Copyright © 2004 Louis Suárez-Potts

At the turn of the century, there were millions of men tramping. Contemporary critics have argued that the tramp differed from other working-class men only in that he was homeless and nomadic. But such a reading neglect the force of turn-of-the-century accounts of the tramp as at once dangerous and romantic, and as jeopardizing the logic of the will that underwrote not just the work ethic but liberal conceptions of the person.

In interpreting the tramp, turn-of-the-century writers imagined him—always a him, there were no, or at least very few, women tramps—as embodying the characteristics of hysteria: of lacking or perverting the element that would have lifted him from the periphery and made him centrally respectable, the will. This paper will examine the play of that conception, and the way the lack of the will was understood by writers such as Jack London to be, perhaps, not such a bad thing at all. I focus on William James and on Jack London, especially his extraordinary anti-child-labor story, "The Apostate," of 1906 and his quasi-autobiographical romance of tramping and love, Martin Eden (1909).

In his 1890 review of Pierre Janet’s work on hysteria and the role of "automatism" in its symptomalogy ("The Hidden Self" in Scribner’s Magazine), James praises Janet’s research as shedding light on the "Unclassified Residuum" of the human mind, especially on the related phenomena of hysteria and multiple personality. Psychologists had previously noted the relation between the two, and both were seen as exemplifying the disintegration of the subject brought about by the weakening of the will. Will" or "self-government" preserved an otherwise vulnerable personal identity: Without the cohering barrier offered by a functional will (which enabled day-to-day consciousness), the self of the subject was open to the influence of other wills and mysterious impulses arising from within the person of the hysteric. For the exhausted or traumatized subject, "the abandoned part . . . may solidify into a secondary or sub-conscious self" ("Hidden" 371). That is, a kind of mutiny can be initiated in the body and mind of the hysteric, with various "parts" gaining a sort of autonomy. But "[i]n a perfectly sound subject . . . what is dropped out of mind at one moment keeps coming back at the next. The whole fund of experiences and knowledge remains integrated, and no split-off portions of it can get organized stably enough to form subordinate selves" (371). A normal self, in short integrates the embryonic identities and thus cuts short their influence. Left to their own devices, in the weak and abnormal self, these virtually autonomous parts grow to identity and take control over parts of the body. Moreover, the logic that James relates in his review allows that we are all susceptible, to a greater or lesser degree, to psychological or cerebral mutiny. Indeed, James goes on to wonder just that: "How far this splitting up of the mind into separate consciousness may obtain in each one of us is a problem" (371). It’s a problem because it’s never quite clear, in this logic, when we are being only ourselves. After all, what keeps us us, rests on the strength of our "unifying or coordinating power" (371).

James’s review substantially duplicates or is duplicated by a chapter in his Psychology, Chapter VIII, "The Relations of Minds to Other Things" (Psychology I, 199-223), in which James expands the article to investigate the relation between the mind and the body. The mind’s "relations to other objects than the brain are cognitive and emotional relations exclusively" (Psychology I, 216). This means that "When it seems to act upon them, it only does so through the intermediary of its own body, . . . and the brain must first act upon the body" (216; emphasis his). In order for any action to take place, the physiology must function adequately: it must take the orders of the mind (not brain) without question. For, in James’s psychology, what enables personal identity is a relation of will to object that is predicated on a conception of property that presumes an axiomatic control over the object owned. For the sane person, then, the body part he wants to move will move, all other things functioning properly. The machinery of the body effects the acts of will.

Not surprisingly, then, James could argue that automatic behavior is important to us as individuals and as social beings. Because the will is consumable, we must "make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can" (emphasis his), for "the more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work" (Psychology I 122). The advantage, then, of habit—or mechanical behavior—is that it frees us from, as James adds in the same chapter, the "miserable" condition in which everything, all quotidian acts of simple consumption and production are "subjects of express volitional deliberation" (Psychology I 122). If we don’t husband our will, we can lose it, and also lose also all our property. (Psychology I 291). Without property, the empirical self is seen as verging into "nothingness"—a quality shared by the "tramps and poor devils whom we despise" (Psychology II 293). "Property" defines the "Self" and its public relations; it makes us creditable, not despicable, like the tramps. Perhaps not so oddly, when James constructed this rather moralizing psychology of the social "me," tramps were a common sight. Yet instead of seeing the tramp as embodying economic effects, James sees in him moral causes. The tramp comes to lack property—of self, of things—because he lacks the right habits of mind and person, habits that would insure his continued identity, his propertied identity, in the world of things and people. Tramps are thus despicable not just because they don’t own property, but because as tramps, they personify the inability to own property.

In contrast, for London, tramping rejects the forms of the will and habit suggested by James’s logic; for London, the dissolution of the mechanics of the will is a good thing, at least insofar as it allows the realization of beauty and desire. Trampland for London is characterized by a redemption of the body dismembered by instrumental work and by an embodied desire that has little to do with the working effects of the will. In a sense, London would agree with James: the tramp does not and cannot own property. But that is not a problem at all; rather, it is his saving grace, and though it has its limits, tramping—being unowned and dispossessed—always ends up being better than working.

Why? Will makes for mechanical work. Automaticity is precisely the problem. In the mechanized laundry where Martin works towards the middle of Martin Eden it’s not just Martin’s labor that is alienated from him; it is his "thoughts," too. "All Martin’s consciousness was concentrated in the work. Ceaselessly active, head and hand, an intelligent machine, and all that constituted him a man was devoted to furnishing that intelligence" (130). As a sailor he was a man who had the freedom of his thoughts, but as a laundry worker he is a man only insofar as he provides the intelligence that runs his body: "The echoing chamber of his soul was a narrow room, a conning tower, whence was directed his arm and shoulder muscles, his ten nimble fingers, and the swift-moving iron . . . ." (130). Those hands, moved by his "conning tower" soul, work with "an automatic accuracy, founded upon criteria that were machine-like and unerring" (129). They work, that is, as if without his supervision they might do things he would know nothing about. His body parts can be controlled not because they’re his but because, as with Johnny of "The Apostate," he is "in intimate relationship" not just "with machines," but with his body (London, Portable 122); he is no longer quite the owner of his own body, merely the manager of the prostheses that once were his hands. As Martin gazes wonderingly at the graceful efficiency of "his" automatic hand, he is removed to the point of experiencing a nearly hysterical disinterestedness.

Paradoxically, from the perspective of the laundry workers, "will" is something that prosthetizes the worker. In this regard, then, will, as a defining term of liberal identity, becomes something objectionable to the factory workers. The operation of the will spells not the acquisition of autonomy, but its loss, and the transformation of the worker into the "intelligent machine" whose exact and repeated motions can nevertheless be oddly described as automatic.

In a powerful reading of the "cultural logistics" of the "body machine complex" informing much of London’s works, Mark Seltzer has argued that in regard to the exemplary "The Apostate," "London’s case study in fatigue thus epitomizes the transposition of the character of the energy-converting machines and the character of the natural body: not the demotion of the living body to the machine but their intimate correlation" (Seltzer 13). Seltzer seems to mean by this transposition the convergence of the use-history of persons, workers, and machines, and their metallic elements. This convergence, Seltzer argues, reaches a prominence around the turn of the century, and it differs from the earlier and simpler notion that

machines replace bodies and persons (as in, for example, Melville’s earlier account . . . .); nor is it accounted for primarily in the notion that persons are already machines . . . ; nor is it "covered" in the notion that technologies make bodies and persons (as in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s or Baden-Powell’s programs for the systematic making of men). . . . [Rather, there is] the radical and intimate coupling of bodies and machines.

(12-13; emphasis in the original)

Whereas before people were reduced to being machines, or thought of as being made like machines (manufactured, in factories), now there is the more subtle "miscegenation of the natural and the cultural: the erosion of the boundaries that divide persons and things, labor and nature, what counts as an agent and what doesn’t" (21). By "coupling," Seltzer presumably means a joining that is at once mechanical (the coupling of adjacent boxcars), and sexual; the term is both an extension and an alternative to the phrase we saw above from "The Apostate": "‘There had never been a time when he had not been in intimate relationship with machines’" (London 122). And the sexual, in Seltzer’s account of naturalist body/machines, is presumably like the "machinic" sexuality that informs La bête humaine (a text which evidences the "violent erotics" of the machinic-sexual "crossings"), and is concerned with the erotic destruction of the body, and its equally erotic replacement with the machinic prosthetic.

Seltzer doesn’t decode the sexual tension informing "The Apostate," but rather details the structure of identity effected by the "miscegenation" of what could be called a body and what could be called a machine. Yet it is that tension, produced by the miscegenation of bodies and machines that compels Johnny in the story to become a tramp. Indeed, Johnny’s machined lack of desire, and its replacement with the mechanical, is the crucial element in the story, and its redemption (coincident with his apostasy) the climax of the story. Johnny’s entry into trampland figures the repudiation of the home, presided over by his mother. It’s an important repudiation, for it explicitly aligns the factory with the feminine domestic in its work of turning desiring men into machines.

Johnny (the "perfect worker [who] had evolved into the perfect machine" [London, "The Apostate" 127]), comes to lack any "illusion"; as he becomes more perfectly mechanical, he progressively eliminates desire from his life. The brief love for the "daughter of the superintendent" (127, 126) has disappeared, as has his desire for other bodily pleasures and appetites, the most telling of which is his desire for a special dessert, Floating Island: "[f]or years he had looked forward to the day when he would sit down to the table with floating island ["better than custard," his other treat] before him, until at last he had relegated the idea of it to the limbo of unattainable ideals" (128). As the perfect machine, he can bring home more money, so his mother, who not only works and makes the home but is his taskmaster, can actually make him the fabulous dessert. It doesn’t matter; when he finally encounters a floating island, it means nothing to him; he does not recognize the object of his mother’s stories of desire and beauty, and he goes "through the meal in moody silence, mechanically eating what was before him" (132). The dessert event is a watershed. It simultaneously marks his utter mechanization and stages his decline into the illness (a "severe attack of la grippe" [131]) that presages his tramping. In the week of relief his illness gives him, Johnny "figures" out what he’s been doing and what he wants. "I’m going away," he tells his scandalized mother, the day he recovers enough to know better than to get out of bed for the factory work his mother wants him to do, and he doesn’t care where (132). Tramping gives Johnny the respite from the "moves" that he’s been making "since he was born" (133). As a hobo, his actions won’t be counted, and he can extend the desirable immobility of his body, its resistance to work, of which he first learned when sick.

The point of being a tramp for Johnny is to abstract himself from the institutions that limit his desires—the home, the factory. By tramping, Johnny situates himself in a nomadic space that is irreducible to the machinic, and, importantly, to the domestic. That is, in aiming the story against child labor, London ends up hitting not (or not merely) the depredatory mill that employs Johnny and his underage coworkers but, more importantly, Johnny’s home. Less a refuge from the mechanizing factory (a mill, in this case) that domestic space is more a reminder of the compulsions to work; in fact, it’s a continuation of the logic of the mill by other means. Indeed, it’s the mother who throughout the story provides the compulsion, the guilt, for Johnny to work. Lest he seem like an unredeemable misogynist here, London is not out to portray the mother as merely and malevolently party to child labor. Rather, the emphasis is on the system of production and reproduction that miscegenates (to use Seltzer’s term) factories and homes, and that blurs the distinctions between the mechanical factory and the domestic. And in this miscegenated space, the mother puts in motion this scandal of production that, in London’s prose, literally unmans Johnny and transforms him into a "piece of life" (134). It is only ill, when his body can’t work, or as a tramp, when he won’t, that he can exit the industrial space of the home and factory and enter the boxcar to rest. The miscegenation of bodies and machines that Seltzer describes works here as the miscegenation of spaces (factory/home), and to the detriment of the male worker who can only see the feminine symbol of desire—the "Floating Island," as but another task requiring a series of countable, willed movements.

I want to finish by suggesting the something about the promise that London saw in tramping; why he returned to it as a theme, despite his knowledge of the facts of tramping, and despite his profound reservations that it held any political hope. In a particularly vivid section of his essay "The Tramp," in which London passionately and incoherent argues for the sympathetic treatment of the tramp, London describes the stolen pleasures of tramping:

If he [the worker] has fought the hard fight, he is not unacquainted with the lure of the "road." When out of work and still undiscouraged, he has been forced to "hit the road" between large cities in his quest for a job. He has loafed, seen the country and green things, laughed in joy, laid on his back and listened to the birds singing overhead, unannoyed by factory whistles and bosses’ harsh commands; and, most significant of all, he has lived. That is the point! Not only has he been care-free and happy, but he has lived! And from the knowledge that he has idled and is still alive, he achieves a new outlook on life; and the more he experiences the unenviable lot of the poor worker, the more the blandishments of the ‘road’ take hold of him. And finally he flings his challenge in the face of society, imposes a valorous boycott on all work, and joins the far-wanderers of Hobo-land, the gypsy-folk of this latter day.

Jack London, "The Tramp," in Etulain 134

"Better a hobo than a beast of toil," Martin says to Joe, his coworker, who, inspired by Martin’s drunken observation that the work at the Shelley Hot Springs resort laundry is transforming them into "intelligent machine[s]," "beast[s]," has decided to quit his job at the laundry and go hoboing, or tramping, and "live."

As it happens, it’s a good decision. At the end of Martin Eden, after Martin has become an immensely successful and influential writer in the society he disdains, he encounters his former coworker Joe one night. Joe has been tramping, and therefore, we recall, living: "I never knew what it was to live till I hit hoboin’. I’m thirty pounds heavier, an’ feel tiptop all the time. Why I was worked to skin an’ bone in them old days! Hoboin’ sure agrees with me" (337). Hoboing—tramping—for Joe frustrates a heterosexual desire that is identical to the desire to enter into propertied relations (something the tramp, of course, can’t do). Thus, after Martin elevates Joe (by buying the incredulous Joe a laundry, of all things), Joe changes his mind about the pleasures of tramping:

"No more road in mine, thank you kindly. Hoboin’s all right, exceptin’ for one thing—the girls. I can’t help it, but I’m a ladies’ man. I can’t get along without ‘em, and you’ve got to get along without ‘em when you’re hoboin’. The times I’ve passed by houses where dances an’ parties was goin’ on, an’ heard the women laugh, an’ saw their white dresses and smiling faces through the windows—gee! I tell you, them moments was plain hell! I like dancin’, an’ picnics, an’ walking in the moonlight, an’ all the rest, too well. Me for the laundry [Martin gives him] and good front, with big iron dollars clinkin’ in my jeans. I seen a girl already, just yesterday, an’, d’ye know, I’m feelin’ already I’d just as soon marry her as not. … Me for her, you can stack on that."

(342-343)

Tramping may be good for the body, but it isn’t good for gaining the company of women. In fact, as London makes clear in "The Tramp," the tramp is a eunuch. Joe’s body is nourished, but his greater substance doesn’t translate him into the economy of the market that would allow him to exercise his desire for women; it only makes him peripheral to the central action of society, production and reproduction. In giving Joe the laundry (a process incomplete until they wrestle), Martin thus moves Joe from an exclusively male and homosocial world to one that unites the feminine with the industrial and is defined by its visually alluring women who, seem to want Joe’s "big iron dollars clinkin’" in his jeans over Joe himself. Or, that is, who have desire for Joe only because of the exchange value of the iron in his jeans. Indeed, the point of being in the heteronormative world of economic relations is to be infinitely exchanged. Joe’s desires for the propertied world of women and things is thus phrased in terms that imply that Joe will simply exchange himself for the laundry ("me for the laundry"), for her ("me for her"). Desire for property, for women, gestures toward a disappearing act of the male subject, and a continuation of the instrumentalism that we saw in the laundry.

The terms of the equation, x for y, do not specify the will, but there is no need. In a tactic that continues the logic of will and (feminine) desire we saw in "The Apostate," a particularly productive and heterosexual desire has metonymically replaced the will as the device of turning men into "intelligent machines." Joe’s previous refrain of "me for work" becomes here "me for her." There is no difference. The problem is production, a particularly vexed form of it, that threatens to replace the subject with the objects of his production. Tramping offers an out from this system of production, even as it engages, as Leslie Fiedler might have argued, central motifs in the construction of the American male.

Works Cited

Anderson, Nels. On Hobos and Homelessness. Edited and with an introduction by Raffaele Rauty. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Davis, Michael. "Forced to Tramp: The Perspective of the Labor Press, 1870–1900." In Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790–1935. Ed., Eric H. Monkkonen. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. London and New York: Verso, 1987.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1969.

Etulain, Richard, ed. Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1979.

Fiedler, Leslie. "Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!" In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By Mark Twain. 1885. Eds., Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995.

Foner, Philip S., ed. The Social Writings of Jack London. Seacaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1947.

James, William. "The Hidden Self." Scribner's Magazine, 7 (Jan. 1890):361–373.

---. Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. 1890. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1950.

London, Jack. Martin Eden. 1909. Penguin Books, Ltd.: Harmondsworth, England, 1968.

---. The Road. 1907. In Novels and Social Writings. Ed., Donald Pizer. New York: The Library of America, 1982.

---. "The Apostate." 1906. In The Portable Jack London. Ed., Earl Labor. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

---. "The Tramp."

Monkkonen, Eric H. "Introduction." In Walking to Work: Tramping in America, 1790–1935. Ed., Eric H. Monkkonen. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.