Evolution and atavism in Jack London's Before Adam

¶ … Evolution in Before Adam

Jack London was, in keeping with his time, fascinated with the emerging Theory of Evolution. This is evident in a number of his works, but no more so than in Before Adam. In this novella London places evolution in a central role, not simply choosing to highlight it in a passage here and there, as he does in Daughter of the Snows and White Fang, but by using it to supply the central conflict and to propel the narrative forward. As the narrator himself says in the opening chapters, "Evolution was the key. It gave the explanation, gave sanity to the pranks of this atavistic brain of mine that, modern and normal, harked back to a past so remote as to be contemporaneous with the raw beginnings of mankind."

The words 'atavist' and 'atavistic' are used repeatedly throughout the text. These words, nearly foreign to us today, would have been well-known to London's contemporary readership, immersed in evolutionary debate. An atavist is an evolutionary throwback, or someone who demonstrates characteristics of an ealier evolutionary stage of development. It is significant that both the novella's unnamed narrator and its main antagonist are atavists.

The narrator, we are told, has been plagued by nightmares since childhood. These nightmares - more upsetting for their foreigness than their content - are brief, disordered episodes in the life of a proto-human who, the narrator determines, is one of his evolutionary ancestors. The narrator tells us that he is otherwise quite normal, but that these dreams are upsetting to him because he is keenly aware that, although there is a scientific precedent for them, they are unusual. As a result of the dreams, he feels himself to be an outsider ("I am a freak - a freak of heredity") and we get the impression that he is disengaged from his life. He speaks of dissociation and says that "I have never been a zealous student. I graduated last of my class. I cared more for atheletics and... more for billiards."

The antagonist in the story is an atavist of another kind. Red-Eye is a huge ape-like creature in the dream. He pursues the narrator's proto-human counterpart, Big-Tooth, and bears more of a resemblance to the now-defunct tree-dwelling species than to the cave-dwellers he lives with and who defer to his strength. Red-Eye is an outsider in his own right, and in this way mirrors the narrator. Accordingly, the conflict in the novella - both the textual conflict between Big-Tooth and Red-Eye, and the subtextual conflict between the alienated narrator and his world - is, clearly, a conflict between atavists and normals. It is a conflict rooted in evolution.

The other main use of evolution in the novella is that of a means of moving the story forward. As the narrator admits frankly, "I did not dream consecutively." The story he tells us has been pieced together from his dream fragments and even what he presents is only loosely chronological. In the end, the motivating force of the narrative is evolution itself. It is evolution that moves the story forward and evolution that brings it to an ending that is, like evolution, not entirely conclusive.