The Iron Heel - All Art is Propaganda
Derek McMillan
follow.
The whole thing is on http://derekmcmillan.homepage.com although
homepage.com cannot always be reached atm.,,rather irritatingly
Introduction:
"All art is propaganda but not all propaganda is art."
This exercise is about the character and role of Ernest Everhard, the
hero of Jack London's book The Iron Heel. I think that it is important
to state at the outset that the primary function of this novel was
socialist propaganda. As London explained in a letter to the editor of
a socialist weekly, The Appeal to Reason -"I don't know whether or not
I can succeed in serialising The Iron Heel in one of the big
magazines. If I can do so, and get 10,000 dollars for it, why I'll
certainly do so. I am mortgaging my ranch in order to build my boat,
and such a deal would help me out. Also some very excellent socialist
propaganda will be thereby spread. (Letters p 224)
The need for money and the need to spread what, with characteristic
modesty, he called "very excellent socialist propaganda" indicate that
he sought as wide an audience as possible for this book. It can hardly
have been aimed at the traditional "novel-reading" middle class who,
as we shall see, were ruthlessly criticised in its pages. It was not
aimed at the socialist intellectuals because the simplified Marxist
analysis of society contained in the first nine chapters provided an
introduction which they would not have required.
In a letter to Macmillan's in 1908, London said "I think that this is
the psychological moment for The Iron Heel to appear, and that, what
of the panic, the general trade depression, and the general situation
in the United States for the past year, that the public is ripe to
boost it along into large sales." It is in this context that I have
examined London's method of presenting his hero to such an audience.
London's "War of the Classes" - a collection of socialist essays - was
first published in April 1905. It was reprinted in June, October and
November of the same year because of its enormous popularity. London
hoped to build on this success with "The Iron Heel". "War of the
Classes" had been very popular with activists of the then Socialist
Labour Party who in turn encouraged new recruits and potential
recruits to read it. Thus it was to the "workers and peasants" of
America that the Iron Heel was addressed.
The propagandist function of the novel was twofold. On the one hand
the arguments of socialists against religion, against the idealistic
notions of small businessmen and against the ideology of the ruling
class are presented in turn. The fact that the early part of the novel
explains Avis's conversion to socialism from her former conservative
beliefs and values can be seen as an invitation to the reader to do
likewise - to take up a particular instance such as the case of
Jackson's arm and see what generalisations about the nature of society
they can draw from the experience; to check their own assumptions
about life against the facts, to see whether the socialist theories
about society "work" and then to "trust their lives" to the socialist
movement.
Secondly, the novel indirectly attacks the growing reformism of the
Socialist Party leaders (The SLP split in 1906 to form the Socialist
Party and the syndicalist "Industrial Workers of the World") by
showing the limitations of their "socialism." In response to
criticisms of his "pessimism" London said, "I didn't write the thing
as prophecy at all. I really don't think these things are going to
happen in the United States. I believe that the increasing Socialist
vote will prevent - hope for it anyhow. But I will say that I sent
out, in The Iron Heel, a warning of what I think might happen if they
don't look to their votes. That's all."
It was Lord George Brown - who could scarcely be described as a raving
revolutionary - who said, "No ruling class in history has given up its
power without a struggle, and that usually meant a struggle with no
hold barred". The implications of this idea are graphically
illustrated in the novel - especially its closing chapters.
There is a Russian proverb which says that "All art is propaganda, but
not all propaganda is art". There is a danger in using a novel for
propaganda that the political considerations will turn the characters
into mere symbols and rob them of their individuality. It is easy for
a revolutionary socialist to admire Everhard and equally easy for a
right winger to fear or loathe him, but it is somewhat difficult to
identify with him. In the early chapters of the novel, Ernest is so
busy tearing away the "democratic" mask of American capitalism that
the reader does not get much of a chance to find out what he is like
as a person. In later chapters he is only rarely mentioned - often
disappearing on some important mission - although even in his absence
he still plays a powerful role because he still exists in Avis's
consciousness.
The love between Avis and Ernest is one of the factors which render
the hero more human, but the propagandist role he has to play tends to
turn him into more of a teacher than a lover at times.
Marxism places very clear limits on the role of the individual in
history. The historical process is not seen as a result of the actions
of this prince or that general, but as a result of the interaction of
man and his environment, the development of the means of' production
and the class struggle. Marxists regard Marxism as "a conscious
expression of the objective needs of the working class movement". The
problem or writing a novel which aims to make Marxist ideas real to
the reader should be apparent from this definition - a certain amount
of reification is necessary for the reader to grasp the idea.
I expect many of London's readers would identify themselves with the
"man from Texas" mentioned in chapter 2 who says "You've got to put it
in my hand". It is rather difficult to put to put "the objective needs
of the working class" into anyone's hand - but it is possible to grasp
such a high-level abstraction if it is personified. To some extent I
think that this is what London did with Ernest Everhard. The fact that
Everhard is introduced to the reader in a footnote to the first
paragraph as a man whose ideas "obtained a force of their own after
his death reminded me, of the famous opening sentence of the Communist
Manifesto "A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism".
(At that time Communism did not refer to the bureaucraticdictatorship
in Russia but to the ideas of scientific socialism)
Nevertheless, though Everhard sometimes functions as a symbol, nobody
could describe him as lifeless. He comes across as a very memorable
figure and perhaps this is the reason the reader would like to know
more than Jack London divulges.
London is most famous as a writer of animal stories, such as "White
Fang". These stories looked at nature without any illusions and were
comparatively free of anthropomorphic references. Nevertheless, the
contradiction that man is an animal in biological terms and yet has
evolved, supposedly, beyond the animal state into something which is
not an animal, is one to which London drew attention with the use of
animal images. Insofaras this is relevant to the hero, I have dealt
with this in Section 2.
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