I was recently asked to read Jack London's, A Call of the Wild. The book was suggested to me because it had greatly influenced this acquaintance and they wanted me to read it as a way of understanding who they were and what had influenced their world outlook.
Word to the wise: Do not ask people to read books who have literary backgrounds.
I had never read this book, knew nothing about its plot nor much about the author. I downloaded the audio version as well as the kindle book, snuggled up in bed and began what I thought was going to be a story about hairy men wandering around in the woods: A Sasquatch hootenanny.
Great literature withstands time because it can be re-read through the ages and analyzed over time taking into account new information about the author, the time it was written, and what it posits when analyzed by different ethnic studies, gender studies, historical studies, etc.
Toni Morrison's, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, states that we all live in a racialized world. We writers and we readers. Her premise is that the construction of literature by the writer, often reveals, even when it is not written or said directly. White people can read Huckleberry Finn and claim it is a yarn about a kid named Huck, during slavery, and his adventures with his pal, Jim. People of African descent will wonder what edition they were reading because they will read something else. Neither reading is wrong but it is a wonderful indication of how great literature stands up over time, allowing for study from those not able to contribute, give voice to their insights, when the given literature was first written. New information comes forth about the writer as well as the history that unfolds with the passing of time.
Pan African studies popped up in academic institutions because beforehand great literature was deemed as inhabited and led by white male authors and no other voices or opinions were allowed at the academic table. If you weren't paying attention to American slavery followed by segregation and laws that forbid Black Americans from reading or writing you might actually get the impression that we had nothing to say.
The pathology of America is a complicated one. We have white men going on and on about freedom for all mankind and having lofty notions about all men being created equal, while a huge chunk of the population was enslaved, tortured and not seen as human. That is a dichotomy. That is a psychotic existence. But it is what we did, how we lived and we struggle with this psychosis up to this very moment. Like it or not.
Morrison examines a select few pieces of literature and notices for us, as a writer and reader familiar with the construction of literature, how white writers fetishize the subaltern, (Arab, African, Asian, etc), by giving them traits that suggest they are the embodiment of all things earthy, sexually dynamic, capable of endless giving or love, silent and absorbing unspeakable torture. She also delves into how white writers silence black fictional characters by having them an integral part of the storyline but failing to let them speak about their own predicament, situation or to have their own opinions while instead having the white character somehow knowing and being able to speak for everyone. As readers we may not notice this silencing but the impact is a profound one. You close the book and go back into the world. A great companion piece to Morrison's book is Richard Dyer's, White. Dyer is a Gay white professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick. In his book he explores whiteness and its construction and presentation as ordinary, not coloured, but just the human race. The rest of us are colored because white is the ordinary, the human race and therefore able to speak for everyone. He explores how this is done in conversation, film, advertisement, etc.
The other dynamic seen in literature is to render an animal with human characteristics. Dogs being mans best friend, (because he can anticipate our needs?), and obedient, birds being tricksters or wise, donkeys being clueless, cats being sneaky, devious, snakes as sociopaths, so on and so forth.
Jack London's Call of the wild is one such book that stands over time and begs for re-examination. I began reading the Call of the Wild, chapter one: Into the Primitive and I couldn't get past the first paragraph without saying to myself: What? When was this written? Buck? Can't read? Needs strong muscles and a certain coat to withstand some sort of punishment? I put the book down and looked up the publication date: 1903. Thirty eight years after the abolishment of slavery. Right smack in the centre of segregation and Jim Crow.
So Jack London was not writing without the influence of his time and place or without the privilege of his time and place.
Let's examine his choice of the name Buck. The OED attributes the use of this word chiefly to Americans in the 1800's to refer to any man who is Indian, Negro or Aboriginal. Americans used it in this sense. Within the context of American slavery, a Buck, was seen as a breeder, the male of several animals. Africans were seen as animals and used to breed with other African women to garner more enslaved people and therefore additional property. The characteristics of Buck, the dog, strong muscles and a good coat are likewise the same attributes which made for a slave worth his muster. Strong, able to withstand harsh climates, abuse, disease, etc. Can't read? Well, do I really need to flesh that one out? An obedient dog about to be kidnapped from his nice little life in West Africa, I mean, suburbia, and taken off in chains and cages far away from the life he knew. Call of the Wild is an analogy. A parable. A wise tale.
So I keep reading desperate to know where this nasty little book is headed. We soon learn that there is a gold-rush which has white men besides themselves trying to get their share. But rather than do the dirty work themselves they need dogs, slaves, to carry their supplies and vittles around. But nice sweet, cuddly dogs don't want to work too hard. They like life before the fireplace and handouts from the table. The only way to get people to do what you want when you have the upper hand, the power to do so, is through violence and torture. That and removing them from what they are familiar with. This is what happens to Buck the dog, and countless people from Africa who had the misfortune of winding up in America. Arriving on American shores, one would imagine that Africans had to trust that these new people, herding them here and there, if simply obeyed and followed, would result in some sort of survival, and so despite being in the hands of strangers, Buck the dog, allows himself to be put on a leash only to find it yanked so hard his tongue begins to bleed.
This story by London, is told and narrated by a dog that has been given human attributes. He thinks, he has opinions, he feels lost, he becomes ashamed; he's a regular intellectual who tells the story of human nature at its worst. Chapter one is Buck, still on the shores of Africa, (suburbia), being prepared for his Middle Passage journey to the New Land, (location). He sails on a boat that London has given the name The Narwhal, (which does not escape me as a possible reference to Melville's, Moby Dick and the internal struggle of white superiority that book grapples with). Chapter two finds Buck in a camp of sorts where he meets a mess of random dogs from all over the place. It is in this camp that he learns to steal, and obey new rules, the laws of Club and Fang. Buck wants to remain civilized but where he finds himself at present, he quickly realizes that in order to survive maintaining civility would mean the cessation of self.
In chapter three, The Dominant and Primordial Beast, I was immediately reminded of Ralph Ellison's chapter from Invisible Man (1952), Battle Royale. This chapter is often taught in high school, but without the context of the entire novel one can come away from that chapter rather perplexed. In a nutshell, Ellison, specifically in that chapter, is writing about the sport of white men enjoying the spectacle of black men beating each other up until one man remains standing. We see this in the spectacle of boxing, or other arena sports like roller derby. To place it in contrast we often find it amusing, the subject of comedy, to think of blacks as bobsledders, skiers, ice skaters, etc. They are suitable only for brutality and a brutality that supports an audience. In chapter three Buck is learning to survive but his survival is enmeshed with his loss of civility. He is morphing into an animal. We already know he's an animal, but now he is getting vicious and learning to kill or be killed. Another interesting point I would like to draw notice to is the dialogue speech pattern London gives the the French Canadian characters Perrault and Francois who London describes as 'half-breeds'. Their vernacular speech, with accent thrown in to let you know they are French also comes across as the speech of the ignorant. Colonizing French arriving in Canada often married members of the Algonquin. Canada's own history of slavery and subsequent categorization of the offspring of such unions holds its own historical mapping of racism, which unlike America's focus on African Americans centers around Métis French and First Nations. I suggest that London deliberately gave the jobs of over-seers to 'half breeds' in the same way black Americans, during American slavery, were given those same job, perceived as better, to those that had learned and internalized the concept that is is a better to be in charge of dismantling than to be dismantled.
The funny thing about research that is crucial to remember, is that if I like you, I will find flowery stories about you. If I detest you, I will find nothing but dirt. But there is something else crucial about research. Papers become available after one book is written, after someone dies, and gobs of new information is learned that was once unavailable. London lived during a time when Native Americans, African Americans were not in a position to call him out on his bullshit. That's just life and how things work. But good literature stays in favor if it can be analyzed over time by all peoples who have something to say about what they have read. Good literature stands up because it can speak to everyone on some level across time. If you Google Jack London you will get mere hints here and there that he was a racist. Most people are raving about his holistic, nature, adventure, Indiana Jones stories but Call of the Wild brings to mind something different from my readings.
In the opening pages of Richard Wright's heartbreaking novel, Native Son, Wright uses the word 'white' no less that thirty-three times to describe the environment Bigger walks through as he leaves his apartment one morning. His use of the word, and the significance it plays in the creation of Bigger, is to symbolize the overwhelming avalanche of white privilege that inundates, squashes out, and eventually demolishes Bigger in the end. In Call of the Wild, London uses the same word to describe the landscape. White snow, white frost, frozen, white dogs, ice, etc. to describe a harsh impenetrable landscape. Impenetrable to all except the fittest. A theme that runs through Canadian literature is that of survival. Surviving unforgiving landscapes, relentless harsh climates and foreboding mountainous barriers. While doing graduate work in The Canadian Maritimes and conducting interviews for my thesis I often encountered people who thought the absence of people of color in Canada, (thought there is no absence), was chalked up to simply: They can't withstand the cold climate. This notion falls back into the notion of people of color not participating in certain sports as mentioned above..
Richard Dyer writes, "The Aryan and the Caucasian model share a notion of origins in mountains…the romantics, by whom such notions were especially promulgated, for 'small, virtuous and "pure" communities in remote and cold places. Such places had a number of virtues: the clarity and cleanliness of the air, the vigor demanded by the cold, the enterprise required by the harshness of the terrain and climate, the sublime, soul-elevating beauty of mountain vistas, even the greater nearness to God above and the presence of the whitest thing on earth, snow. All these virtues could be seen to have formed the white character, its energy, enterprise, disciple and spiritual elevation, and even the white body, its hardness and tautness (born of the battle with the elements, and often unfavorably compared to the slack bodies of non-whites), its uprightness (aspiring to the heights, its affinity with (snowy) whiteness. Such notions did not apply only to forebears. They can still be found in, for instance, nineteenth - and early twentieth-century notions of Canadian identity, where the experience of the cold North is claimed to have moulded in the white settler people a distinct white national character… In the German Bergfilm of the 20's and 30's, in which white men and women pitted and found themselves exultantly against mountain heights and whiteness. Both cases are instructive: explicit racial reference was not always made and both were to do with progress and modernity not genealogy, not looking back to a mountain origin, yet both mobilized a similar rhetoric and imagery of the cold to suggest the distinctiveness of a white identity".
When I hear the term: The Last Frontier what I actually hear and envision is white flight, colonialism, and the pathology of whiteness (white privilege) to conquer, take over and eventually rule. I find nothing romantic in the Klondike Gold Rush, the sleepy southern days of the old south, or that Leni Riefenstahl figured out how to make Nazi's sexy and alluring. I fail to see its romanticism because while I may be distracted by the fever and glitz of the moment there is someone off-screen, whom we can't see, who is screaming. The cliche: history is written by the winners holds a truth. The losers are those deemed unfit, those that were not strong enough to survive. The ones that fall by the wayside and deemed, I guess, not a part of surviving with the fittest.
Buck eventually, having civility beaten out of him, having risen to the ranks of top dog spends the rest of his life with pack wolves. But before his final exit, he learns that a wolf he had been pals with was part of a pack that attacks him, (dog eat dog), and he successfully remains top dog as is the outcome of the fight. He is also shown to be revengeful towards the one person who had been kind to him who was killed by Indians. Buck lays waste to these Indians and once a year he comes out of the wild to mourn the death of his human friends.
We are left to wonder if Buck, like Bigger Thomas, has become ruthless because of his environment or is it inevitable, when given no choice(s) we join the pack and adopt the strategies, however cruel or misanthropic, of the culture which fails to mirror our innate love?
I posit that it is difficult to re-read what we once read taking into account new readings. New insights. It is difficult to hear that the book we loved and which moved us may have a darker side. That running off to Alaska with the Klondike Gold Rush, while romantic and adventurous, can no longer be seen without the subjugation of Native Alaskans, the robbing of precious minerals, the abuse of animals, and the permanent change of the Alaskan landscape now being thought of as the playground of He-Men, all surprisingly white.
Word to the wise: Do not ask people to read books who have literary backgrounds.
I had never read this book, knew nothing about its plot nor much about the author. I downloaded the audio version as well as the kindle book, snuggled up in bed and began what I thought was going to be a story about hairy men wandering around in the woods: A Sasquatch hootenanny.
Great literature withstands time because it can be re-read through the ages and analyzed over time taking into account new information about the author, the time it was written, and what it posits when analyzed by different ethnic studies, gender studies, historical studies, etc.
Toni Morrison's, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, states that we all live in a racialized world. We writers and we readers. Her premise is that the construction of literature by the writer, often reveals, even when it is not written or said directly. White people can read Huckleberry Finn and claim it is a yarn about a kid named Huck, during slavery, and his adventures with his pal, Jim. People of African descent will wonder what edition they were reading because they will read something else. Neither reading is wrong but it is a wonderful indication of how great literature stands up over time, allowing for study from those not able to contribute, give voice to their insights, when the given literature was first written. New information comes forth about the writer as well as the history that unfolds with the passing of time.
Pan African studies popped up in academic institutions because beforehand great literature was deemed as inhabited and led by white male authors and no other voices or opinions were allowed at the academic table. If you weren't paying attention to American slavery followed by segregation and laws that forbid Black Americans from reading or writing you might actually get the impression that we had nothing to say.
The pathology of America is a complicated one. We have white men going on and on about freedom for all mankind and having lofty notions about all men being created equal, while a huge chunk of the population was enslaved, tortured and not seen as human. That is a dichotomy. That is a psychotic existence. But it is what we did, how we lived and we struggle with this psychosis up to this very moment. Like it or not.
Morrison examines a select few pieces of literature and notices for us, as a writer and reader familiar with the construction of literature, how white writers fetishize the subaltern, (Arab, African, Asian, etc), by giving them traits that suggest they are the embodiment of all things earthy, sexually dynamic, capable of endless giving or love, silent and absorbing unspeakable torture. She also delves into how white writers silence black fictional characters by having them an integral part of the storyline but failing to let them speak about their own predicament, situation or to have their own opinions while instead having the white character somehow knowing and being able to speak for everyone. As readers we may not notice this silencing but the impact is a profound one. You close the book and go back into the world. A great companion piece to Morrison's book is Richard Dyer's, White. Dyer is a Gay white professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick. In his book he explores whiteness and its construction and presentation as ordinary, not coloured, but just the human race. The rest of us are colored because white is the ordinary, the human race and therefore able to speak for everyone. He explores how this is done in conversation, film, advertisement, etc.
The other dynamic seen in literature is to render an animal with human characteristics. Dogs being mans best friend, (because he can anticipate our needs?), and obedient, birds being tricksters or wise, donkeys being clueless, cats being sneaky, devious, snakes as sociopaths, so on and so forth.
Jack London's Call of the wild is one such book that stands over time and begs for re-examination. I began reading the Call of the Wild, chapter one: Into the Primitive and I couldn't get past the first paragraph without saying to myself: What? When was this written? Buck? Can't read? Needs strong muscles and a certain coat to withstand some sort of punishment? I put the book down and looked up the publication date: 1903. Thirty eight years after the abolishment of slavery. Right smack in the centre of segregation and Jim Crow.
So Jack London was not writing without the influence of his time and place or without the privilege of his time and place.
Let's examine his choice of the name Buck. The OED attributes the use of this word chiefly to Americans in the 1800's to refer to any man who is Indian, Negro or Aboriginal. Americans used it in this sense. Within the context of American slavery, a Buck, was seen as a breeder, the male of several animals. Africans were seen as animals and used to breed with other African women to garner more enslaved people and therefore additional property. The characteristics of Buck, the dog, strong muscles and a good coat are likewise the same attributes which made for a slave worth his muster. Strong, able to withstand harsh climates, abuse, disease, etc. Can't read? Well, do I really need to flesh that one out? An obedient dog about to be kidnapped from his nice little life in West Africa, I mean, suburbia, and taken off in chains and cages far away from the life he knew. Call of the Wild is an analogy. A parable. A wise tale.
So I keep reading desperate to know where this nasty little book is headed. We soon learn that there is a gold-rush which has white men besides themselves trying to get their share. But rather than do the dirty work themselves they need dogs, slaves, to carry their supplies and vittles around. But nice sweet, cuddly dogs don't want to work too hard. They like life before the fireplace and handouts from the table. The only way to get people to do what you want when you have the upper hand, the power to do so, is through violence and torture. That and removing them from what they are familiar with. This is what happens to Buck the dog, and countless people from Africa who had the misfortune of winding up in America. Arriving on American shores, one would imagine that Africans had to trust that these new people, herding them here and there, if simply obeyed and followed, would result in some sort of survival, and so despite being in the hands of strangers, Buck the dog, allows himself to be put on a leash only to find it yanked so hard his tongue begins to bleed.
This story by London, is told and narrated by a dog that has been given human attributes. He thinks, he has opinions, he feels lost, he becomes ashamed; he's a regular intellectual who tells the story of human nature at its worst. Chapter one is Buck, still on the shores of Africa, (suburbia), being prepared for his Middle Passage journey to the New Land, (location). He sails on a boat that London has given the name The Narwhal, (which does not escape me as a possible reference to Melville's, Moby Dick and the internal struggle of white superiority that book grapples with). Chapter two finds Buck in a camp of sorts where he meets a mess of random dogs from all over the place. It is in this camp that he learns to steal, and obey new rules, the laws of Club and Fang. Buck wants to remain civilized but where he finds himself at present, he quickly realizes that in order to survive maintaining civility would mean the cessation of self.
In chapter three, The Dominant and Primordial Beast, I was immediately reminded of Ralph Ellison's chapter from Invisible Man (1952), Battle Royale. This chapter is often taught in high school, but without the context of the entire novel one can come away from that chapter rather perplexed. In a nutshell, Ellison, specifically in that chapter, is writing about the sport of white men enjoying the spectacle of black men beating each other up until one man remains standing. We see this in the spectacle of boxing, or other arena sports like roller derby. To place it in contrast we often find it amusing, the subject of comedy, to think of blacks as bobsledders, skiers, ice skaters, etc. They are suitable only for brutality and a brutality that supports an audience. In chapter three Buck is learning to survive but his survival is enmeshed with his loss of civility. He is morphing into an animal. We already know he's an animal, but now he is getting vicious and learning to kill or be killed. Another interesting point I would like to draw notice to is the dialogue speech pattern London gives the the French Canadian characters Perrault and Francois who London describes as 'half-breeds'. Their vernacular speech, with accent thrown in to let you know they are French also comes across as the speech of the ignorant. Colonizing French arriving in Canada often married members of the Algonquin. Canada's own history of slavery and subsequent categorization of the offspring of such unions holds its own historical mapping of racism, which unlike America's focus on African Americans centers around Métis French and First Nations. I suggest that London deliberately gave the jobs of over-seers to 'half breeds' in the same way black Americans, during American slavery, were given those same job, perceived as better, to those that had learned and internalized the concept that is is a better to be in charge of dismantling than to be dismantled.
The funny thing about research that is crucial to remember, is that if I like you, I will find flowery stories about you. If I detest you, I will find nothing but dirt. But there is something else crucial about research. Papers become available after one book is written, after someone dies, and gobs of new information is learned that was once unavailable. London lived during a time when Native Americans, African Americans were not in a position to call him out on his bullshit. That's just life and how things work. But good literature stays in favor if it can be analyzed over time by all peoples who have something to say about what they have read. Good literature stands up because it can speak to everyone on some level across time. If you Google Jack London you will get mere hints here and there that he was a racist. Most people are raving about his holistic, nature, adventure, Indiana Jones stories but Call of the Wild brings to mind something different from my readings.
In the opening pages of Richard Wright's heartbreaking novel, Native Son, Wright uses the word 'white' no less that thirty-three times to describe the environment Bigger walks through as he leaves his apartment one morning. His use of the word, and the significance it plays in the creation of Bigger, is to symbolize the overwhelming avalanche of white privilege that inundates, squashes out, and eventually demolishes Bigger in the end. In Call of the Wild, London uses the same word to describe the landscape. White snow, white frost, frozen, white dogs, ice, etc. to describe a harsh impenetrable landscape. Impenetrable to all except the fittest. A theme that runs through Canadian literature is that of survival. Surviving unforgiving landscapes, relentless harsh climates and foreboding mountainous barriers. While doing graduate work in The Canadian Maritimes and conducting interviews for my thesis I often encountered people who thought the absence of people of color in Canada, (thought there is no absence), was chalked up to simply: They can't withstand the cold climate. This notion falls back into the notion of people of color not participating in certain sports as mentioned above..
Richard Dyer writes, "The Aryan and the Caucasian model share a notion of origins in mountains…the romantics, by whom such notions were especially promulgated, for 'small, virtuous and "pure" communities in remote and cold places. Such places had a number of virtues: the clarity and cleanliness of the air, the vigor demanded by the cold, the enterprise required by the harshness of the terrain and climate, the sublime, soul-elevating beauty of mountain vistas, even the greater nearness to God above and the presence of the whitest thing on earth, snow. All these virtues could be seen to have formed the white character, its energy, enterprise, disciple and spiritual elevation, and even the white body, its hardness and tautness (born of the battle with the elements, and often unfavorably compared to the slack bodies of non-whites), its uprightness (aspiring to the heights, its affinity with (snowy) whiteness. Such notions did not apply only to forebears. They can still be found in, for instance, nineteenth - and early twentieth-century notions of Canadian identity, where the experience of the cold North is claimed to have moulded in the white settler people a distinct white national character… In the German Bergfilm of the 20's and 30's, in which white men and women pitted and found themselves exultantly against mountain heights and whiteness. Both cases are instructive: explicit racial reference was not always made and both were to do with progress and modernity not genealogy, not looking back to a mountain origin, yet both mobilized a similar rhetoric and imagery of the cold to suggest the distinctiveness of a white identity".
When I hear the term: The Last Frontier what I actually hear and envision is white flight, colonialism, and the pathology of whiteness (white privilege) to conquer, take over and eventually rule. I find nothing romantic in the Klondike Gold Rush, the sleepy southern days of the old south, or that Leni Riefenstahl figured out how to make Nazi's sexy and alluring. I fail to see its romanticism because while I may be distracted by the fever and glitz of the moment there is someone off-screen, whom we can't see, who is screaming. The cliche: history is written by the winners holds a truth. The losers are those deemed unfit, those that were not strong enough to survive. The ones that fall by the wayside and deemed, I guess, not a part of surviving with the fittest.
Buck eventually, having civility beaten out of him, having risen to the ranks of top dog spends the rest of his life with pack wolves. But before his final exit, he learns that a wolf he had been pals with was part of a pack that attacks him, (dog eat dog), and he successfully remains top dog as is the outcome of the fight. He is also shown to be revengeful towards the one person who had been kind to him who was killed by Indians. Buck lays waste to these Indians and once a year he comes out of the wild to mourn the death of his human friends.
We are left to wonder if Buck, like Bigger Thomas, has become ruthless because of his environment or is it inevitable, when given no choice(s) we join the pack and adopt the strategies, however cruel or misanthropic, of the culture which fails to mirror our innate love?
I posit that it is difficult to re-read what we once read taking into account new readings. New insights. It is difficult to hear that the book we loved and which moved us may have a darker side. That running off to Alaska with the Klondike Gold Rush, while romantic and adventurous, can no longer be seen without the subjugation of Native Alaskans, the robbing of precious minerals, the abuse of animals, and the permanent change of the Alaskan landscape now being thought of as the playground of He-Men, all surprisingly white.
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