Whale Talk: A Guest Post by Xiaolu Guo
Experience Moby Dick like never before in this swashbuckling reimagining centered on one courageous woman. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Xiaolu Guo on writing Call Me Ishmaelle.
Paperback $18.00
Call Me Ishmaelle
Call Me Ishmaelle
By Xiaolu Guo
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.00
From the National Book Critics Circle Award—winning author, a feminist reimagining of Herman Melville’s classic Moby—Dick through the eyes of one inimitable woman and a diverse, swashbuckling crew
From the National Book Critics Circle Award—winning author, a feminist reimagining of Herman Melville’s classic Moby—Dick through the eyes of one inimitable woman and a diverse, swashbuckling crew
For me, a novelist from China rooted in Eastern culture and language, the Western literary canon is something like a distant cousin. I know of her but have only rarely met her. I had read Moby-Dick, first in translation, then in the original, which hardly qualifies me as an expert. But I confess I was fascinated by Melville’s novel, and as a thought experiment I wondered how introducing a woman’s perspective into the most male novel in American history might change the narrative. What if Ishmael were a woman? What if she were to befriend a Chinese sailor onboard?
The most important inspiration for Call Me Ishmaelle was the 19th century Victorian women who disguised themselves to secure a place on merchant and even whaling ships. One case is Anne Jane Thornton, born 1817 in England. At 13 Thornton fell in love with an American sea captain; she then determined to travel to New York to seek out her beloved. Presenting herself as a young boy she found work on a merchant vessel and sailed across the Atlantic, only to learn that the captain had died before she reached the US. She continued to present herself as a boy onboard for years until she was discovered. There are other incredible cases of female sailors and pirates from the same period that stimulated my imagination, and allowed me to find my own Ishmaelle.
What I most wanted for Melville’s narrative was to steer it away from the religious world in which it is rooted, to tack away from his Christianity and all the Biblical references. What I needed was East Asian philosophy and characters. Hence I consciously brought in Daoism, Chinese sailors, Japanese whalers, and the seascapes of the southern hemisphere. I needed scenes with typhoons or monsoons–natural phenomena I am familiar with because I grew up in southern China–rather than the landscapes of northern blizzards and ocean snows. I needed Asian songs and Zen poetry, rather than Shakespeare’s verses and grand speeches.
A whale is never only a whale, it is the language of sea and nature. Moby Dick is a mirror of human violence towards nature. A whale is the content and form at the same time, it is also the beginning and the end of our nature, so to speak. Here I am reminded of a Koan in Chinese Buddhism. The koan goes like this. Two monks are hiking on a mountain. The young monk asks his master: how can we know if we are arriving somewhere if we continue to walk? The master answers: if you have hiked so long, you have no need to arrive. You contain both the journey and the destination.
A whale takes us on a journey, a literary and natural voyage into a larger world. A whale also manifests the destiny of nature, it indicates the way where we humans ultimately belong in nature. A whale does not care where we humans might belong. But a whale would know where it belongs, and where it doesn’t. Its destiny might one day depend on us, humans. As we must contain the journey and destination within us. So says my Ishmaelle, morphed from the Ishmael of Melville’s novel: be careful, girl, watch over your journey.