Misinterpreting the Unreadable: Jack London's "The Chinago" and "The Whale Tooth"

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 Absolute Text. "The Chinago" is a tale that grows out of one of the two great reasons for white European presence in the South Seas--commercial exploitation; "The Whale Tooth" exposes the other great reason--the Christian missionary impulse to show that accurate perception of the world is only reliably provided by one, true, immutable and sacred text. In addition, we want to argue here that these somewhat neglected stories only open up their true depths in the light of critical approaches developed nearly half a century after they were written.

Both the first sentence of the "Chinago" and the last deal with knowing. The first, "Ah Cho did not understand French" (London, "Chinago' 1405), and the last, "That much he knew before he ceased to know" (1417), trace the main character's movement from abstract, cultural and linguistic alienation and ignorance to direct, unambiguous, and perfectly private, albeit limited, knowledge and experience. Between these statements of inarticulate ignorance and transcendent certainty, the text presents several internal texts that obscure interpretation.

Briefly, the story concerns Ah Cho, a Chinese laborer imported by plantation owners to work in Tahiti. In the third year of his indenture, Ah Cho has been a witness to the murder of another coolie. However, on the testimony of a plantation overseer, Ah Cho and four companions are arrested and charged with the murder. Ah Cho knows who did the murder, as do all the other Chinese laborers, and he assumes the French ought to be able to discern it also. The first part of the story is framed by a trial--theoretically a search for the Truth; however, from the accused's perspective, the process is unintelligible because it is in French. Inside the frame of the judicial proceedings are Ah Cho's reflections and memories of the past as well as his plans and anticipations. Sure of his innocence, he looks forward to a rich and contented future back in China. After the verdict, the second part of the story concerns the efforts of the innocent but convicted prisoners to adjust to their new condition. Completely at odds with the facts as the prisoners know them, all five are to be punished: "Ah Chow should have his head cut off, Ah Cho serve twenty years in prison in New Caledonia, Wong Li twelve years, and Ah Tong ten years" (1409). The third section of the story details the final sets of misinterpretations as Ah Cho is mistakenly led to his execution, trying to explain that it was Ah Chow who had been sentenced to the guillotine, and that he is Ah Cho.

Each section of the story contains references to botched interpretations. London employs several structural devices to offer up a labyrinth of spoken testimonies, written texts, and unspoken recollections conveyed by a distant and objective narrator with selectively limited omniscience. A fairly complete list of all the texts (written and otherwise) mentioned within the narrative is almost numbing: testimony, statements, law, contracts, judgments, proceedings, signatures, indentures, meditations, riddles, certificates, reports, insults, curses, signals, marks, sentences, maxims, orders, jokes, pictures, recollections, reprimands, passages, instructions, and tracts.