The Call of the Wild and White Fang - Jack London [7]
London also sees the process of evolution as a “moral” one that relies on proper action across communities. London wants to display this process, the opposite of the one narrated in The Call of the Wild, in White Fang. Evolution, he writes in a letter to his publisher, George Brett, brings with it “faithfulness, love, morality, and all the amenities & virtues.” In this letter, London explains the genesis of White Fang’s story:
I’m dropping you a line hot with the idea. I have the idea for the next book I shall write.... Not a sequel to Call of the Wild.... I’m going to reverse the process. Instead of the devolution or decivilization of a dog, I’m going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog.... And it will be a proper companion-book—in the same style, grasp, concrete way. Have already mapped part of it out. A complete antithesis to the Call of the Wild. And with that book as a forerunner, it should make a hit. What d’ye think?” (Labor, pp. 454—455).
Although London’s Klondike days were well past him by 1906, he returns to this landscape precisely because, more than any other, the Klondike scene is “primordial.” It is an “earlier” setting, a place where the “social instincts” and the “moral sense” are not yet well developed. Simply put, the Klondike exhibits the “primordial” precisely because it offers a safe haven for an individual like Beauty Smith, White Fang’s vicious tormentor.
The letter quoted above, however, reveals a contradiction at the heart of London’s narratives, since it is clear in both texts that the “devolution” to wolf status does not necessarily mean that the now wolf-dog loses his or her social instincts or moral sense; it just changes the definitions of the terms a bit. In other words, the human community in the Arctic resembles an early stage of human civilization while the wolf pack represents the apex of wolf society. The one cannot yet survive successfully in its environment, while the other can.
Life in London’s North is openly marked by constant warfare, but Darwin stresses the fact that survival depends precisely upon this kind of interaction within and between communities. His descriptions of the interrelations of beings in nature must have resounded with London as he beheld his Klondike companions, the men and dogs with whom he shared his experiences. Darwin writes:
How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being been perfected? We see these beautiful coadaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world (Darwin, Origin, pp. 114-115).
Coadaptation is a key term in Darwin’s description of the natural world; beings in nature live in distinct yet essentially interacting communities. Every organism, from the tiniest to the grandest, is equal and equally necessary to the health of the whole. Humans are not greater than animals, they are simply different from them, and each is equally well-adapted to survive in his or her environment.
Darwin’s notion of the “beautiful adaptations” that occurs among organisms begins to explicate the centrality of the relationship between humans and dogs in London’s texts. Wolves have long held a special, if complex, place in the human imagination. Romulus and Remus, the mythical twin founders of ancient Rome, were said to be suckled by a wolf. The Brothers Grimm vilified wolves in their fairy tales, and the full moon brings the fear of the hybrid werewolf. Settlers hunted wolves to near extinction in the lower United States from the first moment of contact, and even recent wolf recovery programs are hampered by deep prejudice against the species. In myth and in reality,