From Clare Spark:
>...Some notes from Clare Spark for reviewers of Hunting Captain Ahab:
Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP,
2001). ISBN 0873386744. 732 pages, 11 illustrations, notes, bibliography
and index.
Since the "Melville Revival" of the 1920s, Moby-Dick has become an undisputed classic of world literature and continues to grow in interest, yet there is less interest in Melville's artistry than in his politics: was the author an ultraconservative, a centrist, or a left-wing radical?
In the recent canon wars, wherein the literature created by "dead white males" has been challenged by non-whites and feminists, Moby-Dick is often cited as chief offender, with Melville described as an abusive husband and father. For some post60s anticapitalist critics, Melville has become a symbol for an "essentially" imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal, ecocidal America, and his hero Captain Ahab "an anticipation" of twentieth-century totalitarian dictators. Such readings have displaced earlier interpretations, some of which viewed Melville as a radical democrat and anti-racist, and Ahab as a nineteenth-century reformer (radical puritan, Chartist, abolitionist, left Romantic artist, Promethean). Other (more conservative) readings interpreted Ahab as tragic hero, symbol of indomitable humanity, yet doomed to failure in either the search for truth or for amelioration of the human condition. Spark considers Ahab as both abolitionist (e.g., Charles Sumner) and modern artist (Melville himself).
Spark's archival research in the papers of the leading Melville critics has led to discoveries that could transform Melville scholarship and modify the teaching of the politics of American literature:
a. three of the key Melville critics, Henry Murray (a leader in academic psychology and personnel assessment for the Office of Strategic Services), Charles Olson ("father" of cultural pluralism and postmodernism), and Jay Leyda (photographer, film historian, and Stalinist), were skilled propagandists allied with the Roosevelt administration.
b. their political and ideological commitments strongly influenced their renditions of Melville's life and art, and they (and/or others) suppressed biographical materials that conflicted with their political allegiances.
c. the result was (an ambivalent) witch-hunt directed against both "crazy" Melville and his monomaniacal character Captain Ahab; both were seen as autodidacts and images of The People. The repressed materials include Melville's annotations to Milton's Paradise Lost (suggesting that Melville identified with Milton's Satan, and, like Milton himself in Melville's reading, was a masked materialist eluding censors); family letters that would have scotched the rumors that Melville was a wife-beater; and a family letter that suggested Melville had a real-life natural half-sister corresponding to the character Isabel in his quasi-autobiographical novel Pierre. The latter is important because the New Deal social psychologists, in both their social democratic propaganda, and in their attempt to achieve "civilian morale" as world war loomed, were rehabilitating and idealizing the good fathers (conflating Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt) while reinterpreting the libertarianism of Jefferson and Paine and generally circumscribing dissent. Melville's "Hebraic" ethical universalism and constant interrogation of illegitimate authority (for instance the apparent exposure of his own father's abandonment of an illegitimate daughter) were threats to their objective: the good father, as "focus of veneration" was the source of group cohesion in a pluralist society.
Though a Protestant and generally a freethinker, Melville was frequently characterized by conservative critics between the wars as a Jew, the archetypal confidence-man, only pretending to be a principled moralist. During the postwar phase of the Melville Revival, it was necessary to reconstruct Melville as a "moderate man," preacher of "virtuous expediency"--precisely the figure who was the target of his most trenchant satire. This shift responded to the perceived need for a centrist ruling coalition that could unite elements of both the prewar Left and Right (much as liberal Catholics had already done). Accordingly, leading Melvilleans decisively separated the author from Ahab's feisty empiricism/ romantic individualism and identified him with aristocratic Captain Vere (in "Billy Budd").
The story of the Melville Revival is intertwined with the history of ongoing antimodern control of the humanities curriculum. Many of the scholars and critics who were supporting Mussolini and even Hitler during the mid-1930s (e.g. Southern Agrarians), entered the literary establishment as New Critics during and after the war. Definitions of "fascism" were adjusted accordingly. For some "moderates," Hitler was switched from antibourgeois, neoclassical defender of "community," to home-wrecking romantic/ the autodidact as assassin. Ahab readings also shifted in a similar trajectory, beginning in the late 1930s. In sum, the materials I have found compel a rethinking of the history of the last five centuries from the point of view of the common reader or autodidact: no political tendency or social movement emerges uncriticized. I hope others will join me in this titanic effort, only begun in my book.
Also see my article, "Race, Caste, or Class? The Bunche-Myrdal Dispute Over AN AMERICAN DILEMMA," International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society Vol.14, No.3 (Spring 2001): 465-511. The theme of counter-Enlightenment presenting itself as the vanguard of enlightenment is continued, with Bunche holding the line for materialist historical analysis (empiricism or positivism), while Myrdal is the epitome of the German historical school ("radical subjectivism"/cultural relativism), the favored methodology in the postwar writing of history. **************************************************************************** **************
Blurbs for Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival
Hunting Captain Ahab constitutes a major reassessment of Melville and his critical reception in America. Thanks to Clare Spark's in-depth archival research, the political dimensions are at last fully brought to light. The world of Melville scholarship will never be the same. (Roy Porter, author Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World)
Hunting Captain Ahab is a delicious concoction, an irresistible melange of Hannah Arendt, Kermit Vanderbilt, Kitty Kelley, Ronald Radosh-Joyce Milton, and A. S. Byatt. Usual and unusual suspects are tracked down, strip-searched, grilled and served up. FBI files, private filing cabinets, and great library archives are ransacked for our astonished delight. Who would have though that so many startling family comments on Melville remained unseen? Who would have thought those secretive, conspiratorial academics would have preserved so many incriminating papers? Anyone who writes on Melville must buy this plump plum pudding of a book, this vast long-considered trifle, this huge fruit-cake of certifiably weird fellow-travelling Melvilleans. Lord, I wish I had known some of them in the flesh. (Hershel Parker, Melville biographer and co-editor Northwestern-Newberry complete works of Herman Melville)
Clare Spark provides us with an intricate and exhaustive view of the politics of literature and of literary reputation. Without succumbing to simplistic "right-left" dichotomies, she demonstrates, through an analysis of the Melville Revival, how our literary icons are made and endlessly remade in the service of ideological, as well as esthetic, agendas. She depicts the long, struggle between the obsessions of sundry Melville scholars and the titanic obsessions of Melville himself (always, of course, at war with each other) with a singular originality of vision. "Hunting Captain Ahab", faithfully echoing Melville in its plenitude and bold intellectual counterpoint, will give contemporary Melville enthusiasts dozens, if not hundreds, of new themes to ponder and deliberate. (Norman J. Levitt, Rutgers University, author Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Science)
[e-mail to author:] Salutations Clare Spark,
Erin Holman gave me your e-mail address because I wanted to tell you what a
phenomenal book you have in Hunting Captain Ahab. I am the proofreader working for The Kent State University Press who is having the distinct pleasure of reading your book. As a freelancer, I see a variety of presentations. Your work offers the most readable, provocative, and informative book I have read for work or interest in many a day! An exciting addition to the world, indeed. Thank you.
Take care,
Toni Mortimer