Northland Stories Read Online Free Page B

Christianity (“Keesh, the Son of Keesh”), by the hunger for material goods (“Li Wan, the Fair”), and other gifts bestowed by the white man. Digging deeper and deeper for the sources of patriarchy, London gradually has come up against an all too present history. Even a familiar tale like “The Law of Life,” which would seem to offer the purest demonstration of nature’s Darwinian logic, takes on a more urgent and immediate cast when set in the context of these other disturbing and violent stories portraying ruined kings.
    Such a dark view of defeated manhood compels London to alter his representation of women. While the first two collections of Klondike stories depict native women as items of exchange who assure bonds of totemic kinship among men, here London begins to see these native fathers and daughters as unwilling actors in a larger historical process driven by the expansion of capital into foreign lands. No longer governed by miscegenation, social relations in the Northland have become mainly dictated by commerce, with commodities replacing squaws as fetishized objects of desire for both white and red men. The economy of the totem, based on the principle of exogamy, has turned into the rule of the capitalist State.
    The destructive force of commerce had made itself felt in London’s Far North since “The Son of the Wolf.” But in these earlier tales London is more intent on imaginatively establishing his “Wolf” kinship than in exploring the consequences of his exploitation of a regional field. Only by letting dying patriarchs speak for themselves does London begin to come to terms with his attempted reconstruction of race. In this regard London’s crowning achievement remains “The League of the Old Men,” one of his greatest and most poignant tales, which he chose to conclude Children of the Frost. The main action of the story takes place in a court of law, where Old Imber, an Indian chief, faces punishment for murdering whites. The figurative “Law of the Wolf” is thus rendered as a concrete institution which no longer dispenses the Malemute Kid’s informal (but highly moral) brand of frontier justice. In the earlier tale “To the Man on Trail” the Kid and his mates triumph over the official agents of the law. But now the wisdom of the trail has given way to the machinery of a trial. Yet in moving from trail to trial whom does London view as the real criminal?
    As the story opens we see how London’s Klondike is now under the control of a series of state functionaries—clerks, mounted policemen, governor, presiding judge—all surrogates for the “chief white man” that London has been searching for throughout the Northland and is yet to find. Against the inexorable incursions of the State, Imber and his fellow tribal elders have banded together to form a terrorist union of their own bent on taking the white man down with them. At a key moment in Imber’s confession, London interrupts the native’s testimony to bring his own art to account. He registers the illiterate Indian’s shock at the power of writing as a magical instrument of subjugation, as opposed to the impermanence of Imber’s own act of speaking. Not these petty functionaries, not even the authority of the court, hold the secret to the Wolf’s domination, but rather the field of writing/reading through which the symbolic Law of the (White) Father makes itself known.
    Jack London used to insist to his friends, somewhat notoriously, that he was a white man first and a socialist only second. But his sympathetic rendering of conspiring red revolutionaries in “The League of the Old Men” suggests a more complex and unstable relation between his thinking on race and his politics. Closing out three concentrated collections totaling thirty tales, “The League of the Old Men” culminates London’s search for