Portelli

SF-TH Inc
Jack London's Missing Revolution: Notes on "The Iron Heel" (La révolution manquante,
notes sur "Le Talon de fer" de Jack London)
Author(s): Alessandro Portelli
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, Utopia and Anti-Utopia (Jul., 1982), pp. 180-
194
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239479
Accessed: 18-12-2018 10:01 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science
Fiction Studies
This content downloaded from 200.49.224.88 on Tue, 18 Dec 2018 10:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
180 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 9 (1982)
Alessandro Portelli
Jack London's Missing Revolution: Notes on The Iron Heel*
'A film about Birkut, without Birkut? It doesn't make sense!'

Andrzej Wajda, The Man of Marble
What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
Like a syrup sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes, "Harlem"
Jack London's The Iron Heel (1907) has been called "a small folk Bible of
scientific socialism." Its historical relevance has been found to lie mostly in
the introduction it provides to revolutionary thought and in its scientific
predictions, rather than in its literary form. Even Trotsky, a not unsubtle
literary critic, pointed out the exactness of London's predictions and defined
the form of the fiction as nothing but a frame for its social analyses.' Form
would appear to be a kind of irrelevant "superstructure," an ornament and
aid for uneducated readers.
However, there are too many books in the utopian (and dystopian)
genre in the late 19th century-early 20th century period for its form(s) to be
discounted as merely an incidental feature of political-historical discourse.
With the growth of industrialization and the birth of a working-class movement,
this sort of text becomes a major instrument for the search into the future
and the projection of utopian hopes or anguished fears. Between the year of
the Haymarket Riot, 1886, and that of conservative restauration, 1896, more
than 100 works of a utopian character were published in the US alone.2
Most-including the best known, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
(1888)-have been read as nothing but reform tracts, entirely discounting
their literary form. However, even if we leave aside Butler's Erewhon (1872)
and Morris's News from Nowhere (1891), a book such as A Traveller from
Altruria (1894) by an established writer like William D. Howells shows that
literary intentions are an essential part of these novels. Jack London was very
well aware of working not only in a political, but in a literary tradition as
well. The mention of H.G. Wells's name in The Iron Heel is there to remind
us that the imagination of those years was also laying the foundations of
contemporary SF.
* A slightly different and longer version of this paper appeared in Italian in

Calibano, 5 (October 1980):52-76. I wish to thank Carole Beebe Tarantelli for this
English translation.
NOTES ON THE lRON HEEL 181
The difficulty in perceiving the rationality of contemporary reality was

at the time a problem not only for establishment intellectuals, but also for
those engaged in the search for a "rational" way out of capitalism.3 This
created a vacuum, which was occupied by "imaginary" solutions for the
contemporary crisis: imagination became then an essential, if implicit, ele-
ment of political discourse rather than a superimposition upon it. The novel
is the only place where we find a tangible image of alternatives to capitalism:
therefore, a reading of the utopian romances such as The Iron Heel as literary
texts is necessary to grasp the ways in which these alternatives were imagined
to be constructed and brought into being.
1. The most obvious formal element in The Iron Heel is the stratification of
its narrators. The main text, "written" in 1932 and concerning events which
'occurred" from 1912 to 1917, is narrated in the first person by Avis Everhard,
the hero's wife. This text is framed by another, composed of footnotes and of
a foreword by Anthony Meredith, the imaginary editor of Avis's manuscript,
found and published seven centuries after the Revolution had overturned the
Iron Heel and established socialism. Lastly, there is Ernest Everhard, who
cannot be considered a narrator in the strictest sense but is nevertheless an
important "voice" in that he speaks throughout the first part of the novel.
This stratification of voices has multiple functions. In the first place, by
sharing the responsibility for its contents, the different narrators accentuate
the book's credibility. Everhard is the source of theoretical knowledge; Avis
of direct experience; Meredith of historical knowledge. Each introduces a
different literary genre: the essay and oratory (Ernest), the novel and
autobiography (Avis), history and criticism (Meredith). The presence of
Meredith's notes raises Avis's story to the status of a "document," conferring
upon it the credibility belonging to historical "sources." The fact that Meredith
questions some of Avis's secondary statements underlines the accuracy of the
rest. At the same time, Avis's narrative clothes the bones of Ernest's theoretical
discourse with the flesh of personal experience. Thus, the capacity of the text
to function as an introduction to socialism depends largely on the literary
artifices of its construction.4
But Avis, Ernest, and Meredith are also hierarchically ranked. The
difference between Avis's attitude toward Everhard and Meredith's is sufficient
to reveal this. She exalts him as a hero, a God, a superman, while Meredith
cuts him down to size in a footnote: "With all respect to Avis Everhard, it
must be pointed out that Everhard was but one of many able leaders who
planned the Second Revolt."5 As Meredith says in his foreword, the differ-
ence between Avis and himself is one of perspective: she looks at Ernest
from below, he from the heights of centuries and of the successful revolution.
The different perspectives generate different modes of perception in
the text. The hero appears at the same time superior, equal, and inferior.
Avis's narration often resolves itself into myth or romance; Meredith often
introduces an element of irony with his comments and with the estrangement
produced by the description of the "strange" customs of early 20th-century
society.6 Finally, London himself tends to place Ernest Everhard on a plane
of parity with himself: he places in Everhard's mouth a speech identical to
the lecture he himself gave and published as "Revolution," and describes the
meeting between Ernest and Avis much in the same terms as the later (and
largely autobiographical) Ma,tiii Eden (1909).7
The attribution of three different and gradually ranked perspectives to
the three speakers allows London to offer the reader the choice of the
perspective with which he or she feels most at ease. Thus the novel is able to
function at different levels-a quality which is anything but irrelevant to a
work of "propaganda."
2. In her description of the book's most dramatic episode-the Chicago

Commune and the massacre of the proletarians-Avis says: "Many events are
focused sharply on my brain, but between these indelible pictures I retain are
intervals of unconsciousness. What occurred in those intervals I know not,
and never shall know" (23:219). The event is too terrifying for Avis to be able
to look at, remember, describe; the only reassurance derives from the fact
that it has taken place in an interval-that is, that there was a before and an
after. As horrible as these experiences have been, Avis has nevertheless
survived them. In fact, she repeatedly stresses the prodigious character of her
survival: "it seemed inconceivable that I could bear the weight I did and live"
(23:210); "Garthwaite and I bore charmed lives" (23:215).
The survival of the narrator is an essential characteristic of narratives
of the future. SF consists of stories of the future told in the past tense; the
fact that someone has lived to tell the story provides reassurance after the
reader has glimpsed the traumatic possibilities inherent in it. As Adorno says
in his essay on Huxley: "The formal trick of reporting future events as though
they had already happened endows their content with a repulsive complicity."8
Thus, the narrator guarantees the reader's own survival: as terrible as the
events imagined and described may be, the use of the past tense shows the
continued existence of a narrating subject and thus allows the reader to
exorcise them.9
The Iron Heel grants the reader this relief in many ways, even beyond
those provided by Avis's "kindly blanks" (24:219). The stratification of narrators
allows for a story (Avis's) which begins before the Revolution and ends in
defeat, as well as for one told after the fact and which informs us from the
very first page that the Revolution has triumphed (Meredith's). We are thus
presented with the before and the after of the Revolution, while the Revolu-
tion itself remains invisible: another object which cannot be faced and
described. The procedure London uses to assure us that the Revolution will
succeed (that is, that "we" will survive) implicitly defines the means through
which the success is achieved: revolution appears as an event which is
frightening even for its very proponents.
This device is in line with a long literary tradition: Bellamy's Julian
West falls into a hypnotic sleep and wakes up after the socialist state has
been established; Irving's Rip Van Winkle founds the national literature by
means of a 20-year sleep which exorcises the national revolution. Too often,
the essential part of the story is placed in blanks, in gaps: this suggests that
the impossibility of naming and describing the revolution is a recurrent motif
in American literature. Revolution-the violent substitution of one order
with another-is a "black hole" in the national consciousness.
The traumatic nature of the events which occur in intervals is underlined
in The Iron Heel by a double break in the chronology of narration. First, we
have a gap between Avis's and Meredith's stories; then, we find that Avis's
tale is itself in the form of a broken circle. She begins at the end, describing
her situation at the moment of writing her memoir, but is unable to bring the
tale up to this moment. The time of the story and the time of the narration do
not run together: Avis writes in 1932, but her manuscript is interrupted
(Meredith finds that the last pages are missing and he does not know whether
they were lost or never written) at the end of 1917. Again, the space left
NOTES ON THE IRON HEEL 183
undescribed contains a traumatic event: Ernest's death. The form of Avis's

tale confirms the function of these breaks of narrations: hiding decisive but
unnameable events. This procedure is repeated three times: at the level of
the scene (Avis's "blank" during the insurrection), of the narration (Avis's
account of Ernest's life and death). and of the connection between narrators
(the gap of seven centuries between Avis and Meredith, during which the
Revolution takes place). The People of the Abyss, the death of the hero, the
social revolution-all are untold. This structure implicitly tells us more about
London's attitude toward revolution than all his explicit political statements.
3. In the first part of the novel, Ernest Everhard meets several groups of
emblematic characters: bishops, capitalists, small businessmen. He discusses
with each group one aspect of socialist theory (philosophical foundations,
power relationships, economic analysis), and at the same time offers a des-
cription of the contemporary reality which is necessary for the utopian
tension with the future project.10 The prevalence of dialogue and monologue
reveals the theatrical structure of these chapters: the hero is at the center of
the scene, and the other characters, representing different types of humanity,
alternate before him, in a structure reminiscent of the morality play. London's
choice of names underlines this similarity. Everhard's name is not only
allegorical in its own right, but is also reminiscent of Everyman. The use of
allegorical names, a device of the morality play, extends to the hero's first
name (Ernest) and to those of other characters: Avis (whose Latin meaning is
evoked by her describing Ernest as "my eagle"), Morehouse (who gives up his
house), Wickson (reminiscent of "wicked"), and Mr Calvin and Mr Owen
among the small businessmen.11
However, among these types of humanity-who actually coincide with
the various social classes-there is a conspicuous absence: that of the working
class. This absence should be placed alongside the absence of the Revolution
(of which-at least in the socialist theory to which London claims to
subscribe-the working class is the historical agent). Both are defined by
their absence.
This first "movement" in the form of the morality play is followed by
another, which describes the quest for the working class. Avis, her father,
and Bishop Morehouse undertake a voyage of discovery of this world, whose
very existence they had hitherto ignored. It is mostly an allegorical voyage, "a
journey through hell" (6:69) which Bishop Morehouse undertakes with Ernest
Everhard as his socialist Virgil. But it also takes other forms, so appropriate for
a novel aimed at the masses: those of the detective story (Avis's investigations
to discover who maimed Jackson and have his case reopened) and the
adventure (her father's "adventure"-the term occurs three times on a single
page, 11:115-in his search for the people).
This multiple search for the working class yields no greater fruit than
the mythological quest for the Holy Grail. The seekers move under, around,
and at the margins of the working class, but they never touch its center.
Morehouse first redeems thieves and prostitutes, then aids an old lady who
can no longer work in a factory. Avis meets Jackson, who has been crippled
by an accident and is therefore no longer a textile worker. Later, she talks to
two super-visors. Her father goes through a sequence of jobs-night watchm
potato hawker, warehouse man, utility man, cater carrier, dishwasher-which
belong more to a generically proletarian environment than to a specific
working-class identity. The factory worker, employed in the productive
process, remains outside the novel's reach; the place where the working
class is formed, the central place of the class struggle-the factory-is
unrepresented.
Of course, this is not merely a documentary gap, but another essential
"absence" related to the other "black holes" which form the structure of the
novel: it corresponds on the theoretical level to London's description of the
contrast between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat at the level of the
division of wealth rather than of its production. Notwithstanding his revolu-
tionary terminology, London offers a reformist image of social relationships:
the working class does not appear as an active force in politics and produc-
tion, but rather as a suffering, victimized class.12
This approach is also revealed in London's modification of the final
sentence in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. Instead of "The prole-
tariat has nothing to lose but its chains. And they have a world to gain," in
London's description of the Chicago insurrection we read: "The people of the
abyss has nothing to lose but the misery and pain of living. And to gain?-
nothing, save one final, awful glut of vengeance" (23:207). This places London,
not in the Marxist tradition, but in that of the 19th-century popular novel,
with its emphasis on the "excessive" consequences of capitalistic social
relationships rather than on the relationships per se. The Iron Heel is thus a
good example of how extreme forms of struggle are not incompatible with a
reformist analysis of society.
The absence of a direct, "sociological" representation of the working
class, on the other end, ends up by stressing its symbolic presence. In fact, if
blanks constitute the center of the novel, the blank concerning the working
class accentuates its centrality. Despite its being invisible-or, perhaps,
because of it-the working class is the essential force in the book.
In fact, as is appropriate to the novel's structure, the symbol of the
working class is an absence: Jackson's missing arm, torn off by the machine
in the factory. If the sociological absence signifies passivity, this symbolic
absence is the motive force of the whole plot. "Little did I dream the fateful
part Jackson's arm was to play in my life," says Avis at the beginning of the
chapter entitled "Jackson's Arm" (3:31). The next chapter begins with a
similar sentence: "The more I thought of Jackson's arm, the more shaken I
was" (4:41). The image of the "real," of the "concrete," of Ernest's "irrefraga-
ble fact" (4:41) is in fact an object which just is not there. This missing object
becomes for Avis a symbol of the facts of life; and the "irrefragable fact" is
the fact that "absence" is the form taken by the presence of the working
class. Jackson, the emblematic worker, becomes productive on the level of
the narrative at the moment in which he ceases to be productive at the social
and economic level."3 The loss of Jackson's arm, torn and chewed by the
teeth of the machine, sums up London's strategy of loss, absence, void,
fragmentation by which he indicates-by not describing them-the essential
objects of The Iron Heel.
4. Before going further in this direction, perhaps it would be best to deal with
a possible objection-that is, whether Ernest himself should not be seen as
representing the presence of the working class in the novel. There are hints
in the text that this may have in fact been London's idea: Ernest's first
appearance is announced by Avis's father with "We have with us a member
of the working class" (1:8). "His behaviour was what was to be expected by a
member of the working class," says Avis, upset by his manners. Ernest is
again introduced as "member of the working class" to the Philomath Club

(5:51).
However, Ernest's emotional impact is something else: upon first seeing
him, Avis perceives him as "a natural aristocrat-and this in spite of the fact
that he was in the camp of the non-aristocrats" (1:8). A similar contrastive
formula is to be found later: "He had been born in the working class, though
he was a descendant of the old line of Everhards that for over two hundred
years had lived in America" (2:19). He is, indeed, a member of the closest
thing America has to a blood aristocracy, the "old American stock," which is
contrasted with a working-class identity more suited for recent immigrant
stock. On the other hand, in turn-of-the-century America, there was enough
social mobility to assure that family origins were not the decisive element in
an individual's class identity: though born in the working class, Ernest (like
Jackson) is no longer a member of it, at least not in the sense of the industrial
working class of modern times. He earns a "meagre living" by intellectual
work: "translating scientific and philosophical works" and collecting royalties
from "his own economic and philosophical works" (2:19). Traces of his climb
out of the working class are to be found occasionally in the text: Avis herself
talks of his "rise in society" (5:53); and Ernest stresses his difference from the
workers when he faces the masters at the Philomath Club:
'I am not a working man, cap in hand, asking you to increase my wages or
to protect me from the machine at which I- work. You cannot be dogmatic
with truth when you deal with me. Save that for dealing with your wage-
slaves.' (5:59)
Thus, even though Ernest speaks for the working class, he does not
speak from it. He "represents" it much as the Party "represents" the masses.
His name suggests an image of the Party as the steel core ("Everhard") of
professional revolutionaries. The role of this type of political party is not only
that of directing the class, but also (supposedly) of bringing consciousness to
it from the outside, through intellectuals (like Ernest) who consider themselves
to be its depositories. The synthesis of material and intellectual strength
which characterizes Ernest is also reminiscent of the image of the Revolu-
tionary Party as a union of the strength of the masses and the intellectual
power of the vanguard-an image which has a long tradition on the Left.
The third "movement" of the book, which is dedicated to the activity of
the Socialists before and after the establishment of the Iron Heel, describes
the emergence of this new entity, the Revolutionary Party. That the party
occupies the void created by the absence of the class is perhaps one reason
why The Iron Heel was required reading for members in several Communist
parties at least until the '50s.'4
5. The practice of the underground Revolutionary Party consists mostly in

conspiracy and infiltration. A reciprocal infiltration, as a matter of fact: "We
permeated the entire organization of the Iron Heel with our agents, while our
own organization was permeated with the agents of the Iron Heel" (16:157);
"We mined the organization of the Iron Heel with our secret agents, and the
Iron Heel countermined with its secret agents inside its own organization"
(ibid.). The very verbal form of this description shows the situation in terms
of an exchange: the revolutionaries and the agents of the oligarchy are
interchangeable-to the point that the revolutionary Garthwaite reveals his
identity to Avis not by the Party's password but by that of the Iron Heel.
Hannah Arendt has written that in the totalitarian state, the under-
ground opposition and the secret police end up by resembling each other very
closely:"5 this book seems to be a case in point. The resemblance between the
two sides is emphasized so often that it cannot be accidental. Twice, in their
discussion, the capitalist Mr Wickson and the revolutionary Ernest Everhard
use identical words: "In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine
guns will our answer be couched" (Wickson, 5:63; Everhard, 5:64); "There is
the word. It is the king of words-Power... .Pour it over your tongue till it
tingles with it. Power" (Wickson, 5:63); ". . .power. We of the labor hosts
have conned that word over till our minds are all a-tingle with it. Power. It is
a kingly word" (Everhard, 5:64).
The use of identical expressions indicates the head-on nature of the
clash; but in a certain sense, the opposition appears to be made more
irreconcilable from the very similarity of the opponents. The only real differ-
ence between the masters and the wage slaves seems indeed to lie in that
kingly word, "Power." The masters have it; the workers do not; both adore
it.'6 Correctly, but typically, London emphasizes the fact that both sides are
driven by an identical conviction of the righteousness of their cause: "The
great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right... .For
that matter, the strength of the Revolution, during these frightful twenty
years, has resided in nothing else than the sense of righteousness" (21:191).'7
In fact, the revolutionaries' plan for seizing power is rather a coup
d'etat than a social revolution. The proletariat will be loosed upon the ruling
class, hurled upon them, in order to keep the police busy, while the steel core
of the Revolutionary Party carries out the really important actions. "It would
merely mean that various dangers to us were harmlessly destroying one
another. In the meantime we would be doing our own work, largely
unhampered, and gaining control of all the machinery of society" (21:196).
The masses, like the police, are a danger; rather than "directing" them, the
Party is prepared to use and control them. This use and control of the masses
by the Party seems to be intended to continue also after the seizure of power.
The word "control," which punctuates the text, seems to imply that the
future revolutionary elite will exercise their power and control of the People
and the Abyss, rather than let it come into its own."
The separation between the party and the class, between the leaders
and the masses, shows that there is a split between the elements that London
had attempted to unite in Ernest Everhard, those of physical and intellectual
strength.'9 Intellectual functions are drained away from the working class: the
ruling class co-opts those skilled workers whose work implies at least an
element of intelligence and knowledge; and the Party drains the proletariat of
all functions except those of a battering ram, drains away the most promising
individuals, reduces the intellectual function of the Revolution to conspiracy
and plotting. The owners and the Party together turn people into "agents"-
meaning not that they act, but that other forces act through them:
. . . in the shadow-world of secret service identity was nebulous. Like ghosts,

the agents came and went, obeying commands, fulfilling duties, following
clues, making their reports often to officers they never saw or co-operating
with other agents they had never seen before and would never see again.
(21:194)
This is Avis, describing both the revolutionary secret service and that of the
oligarchs.
6. Ernest's inablility to function as a synthesis points out even greater

discrepancies in the text, which are mirrored in the difference between the
levels of discourse. At the two extremes of Avis's narrative, we find two
examples of descriptive discourse: Ernest's depiction of the capitalist present,
and Meredith's notes on the socialist future. The function we would expect
Avis's text to fulfill is that of linking the two levels: to show how one becomes
the other. But Avis's story is interrupted: in place of the process of the advent
of utopia, we find both an absence (the missing Revolution) and a continuity
(Ernest is like Wickson: the Socialists take over, unchanged, the cities built
by the oligarchs). If utopia is, as Louis Marin suggests, the prefiguration of
something which cannot yet be conceptualized,20 then London's book is the
reverse of the utopian discourse: rather than imagining something which
political theory cannot yet visualize, it divulgates a fully developed theory but
cannot countenance its consequences. The blank at the center of the book,
the impossibility of showing how the present becomes the future, is the not
caused by a theory which has lagged behind the imagination, but by the crisis
of an imagination that dares not face the consequences of the theory.
What brings The Iron Heel back into the realm of the utopian genre is
the role London assigns to the Party. We cannot read the future in what
Ernest and his comrades are today; we cannot read their heritage in the
world Meredith lets us glimpse in his notes. There is no communication
between these two worlds-unless the communication be established by an
act of the will. All of Avis's narrative shows that the Revolution is, if necessary,
also impossible; on the other hand, we know it has triumphed. The Party
presents itself as the absolute subjective will which overcomes this rational
impossibility, a collective Superman freed from all control, independent of
every sanction which is not internal to itself, its own theories, its own ethics.
Here London touches the link between utopia, despair, and terrorism.
"What happens to a dream deferred?" asks Langston Hughes's poem. London's
socialism is just that, a dream deferred-so much deferred that real expe-
rience and dreamed experience are separated by seven centuries, given to
two different narrators, kept apart by an unsurmountable barrier. Thus, what
happens to Hughes's dream deferred also happens to London's: it rots, it
festers, it explodes. Images of rotting and festering flesh and sores appear in
the irruption of the People of the Abyss; and they are linked to the
revolutionaries' decision to provoke the explosion. At this point, there is very
little difference between Ernest Everhard's underground party, with its inflexi-
ble sentences, and the "Assassination Bureau, Ltd.," which gives its name to
the title of London's unfinished last novel-where we are told of a further
division of labor, in which a group of "insane moralists," in the pay of
underground anarchists and revolutionaries, execute death sentences passed
on individuals judged dangerous to society, and justify themselves on the
basis of the ethical superiority of their philosophical vision.
7. Avis's description of the world of secret agents is replete with words like
shadow." "nebulous," "ghosts." To join the secret service is to lose one's
body. The separation of partv and class can-also be interpreted as a case of
the duality which runs through the American naturalist iradition in general,
and London's work specifically. in which rationality. spirituality, and culture
are opposed to the body, to the instincts. to the atavistic remains of man's
animal nature: the separation between the forces of control and those
(Xdangerous to us") that must be controlled. the 'abysmal beast" which is
even more threatening in that it possesses an undeniable element of fascina-
tion and attraction. Thus, in The Iron Heel the proletariat is also a symbol of
the material, bodily aspect of human nature in general.
Ernest's claim to a working-class identity is always substantiated in
terms of his body; the strength of the working class is also physical:
Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands
to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers. This strength we cannot be
stripped of. It is the primitive strength, it is the strength that is to life
germane. (9:95)
London repeats these words of Ernest's in his own essay, "Revolution." But
there is a significant difference between the essay and the novel: Ernest's
body. Ernest's extended hands, stretched toward the masters, frighten them
more than all his words: "Truly Ernest had shaken them when he stretched
out his hands for their money-bags, his hands that had appeared in their eyes
as the hands of fifteen hundred thousand revolutionists" (5:58).21
In Ernest's version, the philosophy of the proletariat is characterized by
a dependence on "facts" which reduces Marxism to a variant of positivism.22
He accuses his philosophical opponents of being "metaphysical," that is,
incorporeal: "He bristled with facts. He tripped them up with facts, ambusca-
ded them with facts, bombarded them with broadsides of facts" (1:13). "I can
hear him now, with that war-note in his voice, flaying them with his facts,
each fact a lash that stung and stung again" (1:16). The proletarian metaphor
of culture as a class-weapon merges here with a vision of proletarian philosophy
as of something made with things, concrete, tangible objects.
In view of this link between the materiality of the body and the
proletariat as a class, the obliteration of the body becomes one more link in
the chain of significant absences that runs through the book. The device by
which the body is made to disappear is disguise: Meredith and Avis often
repeat that disguise is not a dissimulation but an annulment of the original
identity. Throughout the chapters devoted to the Party's underground activity,
a key word is "disappear": Avis disappears when she dresses up as an oligarch
("An hour later Avis Everhard was no more"), and then her temporary
identity "disappeared for ever in turn" (18:167-68). Revolutionaries and
proletarians disappear, kidnapped and killed, like Avis's father, by the Iron
Heel, or swallowed up by the underground; oligarchs disappear too, like
young Wickson, kidnapped and then returned to the world as an agent of the
revolutionists, his identity as an oligarch turned into a disguise.
The obliteration of identity leads to a total manipulation of the body-
destroyed by physical annihilation, completely transformed by disguise:
Among the revolutionists were many surgeons, and in vivisection they

attained marvellous proficiencey. In Avis Everhard's words, they could
literally make a man over. To them the elimination of scars and disfigure-
ments was a trivial detail. They changed the features with such microscopic
care that no traces were left of their handiwork... .(21:193n)
The body-the "concrete," "natural" component of personal identity-is

placed under total control, and can oppose no resistance to the rational will.
The manipulation of the body through disguise and surgery is another example
of the control revolutionaries possess not so much over themselves as over
the masses.23
In fact, the rebellion of the People of the Abyss is described largely
as an explosion of the manipulated, annihilated, wounded, festered body. As
opposed to the "nebulous" world of the "agents," the proletarians are
characterized by concreteness-but a concreteness that is swollen and rotten:
It surged past my vision in concrete waves of wrath, snarling and growing

carnivorous... .swollen with physical grossness and coruption... festering
youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, misshapen
monsters... .(23:207)
Even their rags seem to suggest that nothing can contain and hide these
exploding bodies. The opposition between absence and presence, manipula-
tion and eruption of the body, indicates the opposition between the under-
ground elite and the People of the Abyss.
The absence of the body, together with that of the Revolution, of the
working class, of the factory, emphasizes. the abstract nature of these
revolutionaries, of their party line, of their utopian revolutionary project.
They have no specific social role and identity, no class stake in the Revolu-
tion: they are on the side of the Revolution only by individual choice. The
ease with which they can "pass" into the oligarchy as agents shows that no
objective reason prevents them from joining its ranks-or from imitating it
once they seize power. Nearly all the characters become revolutionaries for
individual motives, which have only indirectly (or not all) to do with the class
struggle. The only member of the underground who at least has a job and is
not a full-time revolutionary is also the only one whose motivation Avis fails
to understand and who is described as unintelligent: "He was phlegmatic,
stolid to such a degree that one could not but wonder how the Revolution
had any meaning to him" (18:171).
8. The emergence of the People of the Abyss from their nameless obscurity
points to meanings beyond the sociological reference to the proletariat, to
something hidden and secret inside the human personality. If the proletariat
corresponds to the aspects of human nature that must be ignored, repressed,
controlled, or buried (in an "abyss"), the rebellion of the Chicago ghetto must
also be read in psychological terms. When an oligarch tells Avis that something
is about to happen in Chicago, something inside her seems on the point of
exploding too:
I flatter myself that I maintained my composure under the keen eye of the
oligarch, but my heart was beating madly. I could almost have shrieked and
flown at his throat with my naked hands before his final cold-blooded
instructions were given. (22:198)
Avis has already made her own body disappear, and built an alternative
identity so perfect that it fools even her husband. And yet. underneath her
ironclad "composure" and control, lurks something animal-like; a primeval
fury is stirring: a hidden, suppressed part of Avis's personality, similar to that
part of society which roars from the abyss and which the Party controls and
uses much as reason controls and uses the body and its instincts.
We can now see in a new light the correlation between the disappearance
of the body and the absence of the working class. The proletariat breaking
out of its ghetto is also the symbolic form in which the repressed re-emerges:
the Revolution stands for the liberation of the instincts. desired and wished
for. but frightening. This ambivalence is visible from the first meeting of
and Ernest. Attracted above all by his "heavy shoulder-development.' his
neck of a prize-fighter. thick and strono' i1:7). Avis tends to sublimate this
attraction by turning him into a Supermani of a semi-divine nature. But even
when she struggles to deny the meanine of Ernest's body. still it is the first
thing she names: "Regardless of his bulging muscles and prize-fighter's throat,
he impressed me as an ingenuous boy... a delicate and sensitive spirit"
(2:18). She finally admits to a mixture of fear and fascination: "His master-
fulness delighted and terrified me, for my fancies wantonly roved until I
found myself considering him as a lover, as a husband" (2:20). "Delighted and
terrified": it is the same ambivalence which later appears in Avis's description
of the People of the Abyss as "a fascinating spectacle of dread" (23:207).
Avis is soon able to control her "wanton" attraction, and her relationship
with Ernest seems purged of all references to sexuality: "our love was never
smirched by anything less than perfect" (11:119). From fancies of physical
strength and love, she goes on to the negation of the body, to the point that
Ernest does not recognize her in her underground disguise-but accepts the
change as if nothing had happened, as if the body had no part in their
relationship. The symbolical result of this state of affairs is that the marriage
produces no children. A revolutionary's life is too filled with dangers to
permit it, Avis says. But it is such a costly sacrifice (not for the children
themselves so much as for the sexuality they imply) that Avis mentions it only
as regards another woman, Anna Roylston, who "dearly loved children,
but... held that a child of her own would claim her from the Cause, and that
it was the Cause to which her life was devoted" (18:179).
The revolutionaries have no body, no family, no sexual life.24 These
negations are requisites for their being "free agents," as Ernest says; actually,
they enable London to project them as supermen with no ties and no
personal responsibilities such as bind ordinary people. More than once, the
defeated and the traitors blame their plight on the family: "Me only friend is
the company. It's not me duty, but me bread and butter an' the life of me
children to stand by the mills....I'd let me soul an' body burn in everlastin'
hell for them children of mine," says Donnelly, Jackson's foreman, who later
turns into an agent of the oligarchy (3:34-35). And his supervisor, Henry
Dallas: "When I was promoted to foreman I got married, then the family
came, and... well, I wasn't my own boss anymore" (3:37). Jackson's lawyer:
"So have I a wife and children ... And there's not a soul in this world except
me that cares whether they starve or not" (3:34).
Revolutionaries, on the other hand, tend to cut to a minimum even
those family relationships that are still standing. An example can be seen in
Avis's courting (or lack of courting) by Ernest: "He did not propose. He put
his arms around me and kissed me and took it for granted that we should be
married. There was no discussion about it" (5:48). This procedure anticipates
another revolutionary's marriage without courting: Malcolm X's, as told in
his Autobiography. In both cases, the narration stresses both the man's
masterfulness and the fact that a revolutionary has no time for such things.
Of course, whether the author is aware of it or not, this has a political
implication, among the most important in the novel. The relationship between
the reader and the narrator of SF assures not only their survival, but also the
continuity of the essential foundations of their culture. The more the plot
concerns itself with historical, political, and otherwise public events, the
more it allows us to take for granted that things are unchanged in private and
daily life. Hence, the deeply political meaning of Avis and Ernest's relationship,
which stresses her subordination "by merging my life completely into his": "I
learned shorthand and typewriting, and became his secretary"; "I did not fail.
I gave him rest" (11:119).
However, we cannot just raise our eyebrows and add London to the
endless ranks of those who did not foresee the rise of women's liberation
(where he belongs for plenty of other reasons anyway). We should rather try
to understand why he stresses so much this relationship, dwelling on it
explicitly several times, in spite of the fact that it is apparently of little
relevance to the "great events" with which the novel deals. We also ought to
understand the relationship between Avis's subordinate role as a woman and
her central role not only as narrator but, throughout the final part of the
book, as heroine.
9. The chapter which describes Avis and Ernest's married life also informs us
about their philosophical discussions. Ernest never succeeds in fully converting
Avis to his version of materialism: to the end, she believes there is a God and
a trancendent reality, to the point that Ernest calls her "his sweet metaphysi-
cian" (11:117), thus linking her with the bishops of the first chapter.
This is not a casual occurrence. The paradigm of religion accompanies
Avis throughout the novel; her language bristles with religious terms. Even
Ernest appears to her in a metaphysical light:
Ernest rose before me transfigured, the apostle of truth, with shining brows
and the fearlessness of one of God's angels.... And then there arose before
me another figure, the Christ! He, too, had taken the part of the lowly and
oppressed, and against the established power of priest and pharisee. And I
remembered His end upon the cross, and my heart contracted with a pang
as I thought of Ernest. Was he, too, destined for a cross? (4:42)
The answer is yes: "he did it out of sheer love of man, and for man he gave
his life and was crucified" (11:116).
Religion is a clue to Avis's role. She re-introduces in the text, albeit
subordinately, those values of feeling, emotion, and spirituality which the
ever-hard" revolutionary (as well as the competitive capitalist) must cut off
from himself at a very high psychic cost. What has been eliminated by
political reason is readmitted by attributing it to persons who are not endowed
with the power to define and operate the winning, dominant values. Thus,
Avis appeals to those readers who do not feel equal to the model posed by
Ernest; they, too, can be in the revolution even though they cannot expect to
lead it. The "womanly" values that re-enter the text through Avis are, finally,
the attenuated, acceptable version of the irrationality attributed to the prole-
tariat. Her presence is an attempt to mediate between the Party and the
People of the Abyss and also a testimony to the human insufficiency of the
revolutionary ethic embodied in Ernest.
In order to be able to bear these values, Avis must maintain at least a
vestige of a social role: as opposed to Ernest, who is only a full-time
revolutionary, she is still a daughter and a wife. These roles, though
subordinate, make her more of a flesh and blood creature, and she appears
as such in the second half of the novel. When it was necessary to argue in the
abstract the theory of revolution, it is Ernest's word that prevails. But when
it comes to seeing, touching, living, and narrating concrete experiences, only
a socially concrete person is able to do it. It is as though against his own
ideological intentions, London were telling us that revolutionary supermen
like Ernest are alright as far as talking of the revolution is concerned; but in
order to live through it, it takes normal people like Avis Cunningham.
NOTES
1. Goffredo Fofi, "Jack London ed il socialismo," preface to the Italian

edition of The Iron Heel, Il tallone di ferro (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972), p. 9. Lev
Trotskij's opinion on The Iron Heel is expressed in a letter to Joan London,
October 16, 1937. The Italian version of my paper contains an analysis of the
influence of the book on the Italian working class, with a sample of interviews
with working-class readers of The Iron Heel.
2. J. Pfaelzer, "American Utopian Fiction 1888-1896: The Political Origins
of Form," The Minnesota Review, 6 (Spring, 1976):114.
3. Vito Amoruso, Letteratura e societaz in America. 1890-1900 (Bari, 1976).
4. From our perspective, we can add another element, which the text poten-
tially possessed, and which became visible to its later readers: the fact that the
events told in it corresponded to what had happened later. This is of course only
possible in a story set in the future; therefore, The Iron Heel derives this credibility
from the literary genre to which it belongs. The effect of the prophecy is accen-
tuated by the fact that it is couched in the forms of "imagination," and yet it has
foreseen "reality": this accentuates the surprise of the reader and encourages
crediting the book in its entirely with a sort of "reality."
5. Jack London, The Iron Heel (London: Journeyman Press, 1974), 1:6. All
subsequent quotations are taken from this edition.
6. For instance, when Avis tells of her admiration for Ernest's "prize-
fighter" neck, Meredith comments: "In that day it was the custom of men to
compete for purses of money. They fought with their hands. When one was
beaten into insensibility or killed, the survivor took the money" (1:7).
Philip S. Foner, Jack London: American Rebel (NY, 1973), p. 89, writes:
Throughout the work are footnotes which are intended to interpret various
obsolete references for readers who live under socialism. The comments, drawn
from his extensive file of newspaper clippings and government documents, are
devastating notes on conditions in Jack London's times and are set forth with so
keen a satiric sense as to give them place among the most brilliant indictments
of capitalism ever written.
Footnotes are a device which applies with equal effectiveness and similar functions
to all genres which imply a chronological distance from the narrative "present."
In the historical novel, we find them used by Walter Scott: "a very able, though
unprecise, collage of quotations allusive and elusive at the same time. The public
which is now being molded into the great audience, demands correct, historically
based citations; references to real or legendary persons must be inserted into a
context with which the reader feels familiar": Benedetta Bini, "Dalla parola
all'oggetto," Calibano, 3 (1979):141-65; my translation. An excellent example of
this procedure in SF is the footnotes and quotations from the Galactic Ency-
clopaedia in Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.
7. London's essay, "Revolution," appeared in the Contemporary Review
(January, 1908). Irving Stone's biography of Jack London, Jack London, Sailor on
Horseback (NY, 1938), describes a lecture given by London at Yale in 1906 which
is reminiscent of the Philomath Club episode in The Iron Heel (see Stone's
chapter 8).
As for the relationship between London, Ernest Everhard, and Martin
Eden, we may note that working-class readers often confuse the three. Philip
Foner mentions a testimony of Ernest Unterman, who lived on Jack London's
ranch after 1910, as to the fact that London saw Ernest as a synthesis of himself,
Eugene London, and Unterman. The meeting and falling in love of a working-
class hero with a bourgeois girl is a recurrent motif in social" literature in the
early 20th century: see, for instance, Iola Leroy's The Walking Delegate (1905). It
also goes back to a folk motif, with a strong tinge of class feeling, often found in
popular ballads: that of the lady seduced by a beggar, a shepherd, a gypsy.

Usually, the seducer is finally revealed to belong to an even higher class than the
seduced: which, in a way, is also the case with Ernest Everhard.
8. Theodor W. Adorno, "Aldous Huxley and Utopia," in Prisms, trans.
Samuel and Shierry Weber (London, 1967), p. 117.
9. This function of the narrator and its "pact" with the reader is discussed in
my paper "Il presente come utopia: la narrativa di Isaac Asimov," Calibano, 2
(1978): 138-84.
10. See Frederic Jameson, "Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the
Production of Utopian Discourse," Diacritics, 7, no. 2 (1977):2-21. London's
procedure is similar to Thomas More's at the beginning of Utopia, with the
dialogue between Raphael Hythloday and the English courtiers (emblematic repre-
sentatives of the "present" world) about the condition of England.
11. Alan Swingewood writes that The Iron Heel is "seriously lacking in
genuine characters" (The Novel and Revolution [London, 19751, II, 6:145). This
remark can only be explained by the fact that the critic misses the "morality play"
quality of London's book, which is not intended to present us with "realistic"
characters but with types of humanity.
12. Alberto Asor Rosa and Bianca Saletti find that this is a characteristic of
most fiction about the working class: "Poor and hungry, humbled and oppressed,
the workers are always seen as the representatives of a subordinate class... .As a
consequence, we never see the factory behind this working class" (Lo sciopero
nella letteratura [Rome, 19741, p. 4).
13. A further paradox lies in the fact that Jackson's episode is historically
real: London informs us, through one of Meredith's notes, that he drew it from a
newspaper article of August, 1906.
14. For information on the didactic use of The Iron Heel in the Italian
Communist Party, see the original version of this paper.
15. There is an "essential affinity between the functioning of a secret
society of conspirators and of the secret police organized to combat it": Hannah
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (NY, 1971 1196?1), VI, 11:380.
16. "You have the wrong idea about revolutionaries. They are often identical
with the bourgeois, except for one thing: they want the revolution, the bourgeois
don't": Alberto Moravia, La vita interiore (Milan: Bompiani, 1978), 3:365; my
translation.
17. The interchangeable nature of the Iron Heel and the revolutionaries is
also implicit in other parts of the book. The most notable case regards the
beautiful cities built by the oligarchs but planned and designed by revolutionary
artists; after the revolution, they will be preserved and used as they are, without
its being necessary to change anything in order to adapt them to Socialism.
Oligarchs and revolutionaries share the same concept of beauty: the references
scattered in Meredith's notes suggest that under Socialism everyone will live as
the oligarchs live now. This is an extension of a concept of Socialism as a
development from and publicization of the capitalistic trusts, advanced by Everhard
in his debate with the small businessmen and widespread in turn-of-the-century
Socialist thought. The same idea is also to be found, worked out to the fullest
extent, in Bellamy's Looking Backward, which is based on an evolutionary theory
of social development from capitalism to Socialism. Of course, the Revolution, as
a traumatic break in this process, has no place in such vision except in the terms
of a seizure of state power. Socialism appears as the logical outcome of the
growing centralization of capitalist economy.
18. A hint of the future control function of the party is to be seen in the fact
that it finds it necessary to have its agents infiltrate other revolutionary
organizations (see 18:178). We should also remember that the concept of "People
of the Abyss" is derived by London from H.G. Wells's Anticipations, which
describes an enlightened technocracy ruling "inferior" masses. See G. Harpham,

"Jack London and the Tradition of Superman Socialism," American Studies, 16
(1975) :22-33.
19. Ernest never uses his physical strength in the novel (except to bring a
young captured oligarch to reason); he never engages in a manual function. His
role in the Revolution is purely intellectual; his prize-fighter's body only serves as
a sign of origins, but is never used.
20. See the discussion of Marin's Utopiques: Jeux d'espaces, in Jameson's
article referred to in n. 10 above.
21. Here London perceives very well the link between the sound of the
voice and the physical presence in oral communication. See Paul Zumthor, "Pour
une poetique de la voix," Po&tique, 10 (1979):513-24.
22. Compare this with Mr Gradgrind's speech at the opening of Dickens'
Hard Times, where "facts" are exalted as the basis of the education masters wish
to give to the lower classes.
23. It is interesting to note the relationship between Ernest's body and his
clothes. At his first appearance, when his working-class origins are stressed by
contrast with Prof. Cunningham's other guests, we are told that his formal dress
can hardly restrain his bulging muscles. Later, when he disguises himself as an
oligarch, he has no problem in finding clothes that contain and hide his now
defunctionalized body.
24. Of course, as Kate Millett points out, Ernest Everhard is an embodiment
of male domination (and in this sense, too, his is a crudely allegorical name).
However, it is a sexuality that stands for something else, as does all of Ernest's
physical dimension. See Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (NY, 1969), I, 2:38n.
RESUME
Alessandro Portelli. La re'volution manquante, notes sur Le Talon de fer de Jack

London.-The Iron Heel a et lu plutot comme un traite ou une prophetie
historique que comme un roman. A cela tient la sous-evaluation de sa forme
litteraire. Celle-ci est caracte'risee, en premier lieu, par une stratification des
voix-Ernest, Avis, Meredith-auxquelles correspondent des genres litteraires
differents-essai, roman, historiographie-et des modes de perception differents.
Ce proce'de accentue les effets de persuasion du texte. D'autre part, entre les
diverses couches de la narration et a' linte'rieur du recit principal, se placent des
interruptions et des silences, qui concernent 'a chaque fois des evenements essen-
tiels: la revolution socialiste, la mort du heros, l'insurrection du "ghetto" proleta-
rien de Chicago. Ce paradigme qui place dans les silences les sujets fondamentaux,
s'etend a' la classe ouvriere et a l'usine: mate'riellement absentes, elles se constituent,
pour cela meme, comme centres symboliques du roman. L'absence de la classe
ouvriere est couverte par la pre'sence du parti revolutionnaire, surhomme collectif
qui la remplace et la controle. Dans le texte s'etablit enfin une connexion
mc6taphorique entre la classe ouvriere et l'aspect mate'riel, corporel, instin
la nature humaine. L'absence, le controle, la manipulation de la classe ouvriere
renvoient donc a la disparition, a' la manipulation, au controle du corps et des
forces instinctuelles, fondement premier de l'image de lui-meme que le Parti
presente a' la classe.(AP)

Portelli

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Portelli

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

SF-TH Inc

Jack London's Missing Revolution: Notes on The Iron Heel*

'A film about Birkut, without Birkut? It doesn't make sense!'

What happens to a dream deferred?

* A slightly different and longer version of this paper appeared in Italian in

The difficulty in perceiving the rationality of contemporary reality was

2. In her description of the book's most dramatic episode-the Chicago

undescribed contains a traumatic event: Ernest's death. The form of Avis's

again introduced as "member of the working class" to the Philomath Club

5. The practice of the underground Revolutionary Party consists mostly in

. . . in the shadow-world of secret service identity was nebulous. Like ghosts,

6. Ernest's inablility to function as a synthesis points out even greater

Among the revolutionists were many surgeons, and in vivisection they

The body-the "concrete," "natural" component of personal identity-is

characterized by concreteness-but a concreteness that is swollen and rotten:

It surged past my vision in concrete waves of wrath, snarling and growing

1. Goffredo Fofi, "Jack London ed il socialismo," preface to the Italian

popular ballads: that of the lady seduced by a beggar, a shepherd, a gypsy.

describes an enlightened technocracy ruling "inferior" masses. See G. Harpham,

Alessandro Portelli. La re'volution manquante, notes sur Le Talon de fer de Jack

You might also like