Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (review)

In Hunting Captain Ahab, Clare Spark replicates Ahab's obsession as she pursues the psychology and politics behind the Melville revival of the early twentieth century. The scholars who created the revival—and Spark dissects the theories of all of them—wrote in an atmosphere in which free thought was inhibited by the competing values of individualism and order. According to Spark, these men both supported and were threatened by social policies that embraced a multiclassed, multiraced United States where big business and public intellectuals developed policies that gave the appearance of security for all. These seemingly disparate groups endorsed a fend-for-yourself attitude that maintained the privileged positions of the elite and supported a foreign policy that would inhibit the spread of communism and the power of the masses.

Raymond Weaver, the "father" of the Melville revival, is a case in point. Hired by Columbia to replace a professor fired for his antiwar stance, Weaver entered an academy whose values supported American writers like Emerson over the chaotic questioning of Melville, as the techniques of New Criticism gained currency. Weaver himself was a conflicted radical, caught in the academic battles at Columbia, who resigned his position because he had no possibility for advancement; afterward, he taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, itself a prison of mediocrity. Reflecting his own displacement, Weaver emphasizes Melville's move from travel narratives to the success of Moby-Dick to the pessimism of his late career that caused readers to abandon him. Although Weaver suppresses much of his knowledge of the Melville family, he still gives us a Melville who merges art and autobiography, displaying his struggles with his mother and his homosexual attraction to Hawthorne.

One of the first-wave revivalists, Henry A. Murray, worked on the development of the Thematic Apperception Test, designed to probe the psyche and to build the morale of soldiers in World War II. The second wave, Spark claims, moved away from the biographical to an examination of literary sources and craft. But Spark herself never moves from the psychological assessment of the Melville revivalists. Nowhere is this more evident than in her discussion of Jay Leyda, about whom she asks: "Who was Jay Leyda and what was his problem?" (328). For Spark, Leyda's fact-finder approach to Melville that culminated in his Melville Log was precipitated by his own obscure origins. Leyda grew up in a family where his relation to other members was distorted to the point that he believed his grandmother was his mother. Longing for the exotic life of his reputed father, a circus man, Leyda moved out of his "humble and unimaginative" (328) home life into the more exotic life of photographer, film critic, and sometime communist. As a result of the conflicts and contradictions in his own past, says Spark, Leyda used literary and historical texts to show the disjuncture between life and art at the same time that he, like other revivalists, attempted to control Melville studies by both sharing and withholding information.

Spark reads the criticism of the entire Melville corpus in the context of a rising socialism that paradoxically promoted the democratic values of compromise and free speech. Her overriding point is that the Melville revival is "only tangentially about the author of Moby-Dick. It is but one telling episode in the long-standing global effort to maintain authoritarian social relations in an age of democratic aspirations" (11). Foregrounding this paradox in Moby-Dick, Spark shows how, for most Melvillians, Captain Ahab became not a radical man chasing all that is wrong in society but a madman unwilling to compromise, while Ishmael became the true hero of the novel. Although it is difficult to tease out Spark's own reading of Melville from the leviathan information in her book, she implies a more radical view: Ahab is like the radical Puritan...