Jack London: a Man in Search of Meaning: A Jungian Perspective

By Stewart Gabel

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 Londons 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 Londons life and quest for meaning from deeply psychological and archetypal perspectives that are revealed in Londons 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 Londons 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 Londons life at the time of the writing and a brief review of the narrative. A concluding chapter summarizes Londons 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 Londons writings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477283325

Stewart Gabel

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.

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© 2012 by Stewart Gabel. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 11/28/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-8333-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-8332-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012919881

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1   The Issue Of Meaning In Analytical Psychology

Chapter 2   Biographical Sketch Of Jack London

Chapter 3   Early Adulthood And Associated Writing

Chapter 4   Middle Years And Associated Writings

Chapter 5   Last Years And Associated Writings

Conclusion

Appendix A   Biographical Sketch And Life Span Chronology

Appendix B   Longer Narrative Reviews Of Fiction Discussed In The Book

References

INTRODUCTION

Jack London was the best known and probably most widely read American author at the turn of the 20th century. In his short life of 40 years, he wrote approximately 20 novels, 200 short stories, numerous essays and letters. His fiction often involved adventure and outdoors themes, but these areas were only a part of his vast personal and literary interests. London continues to be widely read and studied today, with numerous books and biographies written about him and his work. There is an international Jack London Society, a Jack London Journal, and a series of websites devoted to him and his work.

It now is acknowledged that London’s writings involve much more than adventure themes and heroic exploits in various locales. Much of his work deals with archetypal themes: loss, abandonment, brutality, aggression, loneliness, heroism, love and death. Throughout his writings, London seems also to have been interested in the issues of who humans are in relation to one another, to other species, and to life itself. In some sense, London’s life and much of his literary work can be viewed as an exploration of the issue of meaning in life. In Jungian terms, London always grappled with the relationship of the ego to the Self.

I first read London’s Call of the Wild (1903) when I was about eleven years old. The story on one level is about the adventures of a personified dog, Buck, who was kidnapped from civilized and pleasant surroundings in California and thrust brutally into the life of a dog in harness in the cold north of Alaska during gold rush days. Buck’s ultimate journey was to his ancestral wolf past, to an instinctual realm from what, in human terms, would have been considered a pleasant and secure personal and collective existence. This story has been considered a tale of mythic transcendence.

Call of the Wild was and continues to be a very popular book around the world. The reasons for its enduring popularity are manifold. Critics describe its greatness and the reasons for its importance from different perspectives. Call of the Wild depicts an adventurous and heroic time in American culture; it reflects the search for adventure in the new Alaskan wilderness; it is one of the best dog or animal stories ever written; it reflects innate human brutality and aggression; it speaks to the indomitable will to survive despite great adversity; it reflects the human yearning to return to a primeval past and the instinctual basis of the human species; it is a mythopoietic story of the hero’s journey beyond ego needs to oneness with nature. All of these are true, but for me, and indirectly I believe for Jack London also, it is a story that deals on intimate levels with the search for meaning. Jack London, and I, and everyone else, have the same quest, the quest for meaning on a personal basis. This book was an early expression of Jack London’s own journey.

The issues that Call of the Wild raised about meaning in life and about individual consciousness in the midst of what seemed to be a cold, bleak, neutral and uncaring world have been important ones for me throughout my life. They have contributed greatly to my interest in Jungian psychology because of Jung’s recognition of the importance of the development of meaning in an individual’s life.

This book will explore the issue of meaning in Jack London’s life and selected writings. I will trace the development of London’s relationship with the issue of meaning on conscious and unconscious levels over the course of his life. I will relate historical facts of his life, their possible psychological significance, and analytical interpretations of his life and selected writings to the issue of meaning, as understood within a Jungian framework.

The book will begin with a discussion of the issue of meaning from the perspective of analytical psychology. This will be followed by a brief biographical sketch and personality description of Jack London. Selected fiction from three periods in Jack London’s career will be considered analytically in subsequent chapters. These periods are his early adult, middle and last years.

In this work, I will attempt to show that the movement of London’s unconscious processes, as reflected in his fiction, reveals the unfolding of an individuation process described in Jungian psychology. This process may have been only partly conscious to the author. Had it not been interrupted by London’s untimely death at the age of 40 years, however, he may have been presented with the challenge of developing and integrating a perspective on the issue of meaning quite different from the one he had held previously.

The life and writings of Jack London are of interest because they reveal the conscious and unconscious struggles of a brilliant and creative man who wrestled mightily with the perplexities of the human condition. He, himself, was dedicated to the betterment of his fellow man, while always seeming to have been tormented by the question of the meaning of life. The unsatisfactory answers to this question that came to his consciousness were associated with alcoholism, depression, suicidal thoughts and great personal turmoil. From a Jungian perspective, this great author’s life and writings raise the question whether his own life (and by implication, those of others) might have been less tumultuous, more satisfying and more peaceful if he had been able to integrate the individuation process into his conscious life. Sadly, for Jack London himself, the full accomplishments of the individuation process were not possible. He would not live into the second half of life as it generally is understood to be, and he would not have the additional years available to him that might have allowed the individuation process to occur more fully.

CHAPTER 1

THE ISSUE OF MEANING IN ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

The word meaning derives from the word mean which, in the sense used here, is a verb that comes from the middle English menen and the Anglo-Saxon maenan, to intend, to express, signify or indicate. To mean is to have a purpose or intention in mind. The word meaning as a noun refers to that which is intended to be… conveyed, denoted, signified, or understood by acts or language… significance. (Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 1983).

In Jungian terms, meaning describes what is of hidden or special significance for an individual and what relates an individual’s experience to the broader world within which that person lives. Jung (1961) was intensely concerned with the issue of meaning. He felt that humans cannot tolerate meaninglessness in their lives. Jung stated that the meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me (page 318). He goes on to say, The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? (page 325). Another way of putting this question involves Edinger’s (1992) discussion of the ego-self axis. Meaning in this context involves the development of an appropriate relationship between the ego and the self along the ego-self axis.

Reflection, for Jung, is a specifically human instinct that is an essential character of the human psyche. Reflectivity or reflection, if genuine, involves a going inward, and often becomes manifest in people through their search for meaning and sometimes through their religious beliefs or practices. It has both cognitive and emotional components. Reflection is considered to be one of the five instincts in the human psyche. The others are: hunger, sex, activity, and creativity (Jung, 1960, pages 114-128).

For Jung, the search for meaning is a part of each person’s psychological path and ultimate goal in life. He states, As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. (Jung, 1961, page 326)

Jung said that it is the anima that leads the ego on the path to meaning. The anima, which is the soul or life breath, is that aspect of the psyche that presents us with the symbols of meaning and thereby facilitates the discovery of meaning in an individual. The experience of meaning is accompanied by a change in mood and sometimes a feeling of sudden apprehension or awareness.

Jung says, Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers even the slightest hope of security, does it become possible for us to experience an archetype that up till then had lain hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima. This is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype of life itself (Jung, 1959, page 32, italics in original). This archetype, the archetype of meaning, is commonly symbolized by the archetype of the wise old man (Jung, 1959, page 37).

In Eastern philosophy, meaning is sometimes considered equivalent to the Tao (Jung, 1960, page 486; Jung, 1967, page 20).

Jung cites Lao-Tzu’s description of the Tao in the Tao Teh Ching to illustrate the idea of meaning for him (Jung, 1960, page 486):

"There is something formless yet complete

That existed before heaven and earth.

How still! How empty!

Dependent on nothing, unchanging,

All pervading, unfailing.

One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven.

I do not know its name,

But I call it Meaning.

If I had to give it a name, I should call it The Great.

For Jung, the discovery of meaning and the constellation of the archetype of the self or the wise old man is the result of an imaginal process in which the image or symbol is integrated into consciousness to the degree possible. Jung (1966) considered the symbol to be the intimation of a meaning beyond the level of our present powers of comprehension (page 76). Integration of the symbol enhances the discovery of meaning and the possibility of wholeness. The more a person integrates the image, the more meaning that he or she will derive from the experience, be that through the images and symbols of a dream, a creative work such as a novel or a poem (Jung, 1966), or through an analytic encounter.

According to Jungian psychology, the integration of images and symbols from a person’s unconscious ultimately leads to meaning through the development of a relationship with broader, more universal, archetypal themes. These archetypal themes reflect common and universal patterns in us all. The path of individuation, the path toward wholeness and greater individual fulfillment, is the ongoing psychological and spiritual work that is aimed at the integration into consciousness of these broad archetypal patterns. This is a process that is never fully completed, but for Jung the process is the essential quest involved in being human. He describes a human being’s deepest meaning as being self-realization (Jung, 1967, page 53).

As I have indicated, the anima facilitates the discovery of meaning through the experience of the image. Reflection then provides a form or structure within which this felt experience can be described, further developed or maintained. Sometimes the further development of the felt experience is accomplished in the form of an organized religious belief or practice. In this context, the anima or feminine aspect of the psyche leads to the discovery of meaning, and the animus, or masculine aspect of the psyche, is responsible for reflection and enhancement of the felt experience.

The image is crucial in the process leading to the felt experience of meaning. An emotional response is produced in consciousness as a result of this experience of the image. Through its capacity for reason, consciousness then attempts to create paradigms within which it feels contained, and within which the experience initiated by the image is solidified, enhanced or further developed. The ultimate experience of containment is that of the self, which is the container holding us together and providing us with a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives.

Jack London’s writings, like those of many great writers who have access to the images and symbols of the unconscious, provide examples of this process. A particularly beautiful example is found in London’s short story, Night-Born, which I will discuss in more detail in a later section. In this story, the heroine, Lucy, is a young woman who has been wandering by herself in the great Northern mountains after having left her conventional husband and city life working in a restaurant. She has decided that she is night-born rather than day-born. As Lucy wanders in the wild, at a particular spot, she suddenly sees in front of her a single male caribou quietly standing in a field of purple irises. She realizes this image is in some way profoundly meaningful and special for her. She decides that she will make her home in this area, the place of her encounter with the caribou bull and the irises. Her wandering has ceased. After a period, she is recognized by the Native Americans in the area as their queen. She becomes known as She-Who-Must Be-Obeyed.

The image London created of the solitary caribou in the field of irises struck me as being especially beautiful, peaceful, still, and self contained. It seemed to unify animal and vegetative aspects of life, and to stand out in striking relief from the background of usual experience. For Lucy, the image created a mood of sudden recognition and awareness. She had found a special place—her place in the world. She seemed to be aware also that she must preserve the feeling she had had on seeing the caribou in the field of irises and the special feeling of that place for her. The process then became one that included further reflection, as she came to realize the importance of the image for her, and her own need to preserve that psychological place in her life. As I also reflected further on my own feelings brought forth by the image London had described, I thought that for me the image seemed to be one of conjunctio or joining between opposites, not only animal or instinctual and vegetative, but also between migrating caribou and stationary flower, and between masculine and feminine (bull caribou and Iris, the goddess of the rainbow and psychopomp between heaven, earth and the underworld). Each step of the reflective process seemed to deepen