Martin Eden
Martin Eden is one of Jack London's greatest works . The partly autobiographical novel first appeared in 1909 . It is the story of an uneducated, uncouth, but worldly young man who heroically tries to win the affection of a girl from the upper class. Martin Eden believes that the only way to be worthy of the love of the young Ruth Morse is to gain education and respect. However, he cannot afford a school or a teacher and thus decides to teach himself. In this way, stories are revealed to him that are worth telling, stories about his own life and that of others, stories that tell his experiences in a social class, with Ruth, her parents, her brothers and their social environment is frowned upon.
content
Martin continues to learn undeterred and thereby gains Ruth's affection and love. From now on he decides to be a writer rather than a bank clerk, a teacher or a lawyer. The greater his devotion to the use of the newly acquired knowledge, to the refinement of his language, expressiveness and ability to tell his fictional and autobiographical stories that give voice to his past as a sailor, and the further his knowledge in worldly, profane matters grows, the more his dormant talent develops.
Martin Eden's self-taught training is put to the test when he is first introduced to Ruth's lively, educated friends and teachers. Martin discovers that his knowledge not only keeps pace with those who got their school reports the usual way, but that his independent work on his own education has given him a better understanding of life and politics. Eden becomes even more convinced that he can write and that his stories will sell, in short, that he can entertain himself as a writer. However, he becomes discouraged by his own family and, even worse, after Eden undertook this self-taught masterpiece of self-education, Ruth and her parents as well.
Martin fights for Ruth's support by discussing his works with her, asking her to use her own critical intelligence to confirm for herself that the stories of the man who loves her have value and that others will read them . Eden continues his writing with an almost obsessive confidence that seems to grow stronger with each day that the editors refuse to publish his stories.
Martin devotes every hour to writing, but still doesn't find an audience for his stories, becomes a poor man and thus unacceptable to Ruth's environment. Before long, Martin is rejected by Ruth, her parents, and her family's socially prominent friends. His stories remain unpublished.
But just when the rejection is greatest and his future is deeply endangered, the long-awaited success suddenly sets in. However, in the end this will only turn out to be the most lasting stroke of fate that Eden has to endure in his life. One of Martin's obscure manuscripts, a work with a deeply philosophical undertone and by no means one of his best works, is published and welcomed by the establishment. He becomes the author who is now scrambling for the same editors who previously rejected him most consistently and repeatedly. They are now offering him unprecedented top prices for his stories. But by that time he had long since given up writing. He is physically weakened by the recurring phases of hunger, emotionally drained and at the time of his success a broken man. His defeat is so complete and so deeply felt by him that no success can cheer him up. He is invited as a guest of honor to social meetings of socially prominent citizens, but cannot overcome the realization that it is one and the same people who have avoided his publicly recognized success as a writer due to his insignificant origin and social position.
Martin says: "[They] now accept me for a job that has already been done." He is now accepted unconditionally by Ruth and her family for the same work, the exact same skills and stories that he was previously ridiculed for when he seemed to be drowning in poverty as an unknown author. Martin is fully aware that Ruth's love and affection are based solely on his new fame.
Time comparison - the world then and now
Martin Eden's success is well deserved, but the experience of having been rejected helps him to see the falsehood of fame. Martin knows that the absence of his social acceptance made Ruth and those around her unable to see what was really valuable. Ruth is only able to love Martin after the rest of the world has confirmed what her education and the consciousness of her class were not prepared to accept. Since the good and the true, i.e. the quality, cannot be measured by the number of publications by an author and it is not a question of the acceptance and awareness of modern mass society, Eden logically concludes that this society simply cannot recognize the good and the true .
Martin Eden's story invites us to be careful, to naively place our trust in the knowledge of the establishment. Editors decide what to publish, but editors are just as contaminated with blindness and ignorance as Ruth and her family are.
epilogue
The moral of the Martin Eden story is not that good will ultimately win. Although the reader longs for a happy ending for Martin Eden's sake, Jack London steers his story in a completely different direction. To escape the hypocrisy and hypocrisy of his world, Martin embarks on the steamship “Mariposa”, which has an island in the South Pacific as its destination. One night, driven by an increasing indifference to the world and his own life, he decides to leave the ship on the high seas to drown himself in the sea. He glides quietly through the porthole of his cabin into the dark water of the ocean while the “Mariposa” drives towards her destination.
Martin Eden's success shows us how we judge whether something is good and how society (especially forms of social awareness) leads to harmful and false opinions when judging whether something (or someone) is valuable or true. The story of Martin Eden - a story about desire, about education, about material poverty and the realization of the poverty of social values - is a story about the ethics of humanity. Martin Eden fails by achieving his goal. It is a failure of our world, in which skills and knowledge are only accepted if they are felt to be right by the respective establishment. It's not just a problem that a writer grapples with in search of his audience, but a problem that each of us must grapple with at some point, in search of those others who see the truth in his words.
Adaptations
The novel has been adapted several times for film or television. As early as 1914, a film adaptation was made under the direction of Hobart Bosworth , on which Jack London himself worked and in which he can also be seen. The Adventures of Martin Eden followed in 1942 with Glenn Ford in the role of Martin Eden and in 1979 the four-part television film Martin Eden . In this co-production by RAI and ZDF , Martin Eden is portrayed by Christopher Connelly .
Aude Samama and Denis Lapière edited the novel as a graphic novel .
expenditure
- Jack London: Martin Eden , ISBN 9968-9950-6-1 ( online copy from Project Gutenberg )
- Jack London: Martin Eden ; translated by Lutz-W. Wolff; with an afterword, notes and a timetable; dtv, Munich 2016; ISBN 978-3-423-28081-5
literature
- Sacvan Bercovitch, Cyrus RK Patell: The Cambridge History of American Literature: Prose writing, 1860-1920 . Cambridge University Press 2005, ISBN 0521301076 , pp. 287-290, 396-409
- David Minter: A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner . Cambridge University Press 1996, ISBN 0521467497 , pp. 26, 41, 45, 54-63
- Jeanne Campbell Reesman: Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography . University of Georgia Press 2009, ISBN 9780820327891
- Charles N. Watson, Jr: The Composition of Martin Eden . American Literature Vol. 53, No. 3 (Nov. 1981), pp. 397-408
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Marsha Orgeron: Rethinking Authorship: Jack London and the Motion Picture Industry . American Literature March 2003 75 (1): pp. 91–117, esp. 102 ( online copy ; PDF; 538 kB)
- ↑ Aude Samama & Denis Lapière: Martin Eden (d'après le roman de Jack London) , Futuropolis , Paris 2016, ISBN 978-2-75481-013-5 ; German edition: Martin Eden. Based on the novel by Jack London. Translated from the French by Anja Kootz. Knesebeck , Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-95728-049-7 .