The Atavistic Nightmare: Memory and Recapitulation in Jack London's Ghost and Fantasy Stories
The Oxford Handbook of Jack London
Edited by Jay Williams
Literature, Literary Studies - Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199315178.013.14
Revenants: Jack London's Ghosts
The Inheritors: London's Fantasies of the Primitive
The Loneliest One: Jack London's Fantasies of Recapitulation and the Fate of the Professional Writer
Life on the Pacific Rim: The Ideology of The Overland Monthly
The Facts of Life and Literature
Family, Friends, Mentors
Jack London, Marriage, and Divorce
"Never Had Much Difficulty": Jack London, George Brett, and the Macmillan Company
Jack London's International Reputation
"The Feels": Jack London and the New Mass Cultural Public Sphere
Jack London, War, and the Journalism that Acts
"In the Thick of It": The (Meta)Discourse of Jack London's Russo-Japanese War Correspondence
"Come Down from the Mountain Top and Join the Fray": Jack London's Role in the Mexican Revolution
The Essays, Articles, and Lectures of Jack London
Jack London as Playwright
Jack London as Poet
Darwin's Anachronisms: Liberalism and Conservative Temporality in The Son of the Wolf
The People of the Abyss: Tensions and Tenements in the Capital of Poverty
Canine Narration
Making Sense of Jack London's Confusion of Genres in <i>The Sea-Wolf</i>
<i>The Iron Heel</i> and the Contemporary Bourgeois Novel
"Mix According to Formula": Martin Eden and the Question of Genre
Jack London's Sci-Fi Finale
The Valley of the Moon: Quest for Love, Land, and a Home
"A Curious Sort of Book": Jack London's The Star Rover and the Politics of Prison Reform
Cherry, Unfinished Business: Race, Class, and the American Empire
Sex and Science in Jack London's America
From Atavistic Gutter-Wolves to Anglo-Saxon Wolf: Evolution and Technology in Jack London's Urban Industrial Modernity
A Bestiary from the Age of Jack London
"The Ragged Edge of Nonentity": Jack London and the Transformation of the Tramp, 1878–1907
Jack London and Physical Culture
The Sovereign Logic of Jack London's Sea Stories
"See Things in New Ways": Jack London, Socialism, and the Conversionary Model of Politics
Jack London, Suffering, and the Ideal of Masculine Toughness
Women's Rights, Women's Lives
Blurred Lines: The Illustration of Jack London
This essay argues that Jack London's fantastic tales hinge on a belief in the theory of recapitulation, and that a common concern with the past-haunted self characterizes these stories. Taking Before Adam (1906), "A Relic of the Pliocene" (1904), "When the World Was Young" (1913) and The Star Rover (1915), and the ghost stories, "Who Believes in Ghosts!" and "Planchette" (1906) and "The Eternity of Forms" (1910) as its examples, the essay shows how London returns again and again to people, objects, creatures who exist as echoes of the past. His is a "recapitulatory" imagination, and here selves are doubled with past selves. London pictures contemporary identity in this way to expose the crack in modernity, that it is in fact not modern at all, or only in so far as it is also primitive, a reprise.
Keywords: ghost story, fantasy, recapitulation/recapitulatory, stone age, the haunted self, spiritualism, modernity
Michael Newton works at the University of Leiden. Presently he is writing a book on film stars for Reaktion Books. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002) and Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865–1981 (2012), both for Faber & Faber.