AT THE FORMAL LIMITS

Abstract

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.