What Naturalists have Missed
To Build a Fire
In naturalistic novels, humans who try to fight against the superior but
indifferent nature, fail and surrender. This idea corresponds to Social
Darwinism, and the naturalists have also tried to reveal the “brute” in humans, which exists inherently among all of them.
Naturalism prevailed around the early 20th century, when all
the economic depressions and the two brutal World Wars had happened. A lot of
the authors were naturalists, and Jack London of To build a Fire,
and William Golding of the Lord of the Flies were among them
also. Throughout the story To build a Fire, London tries to show
the ugly side of human instinct-the selfish instinct to survive, the arrogance
that eventually led himself to destruction-and, how the nature is superior to
the man; no matter how hard the man struggle, he fails to overcome the nature.
The arrogance the author tried to show appears from almost all parts at
the front of the story. For example: "He was quick and alert in the things
of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances",
"Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below
zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that
never entered his head” and "What were frosted cheeks? A bit painful, that
was all." This arrogance was something that eventually led himself to
destruction. The man shows his selfish instinct to survive; he tries to kill
the dog just to thaw out his hands. Despite of all his continuous trials of
building a fire, nature, much more superior to him, strikes him ruthlessly, and
finally leads him to death.
The impression I got from this story, however, was that London failed to
describe the real general human instinct. Like what the most naturalists tend
to do, London picked certain parts from human life and wrote his story using them
as a tool to convey his meanings. But the world is definitely something more
than he wrote. To explain, London had missed the fact that humans are not
all arrogant as the man in this story does. There are a lot of humans that do
recognize fifty degrees below zero as something that can freeze them to death.
Therefore, the story is about an extraordinary man who is stupid enough to not
care about such a freezing weather when the bulk of human beings are not, and
thus the story fails to describe the nature of most humans.
This does not apply to this story but also
to most of the naturalism stories; humans are something more than they think.
And, in the same vein, I really agree with Eric Sundquist said: (Naturalism
is) “revelling in the
extraordinary …… and the grotesque
in order to reveal the immutable bestiality of Man in Nature……” One strong reason is that, humans
resist, even to the absolute thing like nature, and there are ones who do not
surrender when naturalists think all humans would.
Camus, despite the
fact that he had also experienced World Wars and economic depression, and even
that he was once a soldier in those wars, wrote completely different novels.
His fundamental idea is based on “resistance.” Resistance, according to Camus,
is what dignifies human. One of his masterpieces, La Peste, is a
typical story that shows this “resistance” idea. Plague was all over the city,
and people were dying helplessly. Rieux, the protagonist, fights against the
disease by incessantly taking care of the patients. He never gives up, and he
never even thinks of giving up his "resistance" against the plague
even when the plague was at its peak, that it seemed so powerful and endless to
win over. The plague symbolizes the irrationality human beings can face; something
out of their will, but in the same place, something so powerful. Rieux
never surrenders, and his fight continues until the plague finally ends.
Always there has
been someone resisting against the unreasonable society. No matter how powerful
the absurdity seemed to be, there were people who gave away their lives and
rebelled to their realities. That is the part the naturalists have missed:
humans resist, and it is not the few minority of the whole human being; the
history could go on with those resisting people’s incessant challenges. There
has been, and will be, people who try to fight against the unreasonable
reality, and what matters is not the effect but the fact that he resisted: that
is what finally dignifies humans. Naturalists have missed that part of humans.
Humans don’t accept the world as it is; they fight against the reality for a
better place for them. They do not surrender, and some of them give up
what their most basic instinct try to protect: their lives. They do it for the
world to change.
If William Golding
has really written his story Lord of the Flies as a response
to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, he missed to see how
the old man successfully and incessantly resisted against the superior nature,
the sea. That spirit of unquailing resistance surely exists among humans, and
if the object of resistance is powerful or not does not matter, because there
are still people who resist against things that seem impossible to win over,
like the old man. Human beings do have people like the old man, and therefore
the view that humans would always fail to make changes and surrender to the
superior nature cannot be enough to explain the whole human being. The
world is somewhere more hopeful than naturalists view it, since it has people
that will resist for a better world.
Comments
Chonghyun Ahn: I was unsure on
how you came to the conclusion of this story was about ugly human instincts. If
the conclusion is right, it'd be better to see why the author came to such
thoughts and then refute by using more examples other than a quotation. I agree
that men are depicted negatively, and that there was extreme pessimism, but I'd
like some more support behind that.
Yun Jo Jeong: Sorry. I see it
has a great level of academic discussions, but I'm not in the position to
connect on this. Just two words is enough: Good Job! +) he checked several
grammatical mistakes
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