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Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography, by Jeanne Reesman
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Jack London (1876-1916), known for his naturalistic and mythic tales, remains among the most popular and influential American writers in the world. Jack London's Racial Lives offers the first full study of the enormously important issue of race in London's life and diverse works, whether set in the Klondike, Hawaii, or the South Seas or during the Russo-Japanese War, the Jack Johnson world heavyweight bouts, or the Mexican Revolution. Jeanne Campbell Reesman explores his choices of genre by analyzing racial content and purpose and judges his literary artistry against a standard of racial tolerance. Although he promoted white superiority in novels and nonfiction, London sharply satirized racism and meaningfully portrayed racial others―most often as protagonists―in his short fiction.
Why the disparity? For London, racial and class identity were intertwined: his formation as an artist began with the mixed "heritage" of his family. His mother taught him racism, but he learned something different from his African American foster mother, Virginia Prentiss. Childhood poverty, shifting racial allegiances, and a "psychology of want" helped construct the many "houses" of race and identity he imagined. Reesman also examines London's socialism, his study of Darwin and Jung, and the illnesses he suffered in the South Seas.
With new readings of The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden, and many other works, such as the explosive Pacific stories, Reesman reveals that London employed many of the same literary tropes of race used by African American writers of his period: the slave narrative, double-consciousness, the tragic mulatto, and ethnic diaspora. Hawaii seemed to inspire his most memorable visions of a common humanity.
- Sales Rank: #2602896 in Books
- Brand: Brand: University of Georgia Press
- Published on: 2009-02-15
- Released on: 2009-02-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.30" w x 6.12" l, 1.75 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 448 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
Jack London's attitudes toward and treatments of the race issue in his public statements and in his fiction constitute one of the most controversial and problematic aspects of his complex persona. Reesman's study is both exhaustive and definitive. She rightly argues that London's attitudes defy simplification, not only because he was divided on the issue in his own mind but also because his attitudes were dynamic, not static. She has deftly analyzed the causes of his ambivalence and accurately traced the course of his significant attitudinal changes through both his fiction and his nonfiction.
(Earle Labor editor of The Portable Jack London)
Almost certainly destined to be a 'lion in the path' to all future work on Jack London.
(Lawrence I. Berkove coeditor of The Short Fiction of Ambrose Bierce: A Comprehensive Edition, Volume I)
This is an important book, not only because Jack London is an important and often underappreciated writer but because the contradictions and ambiguities about race that marked London’s work continue, alas, to mark American society and politics to this very day. Reading London, as this book so vividly shows, is reading ourselves.
(Paul Lauter general editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature)
History seems to have dealt London a bad hand as he's now best remembered as an adventure story writer meant for Boy Scouts and teen naturalists. Reesman knows better. Her detailed explications of London's life and writings reveal the complicated and radical thought behind his fiction.
(Steve Horowitz Pop Matters)
Jack London's Racial Lives reveals the ambiguity of London's temperamental views of race while making a case that he was progressive and radical in his racial views in some of his work. Was Jack London a racist? Yes, the answer seems to be, but it's complicated.
(John Lennon American Studies )
About the Author
Jeanne Campbell Reesman is a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of American Designs: The Late Novels of James and Faulkner and Jack London: A Study in Short Fiction. She is coediting a major collection of London's photographs that will be published by the University of Georgia Press.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
the spectrum of the famous author's racial views
By Henry Berry
Jack London was a self-avowed proponent of the late Victorian/early 20th century "scientific racialism" supposedly derived from Darwin's theory of evolution. The "scientific racialism" held the superiority of the white race. Nonetheless, London's racial views as depicted and implied in his writings were much more complex; to the point of raising questions about whether London really did believe in "scientific racialism. The U. of Texas English professor Reesman sees this author's racial views conventional among whites of the era as associated with the rough conditions of his childhood, but as demonstrably being considerably modified or even abandoned as London moved to and wrote about far-flung parts of the world. It is in London's fiction, Reesman notes, with the characterizations, settings, interplay of characters, and resolutions of fiction, where his complex feelings and observations about race are most evident.
London was a pioneer in the realistic/naturalistic style of literature coming about in the early 1900s. He wrote journalism about the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the heavyweight championship boxing match pitting the African-American Jack Johnson against the white man Tommy Burns in 1908, and the Mexican Revolution in 1914. Reesman follows how in London's series of writings on the heavyweight fight, his regard of Johnson underwent a sea change. Settings of London's fiction were the wilderness of Alaska or the Klondike, the remote islands of the South Pacific, or some other unpopulated place where individuals had to use their wits and their strength to survive in direct contact with nature. London's stories drew the interest of movie studios for their adventure and drama of survival.
Reesman relates London's ambivalence and changing views toward race as a sequence of "homes" corresponding to the actual homes the writer lived in different parts of the world. The organization of her book is thus biographical, not thematic or theoretical reflecting some school of literary critique. This seems only natural considering London's rootedness in journalism and naturalism. The literary critique places London alongside Conrad and Kipling as a late Victorian/early 20th century white author whose works shed much light on the era's insubstantial, largely fanciful theories of white superiority and portray alternate views on other races inhabiting the settings of their books. This book also has the special treat of more than 40 photographs taken by Jack London. Reesman is at work coediting a major book of collected photographs of London to be published by the publisher of this work.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Readers of his major works examine method and compare his techniques and results
By Midwest Book Review
JACK LONDON'S RACIAL LIVES offers the first full study of race and appearance in London's life and works, exploring characters, settings, and choices in satirizing racism in his works of short fiction. Readers of his major works examine method and compare his techniques and results with that of his literary contemporaries in this fine survey, recommended for college-level literary collections already strong in Jack London studies.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A "Lion in the Path"
By Simple Jack
I tried to like this book; it's not as though I'm poorly educated and simply cannot understand the glut of apocryphal terms slung at the reader here; it's that this book is trying to do something that ought not be done to begin with. That is, Reesman is trying to have her cake and eat it too. It's very obvious that she loves Mr. London's work and is in awe of his literary power, and his persona. Good, so am I. But in "Racial Lives" she's writing for the same dry, dour academics London himself dismissed after his single semester at Berkeley. Well, of course she is, because you can't get a book into hardcover without having an approved academic thesis, and right now, the academic narrative is that Jack London is an incredibly good author, but some of his "racial views" are wrong-headed. So in order to get published under scholarly auspices, you must first implicitly agree that London is a racist.
Where she goes badly wrong here is in trying to laud Mr. London for his extraordinary work, all the while performing a painful dissection of his psyche, trying to explain in clinical terms why he's a racist, or at least a "racialist". This operation is done without anesthesia, and if I may say so, without any surgical training. Jack London himself performed far more skillful tooth extractions on headhunters and other impromptu dental patients during his cruise of the Solomon Islands (see "The Cruise of the Snark" for more on this). What results is a muddy, convoluted amalgam of excuses, conjecture, half-baked theories, and faint praise mingled with subtle slander.
Perhaps the most outrageous example of this is Reesman's treatment of "Adventure", one of Mr. London's later, and most seminal, works. The book is a rollicking good read, and became the template for dozens of other books and screenplays in succeeding generations. I have read "Adventure" twice, the second reading being a basis for critical analysis and producing several pages of detailed notes. Ms. Reesman and I are in complete disagreement about the nature of "Adventure." When Reesman commits the cardinal literary sin of assuming the words and actions of the character Sheldon are reflections of London's own, personal views, she loses focus and misses London's point entirely. Jack London, in "Adventure" is presenting the reader with an accurate depiction of the thoughts, actions, and attitudes of people he knew himself. Apparently it's not nice for Mr. London to create "heroes" that are anything less than pure as the wind-driven snow, "clean and noble" and eminently palatable to today's reading public. Thus, Reesman dismisses the book after spending several pages chiding London for being a racist and racialist. Supporting Reesman here are quotes from Clarice Stasz, another Professor and London critic who's known for harshly judging London with post-modern politically correct standards, all the while selling books based on his life and work. (Mr. Sheldon is not a hero, by the way, but merely a main character.)
Here is a news flash for Ms. Reesman and Ms. Stasz, who should know better: authors very often create characters whose views, beliefs, and actions are different from their own. Should we condemn Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, R. L. Stevenson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, or others for creating characters who are complex or even despicable? Unlikely. However, it is not unusual for critics to utterly miss Jack London's meaning; it's well-known now that when Martin Eden and The Sea-Wolf were published, most critics completely missed the point that both books were attacks on Nietzschean individualism. London commented at length about this oversight, and would be laughing today at the likes of Reesman and Stasz, among others, stumbling about trying to discern his deeper motives. What makes this wrong-headed assessment of "Adventure" all the more ironic is that in "`No Mentor but Myself': Jack London on Writing and Writers, Second Edition", a book edited by none other than Reesman herself, London explains this very technique:
"As regards the conscious aim of my writing -- as the public, as a general thing, and the reviewers as well, have quite ignored my motifs, I don't consider it as worth while to discuss my conscious aim. I am accredited generally with exploiting brutality for brutality's sake. This is the belief of the reviewers and the public, and it is hopeless to combat it. As for my really and truly conscious aim, it will be found woven into every bit of fiction I have written -- the motif under the motif." Mr. London goes on to say, in a later essay in the same book, "Let us bring fire in a humble way. Let us have an eye to the ills of the world and its needs; and if we find messages, let us deliver them." Speaking of another author, Maxim Gorky, but apropos of London's own work, Jack writes, "From that clenched fist of his, light and airy romances, pretty and sweet and beguiling, do not flow, but realities -- yes, big and brutal and repulsive, but real."
It is astounding that the first of these quotes appears in the introduction to the book, written by Reesman. One might forgive her for overlooking the latter quotations which appear in various essays later in the volume, also edited by Dale Walker. For an English professor and self-proclaimed Jack London scholar, this double-standard in evaluating Jack London's work -- attributing evil characteristics to Mr. London whenever his characters do evil -- is unpardonable when viewed in the light of necessary journalistic and academic integrity. In my analysis of "Adventure" I thought it was quite plain to see that Sheldon -- a British plantation owner -- is symbolic of not only the decaying British Empire but of the inevitable failure of any race or culture when it relies on the subjugation of another. Joan Lackland, his disputatious love interest, represents the New World; she's 22 years old, a mixed race Hawaiian, who can out-think, outshoot, and outmaneuver Sheldon at every turn. She literally swims with sharks, skippers sailboats, oversees and ultimately manages bloodthirsty cannibals, and preaches love and understanding over the Iron Heel. The two are set against each other so London can work out the dialectic of old versus new; he introduces very plainly the notions of women's suffrage, an end to exploitation of workers (something he's well-known for) and a host of other subtle social issues. For Reesman to have missed all this is puzzling, and perhaps something that will become clear later.
Reesman would have done well to have taken a bit of advice from her occasional literary colleague, Earle Labor; in praising Franklin Walker's Jack London and The Klondike: The Genesis of an American Writer (The Huntington Library Classics), Labor states, "Gracefully missing are the pretension and jargon which characterize so much of what has come to pass as academic criticism."
Even more telling is the cryptic and perhaps sardonic comment by Laurence I. Berkove, found on the back cover: "[This book is] almost certainly destined to be 'a lion in the path' to all future work on Jack London." Berkove's comment warrants just a bit more analysis; "a lion in the path" has generally come to mean a false doubt or baseless fear that can be overcome by determination and grit. I refer here to John Ruskin's analysis in "The Queen of the Air" of the helmet of lion's hide worn by Hercules, of Greek mythology. The lion in question (the one in the path) is a "Nemean cub, one of a bad litter, born of the whirlwind and the snake, Typhon and Echidan." According to Ruskin, this Nemean lion is "the first ugly and strong enemy that rises against us, all future victory depending on victory over that [enemy]." Something tells me that Berkove wore the smile of the Cheshire cat when he penned those words. For his unflattering "motif under the motif" to be unrecognized by the book's author is but further evidence of what I think will be the future of Reesman's book.
Perhaps Alex Kershaw expresses the irony of work such as "The Racial Lives of Jack London" in the closing paragraphs of his 1997 biography, Jack London: A Life where he specifically refers to The Jack London Society, a collection of academics and scholars, of which Reesman is the head. Kershaw states, "That [London] is so exalted by such academics is only one of the ironies of Jack London's life. While he was alive he took every opportunity to lambast academia. He detested what he saw as the snobbish and patronizing attitudes of East Coast literary critics, and had no time for the men in morning suits who sought to replicate the ancient privileges and civilization of Europe rather than embrace the unbounded possibilities that lay on the shores of the Pacific."
It would seem Reesman and the Jack London Society are merely a continuation of that same academic tradition, and that "The Racial Lives of Jack London" is nothing less than what we in the West call a "back-handed compliment".
As a final note, I recently finished reading Werner Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science", a discussion of quantum physics and their social and political ramifications. I had no trouble with it. Perhaps Heisenberg was less confused, or more intellectually honest, about his thesis.
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