AT THE FORMAL LIMITS
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.
Mariners, renegades, and castaways : the story of Herman Melville and the world we live in : the complete text
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.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.