Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 107–08.
B. Traven, The Death Ship (1934; repr. Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), 79.
Ibid., 106.
Ibid., 107.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid., 172–73.
Ibid., 173.
Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 106.
Traven, The Death Ship, 131.
Marx and Engels fought bitterly with the anarchists under Bakunin and preferred to destroy the First International (1864–1876) rather than let the anarchists take over. Engels famously asked something to the effect of, “How can you have a ship without a captain?” or “When there’s a storm, how can the ship get through without a captain?” B. Traven supplies the answer, as did the pirates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who we read about, sailors who rebelled against their captains. What ships provide otherwise is ruthless, authoritarian discipline. Read Melville.
Traven, The Death Ship, 176–77.
Ibid., 191.
Ibid.
Ibid., 202.
Ibid., 265.
Ibid., 267.
Ibid., 183.
Ibid., 207.
It might seem that because the work is so inhuman, the things of the workplace become human—or, if not human, at least animated, especially with respect to their ability to tell stories. On the Death Ship, beleaguered sailors speak with beleaguered machinery, slaves together on a journey to the end of time.
Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 102.
Ibid., 108–09.