AT THE FORMAL LIMITS

Abstract

Through a reading of C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (a reading of Melville's Moby Dick, which James wrote while imprisoned on Ellis Island in 1952 awaiting deportation hearings), this essay examines James's effort to rethink – through an anti-colonial and Marxist lens – the political limits of the novel form in general and the realist novel in particular as representational regimes. The essay begins by examining how James uses his own status as a political alien not merely to ‘reinterpret’ Moby Dick but more importantly to (re)tell what he claims was the novel's intended but ultimately ‘untold’ central story – i.e. that of the crew – a collectivity of stateless migrants and refugees labouring in the shadow of US Empire. That these stories remained untold, for James, was not merely a political choice but a formal one – that is, these experiences of migrant labour and collectivity haunt the ideological and representational limits of the realist novel. As such, I argue, ‘retelling’ these untold stories requires not merely different content but more importantly, for James, different forms of representation. Often considered an odd literary interpretation of Moby Dick, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways – with its generic mix of criticism, memoir and political commentary – can instead be read, I argue, as James's effort to enact precisely this different form of representation – as an effort to decentre the realist novel as the privileged form of postcolonial representation and articulate a different representational mode – one that might rethink the relationship between artist/intellectual and the ‘people’ (including James's own) and one that might enable the stories of the ‘mariners, renegades and castaways’ haunting both Melville's novel and the US to be heard.

Keywords:

• C. L. R. James
• form
• migrant labor
• the novel
• realism
• US empire

Notes

¹Prior to Pease's reassessment of Mariners (in particular his introduction to the book's reissue in 2001), critics consistently accused James's book of falling victim to its political circumstances. James's often celebratory evocations of American democratic culture in the book, juxtaposed with his repeated denunciations of communism and the Soviet Union, led many to argue that James – facing imminent deportation – used his reading of Melville to tell Cold War America what it wanted to hear. James's excellent biographer, Paul Buhle, for example, rejected the book, claiming that it was ‘the least representative of his major works’ (Buhle 1988: 106) in which James ‘more nearly approached an apologia for social life under capitalism than at any other time before or since’ (110); Darrel Levi claimed the book ‘suffered from James's immediate crisis. His denunciations of communism and communists … intended to persuade McCarthy era immigration authorities of his political respectability – were too categorical and unfair’ (1991: 492); and Timothy Brennan accused it of ‘seriously exaggerating the merely nominal democracy of America’, and that it was, in the end, a work ‘of Anti-Communism with a Capital C’ (Brennan 1997: 224). One notable exception to this critical trend is Cedric Robinson's (1995) compelling essay. Since the book's reissue, critical attention has generally shifted to the more radical political undercurrents of the text's critique of Cold War America and the modern nation-state in general – in particular within the context of the transnational or post-national ‘turn’ in American studies. See, for example, Gair (2006) and Stephens (2005: 204–41).

²See also Pease (1997, 2000).

³Following James's argument, we might see Melville's effort to represent and give voice to this emergent class of migrant labourers as one of the sources of Moby Dick's own infamously unruly and hybrid form.

⁴This critique of vanguardism and the emphasis on the autonomy of spontaneous social movements represented the two central distinguishing positions of the Forest-Johnson Tendency, the group James co-founded after breaking with Trotskyism with Trotsky's former secretary Raya Dunayevskaya. For a good staging of the debate in Marxist theory between vanguardism and ‘spontaneity’, especially as it relates to Gramsci's theory of the ‘organic intellectual’, see Rabasa (2005) and Lloyd (1993).

⁵Finally, we might also see in James's description of these ‘federated isolatoes’ a prefiguring of his emerging vision for Caribbean independence as a whole – ‘West Indian Federation’, i.e. James called for and became deeply involved in the failed effort (it lasted from 1958 to 1962) to join the Caribbean into a federation of islands (federated isolatoes) with no single organizing state structure. See, for instance, his lecture ‘On Federation’ reprinted in James (1984: 85–129).

⁶I thank Chandan Reddy for this formulation.