Call of the Fang

(musical suggestion: Timothy Vajda - As the Crow Flies)

 

White Fang and The Call of the Wild were once so thoroughly entrenched in the youth literature canon across two continents that as I grew up everyone I talked to simply assumed I had read them. Which of course I had. In that order. So the notion grew in my head that Buck must be White Fang's descendant, even if the details didn't quite dovetail. Only well into adulthood did I discover White Fang was written as a sequel and thus Buck, if anything, the progenitor. But of course the books' arrangement prompts that train of thought from either direction, both volumes' scenery cycling into each other, nature and civilization intersecting at savagery.

 

Jack London seems to be gradually dropping out of public consciousness over the past thirty years (along with... books, in general) and I don't think I'm over-attributing by blaming political polarization in this case. A socialist fascinated by the struggle for survival, his stories now scream "heathen" to the right wing and "trigger warning" to a left wing he would find clownishly unrecognizable. Sure, with the benefit of a hundred and twenty years' historiography and nature documentaries, anyone might toss the odd critique at London's presentation of "nature red in tooth and claw" or wolf pack dynamics. But I do believe quibbling over factual minutiae serves as smokescreen for more visceral aversion.

I've made the case before that we've misfiled environmentalism as flower power and pictures of baby pandas. Modern, trendy urbanites are raised into an allegorical image of nature as a baby-ish, cooing, cuddly, hapless ingenue, the better to enlist our instinctive altricial protectiveness in its defense. Jack London saw nature as brutish, merciless, chaotic with fits of tyranny... and loved it as such, gloried in the spectacle. So that I have to wonder how many of our modern snowflakes who see everything as a "with us or against us" dynamic with no room for nuance can even grasp that presenting nature's unpleasantness is not a condemnation, or that the man in the red shirt is still a villain regardless of "winning" his conflict and then exiting stage thataway.

 

Or, for that matter, that London's love of nature did not presume a hatred of civilization. It is not that he thought modern humans had no place out there, but that they should not blunder out gormlessly. Conversely nature's violence did not make it a threat to be eliminated but a system of grim necessities to be better understood. Pay attention to where the most disgusting conflicts occur in both novels: at the intersection of the two, a maladaptive and dysfunctional border. Dogs broken for export to the frontier, wolves enlisted to slash the throats of dogs in fighting rings, brash inexperience turning suicidal, alcohol employed in deliberate ruination of an otherwise (if not explicitly noble) contentedly functional savage.

 

Leave aside the books' main focus on nature itself for a moment and note their more interesting warning: society is perverse and nature is merciless, but truest cruelty comes at intersection where civilized mores are actively disrupted or wasteful viciousness is economically enabled.

 

 

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(mused the lycanthrope)