Boricean Teodora-Maria

Grupa: Re-A
Anul: III
Being a writer-between optimism and pessimism

Martin Eden by Jack London offers insights on the American social class structure
during the early- to mid-20th century, which is still relevant today. The protagonist
is a representative of the lower-class, having worked a blue-collar job before
deciding to become a writer. He falls in-love with a young woman from the upper-
class society of San Francisco. It is the first book he wrote after his ill-fated voyage
to the South Seas aboard his yacht the Snark, and it reflects the illness and
depression he brought home with him.
Martin Eden also presents a Darwinian superman; Martin is both physically tough
and intellectually superior to anyone else in the novel, the ordeal in which Martin
proves himself is his unrelenting struggle to educate himself and to become
established as a writer in the face of endless rejection.
When he was a sailor, he lived a more carefree lifestyle. When he embarked on his
career as a writer, there were industry and social pressures to excel. However,
Martin soon found that being a writer was more difficult than being a sailor. The
writing process is lonely and the publishing industry, he soon found out, was
corrupt and exploitative.
The novel also explores the cut-throat culture of the art and literary world. When
he was being rejected by publishing companies, and the woman he fell in love with
began to lose faith in him, he realized that people's perception of others is fickle.
When he became successful, his detractors, including Ruth, acted as if they had
always supported him.
The novel also examines how individuals perceive their place in society. For
instance, when Martin realized that his writing career was built on illusions of
celebrity and synthetic social relationships, he decided to commit suicide.
When Martin Eden says, ‘‘My desire to write is the most vital thing in me,”1 he is
merely giving ‘‘impassioned voice” to what has been apparent from the first pages
of his story. The combined effect of his thoughts, utterances, and actions is to
emphasize that in this autobiographical characterization Jack London has intended
nothing less than a kind of a portrait of the artist. Surprisingly enough, no one has
yet offered an extensive reading of Martin Eden in these terms, as if neither the
character nor the author is quite to be trusted with what he is rather obviously
saying. Even sympathetic critics have tended to subordinate Martin’s struggle to
become an artist to other aspects of his life.
Jack London explained his character not in relation to writing but to other themes:
knowledge, success, and an idealized love. “These were the things he had found
life worth living in order to fight for. When they failed him, being a consistent
Individualist, being unaware of the collective human need, there remained nothing
for which to live and fight. And so he died.”4 All these readings, including
London’s, can be substantiated in the text, and yet they also can be subsumed
under an interest more immediate to London in 1907 when he began the novel than
knowledge, success, or an idealized love—his possibly subconscious but
nonetheless searching of himself as artist.
By the time London had set out on the projected several years’ voyage to the South
Seas during which he wrote Martin Eden, he was at a crucial stage of his career. At
thirty-one, nine years after he had committed himself to writing, he was eminently
successful. He had made money and, clearly, was going to make much more. He
had attracted a great deal of attention, critical as well as popular.
How closely Martin’s experience as an artist corresponds to London’s own
experience is finally impossible to know, of course. London did say, “I was Martin
Eden,” referring to his character’s swift success; Martin’s other characteristics may
have been equally autobiographical. Establishing the precise degree of connection
between the author and character, however, is not as important as recognizing that
external and well as internal evidence points to a somewhat different reading of
Martin Eden than it has previously received. In this novel, London is primarily
concerned with the quest of the writer to order experience. As I have suggested,
London was unsure about the outcome, and consequently he gives several different
portraits of the artist, rejecting each in turn.
It will be nearly a year before Martin will designate himself as a writer, a year
during which he learns “much of himself” and achieves a “conviction of power,
but three clusters of experiences this first evening at the Morses reveal Martin as a
potential artist and act as catalysts which “work the revolution in him, changing
him from an uncouth sailor to a student and an artist . . .” : his reaction to various
forms of “art,” his response to an audience, and his discovery of Ruth. On first
entering, he is attracted to the “beauty” of an oil painting.
Most significant duster of experiences on this first evening are those defining
Martin’s relation with Ruth. She is, next to Martin, the most important character in
the book, and I think the most misunderstood. Her progress in Martin’s mind, more
complex than a brief summary can define, is not unlike that of Gatsby’s Daisy—
from a goddess “remote and inaccessible as a star” , through incarnation, to
identity with “a rotten crowd.” Martin first sees her, not as a person, but as “a
spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such sublimated beauty was not of the earth. She might
well be sung by that chap Swinburne”. He does not think of “her flesh as flesh” but
as “an emanation of her spirit. Her purity smote him like a blow, superlative of
goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal life”
London has thus presented Martin as proceeding from a pre-artist stage of vivid
and yet inchoate feelings about life through a sentimental celebration of the highest
ideal he can envisage, followed by a more reasoned affirmation, expressed in
“pieces of reality” that exist only in his own mind. Martin now not only
specifically rejects these past attempts as an artist, but offers to Ruth, in verbal
outpouring, his new image of himself as artist. They are in the Berkeley hills, Ruth
seated “upon his coat, and he sprawling close to the warm earth.” The scent of the
grass “entered his brain and set his thoughts whirling from the particular to the
universal.” He recites for his listener its cycle of existence, finding the grass.
He could not belittle love. He worshipped it. Love lay on the mountaintops beyond
the valley-land of reason. It was a sublimated condition of existence, the topmost
peak of living, and it came rarely. Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers
he favored, he knew the biological significance of love; but by a refined process of
the same scientific reasoning he readied the conclusion that the human organism
achieved its highest purpose in love, that love must not be questioned, but must be
accepted as the highest guerdon of life. Ruth is pressed by her family to reject him,
only because they think Martin will never change, will always remain the selfish
man, who always puts himself first and his manners will be of a “lower-class”
man, with lower standards. She writes a letter terminating their relation, Martin’s
reply, “pleading passionately for love”, is ignored. When he encounters her in the
street, he implores, ‘Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not
stronger than love!’”. But Ruth is adamant in her propriety, and Martin is finished
as an artist. He returns to his room and mechanically completes the major
manuscript in progress, one which, though unfinished, he compares to “the tales of
the sea-writers, and he felt it to be immeasurably superior.
He writes in a daze, “strangely detached from the world around him, feeling like a
familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his former life,” adding twenty
thousand words more than he had planned. “It was not that there was any vital
need that the thing should be well done, but that his artistic canons compelled him
to do it well”
There is the fact of Martin Eden itself as a record —a “poem of the mind,” as it
were—of the recognition that the act of finding is necessary, and, much more, that
such an act is all there is, ultimately. He creates in considerable “honesty” a
portrait of himself through the relation of the total novel to the characterization of
Martin Eden, exploring some options that bid fair to be shattering.
So being a writer represented for Martin the necessity to become someone and also
to get higher to his status, in order for Ruth to appreciate him and to love him the
way he did. The concept of optimism is found in Martin’s struggle to write even if
he did know at first and found it difficult to understand the words and the authors.
The pessimism came only when he was rejected from all the magazines and
publications, because his writings were about reality and most of all about his true
passion “the sea”.