Jack London's South Sea Narratives. David Allison Moreland Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1980 Jack London's South Sea Narratives. David Allison Moreland Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Moreland, David Allison, "Jack London's South Sea Narratives." (1980). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 3493. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/3493 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This was produced from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. 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ZEEB ROAD, ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW, LONDON WC1 R 4EJ, ENGLAND 8021755 MORELAND, DAVID ALLISON JACK LONDON'S SOUTH SEA NARRATIVES The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Col. PH.D. 1980 University Microfilms International300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 18 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4EJ, England PLEASE NOTE: In all cases this material has been filmed in the best possible way from the available copy. Problems encountered with this document have been identified here with a check mark . 1. Glossy photographs__________ 2. Colored illustrations__________ 3. Photographs with dark background__________ 4. Illustrations are poor copy ________ 5. °rint shows through as there is text on both sides of _page 6. Indistinct, broken or small print onseveral pages^ throughout 7. Tightly bound copy with print lost in _________spine S. Computer printout pages with indistinct print_________ 9. Page(s) ______ lacking when material received, and not available from school or author_________ 10. Page(s) _________seem to be missing in numbering only as text follows _________ 11. Poor carbon copy_________ 12. Not original copy, several pages with blurred ___________type 13. Appendix pages are poor _________copy 14. Original copy with light type_________ 15. Curling and wrinkled pages_________ 16. Other Jniversitv MjcrdTiims nternarional OC \ ZEE5= 0 ANN iRBO? VI! AS' 06 ■ 31 3! 761-4700 JACK LONDON'S SOUTH SEA NARRATIVES A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by David Allison Moreland B.S., Spring Hill College, 1961j. M.A., University of Notre Dame, 1966 May 1980 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my major professor, Dr. Darwin Shrell, and my committee members, Dr. John Wildman and Dr. Donald Stanford, for their direction and encouragement in the writing of this dissertation. I am grateful as well to the Bryce Morelands, the Robert Mays, the Thomas Days, and the Daniel Pourriers for helping keep this body and soul together during this extended pilgrimage. And, finally, I can only inadequately express my appreciation to my parents, Mr. and Mrs. L. A. Moreland, Jr., whose sacrifices on my behalf have made the completion of my doctoral studies a reality. ii CONTENTS CHAPTER I LONDON, THE CRITICS, AND THE SOUTH SEA NARRATIVES........................1 CHAPTER II THE AUTHOR AS HERO: JACK LONDON'S THE CRUISE OF THE SNARK...................... 19 CHAPTER III THE FUNCTION OF VIOLENCE IN THE SOUTH SEA NARRATIVES.................... 63 CHAPTER IV THE QUEST THAT FAILED: LONDON'S LAST TALES OF THE SOUTH SEAS................. 1i|5 EPILOGUE................................................. 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................ 208 VITA...................... .............................. 221 ill ABSTRACT Although Jack London is recognized as one of the most popular American fiction writers in the world, critics of American literary naturalism have tended to rank him considerably below the other well-known naturalists: Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser. The consensus has been that London wrote too much, too hastily, and weakened his art by imposing "ideas" (Darwinian, Spencerian, Nietzschean, Marxian) upon his narratives. However, in recent years a serious reevaluation of "the boy wonder of the naturalist carnival" has begun. As a master of the action narrative, Jack London, who both mirrored his age and anticipated later twentieth-century literary trends, is now receiving deserved attention. Nonetheless, most of this interest has centered upon London’s Northland classics, such as The Call of the Wild, and his apocalyptic visions of social revolution, such as The Iron Heel, while the most outlying and, in many ways, the most fascinating of the author’s fictive worlds, the South Pacific, has remained relatively uncharted. This is a serious omission, for in two novels, a travel book, and in four complete short story collections, as well as iv in miscellaneous short stories and articles. Jack London drew upon the personal experiences of his cruise through Polynesia and Melanesia (1907-1909) to extend his literary landscape. This study is intended to help fill this gap in London scholarship by focusing upon the themes and motifs of these South Sea narratives which distinguish these works from the rest of the authorfs canon. A work-by- work analysis in the reader’s guide tradition has not been attempted. Rather, sixteen narratives (The Cruise of the Snark, "The House of Mapuhi," "The Pearls of Parlay," "Mauki," "Yah! Yah! Yah!," "The Inevitable White Man," "The Seed of McCoy," "The House of Pride," "Koolau the Leper," "The Chinago," Adventure, "On the Makaloa Mat," "The Water Baby," "The Bones of Kahekili," "Shin Bones," and "The Red One") are utilized to illus trate these distinctive thematic elements. Most note worthy are London’s blending of romantic, realistic, and naturalistic elements in narratives of idealized heroes struggling for dominance in a deterministic universe; his explicit, often excessive, use of violence and death to demonstrate the naturalist’s law of life; his con flicting visions of "natural man"— Polynesian and Melane sian, god and devil, respectively; his use of irony to v undercut his own dogmatically espoused opinions regarding white racial superiority; and, finally, his use of Jungian theories in his last South Sea stories to explore the possibilities of escape from the spirit-destroying trap of determinism. vi CHAPTER I LONDON, THE CRITICS, AND THE SOUTH SEA NARRATIVES "An* the Golden Gate! There*s the Pacific Ocean beyond, and China, an’ Japan, an* India, an’ . an’ all the coral islands. You can go anywhere out through the Golden Gate. Why, all them places are just waitin’ for me to come an* see ’em. I'm not going to live in Oakland the rest of my life. I’m goin’ to get away . away. ..." — Jack London, The Valley of the Moon When Earle Labor addressed the Michigan College English Association in 1963, Sam S. Baskett introduced him as "the other Jack London scholar."^ While intended to draw a few chuckles, Baskett*s comment only slightly exag gerated the state of London scholarship roughly half a century after the author’s death. Although Jack London (1876-1916) was the most popular and most highly paid American fiction writer of the first decade and a half of this century, his critical reputation has never been of the first order. His strongly deterministic tales of vio lence played out against stark, elemental landscapes so alien to the "Genteel Tradition" of New England, the every day or "representative" realism of William Dean Howells, and the labyrinthine psychological realism of Henry James 1 were summarily dismissed by much of the literary community of his day. As Joan R. Sherman has noted, "with the ex- ception of his earliest Klondike tales and The Call of the Wild, London received negative or, at best, mixed reviews from the literary elite on both sides of the p Atlantic." Yet if the Establishment rejected this West Coast radical, the reading public read and welcomed him with open minds and wallets— his income from writing alone averaged seventy thousand dollars a year for the last thirteen years of his life, despite his avowed socialism and a private life which repudiated the standards of the American ideal.