[literature -6]
"Of all that's left: el'aver known to have fought. This will be the gain of the game, even if it lost the gold of the post. " Jack London is one of my favorite writers. And 'perhaps the only writer that I consider almost like a "buddy" and a "friend", well as a master of life. Jack London is one of the biggest names in American literature, and one of the most widely read authors in the world. The academic criticism has not ever given a serious consideration. But you know, the official was critical, and sometimes still is, reluctant to accept the authors of the tumultuous life, the vicissitudes which have a direct impact on the pages of their books, innovative writers, and then (why not?), Even contradictory . Suffice it to say that Melville, one of the authors now considered one of the pillars of American fiction, with his masterpiece, Moby Dick, emerged as a major literary figure only very long after his death in the midst of poverty and utter incomprehension. The approach to Melville is not random, because if it displeasing or not the critics official, Jack London belongs to that genre of fiction that has made American literature. And 'that literature has its most important dimension in the "lived" nell'irrequietezza and drive to find themselves. It 's the life stories that provides the raw material upon which to derive the literary inspiration. The lives of these authors, however, is also a life a little 'detail. The literature of these writers that focuses on hard life experiences on street life, in contact with outcasts and adventurers on trips and adventures in wild places. Jack London belongs to the ranks of these authors and deserves an honored place in the Olympus of the great American writers. As he wrote Andrew Sinclair, Jack London's biographer:
"Those who followed his dramatic way of life and his writing style, nervous and unadorned, like Ernest Emingway, forgot to attribute the merit of having invented a style that had more contacts with the Alaska of London that the Paris of Gertrude Stein. Jack also received little thanks from John Dos Passos or Kerouac or Steinbeck to get ahead of the novel 'vagabond' with The Road. Norman Mailer has never praised the writer who, with great immediacy, he took boxing as a subject of some of his things as a journalist and writer. "
Jack London began as a boy to do street life. Age he embarks on a pirate boat making oyster. Participate in the hunting of seals in the Bering Sea. Immediately after you join an army of unemployed to Washington, making life as a tramp carriages between trains, country roads and a prison (these experiences will be published as "La Strada"). Start young to devour books of all kinds. Especially the essays will be read to influence not just his inspiration literary among his favorite authors will include Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Spencer, authors who will become the source of his literary inspirations. Experience Life decisive for his literary output will be that of the gold rush in Klondide, between 1897 and 1898. In one of his most famous short stories he wrote: "Of all that's left: el'aver known to have fought. This will be the gain of the game, even if it lost the gold in the mail. " must be said that this phrase sums up a wonderful little 'whole personality of our formidable author, who has well expressed in his work a love of life, the momentum of the individual that does not give up, who wants to know, to fight, he wants to face the reality, whether you are struggling with the icy wilderness of Klondide, with the stormy waves of the ocean and whether it be in the slums of a city like London in the early twentieth century. Klondide returned from London with a few grams of gold, but another was the treasure he brought with him: the enormous amount of personal experiences, lived on the "limits", in contact with the wilderness of the Far North and the baggage of history that circulated among the gold miners, stories violent, extreme and fascinating, in which the courage, the human virtues and defects were severely stressed. Perhaps it is tales of the Great North, Jack London gave the best account of itself, the periods of style: "Getting a Fire," first, and then
"Love for Life", "Batard" "lose face", "White Silence", "In a far country", "The Law of Life" and "The Unexpected" and many others, are his masterpieces. In all these stories that are read in one go, from the interweaving and fascinating and engaging pace, we see men and dogs wandering in the off-limits, dealing with hostile territories, with a nature that challenges the individual o gli individui, facendo cadere molte loro illusioni, consuetudini e valori che essi si portano con la civiltà. Siano essi uomini, cani o lupi, tutti sono decisi a lottare per quell’ “amore della vita” che alla fine forse risulta essere uno dei nodi, oltre che letterari, anche esistenziali nell’opera di Jack London (potremmo parlare quasi di vitalismo in proposito). Il confronto con la natura selvaggia, con il Wild, con i suoi pericoli e le sue avversità è sicuramente uno dei temi centrali in molti racconti e romanzi di Jack London. In pochi altri scrittori si ritrova una tale forza ed incisività narrativa nella rappresentazione del mondo selvaggio. Un fatto importante da notare è che Jack London non ha mai proposto But a romantic vision of nature. The temptation to fall in the romance has been and remains strong for writers who are confronted with the beauty of the great wilderness. The harmonious beauty of nature obviously apparent at times in his stories, but almost fleetingly, as in this description will present "The whole canyon of gold":
"Everything was moving floating in the heart of the canyon. The rays of the sun and the butterflies fluttered back and forth between the trees. The buzzing of bees and the murmur of the river were a wave of sound. And the wave of sounds and colors seemed to float weave together to create a plot that was not the intangible spirit of the luogo. Era lo spirito di una pace che non era quella della morte, ma di una vita dal pulsare lieve, di una calma che non era silenzio, di un movimento che era azione, di una serenità palpitante di energia, senza la violenza della lotta e della fatica. Lo spirito del luogo era lo spirito della pace dei vivi reso sonnolento dal placido benessere della prosperità, e non disturbato da voci di guerre lontane”.
Ma la natura è, nell’opera di London, estremamente conflittuale. Nella wilderness vale la lotta violenta per la sopravvivenza, una lotta feroce e senza remore nella quale l’uomo è lasciato in balia del caso e della completa indifferenza della natura. La visione conflittualista di Jack London non however, is confined only to nature but to society as a whole, determined mainly by the class struggle. With this, it should be stressed that, unlike some stereotypical opinions that you read his work (perhaps actually having made a little bed and surface of it), social Darwinism is not involved in London, for his fight for survival and the supremacy of the fittest does not move mechanically from nature to society. The struggle for survival in society as a corollary to the class struggle, the struggle of the marginalized to quit what he called "the social abyss", namely the exclusion and marginalization of classes subordinate, which belonged to Jack. In his novels and short stories, there are no ambiguities in this regard. Surely he could have, from time to time, articles in an essay on, make contradictory statements, but our Jack was a writer, not a philosopher or a theorist of socialism, and his literary work, which must be determined. Marx and Nietzsche were equally important in giving the creative verve, which then are incompatible in a coherent philosophical system, well, 'that's another story. The wilderness is also the protagonist of his two best known novels, "White Fang" and "The Call of the Wild." In these novels immedesimerà strongly with cani e lupi e ripercorrerà attraverso le vicende di Zanna Bianca e del cane Buck la tentazione dell’avvicinamento o (di contro) dell’uscita dalla civiltà dell’uomo. Il fatto che egli riesca addirittura a “sentire” ciò che può provare un lupo, la dice lunga sul suo talento di scrittore. Come afferma lo scrittore Lagioia:
“Altra caratteristica di Jack London che tutti gli scrittori venuti dopo di lui non possono fare a meno di invidiare, è la strabiliante capacità mimetica: la facoltà, vale a dire, di mettere credibilmente in scena qualunque tipo di personaggio. Probabilmente sarà stato aiutato dal suo ricchissimo bagaglio di esperienze e da una capacità uncommon observation. But experience and a good eye, not so good if they are not put at the service of a talent almost demonic. Jack London is able to dive with a disconcerting ease in the role of the proletariat, aristocrats, workers, the mentally ill, children, old people, mothers, murder, police, revolutionaries, butlers, without journalists ... among other things, to limit this power to one genre human when its pages at one point jumping out of a wolf, it seems strange to be in the wolf's head, to think along with him the same thing for bears, dogs, caribou until you cross a threshold rather disturbing - that between organic and inorganic - that London may well be able to convince us (and us, light and capable with him) to embody the spirit, the sense (thought?) of an expanse of snow, a stream, a rock, a corpse of a locomotive. It takes talent, almost demonic, I said, because the feeling is that London has, literally everything, whether living or not, that comes within range. "
The stories of these two novels back to dear Jack London classic themes also present in the stories of the Great Northern: The adaptation to the environment and the struggle for survival and supremacy, the confrontation with nature and the myth of the force. Outstanding is the first part of "White Fang." Chapters dedicati al lupetto che esce dalla tana trovandosi davanti ad un mondo del tutto nuovo e sconosciuto per lui, con le sue forze e i suoi elementi naturali, racchiudono a mio avviso alcune delle pagine più belle di London. Un motivo che sarà presente anche in altri libri si riferisce alla . . . ricerca dell’amore. Zanna Bianca e Buck, dopo aver vissuto sulla propria pelle le crudeltà di avventurieri senza scrupoli, che li utilizzano come cani da lavoro e da combattimento, scoprono, alla fine, il sentimento di solito umano, ma in questo caso anche animale, dell’amore, che essi ritrovano nell’incontro con un padrone buono (il “dio buono”). I due animali, a metà tra lupi e cani, dall’identità problematica (As was the rest, that of Jack London) will do the opposite. Buck, from civilization symbolized by a house in California comes at the end of the novel, to wander with the wolves: to find, following his instincts, the old wild, White Fang is rather tame as a dog, and finds himself himself in a villa in the California sun, but at the end of the book, at the end of his path toward the man. A burning passion to discover the feeling of love will be Martin Eden, the protagonist of the novel's autobiographical Jack. For the love of a girl of the upper class, Martin will work with all its forces out of exclusion and the social world of the street, finding books in the vocation of the writer and the greatest force for personal emancipation. The loss of love with the abandonment of the girl, who never fail to understand him as a boy of the proletariat (as it is riddled with prejudices of petty-bourgeois) and the identity crisis that sopravverrà with his success as a writer, now seconded both people from the middle class, marginalized by a society that now seems to be a stranger, take-Martin Eden Jack London suicide. According to Amoruso
. . . that of Martin Eden is a classic American story of success and failure on the naturalist novel, not unlike those he wrote as a novelist Frank Norris (McTeague, 1899). London emphasizes the deterministic case, and in particular the connections of a paradoxical tragic irony, through which the social ascent of the main character is told as a progressive self-destructive regression toward a state of desert solitude, an animal trapped in social relations hypocrites and liars who crush and incinerate any future possibile.Tutte different, accelerated stages of education are in fact a reality rewind his life back, a false move that, in fact, reveals step by step ruthless jungle, the arid, unchanged wasteland of his mind, because in it, no future, no liberation, and no utopia really possible. "
Martin Eden is also the story of a literary vocation. The story of a proletarian, a tough street kid who discovers the literature and the new horizons that books can make us open up. It 's also the story of an extremely sensitive man who tries to escape from the' social abyss ", with its own strength, both mental and physical, with the stubborn determination to overcome obstacles. It is also found here the momentum of the individual volunteer, love of life that leads to challenge themselves and insurmountable forces of social exclusion. Individualism, in this sense, is present in Jack London, but it does not follow that he was an individualist. The fact is that Jack, as we said, he was a boy of the working class and had counted on their own resources to avoid falling into the 'social abyss in which it was intended to precipitate. This explains in his essay "Why I became a socialist"
(met) sailors, soldiers, workers, all mangled and distorted, and casseroles from work, hardship and fate, and adrift by their owners as if they were horses aged. I dragged around with them, and beat together many doors; o tremai insieme a loro dentro vagoni abbandonati e nei parchi pubblici, ascoltando in continuazione storie personali che iniziavano con gli stessi auspici della mia vita, con uno stomaco e un corpo buoni quanto il mio o anche migliori, e finite lì, davanti ai miei occhi, nel mattatoio in fondo all'Abisso Sociale. E mentre ascoltavo il mio cervello cominciò a funzionare. La donna di strada, l'uomo dei bassifondi si fecero sempre più vicini a me. Vidi l'immagine dell'Abisso Sociale con la nitidezza di un oggetto concreto, e in fondo all'Abisso vedevo loro, e me appena sopra di loro, che mi aggrappavo alle pareti scivolose con l'unico aiuto dei muscoli e del sudore. [ ... ] Penso sia chiaro che il mio individualismo aggressivo mi fu tirato fuori a hammer, and something else I was nailed in with the same force. But, just as I had been an individualist without knowing it, I was now the Socialist without knowing it, and most importantly, a socialist, not scientific. I was reborn, but I had not had a new name, and I was wandering around frantically trying to find out what it was. "
only by his stubborn determination and inner strength, and after so many sacrifices, she was finally able to become a successful writer ( and one of the highest paid writers of America). The fame and success, however, will not make him a happy man, but instead brought him a lot of trouble stemming from bad investments of money (but not only), so that will also fall in excess alcohol: another big book "on the road," one of those most successful and completely autobiographical, "John Barleycorn," recounts his love-hate relationship with alcohol, until the age of adolescence adulthood. Jack London was far from being ideologically individualist but also a militant socialist, a writer who has struggled to transform society. Many Marxist critics extol his London for the works of a social nature, focusing on class struggle and the life of the proletariat of the metropolis. "The Iron Heel" is in first place in this part of London's fiction. Among the leftists had always very successful, was one of the favorite books of Lenin and had the honor of being published in an edition with the introduction of Leon Trotsky. The vision of Jack London on the future of human society, however, is not optimistic. He will say in his letter: "I see many years of wars and suffering for the working class. I see a middle class willing to fiercely to seize power. " In this novel of political fiction even be able to prophesy almost unconsciously, the rise of fascism and Nazism, when he will speak of the "Centuries Black", the mercenaries paid (in the novel) by big business to suppress organized labor movement. Another work of nature Social and complaint appears to be "The people of the abyss", a kind of sociological survey-based guide to a summer spent by Jack in the slums as poor and degraded of London. Immediately comes to mind with the approach of yet another one of the giants of contemporary thought: "The situation of the working class in England", produced by Engels to just twenty-five years one of the first sociological surveys based on the technique of 'observation participant. " Jack will say in his introduction to the book:
"I went down in the slums of London, as an explorer enters into unexplored regions. I was determined to believe only to what I saw, rather than to the teachings of those who wrote without seeing, or the words of those who had seen and gone before you realize. Also I took with me some simple criteria to judge the world sub-human. All that produces greater intensity of life, physical and moral health is good, however, all that life hurts, false el'avvilisce, is bad. "
Even this book, full of moral tension, it is not good to see so dissimilar from those dedicated to the Yukon and the gold rush. In the statement above he does, as noted, the comparison with the explorer of nature. Change the background action but the intent is always the same: do not be afraid to face the world with its miseries and hardships, do not be afraid to seek, to know and venture into many different environmental contexts. Jack denounce the terrible living conditions of millions of dispossessed, caused by an unjust economic system and how it was inhumane and it is still capitalism. At the end of the book, Jack will carry out a comparison with the lives of "primitive" peoples, whom he had known well in Alaska, and ask if our civilization, the industrial one, has really improved the lives of mankind:
"Then that other inevitable question arises: If the culture has really increased the productive power of the individual, because it has simultaneously improved the living conditions of all? To this question there is only one answer: bad management. Civilization has made possible much material wealth, many intellectual joys, to which the man of the people of England is not participating at all. And if, for ever, must be excluded, civilization has failed in its mission, and there is no reason why it remains an artificial organization that has demonstrated its failure so blatant. But it is impossible that men have built this tremendous artifice in vain. This is what the intelligence stubbornly refuses to admit. Accept such a defeat would give the final blow to the effort and to human progress. There is only one possible alternative: forcing civilization to improve the living conditions of the people. "
After nearly a century after the death of Jack, the advancement of human civilization continues to be marked by the shadows of destruction and death, war and famine. Your questions are present dear Jack, and sensitivity and passion that you put into your life and in those books that we still continue to read, your life force, remain for us an inexhaustible source of inspiration . . .
by Saverio De Marco
