The Call of the Wild and White Fang - Jack London [5]
It is not the way of the Wild to like movement... and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man (p. 92).
The animals (human and dog alike) in London’s fiction are propelled through the landscape by “the law of club and fang,” by the constant war against predators, famine, and cold, against stupidity, brutality, and viciousness. Buck and Spitz fight to the death for command of the team and hence for supremacy in the pack; a baby White Fang eats ptarmigan chicks, narrowly escapes being killed by their mother, then watches in fear as the ptarmigan hen is snatched up by a raptor.
In The Call of the Wild, Buck’s new life as an Arctic sled dog initiates him into this struggle. Before his abduction, Buck was used to a life of comfort and security, a “lazy, sun-kissed life ... with nothing to do but loaf and be bored.” Upon his arrival in the North, Buck senses that he “had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial” (p. 15). Buck finds himself unprepared to deal with this foreign environment; significantly, he must learn about the world around him before he can begin to use it to his advantage. Indeed, both The Call of the Wild and White Fang can be read as accounts of the education of a being thrown into a testing environment. Just as White Fang must first learn to become domesticated before he can become a dog, Buck must first “learn to be wild” before he can become a wolf. Weakness, Buck quickly learns, equals death in this land of the “law of club and fang,” a lesson he learns as he witnesses Curly, the good-natured Newfoundland, torn to pieces by the pack. “So that was the way,” Buck concludes. “No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you” (p. 16).
The “fittest” species—those that are most successful in the struggle for existence—survive and reproduce. For Buck, this law translates to “Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten” (p. 60). In an interesting move, London translates these evolutionary principles into a brief Socialist tract he wrote in 1899, entitled “What Communities Lose by the Competitive System.” Darwin, along with Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx, not only confirmed London’s belief in Socialism, but also gave him a way to comprehend the communities of humans and dogs he encountered in the Klondike. In his essay, London declares, “[H]is strength lay in numbers, in unity of interests, in solidarity of effort—in short, in combination against the hostile elements of the environment” (Foner, p. 419). Labor equals survival, and labor is a collective effort. It does not matter if the laborer is human or animal, if he toils in a factory in California, delivers mail in the frozen Arctic, or stalks food on the “trail of meat.”
The “struggle for existence” that characterizes these efforts to survive and reproduce takes many forms—animal (human and nonhuman alike) versus animal, plant versus plant, and all against the forces in the environment that seek their destruction. London agrees with Darwin, who argues that the long-term survival of the species, not the survival of an individual, is the focus of this struggle. Darwin cautions his readers “to constantly bear in mind” that “heavy destruction inevitably falls” on every single organic being “at some period in life” and consequently