The C.L.R. James Institute: C.L.R. James on Melville & Our World: What They Do

The C.L.R. James Institute

C.L.R. James on
What They Do

Just look at the names of the famous books which will be handed to future generations as a picture of our times: The Waste Land, Journey to the End of the Night, Darkness at Noon, Farewell to Arms, The Counterfeiters, In Remembrance of Things Past—a catalogue of misery or self-centered hopelessness. These are the books Ishmael and Pierre would write if they wrote novels. One thing unites these authors. They know nothing about work and workers, the living experience of the vast majority of living men. Only when war compels them to associate with the great mass of their fellows and sweat and die with them in common association do we get isolated books like The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity. Since World War II the catalogue continues, more dreary than ever. We have had Nausea, The Flies, Reprieve, The Plague, The Stranger. In the two or three words which is all the narrow back of a book will take, the intellectuals of our time have placed their diseased stamp upon the literature of our age as they have placed their diseased stamp upon its psychology. Some of them are men of very great gifts, but for all of them, human beings are the naked and the dead, for whom there is nothing between here and eternity, life is a journey to the end of the night, where in the darkness of midday, the neurotic personality of our time escapes from freedom into a wasteland of guilt and hopelessness. Melville describes the same world in which they live, and Ishmael and Pierre are sick to the heart with the modern sickness. Yet how light in the scales is the contemporary mountain of self-examination and self-pity against the warmth, the humor, the sanity, the anonymous but unfailing humanity of the renegades and castaways and savages of the Pequod, rooted in the whole historical past of man, doing what they have to do, facing what they have to face.

Source: Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, the complete text, with an introduction by Donald E. Pease (Hanover: Dartmouth College / University Press of New England, 2001), pp. 113-114.

The Pequod Project

Jim Murray, Director (make inquiries here)
Ralph Dumain, Librarian/Archivist & Webmaster

Uploaded 6 June 2001
Revised 22 October 2002