Literary Naturalism:

Literary Naturalism:

Jack London's "To Build a Fire"

Realism

"To Build a Fire"

Naturalism

Jack London (1902)

Summary

The Opening Paragraph

Knowledge

Instinct

Knowledge

"he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view" (629)

"The animal...knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment... The dog did not know anything about thermometers...But the brute had its instinct" (630)

"He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow..." (629)

"he had been out before in two cold snaps. They had not been so cold as this, he knew, but by the spirit thermometer at Sixty Mile he knew they had been registered at fifty below and at fifty-five" (630)

"It made quick efforts to lick the ice off its legs, then dropped down in the snow and began to bite out the ice that had formed between the toes. This was a matter of instinct. To permit the ice to remain would mean sore feet. It did not know this. It merely obeyed the mysterious prompting that arose from the deep crypts of its being" (632)

"The creek he knew was frozen clear to the bottom, -- no creek could contain water in that arctic winter, -- but he knew also that there were springs that bubbled out from the hillsides and ran along under the snow and on top the ice of the creek. He knew that the coldest snaps never froze these springs, and he knew likewise their danger. They were traps" (631)

Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o'clock. There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark..." (628-629)

"The dog was disappointed and yearned back toward the fire. This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing-point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge. And it knew that it was not good to walk abroad in such fearful cold." (632-633)

"When all was ready, the man reached in his pocket for a second piece of birch-bark. He knew the bark was there, and, though he could not feel it with his fingers, he could hear its crisp rustling as he fumbled for it. Try as he would, he could not clutch hold of it" (635)

"All the time, in his consciousness, was the knowledge that each instant his feet were freezing. This thought tended to put him in a panic..." (635)

"Zola as a Romantic Writer"

"The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert to the things in life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such a fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe" (629)

Group Work: Knowledge and Instinct

What kind of a tone and/or sense is produced in this passage?

Why are we as readers informed about the trail?

According to Norris, what type/class of people does the realism of Howell examine?

"Howells's characters live across the street from us...We ourselves are Mr. Howells's characters, so long as we are well behaved and ordinary and bourgeois, so long as we are not adventurous or not rich or not unconventional... These great, terrible dramas...[happe] among the lower--almost the lowest--classes." (557-8)

According to Norris, what must happen to the characters in a naturalistic tale?

Darwin and Marx

Review

"Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death" (558)

Origin of Species (1859)

Das Kapital (1867)

What do these two world views have in common?

Realism was dedicated to the truthful representation of life (i.e. plot, characters, dialogue, etc.)

Jack London

According to Norris, what is the relationship between romanticism and naturalism?

In addition to an aesthetic movement, realism was a philosophical movement that challenged idealistic perspectives and sought to find truth through lived-experiences

"Naturalism is a form of romanticism" (558)

• Novelist and Journalist

While the tension between realism and romanticism may seem insignificant, this discourse had important ramifications in the lives of individuals, especially individuals of different classes.

• Prominent Socialist

Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism

Similarly, the realistic portrayal of characters undercut idealism by allowing characters to have ambiguous and/or conflicting feelings--feelings that often problematize a story's theme.

• Wrote Call of the Wild

Summary

As opposed to realism, literary naturalism focused primarily on the experience of those on the economic margins of society.

Group Work

Literary naturalism was directly influenced by Darwinian and Marxist ideas, both of which viewed life as subject to forces beyond human control.

In "To Build a Fire," we see Darwinian ideas in the dichotomy between knowledge and instinct, where human knowledge is helpless against the forces of nature.

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