Martin Eden

So far, Martin Eden is my leading candidate for the masterpiece of American naturalism, beyond even McTeauge, Studs Lonigan, and The USA Trilogy in excellence. It is Jack London’s semi-autobiographical story of a hoodlum sailor who, upon meeting a middle-class woman, falls desperately in love with her and begins a project of self-education in order to be worthy of her. The project is eventually a failure, as he winds her hand in marriage, loses it, and then regains it only to shun it, but along the way London has created the most persuasive portrait of excessive desire I have yet encountered. Once Martin Eden is exposed to history, poetry, biology, and above all philosophy, he becomes an unstoppable machine of knowledge collection and story writing, eventually finding fame and fortune only to find it all meaningless. At the novel’s close, he sets up all of his impoverished friends and family for bourgeois respectability, then commits suicide.

The first interesting aspect of Martin Eden is that, in its fairly complicated rags to riches narrative, it gives us a new type of naturalist narrative, one not mentioned by Donna Campbell. In this one, the brutish man, who the author identifies with and doesn’t condescend to, is introduced to the feminine poetry and manners of upper middle-class society. That the result is still disaster has less to do with the new environment that Martin finds himself in and more to do with the fact that he surpasses the feminine society of his beloved Ruth and her class and ascends beyond them. This is a narrative with one further step than a traditional rags to riches story; upon receiving his riches, Martin is completely dissatisfied for him because he cannot find a place that makes him happy, not because he still empathizes with his previous state, but because he has surpassed upper-class morality with his Spencer and Nietzsche.

The most interesting part of this novel, for me, is Martin’s early love for Spencer and later love for Nietzsche. In Spencer, Martin finds the piece of knowledge that will come to dominate his entire theory of knowledge: “And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him, reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization […] There was no caprice, no chance. All was law.” (109). From Spencer, Martin learns that evolution dominates every process, from biology to philosophy, and this becomes his intellectual framework: the dominance of evolutionary process. From there, he eventually becomes the disciple of Nietzsche, combining Nietzsche and Spencer such that he comes to understand slave-morality as a misguided evolutionary process which hijacks the natural evolution of humanity away from the ubermensch and towards the unwashed masses. There’s no doubt that London himself regards Martin as a version of the superman; Martin accomplishes intellectual and artistic feats that seem impossible, while in his previous life he got every girl and won every fight.

It is impossible for me to discuss every point I found of interest in this novel. I want to conclude simply by stating that, in Martin Eden, London seems to have put every single imaginable aspect of naturalism into play, while also writing the philosophical novel of ideas. Such an accomplishment is, to my mind, nigh impossible, and I expect to study this novel extensively, as it is both the perfect example of what makes naturalism pathological and how a naturalistic work of literature can overcome the standard strictures of naturalism.