Jack London: A Man In Search Of Meaning
A Jungian Perspective
by
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Preview—from: CALL OF THE WILD Review of biographical data at the time of the writing Call of the Wild (1903) was written over a few months from the end of 1902 to the beginning of 1903 (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Essays/comp_date.html.Accessed May 1,2005). London was beginning to achieve considerable recognition and to have much success as a writer at this time. He had married Bess Maddern impulsively in 1900. She seemed like a good match in terms of providing a stable family life, children and time to write. He recognized even before the marriage that he did not love her, however. Although he openly wished for a son, a daughter, Joan, was born in 1901, and a second daughter, Becky, was born in 1902. London’s external life around the time of writing Call of the Wild appeared fairly stable, but he was clearly unsettled in his marriage, and had been going out drinking, sometimes using drugs and seeking other women. In 1902, while his wife was pregnant with his second daughter, he had proposed marriage to Anna Strunsky. Brief Review of Narrative Call of the Wild is the story of Buck, a dog who has been raised in comfort and security on a ranch in California during gold rush days. Buck is suddenly and violently kidnapped one day in order to settle a gambling debt of one of the hired hands. He is beaten and brutalized and taken to the Yukon where he is made a dog in harness, pulling a sled through the cold North. He fights for survival and for dominance among the other dogs with whom he is placed. The laws of survival and of the fang are dominant. Over time, Buck comes to imagine his ancestral past, the life of the wolf he has had. He comes to forget the formerly soft and secure life he had in warmer California, and no longer seems to value it. After a number of masters, Buck is saved from death by John Thornton, a gruff, kindly prospector. He comes to loves Thornton as he has loved no other, and performs great feats for him, while still going off at times into the wilderness to seek out the wild, and the wolf that is beckoning to him from within. On returning from one such wilderness foray, Buck finds Thornton dead, killed by a group of Native Indians. His fury knows no bounds. He kills many of the Indians, and then goes off entirely into the wild. He finds a wolf pack, and becomes a member of the pack, and then its leader. At this point, he has returned to his primal roots, to his own instinctual being as a wolf. He becomes a mythic figure of the North, the leader of the pack, responding only to his instinctual desires. He remains a feared figure for the Indians of the region, seeking revenge always for the death of Thornton… Archetypal themes and symbolic expression. On one level, Call of the Wild is a story of the hero overcoming great losses, hardship, and brutality to emerge, through his own good fortune, cunning, strength and drive to mythic status as the leader of the pack. Buck, the hero, comes to find his primitive nature. He is the wolf, the animal that he has always been, covered before only by the veneer of civilization, by the dog who had been bred and evolved in the company of men and in their society…. Buck finds meaning by discovering his essential, instinctual being after the world of civilization and of humanity no longer is available to him. Through and because of his extreme pain and personal suffering, he regresses into the unconscious. He then becomes a wolf again and finds a degree of fulfillment among the pack of wolves. He now has a sense of belonging, mutuality and the strength of the pack. He becomes supreme and dominant. Out of this expression of his instinctual being comes what is for him a heightened experience of life. Buck’s path is not a completed journey of individuation, however. Individuation is the integration of contents of the unconscious into consciousness, not an identification or merger with them. The journey toward meaning that Buck travels also has a dark side. This dark side is expressed in the vengeance of the ghost figure that would forever exact retribution on those who had slain Buck’s great love, John Thornton. This dark side of the mythic figure that Buck becomes provides additional insights into the psychological life of the author, Jack London, as he, in 1902, at the age of 26 years, confronted the issue of meaning in his life…. Buck, on leaving the security and pleasure of his California home, can be considered symbolically to be the infant or child who is ripped from the protection of his mother and thrust into the cold, impersonal world. Buck, a beaten and abused dog of the northland, also can be considered the male child, hungering for the father and his protection, in this case John Thornton. For Thornton was a father for Buck, playfully rough, emphasizing strength, heroic exploits, and physical accomplishments. There was great love between the two, a love that provided at least temporary meaning for Buck. The description of Buck at the end of the story as a ghost dog taking vengeance forever on Thornton’s killers suggests a continuing sense of loss, grief and anger. Buck, the mythic hero, continues loyal to Thornton, and is forever intent on avenging his death. In psychological terms, London may be speaking of his ongoing grief and desire to avenge the great and unfair loss of his father, John, or perhaps the loss of his biological father who essentially abandoned him…. Individuation. The path forward. Call of the Wild is not simply the story of Jack London told in metaphoric terms. Call of the Wild also is a universal story of return to basic instinctual life. In this sense it is a mythic, archetypal story, a common story for all human kind. The story of Call of the Wild is the story of the emergence of a mythic figure, the “ghost dog”, the wolf like creature who leads the pack. Call of the Wild is a great American novel and a beautiful description of a mythic journey to the instinctual realm of the collective unconscious. The story, from Jungian perspectives, is a coming toward the self in the form of Buck’s mythic journey, but it is also a story in which the individual ego, Buck, the dog, is lost, and merges with Buck, the immortal leader of the pack…. For Jung, the path of individuation, the journey toward the self, is a path of relationship between the ego and the self, not the loss of the ego into the self or the ego becoming the self. The path of individuation involves repeated attempts to apprehend the experience of the self and then to integrate these experiences into consciousness. This experience is not likely to be sustained in a 26-27 year old person, Jack London’s age at the time he wrote perhaps his greatest work.
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About the Book
Jack London was the best known and probably the most widely read American author at the turn of the 20th century. London was interested in the issues of who humans are in relation to one another, to other species, and to life itself. Much of London’s life and writing can be viewed from psychological perspectives as an exploration of the issue of meaning in life generally and as a quest for meaning in his own life. C. G. Jung was an early psychoanalyst who broke from Freud and established his own school of analytical psychology. Jung was himself intensely concerned with the issue of meaning. For Jung, the “decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?” (page 325). Jack London certainly would have agreed with the crucial nature of this question. In Jack London: A Man in Search of Meaning. Jungian Perspectives, the author uses the prism of analytical psychology to examine London’s life and quest for meaning from deeply psychological and archetypal perspectives that are revealed in London’s writings, both fictional and nonfictional. The book begins with a brief biographical sketch and personality description of Jack London. This is followed by a focus on the question of meaning in his life. The next chapter addresses the issue of meaning from the perspective of analytical psychology (Jung). Selected fiction from three periods in London’s career is considered analytically in subsequent chapters. These periods are his early adult, middle and last years. The discussion of each work of fiction is preceded by a brief biographical statement of events in London’s life at the time of the writing and a brief review of the narrative. A concluding chapter summarizes London’s quest for meaning and where it might have led him from the perspectives of analytical psychology if he had lived beyond his untimely death at 40 years of age. There are two appendices. One contains a longer biographical statement (Appendix A). The second (Appendix B) provides longer, more detailed summaries of the works that are discussed. These longer descriptions include quotes from the texts, themselves, that reveal the immediacy, passion and soulful flavor of so much of London’s writings.
About the Author
I am a physician who was graduated from medical school in 1968. I subsequently worked in a number of medical fields, and then completed training in general (adult) and child and adolescent psychiatry in the mid 1980’s. From 1992-2002, I was chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Children’s Hospital, Denver, and Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Colorado Medical School. I have authored, co-authored or edited several books and approximately 75 articles in the fields of health, mental health and organizational change. I read Call of the Wild when I was about 11 years old and was deeply moved by this work. About 10 years ago, I entered a training program in analytical psychology to become a Jungian analyst. I decided to look more deeply into the life and work of Jack London at that time. I had not realized that London, himself, seems to have been strongly affected by Jung’s early work. It soon became clear to me that the two men, working in different fields, both had an intense interest in the issue of personal meaning and the individual’s relationship to a larger presence that might be termed God, the self or the eternal. Sadly, London’s early death precluded what might have turned into fruitful exchanges between the two. This book is based on the thesis that resulted from my studies of both Jung and London.