In
honor of Banned Books Week, we are repurposing some reflections that one of our
team members wrote a few years back. Though
not exactly bringing fiction into the everyday, we think that celebrating
banned books is an important way to honor the value of all kinds of books in
our lives. Even--and especially-- if we
disagree with them.
Call of the Wild
I’ve been told that I have a special characteristic that makes me able to
enjoy American literature. Tolerance. I'm not sure how others get turned off to
American writing, and I'm the first to admit that it is not necessarily the
best in the world. But for a nation so young, I think we've done alright so
far.
To my thinking, Call of the Wild is just about as American as it gets.
It's about a dog named Buck who is kidnapped from his home in California, and
sent to pull a dog sled in the Klondike gold rush. The setting of the story is
very "Manifest Destiny", and the Klondike gold rush was
something that author Jack London experienced for himself firsthand. As for the
plot, what's more American than an adventure to seek treasure in the unexplored
regions of our country? London's book is short, his writing crisp.
And let's not forget the other thing Americans love: dogs. During the course
of the story, Buck changes from a simple domesticated dog to something of a
wild animal. He increasingly draws on a fierce strength buried somewhere
beneath his persona until finally this wildness beckons him away from the human
world altogether and back into the life of a wolf. As this prehistoric
consciousness arises in Buck, London elicits a similar sort of feeling in the
reader. We, like Buck, have an ancient strength underneath our skin, bristling
to get out. As I read the book, I wondered if I, like Buck, have become
domesticated over time, and maybe I should tap into that ancestral ferocity.
Of course, London's message that humanity may have lost something crucial to
our identity flies in the face of the idea that humanity is gradually
improving. Maybe that's why the Nazis burned Call of the Wild in 1933. Getting
off the evolutionary track doesn't exactly create a super-race. Instead, Jack
London proclaims that we used to be something great, and that greatness is
still within us.
