SOURCE: Tietze, Thomas R., and Gary Riedl. “‘Saints in Slime’: The Ironic Use of Racism in Jack London's South Sea Tales.” Thalia 12, nos. 1-2 (1992): 59-66.

[In the following essay, Tietze and Riedl discuss London's treatment of racism in his stories about South Sea islanders, concluding that his ironic style indicts the brutality and ignorance exhibited by white people toward the natives.]

In Jack London's many stories of the South Seas, the white man has brought racism, cruelty, powerful weapons, and disease to a remote and beautiful wilderness in his quest—his calling—“to farm the world.” Ironically, the foreigners also have come to bring the word of God to the benighted heathen. Almost all of the stories hinge upon the issue of race, and some of London's characters display a white racism that makes reading many of his stories uncomfortable for today's readers, steeped in late 20th century sensibilities. That London himself, as well as some of the key intellectuals whose works he admired, was also convinced of the “inevitability” of the white man is evidenced in his own letters.¹ Though the knowledge can never make London's youthful racial beliefs appealing, it is only fair to remind ourselves that these ideas were common not only among leftist radicals—who must have seen the cheap labor that people of color offered as a threat to the already shaky economic situation of the lower classes—, but also among the upper-class Eastern intellectuals. Further, though London's contemporaries would have objected strenuously to the sort of language and graphic depiction of sexual activity that are in our day literally required by editors for inclusion in serious literature, they would not—and did not—object to racial ideas and language that seem to us obscene. Finally, we want to argue that London's self-described racism is actually not present in the voice of the author of the South Sea tales; instead, the stories consistently use irony to indict white ignorance, brutality, and ruthlessness as they celebrate the heroic islanders, who, as often as not, become what Martin Eden called “saints in slime.”

If London professed racist ideas—and it is true that his white characters often refer to black islanders as “niggers” and that the tales often deal routinely with the practice of supplying white farmers with indentured labor (“blackbirding”) nevertheless it is hard to reconcile these tales with any racist ideology on the part of the author. Perhaps most fundamental of all racist phobias is the fear of interbreeding between races—of preventing “the continued propagation of defective strains in the present population,” as Princeton psychologist Carl Campbell Brigham would write in his influential Study of American Intelligence (1923). Though Brigham was specifically concerned about ending the “infiltration of white blood into the negro,” such fears have historically been associated with any miscegenation. Yet, whenever Jack London raises this topic in this sequence of stories, the children produced from these interracial unions are filled with beauty, grace, and even preternatural insights. Avoiding condescension in his dramatizing of the islanders, London's non-white characters usually speak in clear sentences, not in some imagined savage patois. These characters are wise, loving, noble, sometimes mystical—but always human. Could a racist write of such people so sympathetically? In fact, it seems inconceivable that London wrote all these tales with a white racist set of assumptions or even with any corresponding subconscious intention—primarily because he seems to be at such pains to assault middle class complacency through the manipulation of reader viewpoint and sympathy, directed routinely towards people of color. That London's tales did succeed in shaking up some of his readers is indicated by the irate response of one white Hawaiian who wrote to the Honolulu newspapers to condemn London's depiction of this tainted Paradise. London, the writer complained, was “a dirty little sneak, a sneak of the first water, a thoroughly untrustworthy man, an ungrateful and untruthful bounder.”² More objectively we can see today that instead, over and over again, these works argue that London possessed a largeness of mind and heart incompatible with the crassness, narrowness, and ignorance of the white invaders he wrote about. London was writing piercingly ironic stories that forced white middle-class magazine readers to sympathize with, and vicariously share the experiences of, heroic non-white characters.

I. MANIPULATING READER SYMPATHY: CIVILIZED BRUTES, SAVAGE HEROES

In this light, a most appropriate tale to discuss is London's still-popular “The Heathen.”³ The narrator, Charly, clearly subscribes to the notion that “whiteness” is a short-hand term for fairness, loyalty, and trustworthiness. He likes Ah Choon, for instance, and so offers the encomium: he was “the whitest Chinese I have ever known.” Yet the tale itself deconstructs this stable understanding as it ironically offers example after example of white men's failings. In fact, Charly himself has turned his back on the chance to belong to the world of the white overlords. Instead, he is a drunken wanderer, taking odd jobs here and there, until he meets Otoo. After a shipwreck Charly saves Otoo's life when another white refuses to share a flotsam raft with a “heathen.” As a result, they become blood brothers, and Otoo subtly begins to reform Charly until he does find sobriety and prosperity. The story of their mutual love is touching without being sentimental and offers a case study of interracial friendship. In sacrificing his life to save Charly from a shark attack, Otoo displays a heroism that impresses Charly—and us—as the act of a loving friend, not as the toadying gesture of a racial inferior. Since London's racism is so often faulted by superficial readers, it is well to note how unpleasant the idea of interracial love or friendship remained for several decades afterward in American popular culture. Forty years after London's death, the film The Defiant Ones was daring, and still the theme was too controversial for television until the late '60s with the series I Spy. Far from neglecting him because of supposed racism, the more appropriate gesture would be to laud London for being ahead of his time in celebrating this friendship between a white man and a person of color.

“Koolau the Leper” also offers both an indictment of European procedures for dealing with lepers in Hawaii and a hero who must have shocked contemporary readers. (Indeed, the scrupulous detail London employs to describe the horrors of leprosy is powerful and shocking today.) But perhaps more shocking to London's contemporaries than disease is the tale's point-of-view, which almost forces readers to feel the injustice and heartlessness that seem inevitably associated with white rule. White readers are compelled to feel the emotions not of the white police who hunt Koolau, but of the diseased fugitive himself.

Similarly, “Yah! Yah! Yah!” is a frame story in which the white narrator elicits an explanation from Oti, an Oolong Atoll native, for the unquestioned authority exercised by the only white man on the island. Oti tells a tale explaining how earlier cannibal attacks on European ships were stopped by the ruthless retaliatory application of dynamite by the whites against the islanders. But more to the point, the story militates against racism as it forces us to see the situation through Oti's eyes. Though not explicitly stated by the narrator, the tone of the tale points the reader's sympathies towards the cannibal islanders. In the hands of another early 20th century writer, the acts of McAllister (habitual drunkenness, harshness, and scornful autocracy) might make him merely an interesting white macho “character,” another uncrowned island monarch—a type so admired in the popular literature of British imperialism—to be discussed during smoke-filled clubroom reminiscences. But London allows Oti's story to illustrate the shallowness of the concept of the “white man's burden.” In doing so, the author shifts admiration from the European and focuses it on the beleaguered natives.

Another story, “The Terrible Solomons,” takes up the white perspective, but in so doing it reveals the weird brutality that has everywhere accompanied European efforts to “civilize” the remote corners of the world. A black comedy, the story seems to be a kind of parody of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This is a narrative of initiation, as effete Englishman Bertie Arkwright is subjected to all the horrors that an imaginative man can undergo. (In London's Northland stories, imagination is a necessary survival trait, but several times in the South Sea stories, imagination weakens the resolve and threatens the safety of the white intruders.) Bertie's companions—on what he hopes will be a romantic little adventure—are rough-and-tough, hard-drinking sailors who think it good fun to shoot “niggers,” and pretend to blow them up with fake dynamite. Their running “joke” is that when the whites execute blacks, they then log the deaths as due to disease or accidental drowning. Since the government tends, in their opinion, to side with the “niggers,” the whites cheerfully stick together in a cover-up of the routine murders of black ship hands. A central idea here is expressed by one of the characters: the thinking of “the blacks, the yellows, and the browns” is somehow inscrutable and whites ought not to understand it too well. Motivating all this ignorance and viciousness is the urge of “the white race [to tramp] its royal road around the world”—an expression fraught with not very subtle irony.

In another experiment, London builds up a similarly horrific picture of white supremacy, only to turn the tables as he shifts to a tale of revenge. “Mauki” is a grimly inspirational tribute to indomitable independence, as islander-slave Mauki tries again and again to escape from white subordination—and finally succeeds. The tone and point-of-view cannot fail to direct reader sympathy toward the determinedly heroic fugitive and against the inflexible and sadistic authority of the white masters. In the climax, as Mauki swipes the ray-skin mitten on his brutal owner's face, it must be a rare reader who fails to feel a sense of triumph. The underdog goes on to win a free life and at the same time pays his debt to white justice. In the midst of horror, Mauki emerges as a hero.

II. BREAKING DOWN STABILITY: CONFLICTING PURPOSES, CULTURAL IMPASSES

Underlying the sense of poignance and loss that is the tale's dominant tone, “On the Makaloa Mat” uses irony to examine the contrasting values of the warm and loving Hawaiians and the cold and gray Yankee businessmen who try to derive “success” at the expense of happiness. The essential sterility and life-denying attitudes of the white entrepreneurs, their repression of what the native people know to be really natural emotions, their conviction that the only goals worth attaining must be deferred ones—all these “virtues” of civilization are bitterly satirical targets.

Further, should some other invader adopt these visions of success through financial development, only frustration and alienation eventually ensue. “Chun Ah Chun,” for example, tells the tale—apparently based on truth—of a Chinese man who builds a financial empire with his wits, only to find himself discontented with his life, his family, and his future prospects for happiness. This tale also assaults the comparative values that the socially and economically elevated whites confer on status and wealth. (Chun Ah Chun can socialize anywhere with white people in Honolulu but only because of his great wealth—and he knows it.) Further, when the old man's daughters come to be of marriageable age, the only economically suitable mates for them are white businessmen or ship's captains—but their racist social codes make such alliances impossible. Chun Ah Chun, however, knows with whom he is dealing, and so he simply offers a huge dowry to accompany his daughters, and the whites place their convictions about race to one side.

The irony in the story of Chun Ah Chun's life exists in the contrast of Ah Chun's estimable behavior and personable demeanor with how the world treats him. For no matter how pleasant, calm, or content Ah Chun is, the world cannot look past his Chinese surface—except where money is concerned. Ah Chun's vast wealth, achieved exclusively through his own acumen, is what impresses the white world.

Again, what ends up being ironically emphasized is Ah Chun's pure Chinese extraction since even his own mixed-blood children and wife end up turning against him and the Chinese culture Ah Chun continues to celebrate, albeit quietly. The white world Ah Chun lives in tends to extravagance and pretentiousness while Ah Chun's behavior is restrained and without show. In a white business world controlled by contracts, official papers, and bureaucracy, Ah Chun's word is his sacred bond, which makes him an aberration; but, could everyone who comes in contact with Ah Chun learn from this wizened little man, the world would be a better place. In the end Ah Chun leaves the white world to live out his life in peace and equanimity while his own extensive family remains in Hawaii making themselves poor through bad investments and intra-familial bickering.

In “The Inevitable White Man,” London again stigmatizes white intrusions into island cultures. Main character Roberts catalogues individual white men who to him exemplify “the stupidity of the whites.” He observes, “If the white man would lay himself out a bit to understand the workings of the black man's mind, most of the messes would be avoided.” But the bitter conclusion of the narrator of the internal story is: “Don't talk to me about understanding the nigger. The white man's mission is to farm the world, and it's a big enough job cut out for him. What time has he got to understand niggers anyway?” This narrow racial chauvinism is the frequent target of Roberts' derision, and the “stupidity of the whites” is a recurrent theme.

“The Chinago” and “The Whale Tooth” work well together as they further this theme of characters caught in cultural milieus they cannot hope to understand. “Ah Cho did not understand French” is the ironic opening line of “The Chinago,” as the point-of-view character undergoes the experience of white justice. Passively accepting his fate, he is mistaken for another man, tried, and convicted for a crime he did not commit. Though the white men come to realize their mistake, the abstract point of “justice” is too important for them to overturn the order of execution. Written at about the same time as Martin Eden, the tale echoes the novel's ending as the guillotine blade descends: “The knife did not tickle. That much he knew before he ceased to know.” The mirror-reverse of this is found in “The Whale Tooth,” in which a determined, God-trusting Pentecostal white missionary bursts through the jungles of Fiji in order to bring the Word to the poor heathens. Ironically, his faith in his calling blinds him to the knowledge, described for the reader in lighthearted detail, that island politics have worked ahead of him to assure the death towards which the ignorant missionary continues to rush. The stories complement each other. If “The Chinago” provides us with an opportunity to see how inscrutable the West must be from an Asian perspective, “The Whale Tooth” shows us how absurd—almost grimly comic—is the white effort to intrude into island cultures without ever attempting to understand them. Again, both stories must have disconcerted contemporary readers, since they stress the non-white point-of-view.

III. MELTING IN THE POT: LONDON'S ALTERNATIVES

But what happens when the vicious divisions among people based on race break down, and that worst fear of committed racists happens—interbreeding? In “The Seed of McCoy,” the hero is a wonderfully mythic character, largely native in his genealogy, but possessed of the blood of one of the original mutineers of the Bounty. Reflecting London's interest in C. G. Jung, the story tells of a Pitcairn Island dignitary who agrees to help a trading ship find a safe harbor even though it is gutted by a below-deck fire. McCoy is a remarkably self-possessed figure whose beachcomber appearance belies a truly magical power to control others. He is a benign Ancient Mariner who time and again calms the crew, using special knowledge of the islands, the currents, and the winds to bring the burning ship and its panicked crew to land. Of course, McCoy's British racial background provides a richly romantic association of history's most famous mutiny. However, more significantly, in the account he gives of the brutality and murder that followed that mutiny, the white men are exposed as the true savages on Pitcairn. Through intermarriage, the violent white blood has been subdued to McCoy's calm, saintly grandeur: he alone of the characters examined here has succeeded in becoming mystically one with the universe and has become embued with a sense of cosmic belonging. And he alone of these characters is a product of interbreeding of the races. (Although “The House of Pride” concerns an unhappy half-breed, it seems to us that one of the real points of the story is to expose the narrow-minded bigotry of the man's white fellows.)

In “The House of Pride,” Percival Ford, the priggish son of missionaries, has made himself a rich man in Hawaii by exploiting the native population, an exploitation begun by his father. Percival revels in his authority and influence and firmly believes they are a result of the purity of his breeding, a purity that must now be maintained by a celibate life. Women and men of the island, even other whites, possess what he sees as an “assertive crassness” in their sexuality; shameless flesh assails his effete sensibilities. He fervently believes in his own righteousness and ponders and agonizes over “right conduct.” The revelation that he has a half-breed half-brother turns Percival's prim, proper world upside down. Joe Garland, the brother, whose very name suggests the flowered symbol of Hawaii's warmth, friendliness, and naturalness, is the antithesis of Percival. Joe's mixed blood makes him “warm.” Joe dances, Percival sits (literally throughout the story); Joe sings, Percival pontificates. Joe is genial, unselfish, childlike—everything Percival is not. The text implies that Percival cannot survive if Joe remains, and the ending of the story leaves no doubt as to where true power lies, even though the narrator's sympathies are clearly on the side of fairness and morality.

“Aloha Oe” is another outright discussion of white narrowness and bigotry. The objective narration draws our sympathies to Stephen Knight as a fine, stalwart, and admirable young Hawaiian who has understandably attracted the attention of Dorothy Stambrooke, daughter of an American politician. Unfortunately, one “weakness” makes Steve an unsuitable mate—even an unsuitable visitor—once they return to the mainland: Steve is a “Hapa-haole”—a half-caste. The absurd lines drawn by racial purists makes Dorothy's smile ironic as she reflects on “the Honorable A. S. Cleghorn, who had married a dusky princess of the Kamehameha blood, yet men considered it an honor to know him, and the most exclusive women of the ultra-exclusive ‘Missionary Crowd’ were to be seen at his afternoon teas.” A sexual relationship in which the man is white and the woman is Hawaiian royalty is acceptable in the best American racist circles, but the only relationship that may exist between a hapa-haole and a white girl is that of companion: “He could have dinner with her and her father, dance with her, and be a member of the entertainment committee; but because there was tropic sunshine in his veins he could not marry her.” “Aloha Oe” ends with Dorothy's dockside departure and her symbolic effort to disentangle her lei from her string of pearls in order to toss the garland to her hopeless suitor; in the event, the gesture of love proves more potent than her more worldly-valuable necklace: “She deliberately snapped the string, and, amid a shower of pearls, the flowers fell to the waiting lover.”

“The Pearls of Parlay” is a complex tale of interbreeding, greed, madness, and revenge reflected against a riveting description of a hurricane which assumes symbolic proportions. Parlay, a French opportunist (a type almost ubiquitous in London's South Sea Tales), is admirable only in his total devotion to his half-caste daughter, offspring of his marriage to an island queen. Armande, the daughter, is sent to school in France for a “correct” education. Having thought of herself as white for all of her young life, she returns home as a young woman. While waiting for her father at Papeete, she calls upon white society only to be rebuffed because she is of mixed blood. Desperately, she accepts the friendship of a French Lieutenant who uses her and then discards her. In despair, she takes her life. Parlay's ensuing madness fixes itself on a hatred of all white men; “He never forgets they killed Armande.”

Parlay uses the promise of the auction of his prize pearls (one of which is symbolic of his daughter—it was to be a gift to her) to lure men to sail to his private atoll where he can destroy them. The islanders believe that Parlay is a “weather devil,” capable of summoning storms. Tai-Hotauri, a native helmsman working for a collection of profit-minded white men, warns, “No good luck, them pearl. He say he sell. Plenty schooner come. Then he make big hurricane, everybody finish, you see.” The storm is of heroic strength, destroying the island, razing Parlay's house, sinking every boat except for one, and killing nearly everybody, including Parlay. The ships (or men) are symbolized by a “litter of blind kittens” in a battered basket, “all dead save one that feebly mewed and staggered on awkward legs.” Strength remains possessed only by a half-caste named Narri Herring who ironically had plotted Parlay's death. The closing scene is of Narri casually strolling along the strand of the atoll. In narrative and image “The Pearls of Parlay” can be seen as a depiction of the blindness of racism that leads to madness and death, a blindness that even nature condemns.

In addition to its Jungian theme of the collective unconscious and a very Freudian view of psycho-sexual development, “The Water Baby” is a very important treatment of race relations. As in “The House of Pride” and others discussed here, the natives are depicted as vital, healthy, active, and wise individuals while the white narrator is relegated to a passive, physically weak role. Old Kohokumu, an ancient fisherman, retains a moral and physical strength his young, white friend Lakana (Jack London's own Hawaiian name) cannot match. Lakana is relegated to lounging in a canoe throughout the story, consumed with a headache and ennui, while Kohokumu makes a dangerous dive for squid and talks energetically of ancient Hawaiian legends of which he is the Jungian repository. Kohokumu can out-talk, out-drink, out-sing, out-fish, and do a few other things far better than the white man. (Witness the humorous Freudian image of Kohokumu's bamboo pole that suddenly stands upright and begins a devilish dance!) A detailed archetypal explication of Kohokumu's humorous tale of the god Maui and Water Baby is beyond the scope of this paper; however, on a simpler level it certainly functions as an illustration of native ingenuity in the face of real danger to contrast with the white man's inactivity and his role as a mere spectator in life.

London wrote many other stories set in the Pacific, but these exemplify the things London wanted to write about race, culture, justice, and heroism. Other popular white writers might deal with the “noble savage” whose excellences only further distanced magazine readers from the real people who lived on these remote islands. London's stories, however, accurately and consistently showed the islanders as individuals who had to deal, in one way or another, with white intrusions: capitalist brutality, inhumane legal systems, foreign diseases, and racist social practices. Throughout, these tales stab, with an irony born of conviction, at the comfortable paternalism of whites over people of color. No wonder, then, that, like so many of London's social observations, these stories arrested the disturbed attention of the principal audience of his day—white, middle-class magazine readers.

Notes

1. Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard, eds. The Letters of Jack London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), Vol. 1.

2. Grove A. Day, Introduction to Stories of Hawaii by Jack London (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 1986), pp. 3-20.

3. The stories discussed here were first published as follows:

   Jack London, “Aloha Oe,” Lady's Realm, December 1908, 170-75.

   ———. “The Chinago,” Harper's Monthly Magazine, July 1909, 233-40.

   ———. “Chun Ah Chun,” Woman's Magazine, Spring 1910, 5-6, 38-40.

   ———. “The Terrible Solomons,” Hampton's Magazine, March 1910, 347-54.

   ———. “The Heathen,” London Magazine, September 1909, 33-42.

   ———. “The House of Pride,” The Pacific Monthly, December 1910, 598-607.

   ———. “The Inevitable White Man,” The Black Cat, November 1910, 1-10.

   ———. “Koolau the Leper,” The Pacific Monthly, December 1909, 569-78.

   ———. Martin Eden (New York: MacMillan), 1909.

   ———. “Mauki,” Hampton's Magazine, December 1909, 752-60.

   ———. “On the Makaloa Mat,” Cosmopolitan, March 1919, 16-23, 133-35.

   ———. “The Pearls of Parlay,” The Saturday Evening Post, 14 October 1911, 9-11, 64-66.

   ———. “The Seed of McCoy,” The Century Magazine, April 1909, 898-914.

   ———. “The Terrible Solomons,” Hampton's Magazine, March 1910, 347-54.

   ———. “The Water Baby,” Cosmopolitan, September 1918, 80-85, 133.

   ———. “The Whale Tooth” (First printed as “The Mission of John Starhurst”), The Bournemouth Visitors' Directory, 29 December 1907, 10.

   ———. “Yah! Yah! Yah!” Columbian Magazine, December 1910, 439-47.