Fanatical desires can induce dangerous actions and do absurd things. --Mark. Twain
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the relatively stable political situation after the Civil War, the free and relaxed social environment and the relatively broad market were superimposed on each other, and the commodity economy of the United States achieved unprecedented development, and wealth poured into the United States like a tide. But the rapid development of the economy has left the system construction far behind, all kinds of chaos plagued American society, traditional moral concepts are fragmented under the impact of massive money, the beautiful wealth myth is only the surface, behind the wealth hidden too much dirt, this seemingly golden era was later called the "Gilded Age".
The Sea Wolf was published in 1904, when the United States was in the late stages of the Gilded Age, and its author was the famous American tough guy writer Jack Scott. London.
Jack. London
His work influenced many later American writers, the most profound of which was Hemingway, the author of The Old Man and the Sea. In China, Jack's reputation is not very loud, the only work he is familiar with Chinese is the short story "Love of Life" included in the middle school textbook, which depicts a down-and-out gold digger alone, trying his best to complete the story of self-help under the attack of the harsh natural environment and beasts.
Due to space limitations, the values conveyed in Love of Life are simple and clear: a tenacious spirit of human beings in the face of difficulties. In the novel "Sea Wolf", the tenacious fighting spirit is only part of the theme of the novel, and this novel shows more: in the face of the rolling wealth, Americans struggle between desire and morality.
The story of "Sea Wolf" takes place on a seal-hunting sailing ship, the "I" in the story was originally a noble gentleman, because the shipwreck was rescued by the crew of the "Phantom", "I" had to follow the "Phantom" to hunt seals all over the world because of these coincidences, and this also gave "I", a high-society gentleman, the opportunity to see how these desperate people at sea survived in the wind and waves and even earned wealth.
The world was shrouded in maritime power, and the inhabitants of an island on the edge of Eurasia called Great Britain told the people of the world that the conquest of the world did not necessarily depend on vast arable land and huge populations, and that a strong navy and a well-developed network of maritime trade were the methods of another world of government. At that time, the sea power completely overshadowed the land power, the traditional continental powers have lost power, and the maritime countries are like the sun in the sky, as the main ethnic group is the British immigrants of the Americans, perfectly inherited the British maritime culture, the east and west coastlines on countless merchant ships, the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean have become the Pasture of the Americans.
The rise of maritime powers due to maritime trade, countless merchant ships in search of wealth through the vast sea, the sea ships are like an independent world, and in this independent world, the formulation of rules is obviously very subjective and arbitrary, in this group of people who fight for their lives at sea in order to seek wealth, morality must be a luxury.
Centuries of rising maritime powers are impacting the centuries-old moral system of the continent in an unprecedented way. And for the United States, the emerging maritime power, the few moral constraints are vulnerable to huge sums of money.
The savage and predatory stages on the sailing ship "Phantom" in the story of "SeaWolf" are staged every day, and "I" am a gentleman who has no strength and will not fight, and is quickly bullied by the whole ship, until "I" get a dagger one day.
In the eyes of the gentleman "I", the people on the ship were savage and stupid, but there was one exception, he knew a lot of truth, but he was more ferocious, savage and immoral than anyone else on the ship, and he was the captain of the ship, Mr. Larson, known as the "Sea Wolf".
For the most part, barbarism and ignorance are twins, and people act in barbaric ways because their minds are empty and act only on primitive intuition, as is the case with most of the people on the Phantom.
However, the "sea wolf" Captain Larson did not do so, Captain Larson came from a poor background, childhood and adolescence at the bottom of the social ladder to survive, the bottom of life gave him an unusually strong physique, he is infinitely powerful, and proficient in the various techniques of the ship. Unlike other manual workers who only want to make money by their strength, Captain Larson loves to read and learn, and is extremely intelligent, he is very involved, physics, mathematics, politics, literature, philosophy, he learns everything, his knowledge is not even less than the gentleman "I", but despite this knowledge, Captain Larson is more barbaric than the crew, he rules the crew with violence, often uses lynching, he brutally exploits the crew, and even uses guns to force the crew to work for him more.
Captain Larson did not find that he read morality in the book, but after recognizing the existence of morality, he denied the meaning of morality. Unlike other crew members who did not know what civilization was, Captain Larson had a deep understanding and thinking about the civilization of human society, and after thinking about it, he gave up civilization. His knowledge and ability gave him the right to choose between civilization and barbarism, and his choice was clear: civilization is meaningless, and it is most efficient to deal with problems in the simplest and most barbaric way.
In the words of the gentleman "I": "He is like a barbarian born of the wrong era, and he does not have in him the sense of morality that modern man should have."
A superman with no sense of morality, driving all the people on board with his savagery on the boundless sea, the boundless sea without rules, this is his home. He knew what morality was, but in his view morality was nothing more than an inefficient means, and it was clear that barbarism and violence could achieve their ends more simply and directly.
Above the sea, violence is the passport of barbarians, and morality is the epitaph of the civilized.
In the novel "Sea Wolf", there are many discussions about human behavior between Captain Larson and the gentleman "I", "I" explain everything with morality, faith and love, and Captain Larson explains everything with desire and survival instinct, and neither of them can convince the other. But on this sailboat, it is clear that violence has more say.
The crew of the Phantom also had a sense of morality and justice, and the teenager Richie and another sailor, Johnson, who had just been working as sailors, were brave, strong, and right-and-wrong, excellent sailors and men, who were equally powerful compared to the other crew, and because of this, they were very prestigious among the lower crew.
Richie and Johnson once organized a rebellion and revenge against Captain Larson, which is also the peak of the conflict described in the entire book, and this conflict ends with the superhuman Captain Larson defeating all the crew members involved in the revenge and escaping to heaven.
After this revenge, the crew's alliance also collapsed, and everyone except Richie and Johnson willingly continued to endure the oppression of Captain Larson, and the two of them knew that the captain's revenge would come. Eventually, the two men died in a shipwreck artificially created by the captain, and the righteous resistance disappeared on board.
Apparently, the crew had been willing to help Richie and Johnson deal with Captain Larson, not because of their sense of justice, but because they thought that the two of them might be more powerful than Captain Larson, but when they realized that this was not the case, they immediately turned to Captain Larson's rule. Violence is the only voice on this ship.
For a person like Captain Larson who despises morality extremely, reading does not give him a sense of justice, the knowledge learned in the book is just a better means for him to carry out violence, he can use violence to profit, he can profit from knowledge, and he can combine the two for his own benefit, and profit is everything.
But in this ship where violence reigns over everything, where the strongest violent man also possesses knowledge and skills that many others do not possess, the rule he has established on this ship seems unbreakable, but Captain Larson ultimately fails. This superman, the strongest "sea wolf" was eventually abandoned by his crew, trapped in the sea alone, and the reasons why the crew left him had little to do with his barbarism, violence, and immorality, and the crew did so for two main reasons:
The first is that Captain Larson suddenly falls ill, and Captain Larson, who is tormented by the illness, cannot restrain the crew with violence.
Second, the crew found that working on another ship could earn more.
Captain Larson's illness inevitably appears a little abrupt and far-fetched in the text, it appears quickly, quickly crushing this omnipotent superman, and "I", a gentleman, has some strength and skills under the tempering of the cruel life on the ship, and "I" also defeated Captain Larson when he was ill, but the key to this victory is still Captain Larson's illness.
It is indeed ironic that the righteous "I" has a chance to triumph only when the evil "sea wolf" is ill.
If you read through the full text of SeaWolf, you will find that although Captain Larson is a villain, the author Jack Larson. London depicts and represents him far more than the positive figure of "I", and perhaps, in a sense, Captain Larson is the artistic Jack. London, and Jack London is the real Captain Larson.
Jack. Born in California to a bankrupt farming family, in order to survive, he had to work to earn money at the age of 10, the experience of struggling to survive at the lowest level of society both exercised his body and tempered his will, because of his physical strength and brain flexibility, 16-year-old Jack is a low-class crowd with a certain prestige.
At the age of 17, Jack boarded a seal-hunting sailing ship and went to the Bailing Strait, and as a sailor, he learned a lot about navigation, and this experience also provided a lot of material for his future creation of "Sea Wolf". Another benefit of the voyage to Jack was that he was able to spend a lot of time on the long voyage, which paved the way for Jack to embark on the literary path in the future.
The young Jack London was big and strong, and could do high-intensity manual labor, but he did not want to do the simplest manual labor forever, he hoped to be able to do skilled work, so he later chose to be an electrical worker, because it was the rise of the Second Industrial Revolution, electrical work can be said to represent advanced productivity, Jack was tired at work, and he took $30 a month (middle and upper class of American workers at that time), but then Jack knew that because he was too capable, The boss let him work alone for two people, who had previously been paid $40 a month, and because of Jack's appearance, one of the workers was fired by the boss, who was desperate to commit suicide because of unemployment.
This experience made Jack fully recognize the greed of capitalism, and also realized that it is difficult to sell his physical strength and work for others, no matter how hard he tries, he begins to write. Because "the old age of the manual worker is miserable, while the mental worker is just the opposite." "This realization, Jack. London embarked on the path of literature. Jack's literary path was smooth, and he soon became one of the richest writers in the United States at the time, and in an era when a worker's monthly salary was only a few tens of dollars, his writing fee reached a word and a dollar at its peak.
Literary creation solves all his economic problems, but it cannot solve the pain of his inner world, because the two kinds in his heart are constantly pulling him.
Probably due to the early experience of being deceived and exploited by capitalists, Jack. London was very sympathetic to Marx's ideas, and his novel The Iron Hoof even had the implication of a proletarian manifesto of the bourgeois struggle.
But due to the aimless nature of reading, Jack. London received a wide and complex body of knowledge, and in addition to agreeing with Marx's views, another one he highly agreed with was Nietzsche's philosophy of transhumanism.
But it is clear that the two ideas are in stark opposition, Marx believes that the masses of the people are the ultimate driving force for the progress of history, while Nietzsche believes that the progress of the world is led by a small number of supermen, and the broad masses of the people are nothing more than superhuman "herds".
Jack. London grew up at the bottom of the chaotic and disorderly society after the Civil War, and he went to the upper class with his ingenuity and tenacity, and he was both an angry worker poisoned by the hypocrisy and greed of capitalism, and an elite and superman with great ability, who rose to the top of the free market.
Out of sympathy for the working class, he realized the necessity of restraining people with morality, but the experience of being in the free market was a vague reminder that morality would constrain him to exert his full power. This kind of life is destined to be painful.
Jack. London died on 22 November 1916 at the age of 40, after taking too many drugs and becoming famous with a huge fortune. London instead became more miserable, trying to make himself happy by spending money frantically seeking material pursuits, even though as a thoughtful man of letters he knew that this happiness was not real. The 40-year-old Jack ended his life, and 40 years old is a good age even for a manual worker, making his life into infinite pain, and even letting his life summarize in advance is not manual labor, but precisely mental labor, which has to be said to be an irony.
Jack who climbed all the way from the bottom to the top of the fortune. London was a good embodiment of the American spirit of the time. And his confusion was also the confusion of many Americans at that time: Does morality have meaning in the face of power and money?
Perhaps, a setting in "SeaWolf" can better reflect the author's and the entire American society's good feelings about morality and concern about uncontrolled forces, and this setting is the inexplicable, sudden illness of Captain Larson. Captain Larson possessed near-limitless power and wisdom, but the disease that fell from the sky could easily take it all away, leaving him more vulnerable than anyone.
Americans who have made a lot of profits in the maritime trade, because of the serious mismatch between their cultural heritage and sense of morality and the speed of wealth, have made them have a strong sense of fear of where life will go in the past of the tide of wealth, and what they are worried about is probably very similar to a saying that people often say today: "The money earned by luck will be lost sooner or later by ability."
Jack. London's 40-year life almost completed the entire American Gilded Age, and Americans who had acquired huge wealth gradually established their own moral and ideological systems after the Gilded Age, and in 1911, Carnegie, the king of steel, donated all his wealth. At the 1918 Paris Collegiate Conference, President Wilson put forward the slogan of "justice triumphs over power", and after World War II, the strength of American unions expanded and the lives of workers improved.
The Gilded Age of the United States is a grassy era of startups, and the wealth obtained in the grassy era must be maintained through certain conceptual upgrades, so that it can keep wealth as a force that can be controlled by itself, otherwise it is likely to evolve into an embarrassing situation of "money comes like a tide, and goes like a tide".
As small as the individual, the family, the enterprise, the state, after acquiring wealth or other forms of power, must learn to master another power—a force that can control it at that time.