The Charm of Evil

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:

·      The Charm of the Devil - 1

·      The Charm of the Devil - 2