C. L. R. James's Moby-Dick: The Narrative Testimony of the Non-Survivor

C. L. R. James’s Moby-Dick: The Narrative Testimony of the Non-Survivor DONALD E. PEASE Dartmouth College A lthough the event was not unexpected, the Trinidadian social activist and cultural critic Cyril Lionel Robert James was nevertheless filled with dread on the afternoon of June 10, 1952 when government agents arrived with a warrant that required James to accompany them to Ellis Island, where he would be detained for the next six months, to await deportation hearings. Government agents had been keeping track of James’s activities since the time of his entry into the United States in 1938 when the FBI classified him as a security risk. But their harassment had increased dramatically during the heyday of McCarthyism. As warrant for his internment, the state agents cited the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which, despite the fact that it was passed a month after James’s citizenship examination, would nevertheless ultimately become the juridical instrument invoked by the State to justify his deportation. Ellis Island in New York harbor had been consecrated in the national imagination as the port of entry through which immigrants, exiles, and political refugees passed on their way to becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. But in turning Ellis Island into a deportation center, the Immigration and Naturalization Services disaggregated it as well as its itinerant population from the national territory. By removing the conditions of social belonging and political agency from James and his fellow detainees on Ellis Island, the state catastrophically transformed the island into a scene of social death. While he was incarcerated, James worked each day on a manuscript that he published in 1953 under the title Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. After having been taken into custody by agents of the national security state, James turned his detainment on Ellis Island into an occasion to return to his interpretive labors. Before the arrival of the INS officers, James had been working on a series of lectures on Melville that he intended to deliver over the Summer. James correlated the state agents’ forcible removal with the traumatic events that the Pequod’s crew had been compelled to undergo c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 34 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S C . L . R . J A M E S ’ S M O B Y - D I C K under the governance of Ahab. James also depicted the site of social death on Ellis Island as a historical correlative for the catastrophic shipwreck at the conclusion to Melville’s novel. The homology that James adduced between the narrative fate of the crew and the political fate of the refugees on Ellis Island drew upon an equivalence that James discerned between the state’s violence towards him and the interpretive violence Americanist critics directed against the crew. Moby-Dick was not for scholars of American literature merely an object of analysis; it had become one of the planetary instruments responsible for the global hegemonization of American values. Melville’s novel provided American literary studies with a frame narrative that rationalized the liberal values of freedom and individual autonomy that Americanists attributed to the progressive movement of world history. After Moby-Dick was read to predict the world scale antagonism of the cold war, the narrative provided the state with an image of itself as overcoming the totalitarian order to which it was opposed. This frame narrative thereby assisted in structuring the understanding of the U.S. society that it purported to represent. But while he was on Ellis Island, James did not subjectivize the interpretive attitude that normalized U.S. hegemony. James instead interpreted this Americanist text by way of the mediation of the disaporic movements of the “mariners, renegades and castaways” whom scholars in American literary studies had written out of the frame narrative for which Ishmael’s liberal values had served as the principle of integration. The crew were placeholders for the forms of life that the world historical...