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

Keview F Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Wayfare and the Melville Revival CLARE L. SPARK, (Kent State University Press, 2001), x,730 pages or Clare Spark, Melville still speaks powerfully against the forces of illegitimate authority, institutional elitism, liberal compromise, and relativistic pluralism that, she believes, characterize conternporary society, especially academe. Voicing his principles through Ahab and Pierre, Sparks Melville opposes those who would sacrifice truth for order, standing forth as a radical Puritan individualist and autodidact expounding the rational materialism of the “Radical Enlightenment” in a nineteenth century beset by romantic irrationalism, “organic conservatism,” and nascent corporate capitalism. Yet Melville’s aristocratic heritage, with its traditions, loyalties, secrets, and allegiances , inhibited his full expression, and he alternately desired and resented the security his family conferred. This argument is familiar to all who have read Michael Paul Rogins Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1983),a book Spark acknowledges as one spur to her study in Enter Isabel: The Herman Melville Correspondence of Clare Spark and Paul Metcalf, itself a valuable intertext for Hunting Captain Ahab. But Spark takes Kogin one important step further: the conflict between truth and order is not confined to Melville, but is shared by his critics as well. Herein lies what she terms the “Melville problem” (123, $33), “his famously fissured personality or identity that scholars generally described and classified in SKatlC terms and without reference to the analogous paradoxical institutional conditions in which their Melville biographies or criticism were generated; nor, in their published criticism could the revivers admit their own inner turmoil in response to Melville’s art” (7).The burden of Spark‘sproject is to decode, through a detailed analysis of the Melville Revival (which she dates from 1919-1953),both the “institutional conditions” and “inner turmoil” among scholars that displaced Ahab and Pierre with Ishmael, effectively silencing Melville’s radical voice and normalizing him into a literary monument with values suspiciously like those of his revivers. Basing her observations on wide reading in social arid political history, rich archival work in the papers of such notable revivalists as Raymond Weaver, Jay Leyda, Charles Olson, Henry Murray, and Richard Chase, correspondence and interviews with Leyda, Murray, Harry Levin, Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Harrison Hayford, Paul Metcalf, and others, as well as attention to Moby8 8 L E v I A T H A N R E V I E W Dick, Pierre, and C l a d , Spark melds cultural history with psychobiography to produce a complex, oversimplified, illuminating, dogmatic, stimulating, exasperating , insightful, blinkered exposition of the formative years in Melville scholarship. A case study in intellectual history more than literary criticism or biography, this book seeks to uriearch the secre[s and expose the compromises behind Melville’s rise to carionization. The book develops in three spiraling, overiapping sections, plus a 112page appendix of chronologically arranged primary materials, another 130 pages of notes (many of them mall essays in themselves), and a bibliography and index. The first section provides context for all that follows: the academic politics surrounding Weaver’s introduction to Melvillescholarship, relevant facts of Melville biography, key passages in Clad, Mob-y-Dick, Pierre, and Melville’sannotations to Paradise Lost. Weaver began his Melville srudies during a purge of antiwar professors at Columbia in 1917,a vivid instance of academic repression. In coritrast to such “corporatist” authority, Melville offered Weaver a “rainbow”of “natural and universal creativity” (19): “Not surprising, the young Melviilepresented in 1Weaver’s] biography resembled the Columbia troublemakers of 1917” (52). Weaver’sMelville / Ahab thus exposed the confusion of progressive thought and reasserted the primacy of natural rights in the face of “the triumphant ideology of postwar businessmen, federal bureaucracs , arid union leaders, the moderate men of ‘the vital center,’ viny hurnanists all” (35).These are the “corporatists” and ”organic coriservatives” who manipulate Enlightenment thought for coriservativeaims, the illegitimate and antiderriocratic authorities with whom Melville / Ahab struggles. By returning obsessively to one theme, “thedouble bind of the would-be autonomous individual inside the ‘liberal’corporatist family,”Melvilleidentified “one source of malaise for twentieth-century literary critics tied to similarly confusing institutions of conservative reform,” i.e. the universities (36). Not only Ahab, but Pierre...