The Iron Heel Read Free Page B

from a feminist slant that the hero’s unexpected disappearance from the narrative’s climax allows the heroine Avis to come into her own and play a primary role for the first time rather than a supporting one, the fact is that during these scenes of violence she is still accompanied by male revolutionist companions, who act to protect and save her from the rampaging mob.
    More to the point, I think, is that for Avis, the charismatic solitary body of Everhard, as well as his elected representative body, is replaced in the end by the undifferentiated mass body of the people of the abyss. This monstrous bestial underclass had been created by the Iron Heel when it strategically favored certain higher castes of skilled laborer over others. In his previous book The People of the Abyss (1903), Jack London disguised himself as an American tramp to recount with sympathy the sufferings of London’s East End ghetto dwellers, but the people of the abyss here, caught between masters and revolutionists, are simply the residual dregs of class warfare, a mindless, howling mass of rage and misery. Feared equally by rebels and oligarchs, this throng for London is an object of dread rather than of working-class solidarity or even pity. So what begins as an intense love story ends on an equally extravagant note of disgust and revulsion aimed less at the detested but intangible Iron Heel than at the abject mass spawned in its wake.
    Up until this final chaos of clashing bodies, in fact, the figure of the proletariat has remained conspicuously missing from the entire novel. While we are given to understand that Everhard, like Jack London himself, emerged from impoverished working-class origins to lead the revolution, more often than not Avis chooses to emphasize the natural aristocracy of the man, his innate nobility, intelligence, and generosity of spirit that tends to make him superior to the people he presumes to represent. And despite his impressive strength, Everhard earns his living through intellectual work—translating essays and giving speeches—not physical labor. Ernest and his circle of extraordinary comrades thus battle and speak on behalf of the masses but are not of them. Even the early episode of pitiable Jackson and his amputated arm gives us only a glimpse of an ex-proletariat, someone no longer capable of supporting himself by manual labor. So when at last we are suddenly confronted by the collective boiling over of the people of the abyss, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, it is all the more shocking to witness.
    London was committed to rendering the personal “feel” of the times from the point of view of the heroic revolutionist leader and his converts rather than from the perspective of the inarticulate mass proletariat or the shadowy Iron Heel. As a result, he inadvertently produces, via Avis’s first-person narration, an oddly glamorous account of revolution (however pessimistic and bloody) filled with gaps and contradictions that cannot be fully corrected by the retrospective supplemental analysis provided by historian Anthony Meredith. The Iron Heel ’s grim ending suggests how the novel is more intriguing and relevant today in its sketchy representations of the bad guys rather than its celebration of the good guys (including London’s own alter ego). Everhard’s earnest prediction of an ever-growing global unconsumed surplus, for example, leading with mathematical certainty to the breakdown of the capitalist system may strike us as a bit quaint, tied as it is to a strictly industrial model of production. But while London’s embrace of classic Marxist economic theory seems somewhat outdated, his depiction of the measures the corporate state will take to maintain itself still resonates powerfully.
    The novel’s great insights clearly reside less in the economic sphere than in the political or, perhaps more accurately, the cultural realm: the Iron Heel in its formative