Liting Weng
Liting Weng is an MA student in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. She also completed her undergraduate studies in Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Political Sciences at National Taiwan University. Liting is interested in the themes of social orders, means of control, extremist regimes, and traumas of political violence in political, utopian, and dystopian fiction.
Objections upon Objections: Synthesizing Jack London’s Utopia in The Iron Heel
The experimental form of Jack London’s The Iron Heel teases scholars with a future utopia that is never fully depicted. The novel consists of a manuscript set in the early twentieth century by Avis Everhard with a series of footnotes that Anthony Meredith adds seven centuries in the future. Avis writes about her husband Ernest Everhard and her life with him between 1912 and 1932 as revolutionaries under an oppressive capitalist regime, the Iron Heel, and its bureaucrats, the Oligarchy. The manuscript is incomplete because it is suggested that Avis is interrupted by a raid by the fighting men of the Oligarchy and is compelled to hide her unfinished manuscript in her bedframe. The Everhard manuscript remains undisturbed until it is discovered seven centuries later, when the Iron Heel’s reign has ended and the Brotherhood of Man has been established for over four centuries. Meredith takes it upon himself to annotate and publish the manuscript. The juxtaposition of the manuscript and footnotes makes the novel enigmatic. It is “surprisingly utopian in tone and structure” despite its undeniably dystopian theme.[1] It is a story of revolutionists, even if the revolutions and their outcomes remain unseen. It features a protagonist who “appears at the same time superior, equal, and inferior” to other characters.[2] It imagines a future where the origins of people no longer matter without acknowledging “the heterogeneity of the American wage-earning class.”[3] The novel is full of inconsistencies. However, rather than highlighting the inconsistencies as the flaws of the novel, reading them as part of London’s writing strategies might be more productive in comprehending his dissatisfaction about his contemporary world. The inconsistencies of novel embody London’s nuanced messages of objection against his contemporary world that do not fully align with the popular ideologies of his time.
Other scholars’ remarks on the inconsistency and lack of clarity in London’s writing highlight the duality in The Iron Heel. Gorman Beauchamp claims that The Iron Heel “presents a double vision of the future . . . [but both] are never entirely discrete.”[4] The novel strikes the readers as immediately dystopian because of the Everhard Manuscript’s emphasis on the oppression and conflicts under the Iron Heel, but “ultimately, it is a utopia” because of Meredith’s footnotes.[5] Nevertheless, this utopia is never explicitly described. The Brotherhood of Man appears utopian because it is “glorified at the expense of the present” rather than its merits. [6] The present under the Iron Heel, on the other hand, “is both the point in time at which oppression is imposed and the moment in which resistance to that oppression is acutely desirable.”[7] London does not elaborate on how the increasingly violent conflicts between the revolutionists and the Oligarchy led to the peace in the Brotherhood of Man. The transition between the two regimes is not depicted, leaving a void of information. Alessandro Portelli takes a harsher stance, concluding that the lack of description of revolutions, the working class, factories, and the Brotherhood of Man creates “‘black holes’ which form the structure of the novel.”[8] He further criticizes that “rather than imagining something which political theory cannot yet visualize, it divulgates a fully developed theory but cannot countenance its consequences.”[9] However, as the next section argues, London and The Iron Heel does not fully conform to the predominant ideologies of his time. He folds together arguments from different lines of political philosophies and weaves his warning against the pitfalls of them into the novel.
The experimental form of The Iron Heel creates a temporal gap between the coexisting dystopian and utopian vision and challenges the readers to interpret the future London envisions. While the scholars (including Horan, Portelli, and Beauchamp) have not yet agreed on what London’s utopia entails, they agree on one thing, that is by leaving the Brotherhood of Man undescribed, London fails to explicitly illustrate his utopia. Few interpret the lack of a clear vision for utopia as an authorial choice and fewer still question the premise that the Brotherhood of Man is London’s utopia. The overwhelming attention on London’s absent utopian mission begs the question whether the Brotherhood of Man is indeed the utopian vision London wishes to promote. This paper argues that the Brotherhood of Man is not a utopia but merely a world that is better than the Iron Heel. His pursuit of a utopia does not end in the Brotherhood of Man. Rather, the Brotherhood of Man is a phase in the process of London’s search for utopia. By contrasting the Iron Heel and the Brotherhood of Man, London imagines a future where the inevitable clashes between social classes end in a peaceful regime.
Objects of Objection: Reading the Unvoiced Words in The Iron Heel
Inspired by the exhibition curated by Ian Hislop “I Object: Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent” (2018), this paper proposes the concept of “object of objection” as an approach to understanding the veiled messages and objections in the text of Jack London’s The Iron Heel. In the exhibition, Hislop selected items from the British Museum that appeared, at first glance, as nothing out of the ordinary, but carried rebellious messages that resist the official version of history that is conventionally defined by the monarchs and victors of wars. As Hislop observed, dissidents “left their objects, their objections to the official view, you just need to know where to look.”[10] Objects of objection implicitly carry the dissents of their creators against a certain state of affairs and hence are “objects that everyone knows what [the dissidents are] up to but [. . .] can’t quite prove it.”[11] The concept is different from objections per se in the sense that the objects are both the messages and their carriers. These objects codify messages, hiding them in the plain sight of official narratives. To unveil the essence of the dissent, receivers of the objects of objections are tasked to interpret them and unpack the subtlety that gives voices to the sentiments that wouldn’t be accepted or couldn’t be expressed without fear of retaliation.
The novel, the manuscript, and the annotations exist as objects of objection because they embody the authors’ implicit criticism of the world. The novel can be republished in a different format and layout or in a different language, it would still be an object of objection, as long as the content remains the same. The dissent is embedded in the text itself as well as in the existence of the book. Therefore, rather than knowing where to look, understanding The Iron Heel requires readers to know how to read the layers of text; the novel, the manuscript, and the annotations, alongside and against each other to build up a fuller (but still incomplete) picture of dissent. By reading the texts as objects of objection, the inconsistencies throughout The Iron Heel are charged with meaning. They obscure the messages of dissent.
Reading The Iron Heel as an object of objection accentuates the nuances London embeds in the frames of narrative. Its connections to the social disputes in London’s time ought to be put in the context of London’s experience. It is written “in response to the major political crisis unleashed by the Russian Revolution of 1905” and a series of setbacks in his personal life and American politics.[12] The novel may also be London’s attempt to avoid retaliation for his support for socialism and resolve “the troubling contradiction between his literary and political vocations,” which he experienced personally.[13] Kenneth K. Brandt deems the novel London’s endeavors to “re-present his socialist ideas through the potentially more popular genre of the novel.”[14] By delivering his argument in the emotional tone of a loving wife and with the––albeit feigned––objectivity of a historian writing with the perspective of seven centuries ahead, London seeks to soften his political arguments and make them more palatable to the general public.
Given London’s reputation as a well-known socialist, the socialist theme of the novel is not unexpected. However, he does not adopt the predominant socialist ideology of his time unquestioningly. London’s decision to obscure the proletariats in The Iron Heel indicates that he “offers a reformist image of social relationships” instead of the revolutionary. And, his modification of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto––while the original text claims that the proletariat has “a world to gain,” London’s “people of the abyss” would gain “nothing, save one final, awful glut of vengeance” from revolutions––demonstrates that “extreme forms of struggle are not incompatible with a reformist analysis of society.”[15] London also strays away from Marx’s vision of an immediate revolution and instead suggests that “the prolonged form that struggle was likely to take” casts a more pessimistic light onto the socialist revolutions.[16] The challenges to socialism “places London, not in the Marxist tradition, but in that of the 19th-century popular novel, with its emphasis on the ‘excessive’ consequences of capitalistic social relationships rather than on the relationships per se.”[17] In other words, London simultaneously criticizes capitalism and socialism. Therefore, London had to encrypt his dissent into the form of a novel that provides cover for him to express his criticisms and resist two ideologies both of which were prominent in the 19th and 20th centuries. Adopting Everhard, Avis, and Meredith’s voices enables him to compartmentalize these objections to his contemporaries.
At first glance, the Everhard Manuscript is straightforwardly socialist and can hardly be interpreted as something that is not androcentric and anti-capitalist. The manuscript centers around Everhard’s discontent with the oppressive regime that only works in the favor of the capitalists. There is no shortage of portraits of capitalists’ selfishness and cruelty, nor that of the incompetence and inaction of the middle class. Throughout the manuscript, Everhard barely says anything that is not a criticism against the Oligarchy. Nevertheless, it is critical to read beyond Everhard’s speeches and scrutinize the hidden messages within Avis’s writing. In the spaces that have not been occupied by Everhard, Avis voices her opinions. The retrospective nature of the manuscript enables Avis to contemplate the legacies of the revolutionary activities in her time. Although Avis glamorizes Everhard’s contributions, her characterization of the revolutions is not as generous. She laments the repercussions for deflected revolutionists being so horrible “that it bec[o]me[s] a greater peril to betray [the revolutionists] than to remain loyal.”[18] Amidst an ocean of praises for Everhard, there lies Avis’s objection against the increasingly violent nature of revolutions and her anxiety over the escalating violence between the Iron Heel and the revolutionists. The manuscript that looks intuitively like a socialist document transforms into an object of objection where Avis reconsiders the potential flaws of socialist movements.
Such an interpretation reads the Everhard Manuscript against its grain, but it is not unsolicited. Meredith’s foreword directs readers’ attention to the negative emotions of the text. According to Meredith, the manuscript is not valuable for its historical accuracy, but its emotional sway. More specifically, it argues that the value of the manuscript lies in its ability to “[communicate] the feel of those terrible times.”[19] While it is conventionally believed that Meredith is commenting on an undesirable period from the past, his attention to the emotions in the manuscript urges readers to question why he does so. Emotions contradict the rationality, peace, and equality that his “enlightened age” champions.[20] Although he does not elaborate on his reason for re-introducing emotions to his readers and helping them empathize with these feelings, the fact that he feels the need to do so hints at a sense of lack in the Brotherhood of Man. Or, to put it another way, Meredith initiating a dialogue with the past indicates that his time is not a static utopia where everything has reached perfection.
Elements in the list of what Meredith terms the portrayal of the “psychology of the persons that lived in that turbulent period embraced between the year 1912 and 1932” are not always the flaws of capitalists.[21] While some of them are equally applicable to the revolutionists and the Oligarchy, other qualities––”misapprehensions,” “violent passions,” and “inconceivable sordidness”––are directed at revolutionists rather than capitalists.[22] At the expense of London himself, London dismisses the conventional understanding of socialist revolutions, because not only was he a supporter of socialist movements, Everhard’s arguments also echo London’s speeches and essays.[23] Connections between the novel and London’s time create reference points for criticism. The interrelations between the texts allows the reading of any one text to extend beyond the text itself and lend weight to the interpretation of others. Hence, the messages of objection that are hidden within each text can eventually be woven together to reveal London’s message in his object of objection. He imagines a future where the people enjoy an efficient and peaceful life.
Parallel Criticism: The Use of Narrative Frames
London utilizes the voices of Everhard, Avis, and Meredith to weave together three threads of objections, embedding an object of objection (i.e. the Everhard Manuscript) in another (i.e. Meredith’s commentary) and that in a third (i.e. London’s novel itself). The voices frame the ideological discussions London tries to capture and demonstrate how each point of view might respond to each other. As creators of objects of objection, these narrators cannot be taken at face value. Their efforts to embed objections in the manuscript and the footnotes make them less reliable narrators. The unreliability of the narrators guides the readers’ reading of it. Ansgar F. Nünning’s research on unreliable narrators provides a new perspective; Nünning argues that the “unreliability is not so much a character trait of a narrator as it is an interpretive strategy of the reader.”[24] Examinations of Avis and Meredith’s writing are valuable to the readers because they may develop strategies for understanding The Iron Heel based on the interpretations of their intention to write, rather than providing historically factual information. Meredith’s accusation of Avis writing to beatify her late husband after the success of the second revolution invites questions about his reasons for reintroducing emotions to his contemporaries in the Brotherhood of Man. To a certain degree, Meredith’s commentary on the Everhard Manuscript attempts to coach readers in how to interpret the text.
As I have suggested in the previous section, understanding The Iron Heel requires resisting the urge to take the text at face value and investigate the veiled messages of dissent. Harry E. Shaw’s research on the “implied author” provides some theoretical grounds for understanding the authors and their intentions. Shaw argues that narrowing the scope of the “implied readers” is “a way of specifying matters buried so deeply in culture that they precede and undergird the real of the conscious persuasion that characterizes the implied author.”[25] Deducing the target audience of each text is, hence, an integral step in making sense of the texts and their implied authors. Shaw’s argument creates links between the implied readers, the implied authors, and their surroundings. Identifying the addressees of the texts––American citizens during the second revolution for Avis and Brotherhood of Man citizens for Meredith––opens up the mindsets of the authors. To London, his novel is an attempt to approach the public that suffered under capitalism but were suspicious about socialism.
The emphasis on implied readers and authors helps with interpreting the Everhard Manuscript and Meredith’s annotations as objects of objection. Such an approach focuses on the fictionality of the novel and lacks a connection to the historical circumstance that London responds to. Shaw’s theory on the implied authors directs the attention to Avis’s concerns of the seemingly unresolvable violent confrontation of her time and Meredith’s discontent over the bland and emotionless life in the Brotherhood of Man, but it is unable to ground the messages of dissent in London’s context. Hence, to understand The Iron Heel as London’s object of objection, the fictionality of the novel needs to be contextualized. Richard Walsh’s pragmatic approach to fictional narrative suggests using fictionality as a tool to “identif[y] something [readers and critics] are not doing . . . . [a]nd challenges [them] to explain the force and effect of fictionality itself in [their] experience and understanding of fiction.”[26] That is to say, to read fictionality is a way of reflecting on the contemporary world of the author and the readers after the author’s time.
Across the two narrative frames and London’s contemporary moment, the criticisms that are presented in one particular context seem applicable to the others. Since the implied authors “[provide] a terminologically acceptable way of talking about the author and his or her intention . . . [and] serve both as a yardstick for an ethical kind of criticism and as a check on the potentially boundless relativism of interpretation,” the frames of the novel encourage readings that transcend the bounds of fictionality.[27] For example, Avis’s observation of the increasingly violent confrontations between the revolutionists and the Oligarchy alludes to the brutality between the capitalists and proletariat which London believes to be “a necessary evil.”[28] She criticizes the blind righteousness of both the revolutionists and the Oligarchy with examples of revolutionists accusing agents of the Oligarchy executing militia members with “no investigation, no trial” despite prosecuting General Lampton of the Iron Heel without a proper trial themselves.[29] “[T]he impromptu killing [of Lampton] . . . highlights the discrepancy between the idealistic rhetoric of the socialists and their actual behavior,” and hence creates parallelism of criticism between the fictional world and reality.[30]
In the tradition of utopian and dystopian literature, it is not rare to see “evident resemblances between dystopian and existing society [that would] encourage a parallel process, whereby readers are encouraged to judge their own society by the extent to which it embodies dystopian features.”[31] This process serves as an “effective rhetorical device [to] secur[e] the reader’s assent to the author’s point of view.”[32] Meredith’s efforts to “[undermine] the reliability of the manuscript is a long-term premise for the establishment of socialism [that] encourages the readers to speculate beyond [the novel].”[33] To put it differently, Meredith’s scrutiny of the Everhard Manuscript invites readers to dissect London’s The Iron Heel with similar attention. The multiple frames of The Iron Heel invite readers to compare and contrast each frame. Effectually, London’s words and experience lend meaning to each other. The connections between fictionality and reality assist in persuading the readers of London’s point of view or his objections.
Where Does the Argument Lead?: A Dialectical Approach
Despite the palpable violent theme towards the end of the Everhard Manuscript, there is a leap from conflicts to peace between Avis’s and Meredith’s time that is unaccounted for in the novel. While Meredith claims that violence is incomprehensible in his time, Avis’s contemporaries are caught in irresolvable conflicts. Violence and confrontations lurk in the background throughout the manuscript long before they take over the plot during the chapter on the Chicago Commune. Matthew A. Taylor criticizes London’s willingness to promote violent revolutions, his decision to write only a “short-lived” period of peace in the novel and being fundamentally incapable of imagining a peaceful resolution for class-struggles “because of [his] commitment to the notion that socialism could prevail only through a ‘survival of the fittest’ contest with the forces of capitalism.”[34] Similarly, Horan argues “for London, socialist ends justify both savage and manipulative means . . . . [B]rutality was not simply a necessary evil; it was, as [Tony] Barley makes clear, also frequently an appealing one.”[35] Scholars’ criticisms of London’s partiality towards violence, however, overlook the peaceful future London imagines the Brotherhood of Man to be.
Meredith has claimed that life in the Brotherhood of Man is so peaceful that the people “by personal experience know nothing of bloodshed.”[36] In fact, not only is the Brotherhood of Man’s attitude towards violence drastically different from the Iron Heel, the revolutions that lead up to it might not have been as bloody as Meredith’s foreword portrays them to be. Once again, the manuscript and footnotes provide little detail on the conciliation of the discords and how the violent clashes subside. Instead, the parallel criticisms embedded in the narrative frames exacerbate the conflicts rather than resolve them. The fact that the infrastructure of the Iron Heel remains intact in the Brotherhood of Man even suggests some degree of continuity between the two regimes. In other words, at some point during the seven unaccounted-for centuries, the surging violence in the Everhard Manuscript is conciliated. The Brotherhood of Man builds upon the foundation of the Iron Heel, rather than emerging from the ruin of the oppressive regime. Understanding the transition between the regimes more as an accumulation than a revolution enables a new reading. Arguments that initially appear to be contradictory become theses and antitheses for a more comprehensive argument. Avis and Meredith engage in an ideological dialogue in the sense that their texts act as objects of objections that interact with each other. The interactions capture a phase in the spiraling path, resembling the pattern of Hegelian dialectics, towards London’s vision of utopia.
The pattern of Hegelian dialectics consists of a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis. The synthesis resolves two contradictory arguments and creates a new argument that would later be the foundation of further dialectical processes. Guglielmo Carchedi adopts a dialectical approach to understand social phenomena, which he defines as the “starting point of the enquiry . . . into social life with a class-determined analysis of phenomena as the unity-in-contradiction of relation and processes.”[37] He concludes that social phenomena “are always both reali[z]ed and potential,” “both determinant and determined,” and are “subject to constant movement and change.”[38] The nuanced nature of dialectics can be a helpful tool in understanding the unrealized utopia in The Iron Heel. Without being fully depicted, the utopian vision is the potential that is “formless [and] can never be observed because observation implies reali[z]ation.”[39]
A dialectical reading of The Iron Heel helps comprehend the contradictory arguments and criticisms in the novel and potentially synthesizes the ideological arguments between Avis and Meredith. Horan suggests reading Everhard as a paradoxical figure––although he is born working class, Everhard no longer works alongside the proletariats nor does he identify with the capitalist elites––that synthesizes “the corruption of the boss class and the ignorance of the worker.”[40] Aaron Shaheen concurs that Everhard can be interpreted as a synthesizing figure and argues that Everhard “represents a third structure in his embodiment or perhaps even transcendence of” their perspectives.[41] While Horan’s argument focuses solely on the conflicts under the Iron Heel, Shaheen extends his attention to the Brotherhood of Man’s position in the dialectical pattern of the novel. Additionally, he picks up on the theme of socialist revolutions in the novel and reads the Brotherhood of Man as a “Marxian synthesis of previous class-based dialectical forces.”[42] Given the limited depictions of the Brotherhood of Man and the time that leads up to it, Shaheen is unable to elaborate on London’s synthesis of class struggles. Yet, despite the limitations of Horan’s and Shaheen’s dialectical approach to the Iron Heel, they successfully address the interrelations of the Everhard Manuscript and Meredith’s footnotes.
Taking a different approach from identifying a synthesis in the novel, Nathaniel Teich suggests the possibility of not being able to pinpoint the object or character that embodies the synthesis. Instead, he argues that “[t]he way [Avis and Meredith] inform each other produces the cumulative effects and meaning of the novel.”[43] His approach grasps the dynamics of dialectics. While the Brotherhood of man is part of the “social processes [that] are the form of manifestation of social relations, of something which has already left the realm of potentialities and has already become reali[z]ed,” the true synthesis lies beyond it.[44] The interrelations between the manuscript and footnotes illustrate the manifestation of social relations as the two texts are constantly “both the ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ of each other” and lead the readers closer to the utopian vision.[45] Consequently, The Iron Heel embodies a dialogue between two objects of objection or between the layers within the object. Its dialectical spiral that consists of synthesis after synthesis emerges as a prototype to understand London’s utopian vision.
Somewhere in the seven-hundred-year long intermission between the two texts, the violent undertone of class struggles is subdued and gives way to a world without violence. In the Brotherhood of Man, not only is the world free from the oppression of the Oligarchy, but it is also rid of the revolutionists’ violent passions. A dialectical approach does not necessarily fill in the gap, but it proposes a possible way of comprehending the seven-century lapse between the Iron Heel and the Brotherhood of Man. Furthermore, it sheds light on the trajectory of the search for London’s utopia. Beauchamp has demonstrated a possible approach of deducing the life in the Brotherhood of Man by looking into the “whole array of evils––rents, strikes, thieves, lawyers, lap dogs, Wall Street––[that] must be explicated by the editor, since they no longer exist in the twenty-seventh century.”[46] In Meredith’s footnotes, he supplies additional information that may not have been available to his contemporary readers. The unavailability of information and their incomprehension of certain practices hints at the possibility that these behaviors have been eradicated over the years. To understand the progress that happens in the void London chooses not to narrate, the readers have to read into the unsaid words or the implicit dropping of hints about the different social reality indicated in Meredith’s footnotes. In the same way that Avis disagrees with her contemporaries, Meredith alludes to the insufficiency of his time. Ultimately, the book gives cover to London’s messages of dissent that might otherwise be retaliated against. He explicitly criticizes the faults of the capitalist society of his time and, more significantly, he expresses his concerns over the flaws of his fellow socialists. In a similar fashion of negative space drawing, London’s vision for the future emerges from a list of qualities he does not look forward to in the world.
Imagination and the Unimaginable: The Iron Heel as a Dialectical Model
A dialectical approach to The Iron Heel enables a reading where seemingly contradictory arguments function as theses and antitheses and through which a higher level of knowledge can be reached. As objects of objection, the manuscript and the footnotes interact with one another to demonstrate the synthesizing process of oppositions. In other words, the novel captures the process of deliberating a better world rather than providing its reader with a clear vision of a better world. This approach to the novel contradicts Portelli’s argument that the novel “is the reverse of the utopian discourse: rather than imagining something which political theory cannot yet visualize, it divulgates a fully developed theory but cannot countenance its consequences.”[47] London builds upon the developed theory as an approach to get closer to utopia. The Brotherhood of Man is not the utopia itself but one of the phases in the process of approaching utopia and The Iron Heel provides the model of how to do so.
Throughout the novel, London refrains from straightforwardly describing life under the Brotherhood of Man. The Brotherhood of Man is not illustrated as what it is, but how it is different from the Iron Heel instead. In the footnote entries, London sparsely provides his imagination in the form of supplementary information for Meredith’s contemporaries. The absent qualities of Meredith’s time form a negative space where readers envision what the Brotherhood of Man is like. Some of Meredith’s footnotes seem almost abrupt and irrelevant to Avis’s text, but they reveal aspects––or rather, the missing pieces––of the life under the Brotherhood of Man. For example, Meredith claims that people in the past “fill the living rooms with bric-a-brac” because they have not yet “discovered simplicity of living.”[48] He also accuses people of “crudely extract[ing . . . cream and butter] from cow’s milk [because t]he laboratory preparation of food had not yet begun.”[49] These comments indicate that life in the twentieth century seems primitive and savage to Meredith and that it may have completely changed in the intervening centuries.
The footnotes supply little additional information to the ideological debate of capitalism and socialism that underlines The Iron Heel. Although Meredith annotates on the historical facts of socialist movements, his commentary on socialist concepts and events aligns with Avis’s description. For example, when Meredith criticizes the harsh working conditions of the past, he explains that in the past “there [were] many thousands of these poor merchants called pedlers[, who] carr[ied] their whole stock in trade from door to door.”[50] Counterintuitively, the significance of the entry is not the criticism of laboring conditions, but of the societal structure. Meredith quickly turns to larger social issues such as how the “[d]istribution [was] a confused and irrational as the whole general system of the society.”[51] The entry suggests that efficiency and rationality in the structure of Meredith society are so common that his contemporaries cannot imagine what life had been like in the past without sufficient elaboration. It is with the help of the information in addition to the socialist-capitalist clash can the ideological debate escape the confrontational to-and-fro that leads to the surging violence by the end of the manuscript. The additional information indicates that the synthesis of the class struggles may not be dependent solely on the ideological debate, but also on the reformations on other aspects of society.
In order to make sense of the transition from violence to peace, it is worth pointing out that Meredith says nothing of the continuity of violence. Meredith does not say much of the success of the socialist movements. Instead, his words hint at a discontinuity of the revolutions and the possibility of the socialist movements gradually losing their violent nature in the span of three hundred years. The eventual arrival of the Brotherhood of Man is established “[o]ut of the decay of self-seeking capitalism.”[52] Contrary to the destructive force that revolutionists of Avis’s time have become, they grew practical and less willing to take a destructive approach. The Brotherhood of Man subsequently establishes order and utilizes the infrastructure built by the Oligarchy. People of Meredith’s time “tread the roads and dwell in the cities that the oligarchs built.”[53] The lack of destruction invites further examination of the violent image that Meredith first presents in the foreword: “many Revolts, all drowned in seas of blood, ere the world-movement of labor should come into its own.”[54] Rather than understanding revolutions as destructive yet pivotal points of history, the continuation between the Iron Heel and Brotherhood of Man suggests understanding them as stages of transition towards utopia. Namely, as the previous regime falls and the new regime rise, history does not start anew but continues on a path that resembles the pattern of dialectics.
Progress would be impossible in the dialectical process of synthesizing London’s vision for a better world if the Brotherhood of Man is interpreted as a utopia. A utopia is static because there would be nothing to object to. Perhaps satirically, Meredith’s footnote addresses the concept of utopia head-on. Meredith criticizes people in the past for being “phrase slaves” whose minds are “[s]o befuddled and chaotic [. . .] that the utterance of [the adjective Utopian] could negative the generalization of a serious research and thought.” [55] His criticism seems especially paradoxical when, throughout the book, a utopia is never explicitly depicted and the adjective “utopian” remains merely an adjective. Who’s to say that this is not a challenge directed to readers and scholars who are trying to work out what utopia London has in mind? This entry serves as a reminder not to obsess over the term utopia. The Iron Heel does not imagine a utopia, but merely a world that is better than the present. Meredith’s intention to introduce the horrible history of the Iron Heel––including the “mistakes,” “ignorance,” “doubts,” “fears,” “misapprehensions,” “ethical delusions,” and “violent passions”––to the Brotherhood of Man indicates his intention of breaking the status quo and possibly restarting the pursuit of a better world. London is not creating a utopian vision but developing a dialectical model of synthesizing utopia[56]. As a model, the novel objects to the notion that Brotherhood of Man is the pursuit of a better world.
Although both the manuscript and footnotes in The Iron Heel are written in retrospect, they exist in the future that is fictional to London. The time frames of the novel add to the potential complexity of the analysis. Henry Yiheng Zhao follows Émile Benveniste in distinguishing the “three moods” of narratives––the indicative (retrospective), interrogative (present), and imperative (future)––which he argues indicate the “intention behind the text, a kind of intersubjective attitude that runs through the narrative communication, in correspondence with a certain type of expected response.”[57] His analysis ignores the contexts in which London wrote The Iron Heel. London does not write to recount history. Instead, he writes to show his objections to his contemporary world. It is interrogative and imperative about the struggles in his present and near future. Regardless of the retrospective nature of the narrative, the novel carries the urgency of works that engage with the world around it. To read the novel is to pull apart Avis’s and Meredith’s texts and reassemble them into London’s ideological debate.
Avis’s reflection on the revolutionists’ excessive use of violence exposes the parallel between the Oligarchy and the revolutionists. She warns against the stalemate that violent conflicts may inevitably lead to. Through Avis’s words, London calls into question the overwhelming belief in an inevitable violent class between the capitalist and proletariat classes. Although he is unable to see a peaceful way of standing up against the capitalists, London imagines a less destructive outcome where the infrastructure survives and serves as the foundation of a new era. He might not have found a way to harmonize the conflicts, but London curates a conversation with Avis’s and Meredith’s texts as objects of objection. Namely, he “place[s] the accent on the fight for the utopian goal” over presenting a utopia to his readers.[58] London codifies his objections and embeds them in a larger and more mainstream narrative. While he does not present readers with a solution, he presents them with a novel that carries his dissent towards his contemporaries in a dialectical model that is the formula of a less destructive outcome. The novel is not the snapshot of a utopia. Instead, London imagines a future where the overwhelmingly violent discourse surrounding the class struggles can be resolved. The Iron Heel is London’s object of objection that contains the instructions of how to imagine a utopia, or perhaps, eventually build one.
End Notes
[1] Thomas Horan, “The Sexualized Proletariat in Jack London’s The Iron Heel,” in Desire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction (Charleston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 26.
[2] Alessandro Portelli, “Jack London’s Missing Revolution: Notes on The Iron Heel,” in Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982): 181.
[3] Christopher Phelps, “The Novel of American Authoritarianism,” in Science & Society 84, no. 2 (April 2020): 240.
[4] Gorman Beauchamp, “The Iron Heel and Looking Backward: Two Paths to Utopia,” in American Literary Realism 9, no. 4 (Autumn 1976): 307.
[5] Beauchamp, “Looking Backward”, 307.
[6] Horan, “Sexualized Proletariat,” 36.
[7] Horan, “Sexualized Proletariat,” 36.
[8] Portelli, “Missing Revolution,” 184.
[9] Portelli, “Missing Revolution,” 187.
[10] “Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent,” Youtube (The British Museum, September 6, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6xazq5o7uk.
[11] “We’ll let anyone in these days I Guest Curator’s Corner with Ian Hislop #CuratorsCorner,” Youtube (The British Museum, September 10, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5qLyGWDpWM.
[12] Phillip E. Wegner, “The Occluded Future: Red Star and The Iron Heel as ‘Critical Utopias.’” in Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 100.
[13] Wegner, “Occluded Future,” 131. Emphasis original. Wegner points out that London was frustrated by the conflicts between his vocation as a writer and an activist after refusing “a desired assignment to write an exposé on mill conditions in the southern United States because he was afraid of the consequences for future book sales.”
[14] Kenneth K. Brandt, “Class Struggle: Socialist Writings and The Iron Heel.” in Jack London (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 64.
[15] Portelli, “Missing Revolution,” 184. The example is provided in Portelli’s argument.
[16] Brandt, “Class Struggle,” 68.
[17] Portelli, “Missing Revolution,” 184, italicization original.
[18] Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 179.
[19] London, Iron Heel, 5.
[20] London, Iron Heel, 6.
[21] London, Iron Heel, 6.
[22] London, Iron Heel, 6.
[23] Scholars such as Portelli and Paul Stein have noted the resemblance between Everhard’s speeches and London’s political writing. See Portelli, “Missing Revolution,” 181, and Paul Stein, “Jack London’s The Iron Heel: Art as Manifesto.” Studies in American Fiction 6, no. 1 (`1978): 77-92.
[24] Ansgar F. Nünning, “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 95.
[25] Harry E. Shaw, “Why Won’t Our Terms Stay Put? The Narrative Communication Diagram Scrutinized and Historiciszed,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 302.
[26] Richard Walsh, “The Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 163.
[27] Nünning, 92.
[28] Horan, “Sexualized Proletariat,” 34.
[29] London, Iron Heel, 174.
[30] Horan, “Sexualized Proletariat,” 33-34.
[31] Chris Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 109.
[32] Ferns, Narrating Utopia, 109.
[33] David Seed, “Framing the Reader in Early Science Fiction.” Style 47, no. 2, (Summer 2013): 145.
[34] Matthew A. Taylor, “At Land’s End: Novel Spaces and the Limits of Planetarity,” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49, no. 1 (2016): 131. Taylor is quoting from London’s “The Minions of Midas.”
[35] Horan, “Sexualized Proletariat,” 34. Horan is referring to Tony Barley’s “Prediction, Programme and Fantasy in Jack London’s The Iron Heel.”
[36] London, Iron Heel, 178.
[37] Guglielmo Carchedi, Behind the Crisis: Marx’s Dialectics of Value and Knowledge (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 3.
[38] Carchedi, Behind the Crisis, 4-22.
[39] Carchedi, Behind the Crisis, 8.
[40] Horan, “Sexualized Proletariat,” 39.
[41] Aaron Shaheen, “The Competing Narratives of Modernity in Jack London’s The Iron Heel.” American Literary Realism 41, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 45.
[42] Shaheen, “Competing Narratives,” 39.
[43] Nathaniel Teich. “Marxist Dialectic in Content, Form, Point of View: Structures in Jack London’s The Iron Heel,” Modern Fiction Studies 22, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 91.
[44] Carchedi, Behind the Crisis, 8.
[45] Carchedi, Behind the Crisis, 18.
[46] Beauchamp, “Looking Backward”, 307.
[47] Portelli, “Missing Revolution,” 187.
[48] London, Iron Heel, 57.
[49] London, Iron Heel, 208.
[50] London, Iron Heel, 35, emphasis original.
[51] London, Iron Heel, 35.
[52] London, Iron Heel, 7.
[53] London, Iron Heel, 163.
[54] London, Iron Heel, 8.
[55] London, Iron Heel, 62.
[56] London, Iron Heel, 6.
[57] Henry Yiheng Zhao, “The Problem of Time in a General Narratology,” in Neohelicon 38 (July 2011): 334.
[58] Nadia Khouri, “Utopia and Epic: Ideological Confrontation in Jack London’s The Iron Heel,” Science Fiction Studies 3, no. 2 (July 1976): 176.