Pragmatism

Jack London.

Jack London (1876-1916), like Norris, was deeply influenced by Darwin’s ideas of constant struggle in nature and the “survival of the fittest”. Not surprisingly, the heroes of some of his stories are animals. In his famous Call of the Wild (1903) the dog, Buck, is taken from his easy life in California and brought to the frozen environment of Alaska. He survives because he is a “superior individual”. In the end he returns to the world of his ancestors. He became a leader of a pack of wolves. Wolf Larsen, the hero of The Sea-Wolf, is not simply a man, he is a superman. The beautiful poetess Maude Brewster becomes fascinated with him after he rescues her and takes her on board his ship. His knowledge of the sea makes him seem like a master of nature. But in the end, even this superman dies. London himself once explained that this point was that a man like Wolf Larson could not survive in modern society.

The laws of nature govern everything and everybody inside or outside society in London’s novels. Sometimes people are defeated by these laws. In his great story, To Build a Fire (1910) a man stupidly goes out into the terrible cold of an Alaskan storm. Since he has matched, he thinks he can build a fire any time. But in the end Alaskan nature defeats him and he freezes to death.

The turn of the century was an exciting moment in American intellectual history. American novelists and poets were no longer copying British and European writers. They were now sharing ideas with the whole world. America was about to become an important contributor to world literature. A similar thing was happening in philosophy and sociology. John Dewey (1859-1952) and William James (1842-1910) developed their philosophy of “Pragmatism”. They believed that there are no fixed truths; and that the ideas are instruments which are useful only when they help change society. William James, Henry James’s elder brother, greatly influenced European philosophers with his Varieties of Religious Experience, and especially his Pragmatism. In sociology, Thorstein Veblen made an important contribution to the growing attack on the capitalist economic and social system with his Theory of the Leisure Class. According to this theory, America’s very rich do not produce the wealth of the nation; they simply use it. American economic system, Velben says, encourages competition in making money rather than in making products. After they have made their money, the rich use it wastefully. They buy expensive things in order to show other people how rich they are.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06