Acephalous

Of Course He's a Blacksmith; a Giraffe Would Have Been Unsubtle

The title refers to Earnest Everhard, the protagonist of Jack London's The Iron Heel.  I reckon the novel's structured by Lamarckian evolutionary theory; but, as you well know, I'm reluctant to press any issue without some solid evidence.  While I would have preferred discovering Everhard had been a giraffe, I will gladly settle for blacksmith. 

What am I talking about?  Why, only the two most prominent examples of Lamarckian processes in the late nineteenth century.  We all remember the giraffe's neck from high school.  From Lamarck's Système des animaux sans vertèbres (1801)*:

It is interesting to observe the result of habit in the peculiar shape and size of the giraffe: this animal, the tallest of the mammals, is known to live in the interior of Africa in places where the soil is nearly always arid and barren, so that it is obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them. From this habit long maintained in all its race, it has resulted that the animal's forelegs have become longer than its hind-legs, and that its neck is lengthened to such a degree that the giraffe, without standing up on its hind-legs, attains a height of six meters. (122)

You may not be familiar with the blacksmith's arm, however.  As I've written in some five-odd different forms:

Later Lamarckian thinkers—Herbert Spencer foremost among them—departed from this theory of subtle fluid excavation in favor of ostensibly more scientific theories of germ- and body-cells.   According to it, as the parent’s body developed, it created germ-cells which possessed the traits it had acquired; those germ-cells would become the body-cells of their off-spring, thereby transmitting an acquired characteristic.   To borrow one of the period’s favorite examples—found, in this instance, in Vernon Kellogg’s Darwinism Today—a Lamarckian believed that the son of a blacksmith would inherit a genetic predilection for larger, more powerful biceps.  A predilection is no guarantee, however, that the son’s biceps will ever rival his father’s.  He could spend his life in a bank instead of a smithy, in which case his biceps would no more formidable than those of fellow clerks.  But should he ever exercise his arms, he would build muscle at a pace likely to astonish his coworkers; even if he does not, his son—the blacksmith’s grandson—would still inherit a diminished faculty for superior bicep-building, a genetic testament to his family’s social origins.  His son—the blacksmith’s great-grandson—would inherit a talent for what [Silas Weir] Mitchell calls “brain-work,” as well as the nimble fingers required of a teller.  Whether the great-grandson’s stronger predilection for quick fingers qualifies as an improvement over his grandfather’s predilection for sinewy arms, depends entirely on the observer.  A locksmith who values a quick mind and agile fingers over brute strength would consider it progress.  A stevedore would not.

Given the ubiquity of the blacksmith example, for my purposes, Everhard is a giraffe.  Just the one I've been searching for, too.  (If you'd like to visualize me at my desk, papers and books flying as I desperately seek the novel in which the socialist revolutionary is a giraffe, by all means, go ahead.  You ought to be as amused as I am relieved.)

*I love the mysteriousness of the full title: Système des Animaux sans vertèbres, ou Tableau général des classes, des ordres et des genres de ces animaux; présentant leurs caractères essentiels et leur distribution d’après les considérations de leurs rapports naturels et de leur organisation, et suivant l’arrangement établi dans les galeries du Muséum d’Histoire naturelle, parmi leurs dépouilles conservées; précédé du Discours d’ouverture de l’an VIII de la République.  Nothing like leaving a little something to the imagination.

Rendering Google Useless, One Post at a Time

So I'm desperately trying to remember the title of the influential late-nineteenth century book arguing that evolutionary theory favors socialist (or socialistic) cooperatives.  After fruitlessly scanning my bookshelves and skimming my notes, I decide to put the matter to Google. 

"'Evolutionary theory socialism' should cover it," I think to myself. 

Wrong.

(I'm consoled by the fact that this post served its purpose.  By distracting myself with its composition, I allowed the answer—Pyotr Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1902)—to bubble up from the depths.)

The Worst of All Possible Moments in Popular Film

I think I speak for everyone when I say that the titular moment is, without question, the titular line.  The only sure way to prevent a titular line from being laughable is to have a short title named after a central character (Napoleon Dynamite, Donnie Darko) or a primary location (Chinatown, Manhattan).  Otherwise, you risk committing an Independence Day ("We're going to live on!  We're going to survive!  Today we celebrate our Independence Day!") or Back to the Future ("Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future!").  That both of those are examples end with exclamation points is fitting, because it is the emphatic quality of such statements which rips you from your comfortable suspension of disbelief and reminds you that you are, in fact, watching a movie.  Terrible moment, that is ... although there are some exceptions.  In Michael Mann's Heat, for example, Robert De Niro's McCauley twice says:

Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.

In Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, Vincent D'Onofrio's effectively pulls  off

Seven-six-two millimeter.  Full.  Metal.  Jacket.

But those exceptions only go to prove the rule.  For the most part, you wince when Sir Ian McKellen informs you that these nine shall be the fellowship of the Ring.  Where in this continuum does the following paragraph (ripped from my current chapter) fall?

In a recently discovered essay written shortly after returning from England in 1902, “Telic Action and Collective Stupidity,” London describes how “the individual is capable of, and does perform, telic actions—that is, adjusts his acts to remote ends; a thing which society never does.” He laments the stupidity of the crowd, here functioning metonymically for society at large, which despite being composed of individuals capable of telic action, en masse behave as if such feats of foresight are impossible. Although he posits no solution to this problem—concluding somberly, that humans “are as individually wise as [they] are collectively foolish”—he strikes one optimistic note: it is possible for “two or three individuals, or a score, [to] organize a company or corporation and collectively perform telic actions.” Telic actions cannot be performed by acephalous organizations; democracy is hamstrung by “by the arrant idiocy of political organization.” Telic actions can only be undertaken by undemocratic organizations whose leaders are chosen not because they represent society at large, but because they do not. Such leaders will accelerate the process London believes already at work: namely, that “from the facts of [human] history…the trend of [social] development is toward greater and greater collective wisdom.”

I'm the only one likely to find that cheesy, right?  (Observant readers will find that first sentence there familiar.  I swear I'm not cramming all my poor prose/excessive corniness into one paragraph.  Trust me, the rest of them are equally embarrassing.)

What If I Just Call Him Jack?

A sentence discovered during latest re-re-re-revision of the London chapter:

In a recently discovered essay London wrote upon returning from London ...

Checking the tracked changes, I discover I'd already corrected this sentence, which earlier read:

In a recently discovered essay he wrote upon returning from London, London ...

Looking a little more carefully at the tracked changes, I learn the above was itself a revision:

In a recently discovered essay London wrote upon returning from England ...

I can see why I changed it to something dreadful and ungainly: England is not nearly specific enough.  Had to specify London, lest someone get the impression he frolicked with other lily-white folk in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The lesson?  No more arumfartzen with tracked changes.  A writer need never be reminded that his present blockheadedness is but an extension of his past.

Research & How It Warps Your Mind, Part I of Many

When I read this sentence from Jack London's "Up the Slide" this afternoon:

Each step became more difficult and perilous, and he was faint from exertion and from lack of Swanson's dinner.

The first thing I thought was "I didn't realize they called it a 'Swanson's dinner' back then."  Why?  Couple of reasons.  The first is that I've known enough destitute Canadians to be familiar with phrases like "Kraft dinner."  The second, that "Up the Slide" is a Klondike story, so drifting into thoughts of things frozen is to be expected.  (The story, like many a London Klondike tale, is about the lengths a man will go to not to freeze to death.)

It was not until the end of the story, when the character named "Swanson" returned, that I realized I had spent the better part of the story thinking "if only this man searching for gold in 1895 can make it back to camp, he could microwave himself a TV dinner."

Needless to say, this marked the end of my working day.

Ok and Un, Early Champions of Literalism

(x-posted from the Valve)

Adam Roberts thinks he can find better evidence of Jack London’s mastery of the art of dialogue than yours truly, a trained Jack London scholar.  He is so very, very wrong.  I now present an excerpt from London’s play The First Poet, collected in The Turtles of Tasman.  The scene:

The hill nearest to the plain terminates in a cliff, in the face of which, nearly at the level of the ground, are four caves, with low, narrow entrances. Before the caves, and distant from them less than one hundred feet, is a broad, flat rock, on which are laid several sharp slivers of flint, which, like the rock, are blood-stained. Between the rock and the cave-entrances, on a low pile of stones, is squatted a man, stout and hairy. Across his knees is a thick club, and behind him crouches a woman. At his right and left are two men somewhat resembling him, and like him, bearing wooden clubs ... It is late afternoon. The name of him on the pile of stones is Uk, the name of his mate, Ala; and of those at his right and left, Ok and Un.

Uk: Be still! (turning to the woman behind him) Thou seest that they become still. None save me can make his kind be still, except perhaps the chief of the apes, when in the night he deems he hears a serpent.... At whom dost thou stare so long? At Oan? Oan, come to me!

Oan: I am thy cub.

Uk: Oan, thou art a fool!

Ok and Un: Ho! ho! Oan is a fool!

All the Tribe: Ho! ho! Oan is a fool!

Oan: Why am I a fool?

Uk: Dost thou not chant strange words? Last night I heard thee chant strange words at the mouth of thy cave.

Oan: Ay! They are marvellous words; they were born within me in the dark.

Uk: Art thou a woman, that thou shouldst bring forth? Why dost thou not sleep when it is dark?

Oan: I did half sleep; perhaps I dreamed.

Don’t leave!  The cavemen haven’t even discussed the danger of non-literal speech yet:

Why all the Despair Working on London Again?

Read this then you tell me.  Better yet—and by "yet" I mean "for you," a favor you should thank me for in money—two short excerpts:

He ate hurriedly, half chewing the bread and washing the unmasticated chunks down with coffee.

There was legerdemain in her actions.

When these sentences were written in 1906, he was one of the most popular writers in America.  Should've stopped him from making sweet, sweet love to Roget.

It didn't. 

Thin Fiction; or, Work in Need of a Fattening

When not busy book-eventing, I've spent my time reacquainting myself with Jack London.  Not just any Jack London, either, but my Jack London.  The imagined one yearning to be nonfictional.  Created through careful research—biographies, source studies, secondary readings, &c.—my Jack London never breathed, never learned, never loved.  He exists so that I might write a dissertation chapter about him.  As soon as I stop writing and people stop reading my chapter, he will cease to exist.  I am not, as Greenblatt would have it, speaking for the dead or making them speak.

I am conjuring the dead, not from some eternal repose, but ex nihilo.  Would my Jack London have thought the things his counterpart did?  Perhaps.  They share many formative experiences.  They lived at the same time, in the same places, with the same people.  They frequented the same bars and bordellos, and as a result likely died of the same liver failure and/or sexually transmitted disease.   Still, reading the notes I took and the fragments of aborted chapters, I feel estranged.  My Jack London seem gossamer-thick on the page, related to the other one, certainly, but in a dysfunctional family way.

I'll soldier on—I would be working on it now, were I not waiting for linen to dry—but until my Jack London gains some weight, I'll do so warily.  The other Jack London probably couldn't remember all the names of all the characters in all his novels either, right?