C.L.R. James

[Dave Monroe]

Kinda sorta slow these past twenty four hours, I see,
will see what I can do to make a little noise tonight,
but, in the meantime, from Emily Eakin, "Embracing the
Wisdom of a Castaway," New York Times, Saturday,
August 4th, 2001 ...

"Interned on Ellis Island and facing likely
deportation, the Trinidadian critic C. L. R. James
pinned his hopes for staying in the United States on a
most unlikely source: 'Moby-Dick.' 

"It was 1952. Anti-Communist sentiment was running
high. And James, who had been in the country for 15
years leading a Trotskyist splinter group and writing
political and cultural commentary, was viewed by the
government not only as an illegal alien but also as a
political subversive. While his lawyer set about
trying to win his release through the courts (on the
ground that he was not a member of Communist Party),
James sat at a table in the Ellis Island detention
center and for 12 hours a day over several months
jotted down his
insights into Herman Melville's epic tale about a
ship's deadly pursuit of a great white whale. 

"The result was 'Mariners, Renegades and Castaways:
The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live
In,' a 170-page amalgam of brilliant critical analysis
and desperate personal pleading. In James's reading,
Melville's 1851 novel becomes a pointed allegory of
cold war-era America in which the ship, the Pequod, is
a stand-in for the mechanized world of the factory;
the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, a ruthless corporate
manager; the narrator, Ishmael, an impotent
intellectual unable to thwart Ahab's totalitarian
tendencies; and the ship's polyglot crew, an uncannily
exact analogy for the nation's melting pot of workers.


"Convinced that his timely analysis of one of
America's most beloved literary classics would
favorably impress the nation's leaders, he sent a copy
of his manuscript to every member of Congress along
with a request for $1 to put toward his legal defense.

"In case his interpretive skills alone were not enough
to sway the authorities, he appended a final chapter
comparing his internment on Ellis Island to life on
the Pequod and laying out his credentials for
citizenship.

"The ploy was a failure. James was kicked out of the
country in 1953 ....

[...]

"On that score, 'Mariners, Renegades and Castaways' is
something of a puzzle. James wasn't the first to find
cold war imagery in 'Moby- Dick'; other scholars had
begun to contrast Ahab, as a symbol of Stalinist
totalitarianism, with Ishmael, the democratic American
and the voyage's only survivor.

"James's twist was to argue that the totalitarianism
was not simply a foreign threat. There were any number
of potential Ahabs in the United States, he suggested.
Ishmael, for example, was merely 'an intellectual
Ahab,' not the novel's hero. (That honor he reserved
for the Pequod's anonymous crew, which he depicted as
a society of men bound to one another through labor
and a hopeful alternative to the totalitarian state.)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/04/books/04JAME.html?todaysheadlines

I recall having occasion to mention C.L.R. James
(author of The Black Jacobins et al.) here before,
wonder if anyone's much familiar with him ...

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