It was evening like every other day. However, I did not find this evening normal at all in my house. I was running around, setting the table, and carefully cleaning things up to get ready for tonight’s guest. My mouth doesn’t open even when I tell you how tired I am.
The next guest was Jack London, one of my favorite authors. Why was he coming, what was the reason for this? If you are going to ask, there was a new novel that I was writing at that time, and we decided to talk at my house to help with the descriptions I would use in the work. There were so many questions I wanted to ask him—about himself, his work, and his experiences—that I can’t bear to say them all. Anyway, he finally came to my house at the agreed time. It was one thing for us to greet him at the door and move to the table.
Before I talked about the novel, I started asking my other questions. “Mr. London, why don’t you include utopian thoughts when you always talk about dystopian ideas in your works?” Jack London remained silent for a long time. Then he began to explain slowly. “Most of my life has been difficult. As a result of the experiences I have had both since my childhood and when I was a writer, I used to be an optimist, but now I have become an individual who is completely rebellious and defends socialism. As a result of this change, it went as far as the arrests that came to me, which I clearly described in my book The Way. Apart from these, with some exceptions, as a result of the plagiarism accusations against me and the deterioration of the situation in my marriage or political life, I generally included dystopian thoughts in my works. Also, I believe that the existence of dystopian thoughts is actually our biggest helper in showing us the truth.”
After this conversation, I asked another question, which was less profound than the previous one. “Do the dogs mentioned in the novels Call of the Wild and White Fang, which are among your most well-known works, come from real life?” Jack London, on the other hand, pasted his answer as if he was expecting this question. “It is true that the dog I refer to in The Call of the Wild really came from a dog lent to me by the owners of the Bond farm. In White Fang, the situation is a little different, I can describe it as a kind of adaptation of a chain of events from my own life in literature.”
As the clock ticked, Jack London unexpectedly asked me to share with me the plot of my novel and my comments on the ideas I was influenced by while writing the novel. I started to tell him exactly what I interpreted and how I interpreted it and a short summary of the subject of my book. “As for the subject of the novel I wrote, I can’t say that it is very similar to yours. The novel begins with a desert town. This town was spending its time on its own with the products that came out of the arid and infertile lands around it. One day, life is blocked by heavy downpours that suddenly start in the town. After more than a month of downpour, the already arid lands had turned green and the surroundings were lively. However, the townspeople do not know what to do with the greenery, and due to the decreasing problems, the people begin to suspect that something is wrong with it. I try to write pretty well at expressing the paradox that the subject of the book is in the process of getting used to a utopian environment.” Jack London eagerly said after I told him about it, “I see that we are not the only ones trying to write a dystopia. Why did you choose such a thing as the subject of this novel, and what was the reason for that?” he asked. So I started to explain one by one. “My biggest source of inspiration for the subject of the novel is that although I sometimes get angry about the emotional contradictions I experience inside me and the inconsistency I see around me, when I am calm, I inevitably question this calmness, which led to the need to write this novel.” Jack London didn’t say anything, we both understood the situation, there is no freedom from pain and inner contradictions in this world. And that sense of questioning will always exist.
Bibliography: Wikipedia