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In his tales of the South Seas, Jack London so often employs dark humor and grim irony in order to illuminate the ruthless exploitation of nonwhite people by white capitalist interlopers that, at first reading, "The Chinago" and "The Whale Tooth" seem to offer little that is different. In one a person of color, a Chinese "coolie," is caught in the harrow of European efforts to colonize and exploit the resources of a remote island. In the other a white man becomes the victim of his own impulse to proselytize the benighted "heathen" on Melanesia. Both stories depict victims of the clash of cultures, and in both an innocent man dies because the world's varying races seem incapable of mutual understanding. Another reading, however, reveals a profoundly layered series of misread texts, of misunderstood data, all related to the inability of characters to interpret their situation, and all tending to promote violence because of culture-bound epistemologies.
Both stories have been rather neglected by critics ("The Whale Tooth" hardly given passing mention), even though King Hendricks has called "The Chinago" "the greatest story of London's career," citing its "building of an atmosphere, the telling of a narrative, and the development of irony" (Hendricks 24). Neither story is mentioned in the introduction to the recently published edition of The Complete Short Stories of Jack London edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard.
What strikes us in the case of "The Chinago" and "The Whale Tooth" is how singularly and how invitingly the texts offer themselves to modern critical penetration. Jeanne C. Reesman, writing about London's "The Water Baby," addresses the hermeneutic approach to knowledge London took in his most mature work, especially after reading Jung (201 ). We would add that "The Chinago" and "The Whale Tooth" are pre-Jungian attempts by London to address "his life-long preoccupation with the problem of knowing the self" (202) and also the problem of knowing anything with certainty.
If "The Chinago" demonstrates that fatal misunderstandings can arise from ignorance of the truth and foolish reliance on the text, "The Whale Tooth" sardonically explores the parallel possibility that it can also be disastrous to be quite sure of the Absolute Truth and the invincibility afforded by an...