Somewhere Else: Legal Fictions, Capitalism, and Deterritoriality in B. Traven's The Death Ship

The identity of the author B. Traven has been shrouded in mystery. That uncertainty is only fitting for an author who has so perceptively written about the ways certain persons fall through the cracks of the passport system despite the enormous bureaucratic resources summoned to establish the passport as a reliable signifier of both personal and national identity. Much of the author B. Traven's mystique lies in his play with the conventions of the proper name, coupled with his outlaw status as a revolutionary. Before he adopted the pseudonym "B. Traven," the author we now know as having previously been named Ret Marut fled Germany after fighting alongside the unsuccessful attempt at communist revolution in Munich in 1919 (Guthke 1987). He escaped incarceration right as he was about to be tried, and likely executed, by a military tribunal for treason. Having arrived in Mexico in 1924, after going underground and crossing numerous national borders, he continued to publish under pseudonym in exile in Mexico, among others the 1927 novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre which John Huston adapted into a film in 1948.

The novel which we are concerned with here, The Death Ship, was published in German in Germany in 1926 by the Büchergilde Gutenberg, a publishing house connected with socialist trade unions. This novel has gained much attention from readers and scholars due to its vivid depictions of the dehumanizing effects of capitalist exploitation of labor (Taussig 2012) and finance speculation (Wolf 2006), on the one hand, and its critique of the drawing and policing of borders by the governments of nation-states (Gulddal 2013), on the other. By mobilizing the figure of the death ship, these studies show, the novel highlights the peculiar collusion of nationalist territoriality with a capitalist exploitation of nomadic workers. In what follows, we will take the discussion further by looking at the representation of statelessness in the novel, a category that first emerged on the German literary scene in the midto-late 1920s. Traven's novel, we show, links techniques of storytelling to the consolidation of the bureaucratically regulated passport regime which was implemented after the First World War to police the newly drawn borders of Europe. Our essay sheds new light on the novel's depiction of statelessness through its focus on the emergence of fictional storyworlds from an "elsewhere" created by the passport regime. For Traven's novel is not merely concerned with the motif of the passport, along with the themes of statelessness and exploited ship workers. As our discussion of the "as-if" structures of passports and narration shows, The Death Ship also more fundamentally models the problem of narrating statelessness: as a reflection on both how to narrate the path by which a person has come to embody this exceptional status and what it might even mean to narrate from an exceptional standpoint created by, but not territorializable within, the representational logic of the passport system. In short, we discuss this novel's narrative techniques for showing how stateless narrators traffic in fictions with very real effects. We argue that the stateless voice from elsewhere is at once a byproduct of the state's efforts to create a homogeneous nation and a reminder of the multiple storyworlds that haunt the nation-state, even when those stories are not documented in any official records.

Let us begin with a brief summary of the novel's plot, which is narrated in the first person by the protagonist Philip Gale, an American sailor stranded in the foreign harbor of Antwerp. Gale had arrived in Antwerp as a deckhand on the S.S. Tuscaloosa. The ship had delivered a load of cotton from New Orleans. In Antwerp, Gale's ship leaves without him, thus launching the plot of the first part of the novel. Unable to verify his identity to local authorities, he finds himself among the many stateless roving through Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. A sequence of grotesque confrontations with state authorities and bureaucratic apparatuses drives him...