The Charm of the Devil

The Charm of the Devil – 2

Jack London - Image from here

For the 1^st part of this, click here.

Wolf Larsen, the protagonist of Jack London’s novel The Sea Wolf, is a devil for all practical purposes. He can be ruthlessly cruel if he wants. He can engage you in an intellectual conversation about morality or literature when he is in the mood for that. He can throw one of his crew into the ocean just because his shirt stinks. When that man loses a foot to a shark in the ocean before being pulled aboard, Larsen can shrug his shoulders saying that the shark was not in his control or plan.

What makes Wolf Larsen a charming devil is his brutal honesty. He knows that life has no purpose other than prolong itself as much as it can. “You have no fictions, no dreams, no ideals,” the narrator tells Wolf. It is fictions, dreams, and ideals that constitute nobility. We would all be subhuman brutes without our fictions, dreams, and ideals. Add Wolf’s brutal honesty to that and we would be heartless devils.

What keep human civilizations alive and kicking are their fiction, dreams, and ideals. Imagine life without our gods, religions, isms, arts, literature, and umpteen other fictions and dreams. We need these fictions and dreams to tame the devils within us.

But those tamed devils are not as charming as the untamed Wolf Larsen. Towards the end of the novel, Wolf is rendered totally helpless by some disease which is assumed to be brain tumour. He loses his eyesight and is racked by paroxysms of headache. One whole side of his body is becoming paralysed. He doesn’t want to live anymore because such helpless existence is not life. Life has to be pulsating with energy. Life is an intoxication.

Wolf wants to die because his life now is at the mercy of others which he can’t accept. He asks the narrator to kill him. The narrator has enough and more reasons for killing this monster in human shape. Even when Wolf wants to destroy the last chance of their escape from a remote part in the vast ocean, the narrator is incapable of killing him. He can’t kill a helpless man.

“And you know that I would kill an unarmed man as readily as I would smoke a cigar,” Wolf mocks him. “You know me for what I am – my worth in the world by your standard. You have called me snake, tiger, shark, monster, and Caliban. And yet, your little rag puppet, you little echoing mechanism, you are unable to kill me as you would a snake or a shark because I have hands, feet, and a body shaped somewhat like yours.”

Wolf is mocking the narrator’s sophistication, his “fictions, dreams, and ideals”.

The utter ruthlessness that Wolf possesses because he has no fictions, dreams, and ideals is part of what makes the devilish character charming. The other part is his brutal honesty. No ordinary human being is capable of such blunt honesty. Wolf will tell you exactly what he thinks or feels. He doesn’t need the sophistication of any fiction or dream or even simple figures of speech. Worse, he knows that our sophistication is mostly a sham. Scratch our sophistication, and devilishness bleeds out. In other words, Wolf Larsen is a mirror that his creator holds up before us. See how different you are really from him. And the difference is caused not by any heroism but by cowardice! We are plain hypocrites, in plain words. Wolf Larsen exposes our hypocrisy. That is what makes the devil fascinating.

It is quite obvious that Jack London had some admiration for this diabolic character. Just before his death, London gave his wife a ring and asked her to have it engraved. “With what?” she asked. “How about ‘Wolf to Mate’?” London had called himself Wolf for a long time. His dream house which he built in the Valley of the Moon in California was named Wolf House.

London’s description of Wolf Larsen commanding his ship in a gale is revelatory: “He was an earth god, dominating the storm…” An earth god! Yet wasn’t he the devil? Well, the distance between a god and a devil is not as big as you think.

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