The Caine Mutiny (Criticism)

Criticism

Tabitha Mcintosh-Byrd

Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. In the following essay, she analyzes Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny as a 'hostile text' — a novel that resists critical and analytic interpretive strategies.

The Caine Mutiny opens with a textual arti-fact — a page torn from the book of Navy Regulations which contains the articles relating to relief of a commanding officer. It closes with another — the "torn paper" of parade confetti which "brushed the face of the last captain of the Caine." Between these ripped paper bookends lies a densely inter-textual work which is layered with deliberate echoes of a multitude of canonical texts — the most obvious being The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Moby-Dick, and the book of Genesis — and contains scattered references to dozens of others. Though this would seem, at first glance, to mark it as a novel that invites literary interpretation, nothing could be more wrong.

The Caine Mutiny is in fact a novel that is aware of interpretation and resists it — providing obvious entry points for literary critique only to turn them back on the reader and undermine the analytic process. The ways in which the author deflects interpretation and expectation are many. The book proclaims itself to be a novel about World War II, but the action almost exclusively concerns non-combat life. It performs a narrative about-face four-fifths of the way through, forcing an abrupt shift in sympathies for all of the characters involved. It is shot through with morally ambiguous characters who spot the literary and symbolic references just as the reader has begun to, and thus draw us into uneasy complicity with them, making us question the very validity of textual interpretation. In the final analysis, The Caine Mutiny is a novel about the ethics of reading, about the moral implications of overlaying reality with literary meaning. The torn paper of the novel's last line is both a summation of the plot's resolution and an explicit injunction to do likewise — to tear up textual meaning.

From the title of the novel onwards, an analytic reader is predisposed to perform certain kinds of interpretation. Caine, of course, would seem to refer to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, the mutiny fitting in as an analog for the famous verse, "Cain rose up and slew his brother Abel." Analytic assumptions follow logically from this easy literary clue: that the ship and its crew will be outcasts, the mutiny will be couched in the language of family, honor and sin, and that the novel will conform to an easy series of symbolic devices. Several chapters into The Caine Mutiny however, this entire reading is defeated in a masterly sleight of hand. Not for the first or the last time, we as readers have been encouraged to congratulate ourselves on our reading skills, only to find that the narrative is quite aware of the interpretation that we have begun to give it. In a critical discussion during an Officers' meal, Tom Keefer — "the novelist" — tips our hand when he explains to the other officers the symbolic order that we too are using. As he says:

"This ship is an outcast, manned by outcasts, and named for the greatest outcast of mankind."

Their replies deflate both his reading and our own:

"That's the literary mind for you. I never thought of the Caine being a symbolic name — " "It seems to me, Mr. Keefer that you can twist any ship's name into a symbolic meaning."

This latter comment is especially significant. As Keith says, Keefer is an "endless treasury of plays on words," and his identification of the Caine with Cain is just one instance of his intellectual games and — increasingly — his clear moral relativism. Wouk has deliberately staged his narrative to encourage us to make the exact identifications that Keefer does, and in debunking Keefer he debunks us too.

This way of reading — as a search for literary "clues" that can be made to form a coherent pattern — comes consistently under attack throughout the novel, first encouraged, then identified and finally exploded. To an astute reader on the lookout for such clues, the "rotting hull" of the Caine is a clear reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the water-ban episode reinforces the identification. Almost as if it is anticipating the comments that we are about to write in the margin, the narrative again forestalls us:

"The bodies stirred, and rose, and began to move through chores with leaden limbs, like the crew of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

In pointing out the connections we are in the process of making, we are yoked into the viewpoint of characters like Keith and Keefer, who "read" in exactly the same way that we do. Keefer's analysis of Queeg and his steel balls is as predictable as ours — "the man's a Freudian delight. He crawls with clues," while Keith's way of understanding the crew is entrenched in our shared comparative literary methods:

"They reminded him of incidents in novels about men on long sea voyages, and there was a not quite pleasant amusement in seeing the classic symptoms popping out."

Nor is this all. The novel does not seek only to reflect our reading process back on itself; it also serves as a moral judgment on us. The identification of literary methods with morally ambiguous characters is the first way in which this begins. The "strawberry episode" reinforces it, with Queeg's insane search for clues and his obsessive gathering of keys being a clear analogy for critical analysis. However, it is after the mutiny that this theme becomes openly vicious — when Barney Greenwald, arguably the moral center of the novel, realizes that Tom Keefer's literary games lie at the heart of the whole affair. As he says to Maryk after hearing the narrative of events, "Your sensitive novelist is the villain of this foul-up."

The shared celebration for Maryk's victory and Keefer's literary contract underscore the insistent suggestion that there are two novels for which Keefer must take credit. Not only is his half-finished work Multitudes, Multitudes being published, but also his most triumphantly authored work, The Caine Mutiny itself. Even as we begin to recognize this parallel, however, Wouk outplays us again, taking the analysis from us and putting it in the mouth of Barney Greenwald. As the lawyer says of Keefer shortly before throwing a drink in his face, "He was the author of the Caine mutiny among his other works." Through the drunken speeches of Greenwald, the fundamental truths of the war are elaborated for the first and only time in the novel, and act as a series of narrative about-turns that utterly destabilize the reading of the situation that we have been encouraged to accept. To the shocked party-goers he elaborates that the war is about the Holocaust; that enlisted officers like Queeg have devoted their lives to standing between America and such horrors; that Maryk is indeed guilty of making a mutiny; and that the hero of the piece should have been Captain Queeg himself.

Accepting Greenwald's interpretation leads to a series of uneasy realizations about our own complicity in the case, the chief being that we, like the deluded crew, have accepted the romance of the tale and ignored the reality. Just as Keith "had whispered to himself, "'the Caine mutiny, the Caine mutiny,' savoring the ring of the phrase," so we have read the mutiny as an adventure tale, ignoring the narrative injunction at the novel's opening:

"It was not a mutiny in the old-time sense, of course, with flashings of cutlasses, a captain in chains, and desperate sailors turning outlaws."

This is, of course, precisely the way that the Mutiny section has been crafted, and the way in which it is interpreted by the novel's civilians, May Wynn and Keith's mother. The purpose of Wouk's layers of literary reference become clearer — they are there to show us that the reality of war is outside literary craft and that our understanding of it is immorally confused by our reading matter. If we are to disassociate ourselves from Keefer — the critic and coward who is "stained yellow" for-ever — we must reject criticism and interpretation. By the end of the novel Keefer has himself realized his own nature, and is still unable to extract it from literary conceit. His cowardice is linked in his mind with Lord Jim and he tells Willie that he will be "Lord Tom" from this point onwards. It is highly appropriate that he damns himself with reference to a seafaring novel, since he has begun the whole mutiny with his allusion to another. As he said to Maryk early in the escalating tension, "Ever read Billy Budd, by Melville? Read it. That's the whole story."

Of course this is not the whole story, and Maryk tells him so, relating the actual causes behind Queeg's dislike of Stilwell. He points out the real reasons for the hostility, and comments, "I don't have any theories. I'm a dumb comic-book reader." In fact, "dumb" comic-book reading, in which word and image have a direct and uncomplicated relationship, turns out to be the only kind of reading that doesn't morally incriminate the reader. In a truly shocking moment, the scenes at the celebration party have revealed to us that everything before them has been word-play — a literary game stylistically embodied by Keefer's favorite novel, Finnegan's Wake. The version of The Caine Mutiny that we have been reading is no more or less than Keefer's novel, wearily assessed by Greenwald as a book which:

"exposes this war in all its grim futility and waste, and shows up the military men for the stupid, Fascist-minded sadists they are."

If we accept Barney's insistence that this is not true, that it is Queeg who should have been the tragic hero of the tale, then the purpose of the torn page of regulations at the frontispiece comes into retrospective focus. The articles contained therein are the facts — the elements by which we should have judged the action of the novel. It has, in fact, been a trial, and Barney Greenwald is telling us that we too have made a false judgment, and have been found wanting. We are just as gullible as Maryk and, like him, should have stuck to comic books.

Source: Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• Herman Melville wrote a brilliantly and symbolically charged novella in 1797. It focuses on the experiences of a family member of Melville's who presided over the court-martial and execution of a sailor. Though written in 1891, Billy Budd, Foretopman or Billy Budd, Sailor was first published posthumously in 1924. Coincidentally, the English composer Edward Benjamin Britten, aided by E. M. Forster's libretto, made Billy Budd into an opera in 1951.
• A romantic novel by Charles Nordhoff describes what has become the archetypal story of mutiny. His 1932 novel, Mutiny on the Bounty, is based on the actual mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty in 1789 as narrated by Roger Byam.
• In the 1970s, Wouk returned to World War II as a setting for a novel with a two-volume historical novel The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). The first novel tells of the heroic Lt. Henry and the plight of Jews in Poland. The second novel is the translations of a Nazis' private papers near the end of the war. Both novels have been praised for their historical accuracy.
• The other great American novel to come out of World War II in 1948 is Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead. The novel chronicles the experiences of a platoon on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei in the Pacific.
• After the war was over, most just wanted to forget the horrors of the camps. Elie Wiesel, however, refused to let the experience be swept under the rug. He wrote a 1956 novel called Night that described some of his own experiences in concentration camps during World War II. Wiesel then began a lifelong quest to talk about the camps and do whatever he could to prevent them from ever happening again.