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Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

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AT THE FORMAL LIMITS

Joseph Keith
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AT T H E F O R M A L L I M I T S
C. L. R. James, Moby Dick and the Politics of the Realist Novel

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

Through a reading of C. L. R. Jamess Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (a reading of Melvilles Moby Dick, which James wrote while imprisoned on Ellis Island in 1952 awaiting deportation hearings), this essay examines Jamess 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 novels 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 Jamess effort to enact precisely this different form of representation

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interventions Vol. 11(3) 352366 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)
Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13698010903255643

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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 Jamess own) and one that might enable the stories of the mariners, renegades and castaways haunting both Melvilles novel and the US to be heard.

In 1952, after months of harassment by the FBI for his radical activities, the Trinidad-born intellectual, writer and activist C. L. R. James was arrested by the INS and arraigned on passport violations. The state subsequently designated James, who had been living in the US for the previous 14 years and had applied for legal citizenship in 1947, a subversive and therefore subject to deportation under the McCarran-Walter Act. Passed in 1948 in the climate of the Cold Wars founding years, the Act gave immigration officials the unprecedented authority to arrest without warrant, hold without bail, and deport for an action that was legal when committed, any of the 2.5 million aliens residing in the United States. After his arrest, James served out a six-month internment on Ellis Island as he waited for his case to be processed. In one of the many cruel ironies of the Cold War, the island had been reopened two years earlier and converted from the largest port of entry for immigrants into an INS prison used largely for holding individuals the state wished to deport. It was there on Ellis Island in 1952 that James began and largely completed a work he thought might help his case to remain in the US: a book-length study of Melvilles Moby Dick, entitled Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (James 2001). Indeed, as soon as James finished the manuscript, he sent copies to the Court of Appeals and to every member of the House of Un-American Activities, along with a request for a one-dollar donation to his defense fund. It was a wonderfully Jamesian gesture, Stuart Hall has remarked. It was as though he were saying, You do not understand your greatest artist, Melville, and I do. How can you expel me for un-American activities when I am telling you that next to Shakespeare, here is the greatest use of the English language? . . . You should welcome me not throw me out (Hall 1996: 12). The state, however, was unimpressed. Citing as evidence several of his other writings (especially his Trotskyist State Capitalism and World Revolution), and his involvement with various radical organizations, the state denied his request, and C. L. R. James was deported from the United States as an undesirable alien in 1953. Jamess book did not fare much better. Until its most recent reissue under the editorship of Donald Pease (2001), the book James wrote in 19523 was never republished in its complete form. In particular, the final chapter of

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1 Prior to Peases reassessment of Mariners (in particular his introduction to the books reissue in 2001), critics consistently accused Jamess book of falling victim to its political circumstances. Jamess 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. Jamess 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 Jamess immediate crisis. His denunciations of communism and communists . . . intended to persuade McCarthy era

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Mariners, in which James provides a personal account of his internment on Ellis Island (and which takes up a good quarter of the manuscript), was either edited out completely (as in the 1978 Detroit Bewick edition) or reduced to but a few pages (as in the Allison and Busby 1985 edition). Neither edition supplies a reason for the cuts, but what these editorial decisions suggest, at least implicitly, is that the inclusion of a personal memoir of incarceration was irrelevant to the books overall significance: Jamess literary interpretation of Moby Dick. Put in slightly different terms, they testify to the type of formal and generic problems that Jamess unusual book poses, i.e. that its unruly form mixing criticism with personal memoir (as well as with political commentary and with history) needed disciplining into a more coherent or recognizable format of literary criticism. I would like to suggest, however, that these efforts to re-form Jamess text reflect not merely a misapprehension about what Mariners actually is but provide a poignant example of the very categorizing drive of disciplinary formations that Jamess text seeks to transgress. In this essay, I argue that Mariners form, in particular its formal transgressions of generic boundaries, rather than being an obstacle to the books underlying content, is in fact central to it to its effort to extend the scope of what constitutes legitimate knowledges to include other forms delimited within regulative generic and correspondingly epistemological and political boundaries. Critics have often approached Mariners by connecting the text to the unusual context of its writing, and have tended to read the book, in turn, as Jamess attempt to use Melvilles novel to comment on the state of America during the early Cold War (see Buhle 1988: 110; Cain 1995; Levi 1991; Brennan 1997: 224; Pease 2001).1 Perhaps most influentially, Donald Pease, in his excellent introduction to the 2001 reissue of Mariners, argues that by rereading the original text from the standpoint of incarceration, Mariners operates both as an interpretive exercise of Melvilles novel and as a juridical appeal against Jamess own incarceration and against a type of US fascism emerging during the period, one embodied in the McCarran-Walter Act itself. James stages this critique, Pease argues, by using his political exclusion from the nation (which denied him any ability to speak through the law as a full rights-bearing subject) as a standpoint from which to recover the untold story of Melvilles recently rediscovered national classic, Moby Dick namely that of the Pequods crew. James engendered, Pease writes, a creative collaboration between the consciousness of his experiences on Ellis Island and the unnarrated memory of the harpooners pasts. This collaboration produced within James the recollection of the histories of colonial exploitation, Indian removal, and the African slave trade . . . disallowed the harpooners (Pease 2000a: 106). In the recovery of these untold stories, James found a way to re-present a non-national community capable of challenging the coherence of the national community, resituating

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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 AntiCommunism with a Capital C (Brennan 1997: 224). One notable exception to this critical trend is Cedric Robinsons (1995) compelling essay. Since the books reissue, critical attention has generally shifted to the more radical political undercurrents of the texts critique of Cold War America and the modern

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it, and the existent field of American studies (whose exceptionalist frame the terms of Moby Dicks canonization had helped delimit), within a critical transnational frame.2 While building on Peases argument, this essay focuses not on the content of Jamess analysis but instead on its form. More specifically, it examines Jamess 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. I argue that the stories of the mariners, renegades and castaways of the racialized migrant labourers and refugees on both the Pequod and Ellis Island emerge precisely at the ideological and representational limits of Melvilles novel and the United States. Thus, telling their untold stories or unnarrated memory required, for James, not only different or additional content, but, more importantly, different cultural and political forms if those stories and subaltern knowledges were to be represented. As such, rather than simply an odd or politically motivated literary interpretation of Moby Dick (as it is often read), Jamess Mariners with its generic mix of criticism, memoir, political commentary and history can instead be read, I argue, as Jamess attempt to enact precisely this different form of representation in particular, as an effort to decentre the realist novel as the privileged form of postcolonial representation and articulate a different representational mode one that might enable the political and cultural emergence of these racialized migrant labourers as a new social group.

R e a d i n g U n t o l d Ta l e s
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). 2 See also Pease (1997, 2000).

In his 1952 edition of Mariners, James describes the influence of the unusual scene of the books writing:
I had long contemplated a book on Melville . . . What form it might have taken had I written it according to my original plans I do not know. But what matters is that I am not an American citizen, and just as I was about to write, I was arrested by the United States Government and sent to Ellis Island to be deported. . . . I therefore actually began the writing of this book on the Island, some of it was written there, what I did not write there was conceived and worked over in my mind there. And in the end I finally came to the conclusion that my experiences there have not only shaped this book, but are the most realistic commentary I could give on the validity of Melvilles ideas today. (James 2001: 125)

James characterizes Mariners here not only as an interpretation of Moby Dick but also as a recounting of the experiences surrounding his reading of the text. As James makes clear, however, this account is meant not merely to

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illuminate how his experiences influenced his understanding of Melvilles novel, but also to serve itself as a form of commentary, specifically on the validity of Melvilles ideas today. On one hand, the commentary of Jamess incarceration can be understood as a kind of testimonial to the enduring and potentially growing totalitarianism of the United States during the early Cold War, which Melville had foreseen and prefigured in Ahabs command a century earlier. At the same time, the commentary of his experiences also points to a more complex writing practice James fashions in Mariners. Specifically, James finds in his own personal experience a link to that of the crew on the Pequod a shared experience out of which James positions himself not only to reread Melvilles work but also at the same time to retell it to present, as it were, his own version of the story of Moby Dick. The story that emerges is one in which the mariners, renegades and castaways represent Moby Dicks main protagonists and central ethical agents. Yet James is not simply proposing an idiosyncratic reading of a secondary theme; nor is he merely reimagining Melvilles work. Instead, James rearranges large sections and quotes from Moby Dick (challenging the conventions of literary criticism) in order to render the tale, he argues, that Melville had initially set out but failed to tell. In this respect, Mariners represents less an effort to provide a definitive analysis or reading of Melvilles work. Rather, James transvalues his own imprisonment on Ellis Island into an analytic opportunity from which to recover and retell the intended but untold tale of Moby Dick the story Melville wanted to tell but could not. James focuses on the following moment extracted from Moby Dick in which the implied author appears to state his narrative ambition:
If, then, to meanest mariners and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts . . . then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! (Quoted in James 2001: 17)

James contends that while Melville declared this goal, he failed to pursue it. Instead, he wrote the story as the conflict between Ahab, the Pequods totalitarian captain, and Ishmael, the ships resident intellectual. James uses the passage above as evidence that Melville clearly intends to make the crew the real heroes of his book but he does not because, James writes, he was afraid of criticism or as elsewhere James puts it, he was doubtful that people would understand him (18, 17). For James, Melvilles fear of criticism and intelligibility was both a political and aesthetic apprehension. In other words, for Melville to have made the crew the main characters of his

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novel in 1851 would have been both politically and aesthetically in bad form.

Minor(ed) Characters In his book on character in the nineteenth-century realist novel, The One vs. the Many, Alex Woloch argues that within the realist novel there exists a discursive and formal tension between a desire, on the one hand, to tell the story of many characters (the many) and an inevitable turn to an attention to a few or single protagonist (the one). Woloch argues that this assymetric structure of characterization in which many are represented but attention inevitably flows toward a delimited centre registers formally the tensions or limits of the nineteenth-century bourgeois political imagination. He writes:
In my reading of the realist aesthetic, a dialectical literary form is generated out of the relationship between inequality and democracy . . . In the paradigmatic character-structure of the realist novel, any character can be a protagonist, but only one character is: just as increasing political equality, and a maturing logic of human rights, develop amid acute economic and social stratification. (Woloch 2003: 31)

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In other words, the realist novel expresses or is reflective of a growing democratic impulse to tell the story to literally represent the many at the same time that it inevitably privileges a hierarchical attention to the singular protagonist. Indeed, the inevitable emergence of a central protagonist as a self-reflective consciousness in the realist novel, Woloch argues, in fact depends upon the minoring or subordination of other characters (of the many) within the narrative structure. Wolochs argument provides a useful frame for situating Jamess rereading and retelling of Moby Dick. That is, James finds in Melville a similar political desire to tell the story of the crew (i.e. the many), but that he ultimately turns his narrative attention instead to Ishmael (i.e. the one) for fear of criticism. In this respect, Mariners can be read less as Jamess interpretation of the original, but instead his effort to tell that more radically democratic untold story of the many. But what then has enabled James to tell this more radically democratic story in 1952 that Melville could not tell in 1851? This, for James, is a fundamentally historical question and correspondingly one of changing political and cultural forms of representation a question that illuminates Mariners complex relationship to Moby Dick and also, more generally, the

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methodology of dialectical materialism underwriting so much of Jamess work. In his approach to literature and culture, James was drawn to writers and characters in whom he saw embodied the great dialectical contradictions and crises of their historical moment, and in whom the traces of a new historical age could be found. David Scott, in his reading of James in Conscripts of Modernity, describes Jamess methodology eloquently:
James was most impressed by the problem of the historical moment of tragedy, those moments of large historical conflict in which new forms of thought and action are struggling relentlessly with old: Aeschylus in fifth-century Athens, Shakespeare in early modern England, Melville in nineteenth-century America. They all wrote in a time of historical upheaval or civilizational rupture. For James, these were moments not merely of transition, but moments when great historical forces were at irreconcilable odds with each other, in which the tensions between competing historical directions were at a particularly high pitch, and in which new kinds of subjects . . . were being thrown upon the historical stage, individuals embodying within their single selves the mighty conundrums and divisions of their age. (Scott 2004: 12)

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3 Following Jamess argument, we might see Melvilles effort to represent and give voice to this emergent class of migrant labourers as one of the sources of Moby Dicks own infamously unruly and hybrid form.

In the case of Melvilles novel Moby Dick, James saw Ahab as a new kind of historical subject embodying the mighty conundrums and divisions of his age namely, the historical upheavals and ruptures in the mid-nineteenthcentury rise of industrial capitalism. Specifically, Ahab represented the new class of managers, superintendents, executives, administrators, who Melville, in Jamess analysis, had prophetically seen would rise to prominence as a result of the increasing bureaucratization of capital (what James calls elsewhere state capitalism) taking place in industrial civilization. Exploiting the growing historical crisis of capital, and especially the growing degradation experienced by the individual under the mechanization of industrial capital, it would be these managers (not, at least initially, the proletariat) who would overturn social and economic relations for their own political gain, and they would do it using the racial and economic ideologies of nationalism and the nation-state. Ahab embodied, as such, an emerging historical form of totalitarianism, a theoretical category James subsequently used to explain and link the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, along with the growing racial nationalism of Cold War America. At the same time, James also finds in Moby Dick Melvilles effort to trace the emergence of another historical subject of industrial capital and empire namely, that of the Pequods multinational, multi-racial labouring crew.3 The lowly mariners, renegades and castaways represent, for James, the true ethical alternative in the novel to the totalitarian compulsions of Ahabs command. But if the crews stories end up largely untold, it is because,

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according to James, making the crew the main characters of the novel would have forced Melville to centre the question, Why did the men not revolt? (James 2001: 53). And this is a question, James suggests, Melville was not asking, again out of fear, and because it was a question whose answer Melville himself at this historical juncture, according to James, does not really know (63). In other words, as both of these conclusions here imply in different ways, a tale of collective resistance by the labouring crew remains untold because it was a story as yet beyond the limits of the midnineteenth-century bourgeois political imagination. Alternatively, James suggests that as he sits down to reread Melvilles novel in 1952, world-historical events over the previous decade have now made the story of these subaltern mariners, renegades and castaways legible.
The writer of this book confesses frankly that it is only since the end of World War II, that the emergence of the people of the Far East and of Africa into the daily headlines . . . it is only this that has enabled him to see the range, the power and the boldness of Melville and the certainty with which he wrote down what he intended to do. (James 2001: 19)

If James thus cast Melville as writing during a transitional period of civilization upheaval during the mid-nineteenth century one embodied in the new historical subject of Ahab, James, in Mariners, positions himself as writing in the postcolonial context of 1952 at another transitional moment of civilization upheaval, but now one in which the new historical figures are not individuals (single selves) but a collectivity of labourers marked by race and Empire: the mariners, renegades and castaways of the modern and postmodern world. It is this story that Jamess rereading or retelling ultimately draws forth, of the racialized non-national labourers whose work sustains the lives on board the ship and that has built US society, but which remains minored by the novel and disqualified by the nation. It is a story Melville had begun to tell but only tangentially:
[Melville] tells us that in 1851, while white American officers provided the brains, not one in two of the thousands of men in the fishery, in the army, in the navy and the engineering forces employed in the construction of American canals and railroads were Americans. They came from all over the world, were islanders from places like the Azores and the Shetland Islands. Nearly all on Ahabs ships were islanders, and in fact nearly all the nations of the globe had each its representative. (James 2001: 18)

And it is in his attempt to tell this untold story of the special collectivity of non-national workers that James can be understood, returning to Woloch,

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as challenging both the ideological limits of the bourgeois political imagination and its attendant literary form at the time, the realist novel. Telling these stories, in other words, generates the need for both different political and cultural forms of representation. Ultimately, Mariners, I argue, can be read as Jamess effort to do exactly this to imagine and enact this different cultural and correspondingly political form. Returning to Scotts depiction of Jamess methodology, we might make one final addendum. That is, for James, the great historical forces in which new forms of thought and action are struggling to emerge find their expression not only in new kinds of subjects but also correspondingly in new kinds of cultural and literary forms. James was deeply interested in the social history or dialectics of form, that is, how new forms of thought and action historically emerged with and generated new forms of literature and culture adequate to their expression and further development. As he writes in a letter to the Melville critic Jay Leyda, Each historical rebel, rebels against something very specific and it takes a specific literary form, precisely because of its specific social character (James 1993: 232). The question then becomes, if the historic rebel of Ahab finds his form in the nineteenthcentury realist novel, what specific form if Mariners now centres on these multinational and multi-racial labourers as the historic rebels of his contemporary moment does James make adequate to the specific social character of their rebellion to their more radically democratic story of the many? Certainly, one might suggest that the discourse of realism and the form of the realist novel itself went on to engage directly this issue of representing the many. Indeed, James himself grappled with this very question through realism, most notably in his own realist novel, Minty Alley (published almost twenty years earlier in 1936). Hazel Carby (1988) situates Jamess early novel in the context of an interconnected anti-colonial national and socialist international effort at the time to rethink the nature of realism. In particular, Carby focuses on how larger worldly debates about proletarian literature profoundly influenced James and Trinidadian literature more generally to emphasize narrative realism and to make it a means for the representation of the poor and dispossessed as a way of incorporating the creation of a Trinidadian national literature with the political struggle to achieve independence. In Trinidad, she writes, the fictional representation of the people and the maturation of a socialist politics occurred together as writers translated their admiration for the Soviet experiment and the proletarian movement in North America into engagement with the specific conditions of the Caribbean and of colonialism (45). What Jamess own novel thus bears witness to is the profound changes that the discourse and function of the realist novel underwent during the first half of the twentieth century and as it travelled, for instance, to the colonial world in particular

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as the form was made to bear the concrete historical and social experiences of the many. At the same time, however, Carby concludes that Minty Alley represents the very limits of what Caribbean intellectuals thought they might achieve in fiction in the 1930s (51). This conclusion brings us to the question of the role of the intellectual in the politics of representation, which Carby argues is the very subject of Jamess early novel. Focusing on the novels narrative device in which the main character observes the people in the barracks yard through a hole in the wall, Carby claims Its central paradigm is the problem of how the intellectual can represent, either politically or figuratively, the Trinidadian proletariat (49). It stages Jamess keen awareness of his alienation that the intellectual as intellectual producer/author cannot be dissociated from the intellectual as member of the bourgeoisie that formed him as he attempts to represent the many. If the realist novel could thus be made to represent the many, its formal structure still kept in place a representational and political distance James as an intellectual sought to overcome of the one representing the many. It is worth emphasizing that James never wrote another novel and indeed his career was marked by a move across an extraordinary array of genres: histories, plays, autobiography, criticism, journalism, cultural studies. Often seen as evidence of Jamess remarkably wide ranging and eclectic interests (and symptomatic of the difficulty of combining the various aspects of his political investments into any coherent whole), we might also read these generic moves as an ongoing and consistent effort by James to find a form/ genre capable of more adequately addressing the enduring problem of representation staged in Minty Alley. Belinda Edmonsen, in her excellent analysis of Jamess The Black Jacobins, makes a similar argument to Carby. She writes: Toussaints recasting as a Jamesian author-figure of the revolution is useful to us as a metaphor for the privileged relationship of the author to revolutionary engagement in Caribbean narrative: that is, [male] authors author revolution through fiction (1999: 106). My point is that in Mariners, James is attempting to enact a form that readdresses exactly this enduring problem of representation of the privileged relationship of the author to revolutionary engagement.

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The Politics of Form It is with this in mind that I return to Mariners last chapter, in which James moves from a discussion of Moby Dick to an account of his incarceration and to a series of discussions with and about his fellow prisoners. In doing so, I want to focus on the conclusion James draws about his fellow inmates at the very end of the chapter. This is my final impression, James concludes:

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4 This 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 Trotskys former secretary Raya Dunayevskaya. For a good staging of the debate in Marxist theory between vanguardism and spontaneity, especially as it relates to Gramscis theory of the organic intellectual, see Rabasa (2005) and Lloyd (1993). 5 Finally, we might also see in Jamess 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: 85129).

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The meanest mariners, renegades and castaways of Melvilles day were objectively a new world. But they knew nothing. These [referring to his fellow Ellis Island inmates] know everything. The symbolic mariners and renegades and castaways of Melvilles book were isolatoes federated by one keel, but only because they had been assembled by penetrating genius. These were federated by nothing. But they were looking for federation. (James 2001: 1534)

First of all, Jamess use of the term federation here is telling; it is the expression he uses throughout Mariners to describe the crews moments of unity. He quotes the following line from Melville, for example, three separate times: Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! James clarifies that this federation is built upon the social character of the crews labour. They are a world-federation of modern industrial workers . . . They owe allegiance to no nationality . . . They owe no allegiance to anybody or anything except the work they have to do and the relations with one another on which that work depends (20). On one level, a world-federation sounds like nothing more than the socialist model of the international proletariat; workers as the perfect cosmopolitans united not around common nationality but on the basis of their specific position within the economic world-system, represented by the Pequod. But if federation builds upon the model of socialist internationalism, James also uses it to imagine a political form specifically in opposition not only to individualist bourgeois models of citizenship, but also to the forms of collectivism advocated by international socialism at the time. They are not, he cautions, to be confused with any labour movement or what is today known as the international solidarity of labour (20). James, it is crucial to point out, had recently broken with Trotskyism, in particular over its revolutionary theory of vanguardism. Indeed, in direct opposition to the vanguard conception of the intellectual and party as necessary mediators of the expressions of the workers into organized political movements and action, James was attempting at the time to develop as an activist a theory of what he called self activity, which emphasized the capacity for self-government from below, or what he deemed the spontaneous expressions of the workers themselves.4 Jamess use of federation is part of that effort; it is intended to describe a spontaneous political form of collectivity immanently expressed by the isolated groups of workers (federated isolatoes) themselves through their work, obviating any role for the party in their definition or organization into a larger political body.5 If he were alive today, writes James, referring to Melville, he would turn in horror from Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, Trotskyists and all who set themselves up . . . as the vanguard, the organizers, the educators, the leaders of the workers (20).

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6 I thank Chandan Reddy for this formulation.

But what the above passage also registers, and what I want to concentrate the rest of my discussion on, is the corresponding question of Jamess own relation (as an intellectual) to these mariners, renegades and castaways and the question again of how to represent them not only politically but culturally in a form consistent with his belief in self-activity. More to the point, if Melville was able to federate the symbolic crew through the form of the novel, James, as he suggests here, is looking for a form that would enable the crew in a sense to represent themselves. For James, there was a tension, I believe, in regard to the form of the novel in that it functioned in many respects like a vanguard party i.e. an individual representing the people. Thus, if these contemporary mariners, renegades and castaways were looking for federation, what form could James find that did not put him in the similar position of the vanguard, or Melville, or even worse, the Pequods resident intellectual, Ishmael? It is in this context that we might readdress Jamess conclusion. It is written, first of all, in the form of a personal memoir of his incarceration. The first thing that happened, begins section one, was that within an hour of my arrival, I was placed in a special room for political prisoners (126). Throughout the subsequent conclusion, James no longer is reading Moby Dick but carefully documenting his own experiences on Ellis Island and those of his fellow inmates a global amalgam (the whole world is represented, writes James) of working-class migrant men sailors, soldiers, workers, and even a castaway clearly intended to embody the class of mariners, renegades and castaways Melville had prefigured a century earlier. James relates story after story that begin thusly: There was a Canadian soldier, a man put in as a mental case . . . (129); or Another case was that of an Irishman . . . (129); or One is of a young Latin American sailor . . . (152); or There was a Scandinavian who had travelled all over the world . . . (153). In short, out of the proximity of his shared status as a prisoner and minored character, i.e. as someone whom the state has included within the category mariners, renegades and castaways, James documents the multiple untold stories and subaltern vernacular knowledges of his fellow mariners, renegades and castaways circulating off-shore. Walter Benjamin deemed this type of practice that of the storyteller.6 Distinguishing it from the role of the author, upon which he argues the form of the modern novel is founded, Benjamin situates the storyteller instead within a communal oral tradition based upon remembering and relaying the experiences and tales of others it is always the art of repeating stories (Benjamin 1968: 91). Experience, he writes, which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn (84). The model of the storyteller, according to Benjamin, comes from two different historical sources: the trading seaman (85) someone who has come from afar (84) bringing with him experiences and knowledges of

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distant places and the resident tiller of the soil (845) a man with intimate knowledge of the local tales and traditions (84) of the community in which he is so rooted. We might consider James in these terms less as the author of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways than the storyteller of the incarcerated heterogeneity of minor characters on Ellis Island. In this respect, while it has been read either as an awkward (and unnecessary) addendum to his literary analysis of Melvilles novel or as part of his political protest against his imprisonment and the Cold War State more generally, Jamess conclusion can also be considered as a natural but necessary conclusion to the books inquiry into the politics of form. That is, Mariners traces a historical/political development through form. It moves from the novel a form again in which the mariners are federated but only due to the advanced knowledge of the author/intellectual i.e. Melvilles penetrating genius to Jamess enactment in the books conclusion of a different cultural form namely, a hybrid form of memoir and cultural studies in which James attempts to record instead of authoring the multiple tales and knowledges of the crew themselves. It is now their penetrating genius as he says, these know everything. Put in slightly different terms, we can hear in Jamess insistence on the comprehensiveness of the mariners, renegades and castaways knowledge an implicit critique, once again, of vanguardism and the grounds of a different role for the intellectual. For why is there a need for the intellectual to mediate or educate these migrant labourers expressions into a modern language of political theory if they already know everything? Jamess intent, enacted in the form of Mariners, is instead to document and identify the subaltern knowledges the penetrating genius in the spontaneous expressions of the mariners, renegades and castaways, knowledges which remain disqualified and unheard by the infrastructure of the modern state. Read in this context, we might thus see Mariners, though a reading of Moby Dick, as a crucial text in Jamess development of a unique form of cultural studies. We might see it, for instance, as an important precursor to Jamess subsequent memoir and classic work of cultural studies, Beyond a Boundary (James 1963), in which James documents and reads the swings and postures of cricket batsmen as modes of social representation. We might also see Mariners as replicating the central argument underwriting his epic if unfinished study of the US, entitled American Civilization (James 1993). In that work, James analyses American Civilization from the mid-nineteenth century to his contemporary moment in the mid-twentieth century, and he similarly structures the historical/political analysis of the book through a history of form. Specifically, James distills the development of American Civilization from a nineteenth-century culture of intellectuals to the emergence of the people in the twentieth century as the animating force of history a force expressed by and through the rise of popular culture.

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AT THE FORMAL L IMITS

Joseph Keith

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Finally, my interest is not in deciding whether James is successful or not in this effort (that is, whether James does not end up reproducing himself as the author of his fellow inmates revolutionary energy) but in recognizing it. After all, if we return to Jamess conclusion, we might ask how it is that if these mariners, renegades and castaways now know everything, why are they looking for federation? Why, simply put, do they not know how to federate themselves? In that aporia, James seems to rewrite the role of the intellectual as once again authoring and arranging the knowledge through which these migrants might link themselves to a larger collective political body. But I do think that recognizing or identifying Jamess effort and considering Mariners as a different form or genre of cultural production is significant not only for reappraising Jamess text, but also for working to extend the scope of what constitutes valid forms of knowledge to include other forms and genres whose transgressive force of articulation have been excluded or minored by regulative generic or disciplinary formations including, or perhaps especially, in the case of the novel as the overwhelmingly privileged form of representation in postcolonial studies. Indeed, the fact, once again, that Mariners conclusion was edited out of previous versions suggests that what James was attempting to do his effort to transgress formal or generic boundaries in order to retell these untold tales of the novel and the nation remained illegible and in need of disciplining and thus minoring these stories all over again. In the end, then, while a reading of Moby Dick, Mariners can also be read, as I have been suggesting, as an attempt to decentre the novel and an effort to articulate a different representational mode one that might rethink the relationship between artist/intellectual and the people (including Jamess own) and one that might enable the unnarrated stories of the mariners, renegades and castaways haunting both Melvilles novel and the US to be told.

R e f e ren c e s
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Caribbean Narrative, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gair, Christopher (ed.) (2006) C. L. R. James and Postnational Studies, London: Pluto Press. Hall, Stuart (1996) C. L. R. James: a portrait, in Paget Henry and Paul Buhle (eds) C. L. R. James Caribbean, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. James, C. L. R. (1936) Minty Alley, London: New Beacon Books. James, C. L. R. (1963) Beyond a Boundary, London: Stanley Hall/Hutchinson. James, C. L. R. (1973) Modern Politics, Detroit: Bewick Editions. James, C. L. R. (1984) At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings, London: Allison and Busby. James, C. L. R. (1989) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint LOuverture and the San Domingo Revolution, London: Allison and Busby. James, C. L. R. (1993) American Civilization, Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (eds), Oxford: Blackwell. James, C. L. R. (2001) [1953] Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Levi, Darrell (1991) C. L. R. James: a radical West Indian vision of American studies, American Quarterly 43(3): 486501. Lloyd, David (1993) Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lloyd, David and Thomas, Paul (1998) Culture and the State, New York: Routledge. Melville, Herman (1998) [1851] Moby Dick, New York: Penguin. Pease, Donald (1997) National narratives, postnational narration, MFS Modern Fiction Studies 43(1): 123.

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