 |
| Wolf Larsen as imagined by Gemini AI |
Book Chat
“Good-bye, Lucifer, proud spirit.” Maud Brewster pays
her tribute to the dying Wolf Larsen, protagonist of Jack London’s novel The
Sea Wolf (1904). Wolf is not Larsen’s real name. He got that name
because of his inhuman personality traits. Maud Brewster calls him Lucifer and
he might as well be that proud but fallen angel.
Larsen lives totally outside normal
human conventions. He is the captain of a ship named Ghost. It is a
seal-hunting schooner. Larsen is an absolute dictator on the ship and the
entire novel takes place on that ship except a couple of chapters towards the
end. (And those few chapters are rather boring.)
Might is right for Larsen. He is a
staunch follower of the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest.
Fitness, for Larsen, is physical and it has nothing to do with the intellect
and least of all with morality. Morality is a mere human construct, he argues,
made for the safety of the weak.
“Might is right, and that is all
there is to it.” Larsen tells the narrator, Humphrey van Weyden. “Weakness is
wrong.” Larsen is an intelligent and well-read man. He has a good collection of
books with him, including Shakespeare, Milton, Nietzsche, and the Bible. He can
quote even the Bible to prove that human life is nothing but evil. The biblical
book of Ecclesiastes finds “life and the works of life all a vanity and
vexation, an evil thing.”
Once you convince yourself that might
is right and all the rest is either evil or meaningless, life becomes a brutish
affair, which is what it is on the Ghost. Not one of the crew on the
ship likes Larsen. The narrator, who is an eminent literary critic, lands on
that ship purely by chance: a shipwreck from which Larsen’s men pulled him up.
Humphrey van Weyden, the narrator
whom Larsen rechristens as Hump contemptuously, is the opposite pole of Wolf Larsen.
He has a highly sophisticated mind so much so he is utterly helpless in the
beginning, finding himself amid a bunch of brutes who have no sense of ordinary
morality, let alone literature. He has to unlearn many of his earlier lessons
in order to survive among them. He is fortunate to have Maud Brewster, writer,
joining them later because of another shipwreck.
Eventually, Larsen is abandoned by
everyone. Some mysterious illness renders him blind. His crew run away and save
themselves presumably. Humphrey and Maud are left alone with Larsen who
prevents them from using his ship for their further movement. Larsen wants to
die in the sea, where he is now, in a desolate region of the ocean, far away
from any human habitation, die all alone. He mocks Humphrey’s inability to
shoot him though the latter is utterly frustrated with Larsen’s wicked ways.
“Hump,” Larsen says as Humphrey
stands with a gun in his hand, “you can’t do it. You are not exactly afraid. You
are impotent. Your conventional morality is stronger than you. You are the
slave to the opinions which have credence among the people you have known and
have read about. Their code has been
drummed into your head from the time you lisped, and in spite of your
philosophy and of what I have taught you, it won’t let you kill an unarmed,
unresisting man.” [Emphasis added]
The
major conflict in the novel is precisely this: the power of physical might
versus the powerlessness of moral refinement. Larsen represents the former and
all his crew practise that style of life though they don’t intellectualise it
as Larsen does. Humphrey and Maud show us the possibility of being moral even
in an utterly immoral world. They have fictions, dreams, ideals, unlike Larsen
who has, or believes in, only physical might.
Larsen is a charming character. He
holds the reader in a spell right from the beginning of the novel to the last
page. There are a few pages where he doesn’t appear and those are the most
boring pages of the novel though what we get there is a budding romance between
Humphrey and Maud on their newfound little island where there is no other
creature.
Larsen is a charm. Evil is what makes
him charming. Like Milton’s Satan, William Golding’s Roger, and Shakespeare’s
Iago, Jack London’s Larsen will refuse to leave our consciousness long after we
put the novel aside.
I finished reading The Sea Wolf
yesterday. It was the second time I read the book. Larsen invited me to read
the book again after a gap of some 5 years. I woke up at about 3 this morning feeling
Larsen’s spirit haunting my memory, my consciousness. The charm of evil –
that’s what haunted me. What makes evil so much more enchanting than goodness?
[Look at history and much of contemporary politics and you’ll see how wicked
people have been admired by too many men and an increasing number of women
too.]
What makes evil so enchanting? My
morning contemplation began.
Goodness is often passive,
submissive, obedient. Evil, in contrast, rebels, takes action, challenges limits. As Larsen
says, Lucifer “led a lost cause, (but) he was not afraid of God’s thunderbolts.
Hurled into hell, he was unbeaten…. He straightaway incited man to rebel
against God and gained for himself and hell the major portion of all the generations
of man.”
Larsen goes on to argue that Lucifer
was beaten out of heaven not because he was less brave than God or less
aspiring. Lucifer was a free spirit, that’s why. “He preferred suffering in
freedom to all the happiness of a comfortable servility. He did not care to
serve God. He cared to serve nothing. He was no figurehead. He stood on his own
legs. He was an individual.” [Emphasis added]
Wolf Larsen is precisely that individual.
He defies both moral norms and nature. He forges his own code and asserts power
unapologetically.
Secondly, evil characters are more psychologically complex.
They struggle with inner contradictions, wrestle with morality or normal human
ideals. This makes them more ‘human’ and interesting. Larsen is a brute, yet he
is intelligent, philosophical, and introspective. He is a Nietzschean figure
caught between reason and instinct. And his self-knowledge is amazingly clear.
Like other powerful evil creations in
literature, Larsen possesses a unique charisma and eloquence. He has the best dialogues
in the novel. And they seduce not only the other characters, but the reader
too. His rhetoric is sharp, ironic, persuasive. Larsen is terrifyingly
admirable.
Fourthly, evil represents freedom unlike goodness
which is constrained – bound by duty, rules, morality. People like Larsen live
more fully, more dangerously – as Nietzsche counselled to. They are the typical
archetypal outlaws and outlaws possess a peculiar charm – the charm of what we
cannot be though we’d like to be, to some extent at least!
Finally, goodness is boring. Evil
creates all the drama.
You can’t have a compelling narrative with all saints around. Throw in a devil
amidst the saintly sadhus or monks and see what fun ensues.
That is why Maud Brewster pays a
tribute to Larsen in the end though she had found him utterly repulsive throughout
the novel. That is also why Larsen woke me up at three this morning and sent me
into contemplation.
My previous posts on this novel:
Hari OM
ReplyDeleteI only ever read Call Of The Wild, feeling no compulsion to read further of Jack London. May have to give it a go. As ever, your review draws one in! YAM xx
Not a review really. It's a classic published more than a century ago. I took a look at its major theme, that's all.
DeleteI've never been a fan of Jack London. I don't like wilderness stories. And in this case, ocean would be wilderness. I think the problem here is how you defined good and evil. Societal conventions don't make one good. The evil themselves don't believe in evil. They believe in power, and whatever it takes to gain power is necessary. This is shortsighted, but you'll never convince them of that.
ReplyDeleteYes, we won't ever succeed in showing the wicked where their error lies.
Delete