Love in time of need

A recent write up in the New Yorker, on American novelist and social activist Jack London fascinated me, because, among other things, the write up posed a poignant question in light of London's obsession with conditions of material poverty and hunger: "In the absence of money, food, heat, or other necessities, can there be love?"

This question interests me because I've been studying representations of poverty and representations of those whom we label the "poor" in texts of all kinds and in multiple discourses.

Love is rarely a part of these representations and discourses, because the conditions that inspire emotions of love are not the conditions of material wretchedness. 

Somehow, in our minds, love is associated with an above-the-poverty-line existence. That is why even when we see irrefutable evidences of love in ghettos, for instance, we dismiss and deride them as not love, but animal lust, the consequences of which are bound to be disastrous--teen age pregnancy, unwanted procreation, disease, and finally that all-American dread of dependency on the state (to feed the products of ghetto love).

But Jack London, an early representer of the American poor in fiction, thought otherwise.

Love in conditions of indigence is the theme of London's best-selling novel, The Call of the Wild. But the hero is a dog, who finds love and expresses it by closing his mouth around one of his master's hands, "so fiercely that the flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterwards."

The master recognizes the (feigned) bite for a caress. 

In London's short story, "Love of Life", the bite, from a wolf, has darker insinuations.

At the end of the story, a famished man and a sick wolf lie down, side by side, exhausted after days of mutual stalking. The man, drifting in and out of consciousness, feels the wolf licking his hand, and thinks of how the wolf is exerting its last bit of energy in an effort to sink its teeth in the food it has been wanting to have for so long.

Like Plato, London perhaps reaches for a higher love, the love for one's fellow being, or a more social kind of love, that flourishes in conditions of material destitution. 

He wrote, that the "very poor can always be depended upon [as] they never turn away the hungry." 

He also implies that it is easier to love the poor back. In one of his stories, the hero is a right-wing man who has to assume the alias of a working-class man to do his fieldwork. He discovers that when he is in his alias, brawling and drinking, he is much looser, warmer, freer, and sexually richer; he abandons himself to his provisional identity forever.