On Reading with an Equal Eye: Melville and Pope

On Reading with an Equal Eye: Melville and Pope KEITH FAHEY Tarzana, California M oby-Dick summons readers for its tale of tragic obsession. “Loomings ” as a first-chapter title serves as augury, but Ishmael’s opening jests on coffins and funerals invite our laughter. The comically inclined might later sense a submergence in a recurring question: “What then remains?” It surfaces at wide intervals, perhaps innocently, perhaps like a gregarious humpback out spy-hopping. Ishmael asks “What then remains?” in “Cetology” (Ch. 32) and “What then remained?” in “Pitchpoling” (Ch. 84), while Starbuck offers “What, then, remains?” in his “Musket” meditation (Ch. 123) (Longman MD 138, 329, 450). The recurrence raises a wonder: Can it possibly hint at a couplet from Canto V of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock? What then remains but well our Pow’r to use, And keep good humor still whate’er we lose? (Pope 238) The possible stitch of a Pope thread is startling. Maimed, raging Ahab comes first to mind, then former schoolmaster Ishmael, who in his keen transition to kicked-about sailor remained buoyed for a happier end-beginning partly because he kept good humor, taking to the sea as his “substitute for pistol and ball” (Longman MD 21). But for this comic view to gain credence, we need proof that Melville, who fancied he had “written a wicked book” (NN Corres 212), also knew and used the rhapsode weavings of mock-heroic Pope. Affirmation comes by way of doubt when, from distant tranquility, Ishmael recalls a little treatise he once composed on eternity; when, “after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon,” he saw in a mirror certain undulations round his heady atmosphere. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye (Longman MD 334). c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 61 K E I T H F A H E Y Equal eye. The misty passage recalls Chapter 81: where Flask’s cruel lance bursts the piteous ulcer of a maimed, dying whale; a blind whale with no audible voice, just spouting “affrighted moisture” as it “impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died” (321). In An Essay on Man, Pope writes: Oh blindness to the future! Kindly giv’n, That each may fill the circle mark’d by Heav’n: Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, And now a bubble burst, and now a world. (Pope 507) Pope’s “equal eye” embraces suffering in all life, and his equal vision also suggests that “levels of life” is a misnomer used by homo hubris. Each creature’s world is a bubble doomed to burst, a vision transformed by Ishmael: On the first-day’s chase he looks on the spewed bodies and snapped wreckage of Ahab’s boat. On the waves “helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst” (Longman MD 482). On the third day, as the Pequod goes down, Ishmael alone escapes the dark descent: “Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst” (500). Readers of The Rape of the Lock will also recall the...