Relistening to Christina Sharpe’s 2023 conversation with David Naimon on Between the Covers led me to the panel Sharpe organized at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Wu Tsang spoke of her silent film adaptation of MOBY DICK, or The Whale, and how she had been inspired to turn to the novel by C.L.R. James’s powerful 1953 essay, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, in which James countered the prevailing postwar literary establishment’s view of Moby Dick as a Cold War fable of Ishmaelian individualism and liberty triumphing over doomed Ahabian totalitarianism with an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist reading of Ahab as an oppressive captain of industry maniacally driving his multinational crew to destruction.
James, born a British subject in Trinidad, had been under US government surveillance since his arrival in 1938, mostly for his Marxist views and writing on socialism, slave revolts, and Black self-determination. When anti-communist paranoia surged after WWII, James found his applications for US citizenship challenged over his writing. In 1952, he was arrested by immigration police and imprisoned on Ellis Island. During his four months of detention, he wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, effectively calling Melville as a character witness of James’s American-ness. To make his case James sent copies of his self-published book to every member of the US Congress.
Mariners, Renegades and Castaways was unsuccessful, at least, in preventing James’s deportation. In 1953 he left behind his second wife and a son, both American. Nevertheless, this act of critique, writing, publishing, and lobbying with a 220-page book about Melville’s deep foresight and relevance to Cold War industrial capitalist America feels desperate, urgent, even extraordinary.
Writing with wierdly Reaganist hindsight in 1988, James’s biographer didn’t think much of the action or the book calling out its “odd psychological contours and political shading,” and “in some ways the least representative of his major works.” He especially called out the staunch anti-communist James’s inclusion of a frankly sympathetic account of his encounters with principled, humanist communists incarcerated alongside him at Ellis Island.
I confess, I first marveled at the naivete of James’s gesture, that pledging this literary allegiance would prompt a response from a US congressman. But there’s deeper, more damning naivete that James’s situation—his family’s situation—and his book lays bare. When he compared his isolation on Ellis Island with a Melvillian host of mariners, renegades and castaways to the Pequod, the racially and ideologically contorted madness of the US immigration system hurts and contorts everyone—prisoners and guards, aliens and citizens alike. In the end, they all went down with the ship. Except for one guy.
Whatever its failures as a plea for principled, pragmatic justice, James’s book was a resounding witness and warning. And it’s sounding even louder right now.
James’s critique breaks ranks with—or breaks ground for—Melville scholars in its beatific reading of Pip, the Black cabin boy who is transformed by the trauma of being left behind to drown in the sea. Pip is the only one who can break through Ahab’s vengeful shell. “It is Pip who in the end will be hailed as the greatest hero of all.” Following James’s interpretation, Wu Tsang divines a radical plot twist that still rings true to Melville’s text, with Pip rising to Ahab’s captain chair, and surviving the battle with the White Whale to become the teller of Ishmael’s tale, the way Ishmael survived to tell the Pequod‘s.
Whether James lashed himself to Melville or Ishmael, the character his traumatized prophecies resonate so deeply with is Pip.