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...work." (1) This is somewhat of an exaggeration, but regardless, the re-issue of C.L.R. James's Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In should interest scholars of Melville. James's classic Marxist and post-colonial reading of Moby-Dick is foundational text for a tradition of leftist interpretations of Melville's writings that includes Michael Paul Rogin's Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Age of Herman Melville, Donald Pease's Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context, Wai Chee Dimock's Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism, and most recently William V. Spanos's The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies. Although reprints of Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways were issued in 1978 and 1985, this new edition is the first to provide the complete text, including the controversial final chapter which was left out of the Detriot Bewick edition (1978) and included only in part in the Alison and Busby edition (1985). Donald Pease's introduction provides a detailed analysis of the controversy surrounding the last chapter, as well as a provocative account of how James's reading of Moby-Dick can serve as a model for a transnational approach to American Studies. While those familiar with Marxist approaches to Moby-Dick may not discover much that is new in Mariners, revisiting James's radical reading of Melville will provide an opportunity to think again about what it means to teach this most canonical of American texts in the increasingly globalized world we live in.
When James began writing Mariners in 1952 he set out to challenge what was already a canonical interpretation of Moby-Dick. Critics such as F.O. Mathiessen and Richard Chase had read the novel as a political allegory of democratic culture. In this reading, the narrative interplay between Ahab and Ishmael was taken to be symbolic of a dialectical tension in the ideology of American individualism. Ahab's desire to assert his will over God and man served as the antithesis to the "free-thinking" exemplified in Ishmael's speculative and improvisational style of narration. For Chase, in particular, Ishmael's quest to comprehend leviathan represented "the creative elan, with its promise of endurance, growth and fructifying civilization," while Ahab was "the American cultural...
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Jeanne C. Howes. Poet of a Morning: Herman Melville and the "Redburn" ..., February 01, 2003
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