Doing Justice to C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways

1. Just Phrasing

William E. Cain’s contribution to the volume C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies (1995) is entitled “The Triumph of the Will and the Failure of Resistance: C. L. R. James’s Readings of Moby Dick and Othello.”¹ He represents the essay as, in part, an effort to redress the failure of Melville scholars to acknowledge the significance to their archive of James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. James wrote the book in 1953 on Ellis Island, where he had been detained by the state for his subversive activities. “Melville scholars said little about Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways when it appeared in 1953,” Cain mentions as one example of this interpretive neglect, “and it continues to be absent from nearly all of the bibliographies and critical studies devoted to Melville” (261). To document this latter claim, Cain enters into evidence the following footnote:

Stanley T. Williams, in Eight American Authors, an important reference book published in 1956, dismisses James’s book in three sentences. . . . Incredibly, it is nowhere cited in John Bryant’s nine-hundred-page Companion to Melville Studies. Nor is it cited by Kerry McSweeney or Martin Bickman (“Introduction”), both of whom provide overviews of the novel and its place in modern criticism. It is also absent from all the anthologies of criticism devoted to Melville in general and to Moby Dick in particular. Richard Brodhead mentions it in passing (“Introduction,” 19), but inappropriately links it to D. H. Lawrence’s chapter on Melville in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) and Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947). Lawrence’s and Olson’s commentaries have been widely read and have informed scholarship on Moby Dick. Melville specialists, as well as historians of American literature and criticism, either have not known about, or have ignored, James’s work. (270–71)

In the wake of these observations, Cain’s readers might expect him to right this injustice with an account of the difference James’s project would make after its inclusion in the Melville archive. But in place of either arguing the case for its incorporation or providing a commentary of James’s text that would compare its interpretive claims with those of other Melville scholars, Cain instead enumerates the several critical shortcomings of James’s reading of Melville’s literary project.

Cain’s criticisms of James are comprehensive, ranging from the observation that James’s project “shuns [the] academic decorum” (261) expected of literary exegesis to the accusation that James had willfully reimagined the events of Melville’s novels and the meanings they declared. “But this truth is one that James himself extrapolates from, indeed creates in, the texts bringing to light and affirming not what the text contains but, rather, his vivid reimagination of it” (260–61). The differences in the tone and reference of Cain’s judgments might be understood to derive from the different registers in which Cain applied the key phrases from the title of his essay.

Throughout “The Triumph of the Will and the Failure of Resistance,” Cain deploys the two phrases from his title within linked but incommensurable genres of discourse and thereafter conducts a double-voiced reading that results in an interpretive, as well as a juridical, accounting of James’s work. “The triumph of the will” is itself a quotation of the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film. In his interpretive usage of it, Cain proposes that this phrase be construed as an encompassing theme that explains the effect of Melville’s representation of Ahab’s rhetorics of persuasion. When Cain links “the triumph of the will” to “the failure of resistance,” he means for the latter phrase to refer to the crew’s incapacity to withstand the debilitating effects of Ahab’s rhetoric.

But when he thereafter applies these identical...