Why He Keeps Getting Written

In Canto XXVI of the Inferno, Dante descends into the eighth bolgia and nearly loses himself.

Not to a monster. Not to fire or storm or ice. To a voice. Ulysses, wrapped in a tongue of flame, tells the story of his last voyage — how he gathered his aged and faithful crew and sailed west past the Pillars of Hercules, the boundary Hercules had set so that no man should dare go beyond. Then he delivered the speech that undid them:

"Consider your origins: you were not made to live like brutes or beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge."

And they went. And the mountain rose from the sea. And the whirlpool swallowed them.

Virgil had to hold Dante back from following.

Five hundred and fourteen years later, Herman Melville put a whaling captain on the deck of a ship called the Pequod and gave him a similar speech. Ahab nailed a gold coin to the mast and told his crew what they were hunting. He passed the fire around. The three pagan harpooners drank from their harpoon-sockets and swore the oath. And Ishmael — the narrator, the witness, the one who survives to tell it — watched himself choose it along with everyone else.

"With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements. But as it was — I felt a wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me."

He knew. He chose anyway.

The question that has been sitting with me since I finished the Inferno: why does this figure keep getting written?

Not because the writers failed to escape him. Dante knew perfectly well that Ulysses was damned — he put him there deliberately, in the circle of evil counselors, wrapped in the fire of his own tongue. And Melville knew perfectly well that Ahab was mad — Starbuck says so, the ship's doctor says so, Ishmael says so, Ahab says so. Both writers understood what they were making. Both made it anyway, and made it so compellingly that readers have been trying to go past the pillars with Ulysses and sign onto the Pequod with Ahab ever since.

The figure keeps getting written because something in it is genuinely true.

They are not the same character. The differences matter.

Dante's Ulysses is clean. His desire is pure: virtue and knowledge, the proper human end. The speech is not a lie — Dante believes it, which is why he nearly follows it. The error is not in the aspiration but in the destination: the mountain beyond the pillars was closed, and Ulysses didn't know, or didn't care. He drove a crew of faithful men to their deaths with an accurate sentence about human nature.

Melville's Ahab is not clean. He knows perfectly well that his desire is personal, not cosmic. He says so: "All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad." The whale took his leg. He is hunting it because it took his leg. He has constructed an elaborate theology of defiance around this fact — the whale as mask for something behind the world, the harpoon thrown past the mask at the thing it conceals — but he knows the construction is his. He is the one doing the constructing. The distinction from Ulysses is that Ahab's desire is wounded and narcissistic where Ulysses' was genuine and forward-looking.

And yet.

In the Symphony chapter — the penultimate chapter, the day before the final chase — Ahab stands at the stern and watches Starbuck's face. He weeps. He sees, for one chapter, everything clearly: what he's done to his crew, what drives him, what the mechanism of his own destruction is. "I see my wife and child" — he sees them, across water, at a distance he has created. "Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?" He questions his own will, his own agency, whether the chase is choice or compulsion. He has the full picture. Then he goes below. Then he chases the whale.

Both figures see. Ulysses saw the pillars and named them. Ahab in the Symphony sees himself and names himself. Clarity was never the thing that would save them.

Here is what I think the two books are doing with this figure, five centuries apart.

Dante writes from outside the ship. He watches Ulysses in the flame and recounts the speech, but the speech is reported, not inhabited. We hear what Ulysses said; we do not hear his pulse quicken as he said it. We see the men galvanized; we do not share the galvanization. Dante the character nearly follows the speech, but Dante the poet is standing at sufficient distance that we can see the speech and the sea closing over the crew as consecutive facts. The structure of the poem — divine comedy, ordered universe, Beatrice waiting at the top — frames Ulysses' voyage as a deviation from a known structure. There is a right direction, and this isn't it.

Melville writes from inside the ship. Ishmael does not watch Ahab from outside; he boards the vessel, swears the oath, feels the wild mystical feeling in his own chest. We are inside the crew's experience of being moved. We know Ahab is mad; we also feel what it's like to be moved by him anyway, to look at the gold coin and feel something shift. The nineteenth century has no Beatrice waiting at the top. There is no divine comedy, no ordered universe guaranteed to correct for the deviation. There is only the ship, and what the people on it choose, and the sea.

Dante can show us Ulysses from outside because his poem has a structure that frames the deviation. Melville has to show us Ahab from inside because his novel has no such structure. The figure is the same; the relationship between reader and figure is what has changed.

What each era needed him to say:

Dante needed to put genuine aspiration in Hell. The Commedia is a poem about love — the love that moves the sun and the other stars — and part of what it is doing is distinguishing the loves that lead upward from the loves that lead down. Ulysses demonstrates that the problem is not always corruption. Sometimes the aspiration is real, the desire is right, the intelligence is genuine — and it leads somewhere God has closed. This is disturbing in a way that corrupt desire is not, because corrupt desire is legible and in principle resistible. The genuinely beautiful speech toward the closed destination requires something harder than resistance. It requires a structure larger than yourself — a Beatrice, a divine order, a light to navigate by — to know which direction is actually up.

Melville needed to put the democratic crew inside the speech. The nineteenth century was in the middle of building something new: democracy, industry, the idea that ordinary people were the agents of history, not just its objects. And Melville was watching what happened when a charismatic individual could mobilize that democratic energy toward a private obsession. Ahab is not a king commanding subjects. He is a man who moves free people to choose his madness. That's the more disturbing power. Dante's Ulysses moved men who followed because the speech was true. Ahab's crew moved themselves because the figure gave them something to be part of. The feeling was real. The enterprise was not.

One more thing, which neither writer names but both poems carry:

The figures are most dangerous because they offer the crew something real.

Ulysses offers the correct account of human nature: you were made for virtue and knowledge. This is not flattery. It's not manipulation. It's what Dante believes, what the whole poem believes, what the tradition believes. The speech is true. The direction is wrong.

Ahab offers the feeling of defiance on behalf of everyone who has been wounded by indifferent power. "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me!" The mates hear this and feel something clarify. The ordinary whalemen who signed on for oil money find themselves in a story about meaning. The harpooneer who hasn't been offered anything by the civilization whose ships he works on finds himself the object of Ahab's trust. The feeling of being taken seriously, being part of something — this is real. Ahab is not wrong that the men carry wounds. He is wrong that his private wound is the world's wound, wrong that hunting the white whale is a blow struck on anyone's behalf but his own.

The offer is real. The fulfillment of the offer is not. That's what makes the figure tragic rather than simply wrong.

Dante stands in the eighth bolgia and has to be held back. Ishmael boards the Pequod and signs the papers. Both responses are honest: the speech almost took Dante, and it did take Ishmael, and the two different responses are the two different situations of the two different centuries.

The figure keeps getting written because the problem it poses has not been solved. Genuine aspiration, genuinely gifted intelligence, the capacity to move people toward something real — and the possibility that all of this can be directed somewhere closed, somewhere wrong, somewhere that ends with the sea closing over you while the ship spirals down.

The pillars are still there. The white whale is still out there. And someone is always on the quarterdeck with a gold coin and a speech about what you were made for.

The crew looks up. Something in them moves.

And you, reading, know exactly what they feel.