Martin Eden and the Catastrophe of Self-Creation
No modern novel captures the danger of radical self-creation more powerfully than Jack London's Martin Eden.
Martin, a self-educated sailor determined to become a writer, constructs himself through extraordinary force of will. He reads, studies, writes, suffers rejection, and refuses to accept the identity assigned to him by his social environment.
His ambition is admirable.
It is also dangerous.
Martin's entire identity becomes dependent upon self-creation. He believes that if he can make himself into the person he imagines, the world will eventually recognize him.
It does.
And that recognition destroys him.
When success finally arrives, Martin discovers that society is not really interested in the person he has become. The same people who rejected him now praise him because he is famous. His public identity becomes detached from his private self.
The tragedy is not simply that society was hypocritical. It is that Martin had invested so much of himself in defeating society's judgement that, once he had won, he no longer knew what the victory was worth.
His self-created identity has become a prison.
London makes the irony particularly cruel. The author who created Martin Eden died only a few years after the novel's publication. His death has encouraged generations of readers to interpret the novel autobiographically, although Martin cannot simply be reduced to a portrait of London.
The temptation is nevertheless irresistible.
We read the novel and then look at the author's life.
The boundary between fiction and self-explanation begins to dissolve.
