Resentment and Revolution in Jack London's Sociofantasy

Abstract

"The greatest story Jack London ever wrote," Alfred Kazin once observed, "was the story he lived."1 London was one of those writers whose lives fascinate readers as much as, or perhaps more than, their art. Indeed, his career consists of the stuff of old Hollywood biodramas, a sort of Horatio Alger saga of the poor boy's rise to world fame and great fortune—but with the tragic twist that makes his life a cathartic lesson in the price exacted for pursuing the Bitch Goddess SUCCESS, as William James called our national obsession. London was the prototypic success-as-failure. Even more than with most writers, the now old New Criticism that eschews biography as a legitimate source of literary interpretation proves inadequate for evaluating London, whose life and work seem unusually inextricable. A psychological approach to his art thus appears unavoidable.

Resentment and Ressentiment

“…Further research might examine convergences between Nietzsche's ideas (as well as Scheler's) and Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis, both of which concern the reciprocal influences of ideas and emotions, on the one hand, and society and culture, on the other. ENDNOTES 1 Literary critics, too, have given attention to these emotions; illustrative of these are Jameson (1976) on the novels of George Gissing; Beauchamp (1982) on a Jack London work; Pinkerton (1970) on Katherine Ann Porter's portrayal of black ressentiment; Bertonneau (1998) Cooley's (1922, pp. 269-70) brief treatment of resentment as the product of injury to one's self-feeling omits the necessity of a sense of injustice or unfairness.…”