[On March 19th, 1951, Herman Wouk published The Caine Mutiny. That’s one of many important American novels set on ships, so this week for its 75th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy Caine and four others, leading up to a weekend tribute to a colleague studying maritime meanings!]
How Wouk’s Pulitzer-winning novel illuminates three other nautical (or nautical-adjacent) stories.
Although Herman Wouk was apparently inspired to write The Caine Mutiny (1951) by his own experiences in the World War II U.S. Navy, perhaps the book’s most obvious inspiration also happens to be the most famous American nautical novel and one published exactly one hundred years earlier than Wouk’s, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). Wouk’s dictatorial and obsessive Captain Queeg (whose odd name seems clearly intended to echo Queequeg in Melville’s book) is very much a modern Captain Ahab, making the book’s novelist-narrator Willie Keith very much an Ishmael for his times. Among other ways to interpret this comparison, I would argue that Wouk’s work allows us to think about how Melville’s famously allegorical and symbolic novel is also most definitely a nautical novel, and one quite specifically focused on the realities, rules, hierarchies, and conflicts that are found aboard ships, even ones as distinct as a mid-19th century whaler and a mid-20th century destroyer-minesweeper.
A 1990s submarine is likewise quite distinct from either of those vessels, but I would nonetheless argue that Tony Scott’s film Crimson Tide (1995) has a lot in common with Wouk’s novel. Gene Hackman’s Captain Ramsay isn’t quite as dramatically unbalanced as Queeg, but he’s nonetheless clearly in the wrong and endangering all those aboard the sub (as well as the fate of the entire world in this case), and thus the mutiny against him led by Denzel Washington’s Executive Officer Hunter is as justifiable and righteous as that led by Executive Officer Maryk in Wouk’s story. The U.S. is not currently at war in Crimson Tide—indeed, perhaps the film’s most famous and powerful line comes when Ramsay says “God help you if you’re wrong” and Hunter responds, “If I’m wrong, we’re at war. God help us all”—which might seem to suggest that Wouk’s depiction of an unbalanced captain and righteous mutiny features more immediate stakes; but a central point of Crimson Tide is that in the nuclear age, the stakes are always as high as they can be, and putting the two stories in conversation only drives home that point further.
Until researching this post, I hadn’t realized how much of Wouk’s novel takes place on land, and more exactly in Hawaii prior to Keith joining the crew of the Caine. In that sense the book is interestingly in conversation with the novel that it replaced at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List, James Jones’s From Here To Eternity (1951). I had a lot to say about Jones’s novel in that hyperlinked post about a month ago, but would add these quick thoughts through a comparison with Wouk’s book: both depict the realities and effects of the hierarchical, rigid rules of the wartime navy; both portray romantic relationships for their protagonists as heavily affected by those wartime realities; but Wouk’s, echoing works like Melville’s, suggests that the crucible of men’s experiences takes place on ships, far from those kinds of homefront themes. That’s a very consistent and crucial element of most nautical novels, and one that The Caine Mutiny exemplifies.
Last nautical novel tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Nautical novels you’d nominate or other shipboard stories you’d share?
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