Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In

by C.L.R. James

Political theorist and cultural critic, novelist and cricket enthusiast, C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989) was a brilliant polymath who has been described by Edward Said as a centrally important 20th-century figure. Through such landmark works as The Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary, and American Civilization, James's thought continues to influence and inspire scholars in a wide variety of fields. There is little doubt, wrote novelist Caryl Phillips in The New Republic, that James will come to be regarded as the outstanding Caribbean mind of the twentieth century.

In his seminal work of literary and cultural criticism, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, James anticipated many of the concerns and ideas that have shaped the contemporary fields of American and Postcolonial Studies, yet this widely influential book has been unavailable in its complete form since its original publication in 1953. A provocative study of Moby Dick in which James challenged the prevailing Americanist interpretation that opposed a totalitarian Ahab and a democratic, American Ishmael, he offered instead a vision of a factory-like Pequod whose captain of industry leads the mariners, renegades and castaways of its crew to their doom.

In addition to demonstrating how such an interpretation supported the emerging US national security state, James also related the narrative of Moby Dick, and its resonance in American literary and political culture, to his own persecuted position at the height (or the depth) of the Truman/McCarthy era. It is precisely this personal, deeply original material that was excised from the only subsequent edition. With a new introduction by Donald E. Pease that places the work in its critical and cultural context, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways is once again available in its complete form.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Theory, Philosophy, Literature

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

C. L. R. James (1901–1989), a Trinidadian historian, political activist, and writer, is the author of The Black Jacobins, an influential study of the Haitian Revolution and the classic book on sport and culture, Beyond a Boundary. His play Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History was recently discovered in the archives and published Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

hop-on 1 of n to re-reading MOBY-DICK

this feels like, and probably works better as, a lecture on Melville than a work of like dispositive criticism. It's a bit dated, although the reading of Ahab as totalitarian stands up well enough. James does a fast tour of the other Melville ocean books that I found really useful -- not least because he says "these books are kind of bad, you don't need to read them, let me give you the highlights." I wish there was more about THE CONFIDENCE MAN, which I have been trying to read for 20 years (one of these days). His breakdown of PIERRE is extra worthwhile, in direct and violent contrast to the actual reading of PIERRE. Tempting to push some of the ideas about Ahab --> tyrant toward Ahab --> bureaucrat/pocket tyrant.

you don't necessarily need to read or have read MOBY-DICK to get brain proteins from this

>we can see in his full stature Ahab, embodiment of the totalitarian type. With his purpose clear before him, he is now concerned with two things only: (1) science, the management of things; and (2) politics, the management of men."

fire emoji x 3

anyway this book is un poco absurd and a little dusty but CLR James wrote it while he was more or less a captive of bureaucracy / hoteled at Ellis Island semi-voluntarily / having a super bad ulcer (there's a very detailed, very unnecessary fifth act of him complaining about hospital food)

[Laurence Thompson]

Although I'm not unfamiliar with James, I've never read a book quite like this one. The essential arguments:

1.) Melville, in Ahab, created a mode of human that had never existed before, as Shakespeare had done with Hamlet (bear in mind this is before Harold Bloom overstated his case with "The Invention of the Human" - James is infinitely more deft while being infinitely more forceful)
2.) In doing so, Melville was a augur of 20th century totalitarianism
3.) In being so, Melville was a writer of such originality and vision that no other American author comes close, and nobody since Shakespeare worldwide

These are delivered with such declarative confidence that their force is undeniable. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, James builds a perfect critical work. To quote from it would be like removing a foundation stone from an architectural masterwork.

James is the best West Indian author of all, better even than Naipaul. He's also the best Marxist critic. Where a lesser, more dogmatic writer would cast Moby Dick as a tale of American commerce gone mad, or the relationship between Ahab and crew as exploiter/exploited, James shows how Melville's insights stab right into the psychological and symbolic heart of what it means to *work*, and how it stands universes apart from the "work" Bartleby would rather not do. He even upbraids the latter Melville for referring to "the masses" and telling simple tales of oppressor vs oppressed, the very thing more superficial comrades would doubtless be elated to discover in the oeuvre of a 19th century darling of bourgeois culture.

A wonderful book.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an important book of American history - a critique of capitalism in the eras of Melville and post-WWII when the book was written. Fascinating to read CLR James' interpretation of Moby Dick and its characters, esp. given that he wrote this book while interred with communist cell-mates awaiting deportation. Now must read his masterpiece, The Black Jacobins, which labor-historian sister has long urged me to pick up. He writes well, conveying deep ideas with ease and eloquence.
Not even necessary to read Moby Dick to enjoy and learn from this volume!

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally wanted to read this for James' insights on Melville and *Moby Dick*, which I always have regarded as a phenomenal, almost indescribable, work. The connections between the book and the time of James' during McCarthyism and the rise of the Soviet empire with Stalin's bureaucratic murder are captivating. Essentially, James' argues that the book is both about society as a whole-- with sympathy given to the crew most of all-- though Melville was somewhat limited in expressing this given the literary constrictions of the day. He argues Ahab as a totalitarian with Ishmael and the officers being complacent and allowing Ahab the latitude to destroy almost everyone even though they could have stopped him. In essence, James is investigating how good people allow bad things to happen both from an intellectual point-of-view (embodied in Ishmael) and everyday workers (e.g. the crew).

What I didn't anticipate was the final chapter about James' stay on Ellis Island while being investigated as a subversive and threatened with deportation, which ultimately happens. The insights that James makes then painfully resonate with the present. One extract: "The whole system of law and the legal procedures that have been developed in the United States were an expression of a deep faith in civil liberties and were designed and intended to help the alien. But the Department of Justice as a whole is now engaged on a policy whose main aim can be described as the extermination of the alien as a malignant pest" (143).

James is being investigated because of his writings, not unlike the students currently being detained for protesting on topics deemed "illegitimate" by our current regime in the U.S. He mentions how the ACLU is defending him because the government is going against the First and Fifth amendments. He highlights the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and free expression. "It specifically does not say citizen; it says person, meaning anybody" (163). But here we stand at a moment in time when the same attacks against "aliens" are being perpetuate by an authoritarian paranoid regime. The resemblances are uncanny.

This books resonates with the current moment since it is not only an investigation into authoritarianism and complacency around it. But the final chapter investigates resistance from even the most unlikely quarters such as a communist prisoner who James sees as one of the most bold and humane of all the inmates of helping others despite James' deep revulsion towards Communism.

[Brad Barker · Rating 5 out of 5]

James gets to the heart of Moby Dick very quickly and offers unique insight, well under 90 pages. If there are other critics previous to James who recognized what he saw in the character of Ishmael, I am unaware -- it appears most treatments see Ishmael as something of a foil for Ahab, while James recognizes their horrible similarities. There's quite a bit more to analyze and discuss with the 600-page Moby Dick, but James has a laser focus on his thesis, leaving the heavy-lifting of the other aspects of the work for other readers or critics. Anyway, if you wish to perform a reading of Moby Dick from the perspective of a 20th century or 21st century critic, this is a great start.

[Joe Olipo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Political power grows out of the barrel of a[n] gun [ulcer]
— Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1964)

Does Captive Writing Do What You Want

We've heard plenty times the communist position on class ideology: The bourgeois subject, whose worldview [transparently] serves his class interest, always describes this [interest] as the neutral, objective position — and moreover he actually believes it. To what extent does this apply to those on the receiving end political power's double-barrel — the scholars in extremis who, under threat of [political] violence, write gratifying works for those Bourgeois. And in particular we might ask after those political prisoners wasting away on Ellis Island with ulcers of the duodenum — do they also come to believe.

Frankly, we find the argument of Mariners (1953) somewhat implausible. Does the work of Herman Melville anticipate the totalitarian [communist] regimes of the 20th century, well probably not, except in the sense that we find its drama caught up in the continuum of history. (A storm is blowing from paradise.) And neither is Moby Dick (1851) a particularly shrewd psychological study of the authoritarian personality, at least not in its direct portrayal of Captain Ahab. To find praise of the "Great American Novel" more unqualified than in Mariners (1953) you'd have go to back to D.H. Lawrence. (Let's not.) It's hard to resist the temptation of a New Historicist reading here, knowing that, were the author to touch the heart of just one well-placed Cold Warrior, he would be [ulcer] free.

And yet a Cold Warrior won't be moved so easily. You'll be hard-pressed to find more unstinting condemnation of "the communists" in any other text. Let's see what it gets him. 'Well,' the author clarifies, 'I'm certainly Not a Communist . . . actually more of a Trotskyist . . . Oh, you've probably never heard of it . . . or rather a Menshevik . . . if I had to choose . . . you see. . . so not really a Bolshevik per se. . . Don't get me started on Comrade Stalin. . . And, well, yes . . . it was me who wrote The Black Jacobins (1938) . . . Which was . . . uh, of course . . . merely an . . . historical study . . .' James's mistake is he's so far inside the system he seems to forget the ideal anti-communist couldn't tell you what a 'Jacobin' is, let alone tease out the details for four-hundred pages. All he does know — if he had to guess — is that the Black kind must be even worse.

When the text praises a fellow-prisoner, the card-carrying communist, it's part of a rhetorical strategy of condemnation; but the Cold Warrior won't forget that it leads with praise. At the same time, C.L.R. James appears to have shot past his mark — perhaps compensating for the defense he hasn't quite pulled off — and finds himself, on the question of communism, more Catholic than the pope; criticizing the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover [of all things!] for its softcore stance. The text doesn't seem to consider that the FBI negotiates with [certain] communists, but only because it's maximally-leveraged. The secret dysphoric mode of the Cold Warrior — who presents himself as a confidence man [sic] advancing from victory to victory — is that he actually believes, in the end, that communism will win. This is how he justifies his actions, which are all already overreactions. And also why he deigns to negotiate with the [redacted] communist "M," an imprisoned indigent soon-to-be deported, and whom he [conspiratorially] believes represents a mass movement.

The [surreptitious] dysphoric mode of the Cold Warrior has its counterpart in the unspoken Euphoric mode of the Critical Theorist (read: 'Not a Communist'). As Sloterdijk notes, "If one surveys the older Critical Theory, it becomes immediately evident how sharply the dualism between the euphoric and the dysphoric mode is marked in it. Yet to its distinctive features belongs the fact that one may only speak about the dysphoric mode, while the euphoric mode presents a secret that is to be stringently guarded [. . .] The appeal [. . .] arises from the incommensurable experiences of happiness, in comparison with which most profane situations seem unreal, insipid, and unacceptably crude" (Peter Sloterdijk, Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger, 2016) In short, it's important to ask the forbidden question: to what extent is C.L.R. James having a laugh.

What this text praises in Melville — the darling of [White] American literature — is precisely the highly-implausible claim that the author of Moby Dick (1851) is a 'prescient political pundit for the atomic age.' Against the grain of obsequious praise we're tempted to recall the maxim that, "Praising the powerful for virtues they do not possess is one way of insulting them with impunity" (La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665). So we find this text remains, even now, in tension. It's hard to write with an ulcer — like doing it at gun-point. It's hard to be certain that the gift of this text for Melville scholarship [and the House Committee on Un-American Activities] isn't a Gift-gift (a poisoned gift). If there is a flaw, it's the sense that C.L.R. James is a little too clever to be writing what he's writing, a little too . . . dialectical. Perhaps what's really needful, then, is a treatment of that stomach ulcer. This should help sort things out: the standard-of-care necessitates stool-testing for H. pylori — i.e. a definitive way to tell if he's full of it.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Immensely entertaining but fairly ridiculous.

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't often find myself studying much literary criticism, but found I found James' work to helpfully expand upon my thoughts from Melville. That's just to say that if you've read Moby Dick, then this is worth reading.

James poses a heterodox interpretation of Moby Dick that reads a great conflict between the crew and Ahab. Throughout the book, James reads Ahab as the quintiessential modern-man valued by regimes such as the USA and the Soviet Union. Indeed, James argues that Melville's Ahab is an original character that each of his previous novels had only in part portrayed. In a similar fashion to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Melville's Ahab is, for James, the first character to epitomize 'the world we live in.' Given James see such ingenuity and originality in Ahab, he reveres Melville as the greatest of American literature (a reverence I now share).

Interestingly enough, I was surprised to find how 'Cold War' James was in this text. His reading of the Ahab and the crew are very much situated within the context of him being held on Ellis Island during the early '50s and being stuck between two totalitarian regimes. I hadn't read a Cold War book in over a year, so it was exciting to come back to that era from a very different genre and set of questions.

Anyways, Mariners wasn't a mind-blowing or paradigm shifting read, but it gave my reading of Moby Dick a more robust background and analysis, which was wonderful. I highly recommend to those interested in Melville, James, Cold War literature, and/or mid-century decolonial thought.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

James' short, terse survey of Melville novels, with a strong focus on Moby-Dick, I found extremely illuminating. His embrace of the genius of Melville as an artist is clear; he ranks Melville with Aeschylus and Shakespeare.

The Pequod in Melville's Moby-Dick, according to James, represents a global society of mixed races, all shouldering the labor of maintaining the vessel on its hunt for whales in the 19th Century. James continues by showing the megalomania of Ahab, acting as dictator and tyrant, in commandeering the mission of the whaler to his own personal ambition of revenge in hunting the white whale. The conflicts that Ahab has with Starbuck, Stubbs, and Flask (as related by Ishmael) show trademark authoritarianism. The elite status of the native harpooners, Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg represent (to James) native civilizations and their societal work ethic.

I have read Moby-Dick several times. What I loved about James' book is his prescient reading of the same novel. I gained so much in finding the examples James called out for interpretation that I had missed or glossed over.

Last note, I think James' book should have a wider audience today since Melville's own country seems to be sliding to its own brand of Ahab-induced authoritarianism. Melville's novel is extremely current. So should James' study be.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most interesting books about Melville's "Moby Dick" I have ever read (and I have read many). He makes the claim that Melville was writing about the world in our time (1953) or the time in which he wrote the book. He argues that Melville invented a new character (a rare act in literature) a description of a type, a tyrant like Hitler that the world had just experienced. But is astonishing to me that not only does the case he makes prove to argue that Melville not only wrote about his time in 1953 but also describes our time in 2025. To go further James reveals that he wrote the book while being detained at Ellis Island waiting, under the alien enemies act and the influence of the UnAmerican activities act for having written a history of the Communist International. The book captures the experience of those being deported today, for the most part being a person of color and having written something the current American Government does not like. I strongly recommend this book to anyone appalled by the behavior of our current government.

[Roy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting examination of Melville's works, especiallyMoby Dick. It asks the question: Why did the crew not rise up in rebellion (mutiny) against Ahab?
The postcolonial analysis is insightful on the psychological states of Ahab, the mates, and the crew. It is especially scathing on its categorization of Ishmael as an impotent intellectual.
In my opinion, the concluding chapter on C.L.R. James' imprisonment on Ellis Island is autobiographically informative but not as directly connected to the main analysis as James believes it is.
Also, in my opinion, the Introduction in this edition is disjointed and can be skipped.

[Nathanael Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read. Mid-20th century scholarship is always so sure of itself. That's fascinating enough as it is. Thoughtful interpretation of Ahab. The last chapter about the author's time amongst the Communists all held for deportation on Ellis Island is narcissistic garbage. Skip it.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid early start, tying Ahab's totalitarianism to American capitalism and the neurotic disassociation it produces in the intellectual class and middle management. As it spins out to broader Melville background and comparative lit, I cared less.

[Leah Montange · Rating 4 out of 5]

a ship, an island, a prison

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Good: James is inspired with how he puts Melville's writing (and Ahab as a character) in the context of the first part of the 20th century. I never thought about referencing the totalitarianism of the character against the rise of Nazis, Communists, and dictatorships that were common of the era. He also takes a fantastic step back as he looks at the "savages" of the crew: the harpooners of color and what that has to say about American imperialism.

The Bad: I think the last few chapters, which focus on Melville's other writings, weren't as strong. I also would've liked some more commentary on Melville's biography--namely his father in law and his enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act.

The Good: This is a quick read and would be a great pairing for high school students tackling the book. The preface, which shows how these themes are timeless even in the 2020's makes it still prescient and topical, sadly.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine look at the rise of mono-maniacal fascism through the lens of Ahab and the Pequod. Also takes in Melville's other writing as lead up and release from Moby Dick. Very smart. Written in the 1950's when James was being held before deportation as some kind of subversive.

[W.B. Garvey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of Melville and the world we live in.

[Eric Marcy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb reading of Melville, surprisingly accessible, that provides a profound psychological and economic critique of materialist societies (capitalist and communist) and probes the origins of totalitarianism.