"Toast to the man who is hurrying tonight, may his food be abundant, may his dog not be tired, may his matches be able to draw fire, may God bless him, may he have a smooth journey." --Jack London
Jack London was born in 1876 in the Year of the Rat to a bankrupt peasant family in San Francisco. In 1876, when China was in the last year of the Qing Dynasty, Zuo Zongtang led the Xiang army to invade Xinjiang and began the "Battle of the Qing Army to Recover Xinjiang", and the Qing Dynasty signed an unequal treaty with the British in Yantai. That year, Cai Yuanpei was 8 years old, and Chen Duxiu was born 3 years later. That year Bell invented the telephone in England, and the American brand Budweiser, which we are familiar with, was founded. It was an era of symbiosis between turmoil and innovation.
Living at the bottom of society, Jack London worked as a newsboy, dock worker, sailing sailor, hemp weaver worker, he panned for gold while reading and self-study, his growth period was the formation of American consumerist culture, was the supremacy of money and social polarization, in "Land of Desire: The Rise of American Consumerist Culture" recorded that the cultural characteristics of the time were to obtain and consume as a means of achieving happiness, the worship of new things, the democratization of desire, the main measure of all the value of money in society. By the age of 16, he had completed internships in various types of work, unemployment, vagrancy, imprisonment, freedom and slum experience.
The short story "Rebellion" is a portrayal of part of his life, he worked eighteen to twenty hours, exhausted, and experienced hardships in the life of hungry and cold cattle and horses. The foreword to the novel is as follows: "Jack London from the bottom of society has a deep sense of the miserable situation of living on the garbage heaps of capitalist civilization. In Rebellion, he described the destruction of the minds of child laborers by the ruthless exploitation of man and machinery in the course of capitalist development. Johnny, a child laborer, finally embarked on the path of the wanderer desperately, precisely because he could not stand the exploitation and torture of bone sucking. ”
Is Johnny, a child laborer in Jack London's novels, really rebellious, a tragic character? It seems that johnny's mental state is more like Lu Xun's insensitivity to scold Kong Yiji, and his mechanical diligence cannot keep up with the speed of money expansion, so even the most skilled technicians are still hovering on the edge of survival.
His state is described in the novel as follows:
"He has no ideals, some are just hallucinations, like the coffee he drinks, he always thinks it's the best." He was nothing more than a working animal. The spiritual life is even less so, but every hour of his toil, every movement of his hands, every movement of his muscles, he cannot help but carefully measure it, and all this is in preparation for the actions that surprise himself and his little world. ”
The rebellion of child labor Johnny did not happen inexplicably, and Johnny's heart had a hint of sobriety, a hint of hope for the future.
He was very sober about his own career orientation, as Jack London described in the novel: "He never had a time when he was out of harmony with machines. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was born a machine, to say the least, that he grew up next to a machine. ”
Johnny is also aware of who has accumulated and corrupted his vision of the future: "Work wears down their edges and makes them calm — just like him." Johnny is like this, or rather, everyone else measures everything in the world by his own yardstick. ”
In the novel, Jack London arranges for the protagonist Johnny to clearly review his actions between half-dreams and half-awakenings, laying the groundwork for future rebellion: "The place where he sat was wet and hot, but he didn't hate the job, because he was still very young, and he liked to dream and fantasize. He would look at the steaming, flowing cloth and dream at the same time. However, this activity does not require exercise, does not need to use his brain, his dreams are getting less and less, and his brain has become always sleepy. ”
Johnny may be part of Jack London.
Harold Bloom, in Short Story Writers and Works, said of Jack London: "He was more of a wanderer and revolutionary throughout his life, until he later became a professional writer and a war correspondent. London's energy was immeasurable, he was a navigator, a rancher, a socialist politician, a perpetual explorer, a writer who kept writing. He is still both a peculiar phenomenon of our fantasy literature and an eternal figure in American mythology. ”
The story of Jack London's Rebellion is so realistic and authentic that it restores the land of desire, so much so that the reader of the novel has the illusion of being immersed.
The illusion may have been written in the novel: "The sun makes good use of the sky—this golden ladder that fills the rest of the world with its compassion and warmth, and then sinks westward and disappears behind the jagged skyline that draws the roof." ”