessed as he is with quantification, like many of Hemingway's heroes, the man maintains his emotional distance. The fixation with measurable details is a clue in many of London's stories to a character's allegiance to deterministic forces, most notably in the story “The Apostate.” The timeless quality of “To Build a Fire” is ironically counterpointed by its great attention to how many miles the man must travel (locales are even named “Sixty Mile,” and so on); how cold it is; and what time of day it is. The story begins at 9 o'clock and pauses at 10. The zenith of the sun is noted, and the man pauses for lunch at 12:30, planning to be in camp by 6 o'clock. Degree fluctuations are closely followed. One of London's greatest strengths is his narration of action, but here, when the action is related from the protagonist's point of view, action confines itself to what the man can measure (how many twigs, how many matches). Perhaps such a fixation is a defense against painful knowledge as well as against emotional contact with other people—and a futile defense against death itself. The irony is made clearest when we read that the man builds his fire with “twigs the size of his finger” then “branches the size of his wrist,” having to look down to know whether he has hold of a twig or not, for “the wires were pretty well down between him and his finger-ends” (81). Although he may think in mechanical or technological images, he is not separate from Nature and able to quantify it: his body is Nature, as twigs/fingers, branches/wrists. Such irony is one of London's best techniques, and one most often missed.

In contrast to the epistemological confusion of the hero, the dog epitomizes instinctual knowledge. As Earle Labor and King Hendricks have noted, the dog is a ficelle that makes us see the protagonist as a “hollow man whose inner coldness correlates with the enveloping outer cold,” and furnishes “subtle counterpointing” between the dog's “natural wisdom” and the man's “foolish rationality.”³² The man's crystal beard of spittle and tobacco juice contrasts early in the story with the dog's “proper” wolf-coat, and so his knowledge seems inferior to that of the dog, whose point of view, though not anthropomorphized, is handled as though he is a sentient character. The dog's instincts state that it is too cold to travel, and the dog feels the “vague but menacing apprehension” around the pair that the man ignores (68). All the dog's ancestry knew cold, “and it had inherited the knowledge.” But because there is no intimacy between the dog and the man—the dog is the “toil-slave” of the man—the dog makes “no effort to communicate its apprehension” to him, and the man does not attempt to “read” the dog (77). The man does not share the dog's instincts, and when his powers of observation and his theorizing fail him, he is resourceless. The man fails to capture the dog when he attempts to use its body to keep warm because he forgets how their relationship works (harsh words, erect posture).

Significantly, the man has chosen only a non-human companion, the dog, as his trail-mate, and there is no love between them. Of course, since the man has his “muzzle of ice” and “crystal beard” the color of amber from the tobacco juice (69), speech is impossible, if there were anyone to talk to. He does, however, return again and again to one figure, the old timer on Sulphur Creek who warned him, “Never travel alone.” In effect the old timer is his companion, like the teller in the tale, sitting by his fire and relating his Northland lore. Unlike the man, he does have imagination, and whereas the temperature strikes the man as “uncomfortable,” but “did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, … and from there it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe” (64-65), the old timer's wisdom must teach him otherwise. The man thinks, “Well, here he was; he had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. … All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right” (81). The point is, of course, that his head is freezing! In using this particular image to emphasize isolation—and in dwelling in the same passage upon the distance between the man and his control of his hands and fingers—London asks what is needed to compose identity. As the protagonist's body freezes, so his consciousness eventually undergoes a change; he first thinks that “the boys” will take care of him, but eventually, “He did not belong with himself anymore, for even then he was out of himself, standing with the boys and looking at himself in the snow. It certainly was cold, was his thought” (97).

In the end, losing control of his senses, the man runs blindly, like “a winged Mercury,” unable to feel the ground (94). From this messenger of the gods, he learns that he is at last a man among other men, for, when he finally decides to “take it decently,” his notion of propriety resembles a social one. And with his “new-found peace of mind” comes a final vision of the old timer “warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe” (96-97). The old timer had warned him, “one must not be too sure of things” (76). Like the man in the conclusion of the story, the reader is taught to see things in relation to other things and accept the resulting epistemological contingencies: never to “travel alone.”

Of the half-dozen times the protagonist thinks of the wise old man on Sulphur Creek, all but once his specific thought is that the old man was right. The old man represents the wisdom that the man on the trail lacks, and his power is most clearly alluded to by the several kinds of fire that accompany him: his warm fireside, his wreath of pipe smoke, his home at a place called “Sulphur” Creek. He is also connected to the “stars that leaped and danced” at the man's death, as the flame of the man's first fire earlier “danced.” Life = fire; death = cold. But fire also = knowledge, especially the wisdom of the old timer, shared by the narrator and reader, listeners as we are by the fireside. The vision of the old man replaces the hero's conscious knowledge of his surroundings, and the man apologizes: “‘You were right, old hoss; you were right’” (97). This unbidden image with the statement made in response to it is his last thought and his truest one. In spite of his arrogant determination to travel his way, the man at last has not traveled alone, if only in his dying moment. In this version of the story, no longer is there a simple “moral”; rather, one encounters the assertion of a relationship between Hero and Other, youth and old timer, and, in turn, of a collective knowledge the narrator and reader share.

But the old timer's warning transcends the man's individual case and takes on a mythic dimension, characteristic of London in that it grows out of a naturalistic detail. Sulphur, or brimstone, is the stuff of hell, and after the gold it is the “other” yellow mineral of the story. The burning brimstone flares up in the man's nostrils as he lights his second fire (interestingly, when it happens, he immediately thinks, “The old timer on Sulphur Creek was right …” [87]). Later, when he picks up the entire seventy sulphur matches and scratches them against his leg, holding them until his flesh burns, he can feel it “deep down below the surface” (88). Indeed, not unlike the damned “below the surface” in hell, despite his efforts he is isolated from the community of the blessed awaiting him at the camp.

The ancients believed sulphur to be the father of the elements. A telling reference occurs in Paradise Lost, where Mammon, one of the fallen angels in hell, is the leader of a band of “pioneers” who dig into the sulphuric earth for gold and other minerals from which to build Pandemonium:

                                                  Mammon led them on:
Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From Heav'n, for ev'n in Heav'n his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
the riches of Heav'n's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine of holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific: By him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the center, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother earth
For treasures better hid.

(I.678-88)³³

The word “Mammon” in Syriac meant “wealth” and became familiar in the New Testament through Matthew's use of it: “Thou canst not serve both God and Mammon” (4:24). In Pandemonium, three plans are put forward: Moloch desires war, Belial hopes to stay where they are “in peaceful sloth,” and Mammon wants to build a rival kingdom, to

                                                                                                                                            rather seek
Our own good from ourselves, and from our own
Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp.

(II.252-57)

For Mammon heaven is only a place of golden pavements and handsome, jewel-encrusted buildings; his eyes sparkle as he contemplates building his rival kingdom to be even more magnificent: The fallen ones can work with earth's resources and “thrive under evil and work ease out of pain / Through labor and endurance.” “What can Heaven show more,” he asks, than such self-sufficiency? “This desert soil / Wants not her hidden luster, gems and gold; / Nor want we skill or art …” (II.273).

These references in Paradise Lost would be merely suggestive parallels to “To Build a Fire,” were it not that Paradise Lost was one of three books London carried with him into the Klondike, the others being a trail guide and a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species.³⁴ The references to Milton reinforce the role of the old timer who furnishes the thematic key to the story by warning against the entire enterprise of “traveling alone” in the White Silence—seeking Mammon. Is he one of the Fallen Ones who has made his peace, an Ancient Mariner who remains at home to counsel the unwary? His warning comes too late for the man, but not for us. With the dog by his side, the man dies, the occasion marked only by the dog's soft whines and throaty howls—recognition of the need it had of the man, if not true mourning. But the “stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky” (98) remind us that though Nature seems far away and uncaring, people “leap” and “dance,” not heavenly bodies, and not machines. Jack London's response to the White Silence of the Klondike was to abandon the search for Mammon there and to earn his gold by writing about it.

Notes

1. Jack London, “The White Silence,” in The Son of the Wolf (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900), pp. 6-7. Dates for all stories and novels cited in the text are first book publication, unless noted.

2. London, “The Water Baby,” in On the Makaloa Mat (New York: Macmillan, 1919), p. 151.

3. Charmian London noted in her diary that her husband found himself deeply affected by his reading of Psychology of the Unconscious by Carl Jung in the summer of 1916; one of the passages he marked in his copy of the book was Jung's citation of these verses. Charmian copied out Jung's citation, and she noted in her biography that London told of how this passage and others in Psychology of the Unconscious affected him: “I tell you I am standing on the edge of a world so new, so terrible, so wonderful, that I am almost afraid to look over into it” (Charmian London, The Book of Jack London [New York: Century, 1921], II, 322-23).

4. Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, revised ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984), p. 12. See also Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1956), esp. pp. vii-viii, 25-25, 29; Lilian Furst and Peter N. Skrine, Naturalism (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 22; and Sydney Krause, “Introduction,” Essays on Determinism in American Literature (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1964), p. 9.

5. June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 37.

6. Harold Bloom, ed., “Jack London,” The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism: Twentieth-Century American Literature (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 2, 280. This headnote rushes London into the grave a bit early; his death occurred on 22 November 1916.

7. Richard Gid Powers, “Introduction” The Science Fiction of Jack London (Boston: Gregg Press, 1975), pp. vii-xxiv: rpt. in The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism: Twentieth-Century American Literature, pp. 2,286-92.

8. Pizer, p. 12. We still lack a full-length critical biography of Jack London, but the most reliable source on his life is Russ Kingman's A Pictorial Life of Jack London (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979; rev. and rpt. as A Pictorial Biography of Jack London [Middletown, CA: David Rejl, n.d.]). For a recent study of his work that corrects major misconceptions, see Earle Labor and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Jack London: Revised Edition (New York: Twayne, 1994). See also Russ Kingman, Jack London: A Definitive Chronology (Middletown, CA: David Rejl, 1992).

9. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3-4.

10. Ibid., pp. 167-68.

11. Ibid., pp. 224-25n37.

12. Ibid., pp. 169-72.

13. Jack London to Cloudesley Johns, 1 March 1900, The Letters of Jack London, ed. Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz, III and I. Milo Shepard (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988), p. 164.

14. Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), pp. 20-21. From Herbert Spencer, London drew his sense of adaptation as the key to individual and society survival; for a useful discussion of his reading of Spencer, see Anthony J. Naso, “Jack London and Herbert Spencer,” Jack London Newsletter, 14 (January-April 1981), 13-14.

15. James I. McClintock, White Logic: Jack London's Short Stories (Cedar Springs, MI: Wolf House Books, 1976), pp. 44-45). London has his semi-autobiographical character Martin Eden muse: “He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred, in Martin's estimation, and erred through too great singleness of sight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod” (Martin Eden [New York: Macmillan, 1909], p. 212).

16. Dale H. Ross, “Jack London: An American Dilemma,” Journal of American Culture, 5 (Winter 1982), 57.

17. See Earle Labor, “Jack London,” in Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source-book, ed. Fred Erisman and Richard Etulain (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 268-79; Labor, “Jack London's Symbolic Wilderness: Four Versions,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (Sept. 1962), 149-61; Charles N. Watson, Jr., “Jack London: Up From Spiritualism,” in The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920, ed. Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles Crow (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1983), pp. 195-205; Watson, The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Jay Gurian, “The Romantic Necessity in Literary Naturalism: Jack London,” American Literature, 38 (March 1966), 112-30; and Terry Whalen, “Roberts and the Tradition of American Naturalism,” in The Sir Charles G. Roberts Symposium, ed. Glenn Clever (Ottawa: Univ. of Ottawa Press, 1984), pp. 127-42. Whalen emphasizes that London's capacity for “primordial wonder” allowed him to represent the ambiguity inherent in the act of apprehending the wilderness, and calls his style “an index of his religious dimension as a writer who seeks to unmask the face of the god behind the physical world he observes” with his “imaginative receptivity of mind” and sense of “agitated awe.” London insists that those who are not alert to “the mysterious presence of the physical worlds are … limited, narrow and morally dangerous” (pp. 133-35). For London, according to Watson, life was a “tragic paradox”; London's artistic “double vision” arose out of the clash of “high art and hack work, illusion and reality, spirit and flesh, life and death, being and nothingness” and energized his career. London scorned supernaturalism but agreed with Spencer that an “adamantine line” was drawn between the knowable and the unknowable: “Again and again he dramatized in his fiction those moments of mystical rapture that permit one to burst the fetters of materiality. …” (pp. 12, 14-15).

18. James G. Cooper, “The Summit and the Abyss: Jack London's Moral Philosophy,” Jack London Newsletter, 12 (January-April 1979), 24-27. One of London's favorite words was protean, writes another critic, in which is implied “variety, change, multiplicity” to invoke a universal response in the reader; such stories as “To Build a Fire” stress “basic elements and their ramifying complexities” (Edwin Erbentraut, “The Protean Imperative,” Jack London Newsletter, 2 [May-August 1972], 153-56).

19. Jack London, John Barleycorn (New York: Century, 1913). Further references cited in text.

20. Labor, Fifty Western Writers, pp. 272-73. One is reminded of B. F. Skinner's thesis that “Without the help of a verbal community all behavior would be unconscious. Consciousness is a social product. It is not only not the special field of autonomous man, it is not within the range of a solitary man” (Beyond Freedom and Dignity [New York, Knopf, 1971; rpt. New York: Bantam, Vintage, 1972], p. 183).

21. Scott L. Malcolmson, “The Inevitable White Man: Jack London's Endless Journey,” Voice Literary Supplement, 1 February 1994, pp. 10-12.

22. Jack London, “Jack London By Myself,” pamphlet quoted in Labor and Reesman, Jack London: Revised Edition, p. 16.

23. McClintock, p. 116; Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 52-53; and Charles E. May, “‘To Build a Fire’: Physical Fiction and Metaphysical Critics,” Studies in Short Fiction, 15 (1978), 22-23. May's comments represents a fallacy common among London's critics: he simply could not have meant to achieve the effects he in fact does. McClintock believes that the Alaskan landscape in general is “identified with a naturalist logic that denies human significance”; values or “spirit-groping” must then be shown in the stories set there to be “the product of man, himself, responding actively to the whisper calling to completion. … The external would be actual and the internal the ideal” (pp. 50-51). But by the time of “To Build a Fire” (written so much later than nearly all the other Klondike stories), the landscape “has become killer. What remains for London to do in this story … is to record the grotesque details which describe the nightmare of impaired physical activity that is the prelude to the modern man's death.” London's protagonist is “merely helpless victim of the killing landscape, [and] the mystical light goes out of the Alaskan sky.” The quest has been replaced by the “inexorable, external forces of natural and man's irrationality,” and London “retreat[s] from the ‘Unknown’” (pp. 118-190). McClintock thus allows for no affirmative dimension in the story.

24. London, Letters, p. 137.

25. Jack London, “To Build a Fire,” in Lost Face (New York: Macmillan, 1910), p. 63. Further references cited in text.

26. Arnold Chapman, “Between Fire and Ice: A Theme in Jack London and Horacio Quiroga,” Symposium, 24 (Spring 1970), 20-24.

27. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1993), p. xii.

28. Ibid., p. 5.

29. Ibid., pp. 33-37.

30. Ibid., pp. 58-59. Images of whiteness in London's work may also be seen as signifiers of sexual repression in a character—as in The Sea-Wolf, where Wolf Larsen's white skin, as observed by the protagonist Humphrey Van Weyden, represents both inarticulable desire and a negation of complexities of all kinds.

31. As noted, nearly all of London's Yukon stories feature Indian characters and describe the manifold problems arising from the white newcomers' racism and failure to adapt to the Northland. Notable examples include “An Odyssey of the North” (1900), as well as “Li Wan, the Fair” (1902), “The League of Old Men” (1902), and “The Wit of Porportuk” (1910). Race remained a fundamental concept in London's thinking throughout his career, surfacing most dramatically in his later Hawaiian and South Seas stories, where he examines racial and cultural collisions even more critically than in the Klondike fiction. Scott Malcolmson writes that early on London, looking for categorical certainty beyond class, thought he had “found one in an imaginary region at least as American as pitiless industrialism: race.” As Malcolmson further notes, London frequently makes “his heroes' whiteness, their understanding of it and its requirements, the animating fact of their destinies.” Whiteness is for his characters “an inexplicable tribal imperative and a historical force.” Race gave London “the possibility of a world view unlike that of socialism, one which accommodated both firm collective identities and human drama and tragedy on a global scale, without end. Life for London had to be a struggle; and racism, racial conflict, was full of promise.” Yet race ultimately did not quite “deliver the happy marriage of individual and collective destiny” (Malcolmson, pp. 11-12). Thus London's handling of race was always inconsistent; for example, his treatment of nonwhite characters in works such as A Daughter of the Snows (1902) and Adventure (1911) is little different from the stock racist attitudes of popular writers of his day. But on the other hand throughout his career he often makes nonwhite characters heroic in opposition to evil and grasping white men, and the oppositions are treated with irony, pathos, and sometimes horror: in “The Story of Jees Uck” (1904), “The Chinago” (1911), “Koolau the Leper” (1912), “The Red One” (1918), and many others. For more discussion of London's contradictory ideas on race, see Earle Labor, “Jack London's Pacific World,” in Critical Essays on Jack London, ed. Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1983), pp. 214ff.; Watson, The Novels of Jack London, pp. 200ff.; Susan Nuernberg, “The Call of Kind: Race in Jack London's Fiction” diss. Univ. of Massachusetts, 1990; and Andrew J. Furer, “‘The Strength of the Strong’: (Re)forming the self in Fin-de-siecle American Literature and Culture” diss. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1994), esp. chapter 5, “Man and Superman: The Construction of Contradiction in Jack London's Social Thought.”

32. Earle Labor and King Hendricks, “London's Twice-Told Tale,” Studies in Short Fiction, 4 (1967), 335.

33. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993). Line references cited in text.

34. Franklin Walker, Jack London and the Klondike: The Genesis of an American Writer (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1978), p. 135.