Ishmael (novel)


Ishmael is a 1992 philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn. The novel examines the hidden cultural biases driving modern civilization and explores themes of ethics, sustainability, and global catastrophe. Largely framed as a Socratic conversation between two characters, Ishmael aims to expose that several widely accepted assumptions of modern society, such as human supremacy, are actually cultural myths that produce catastrophic consequences for humankind and the environment. The novel was awarded the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991, a year before its formal publication.
Ishmael is part of a loose trilogy that includes a 1996 spiritual sequel, The Story of B, and a 1997 "sidequel," My Ishmael. Quinn also details how he arrived at the ideas behind Ishmael in his autobiography, . Yet another related book is Quinn's 1999 short treatise, Beyond Civilization.

Plot summary

Implicitly set in the early 1990s, Ishmael begins with a newspaper advertisement: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person". The nameless narrator and protagonist thus begins his story, telling how he first reacted to this ad with scorn because of the absurdity of "wanting to save the world", a notion he feels that he once naïvely embraced himself as an adolescent during the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Feeling he must discover the ad's publisher, he follows its address, surprisingly finding himself in a room with a live gorilla. On the wall is a sign with a double meaning: "With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?" Suddenly, the gorilla, calling himself Ishmael, begins communicating to the man telepathically. At first baffled by this, the man learns the story of how the gorilla came to be here and soon accepts Ishmael as his teacher, regularly returning to Ishmael's office. The novel continues from this point mainly as a dialogue between Ishmael and his new student.
Ishmael's life began in the African wilderness, though he was captured at a young age and has lived mostly in a zoo and a menagerie, which caused Ishmael to start thinking about ideas that he never would have thought about in the wild, including self-awareness, human language and culture, and what he refers to as the subject he specifically teaches: "captivity". The narrator admits to Ishmael that he has a vague notion of living in some sort of cultural captivity and being lied to in some way by society, but he cannot articulate these feelings fully.
The man frequently visits Ishmael over the next several weeks, and Ishmael proceeds to use the Socratic method to deduce with the man what "origin story" and other "myths" modern civilization subscribes to. Before proceeding, Ishmael lays down some basic definitions for his student:
At first, the narrator is certain that civilized people no longer believe in any "myths", but Ishmael proceeds to gradually tease from him several hidden but widely accepted premises of "mythical" thinking being enacted by the Takers:
Ishmael points out to his student that when the Takers decided all of this, especially the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with humans, they took as evidence only their own particular culture's history: "They were looking at a half of one percent of the evidence taken from a single culture. Not a reasonable sample on which to base such a sweeping conclusion".
On the contrary, Ishmael asserts that there is nothing inherently wrong with humans and that a story that places humans in harmony with the world will cause humans to enact this harmony, while a destructive story such as this will cause humans to destroy the world, as humans are doing now. Ishmael goes on to help his student discover that, contrary to this Taker world-view, there is indeed knowledge of how humans should live: biological "laws" that life is subject to, discernible by studying the ecological patterns of other living things. Together, Ishmael and his student identify one set of survival strategies that appear to be true for all species : in short, as a species, "you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war". All species inevitably follow this law, or as a consequence go extinct; the Takers, however, believe themselves to be exempt from this law and flout it at every point, which is therefore rapidly leading humanity towards extinction.
To illustrate his philosophy, Ishmael proposes a revision to the Christian myth of the Fall of Man. Ishmael's version of why the fruit was forbidden to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is: eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil provides gods with the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die—knowledge which they need to rule the world. The fruit nourishes only the gods, though. If Adam were to eat from this tree, he might think that he gained the gods' wisdom and consequently destroy the world and himself through his arrogance. Ishmael makes the point that the myth of the Fall, which the Takers have adopted as their own, was in fact developed by Leavers to explain the origin of the Takers. If it were of Taker origin, the story would be of liberating progress instead of a sinful fall.
Ishmael and his student go on to discuss how, for the ancient herders among whom the tale originated, the Biblical story of Cain killing Abel symbolizes the Leaver being killed off and their lands taken so that it could be put under cultivation. These ancient herders realized that the Takers were acting as if they were gods themselves, with all the wisdom of what is good and evil and how to rule the world: agriculture is, in fact, an attempt to more greatly create and control life, a power that only gods can hold, not humans. To begin discerning the Leavers' story, Ishmael proposes to his student a hypothesis: the Takers' Agricultural Revolution was a revolution in trying to strenuously and destructively live above the laws of nature, against the Leavers' more ecologically peaceful story of living by the laws of nature.
The Takers, by practicing their uniquely envisioned form of agriculture produce enormous food surpluses, which consequently yields an ever-increasing population, which itself is leading to ecological imbalances and catastrophes around the world. Ishmael finishes his education with the student by saying that, in order for humanity to survive, Takers must relinquish their arrogant vision in favor of the Leaver humility in knowing that they do not possess any god-like knowledge of some "one right way to live". Ishmael tells his student to teach a hundred people what he has learned, who can each pass this learning on to another hundred.
The student becomes busy at work, later discovering that Ishmael has fallen ill and died of pneumonia. Returning to Ishmael's room one day, he collects Ishmael's belongings. Among them he discovers that the sign he saw before has a backside with another message: "With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?"

Reinterpretation of Biblical myths

Ishmael proposes that the story of Genesis was written by the Semites and later adapted to work within Hebrew and Christian belief structures. He proposes that Abel's extinction metaphorically represents the nomadic Semites' losing in their conflict with agriculturalists. As they were driven further into the Arabian peninsula, the Semites became isolated from other herding cultures and, according to Ishmael, illustrated their plight through oral history, which was later adopted into the Hebrew book of Genesis.
Ishmael denies that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden to humans simply to test humans' self-control. Instead, he proposes that eating of the Tree would not actually give humans divine knowledge but would only make humans believe they had been given it, and that the Tree represents the choice to bear the responsibility of deciding which species live and which die. This is a decision agricultural peoples make when deciding which organisms to cultivate, which to displace, and which to kill in protection of the first.
Ishmael explains that the Fall of Adam represents the belief that, once mankind usurps this responsibility—historically decided through natural ecology —that humankind will perish. He cites as fulfillment of this prophecy contemporary environmental crises such as endangered or extinct species, global warming, and modern mental illnesses.

Characters

Main characters

;Ishmael
A gorilla who was captured from the West African wild when young and sent to an American zoo. After the zoo sold him to a menagerie, Walter Sokolow bought him and discovered he could communicate with him through his mind. Ishmael, learning he can talk telepathically with humans, begins teaching humans a subject he calls "captivity."
;Narrator
A middle-aged white American man who sought a teacher to show him how to save the world when he was younger, during the turbulent and idealistic 1960s. Now an adult, he finds an ad looking for a pupil who wants to save the world. Intrigued because his childhood question may be answered, but skeptical because he has never found answers in the past, he goes and finds Ishmael, who teaches him, as promised, about how to save the world. The narrator never reveals his name in Ishmael, though it is revealed in My Ishmael to be Alan Lomax.

Unseen characters

;Walter Sokolow
A wealthy Jewish merchant who is mentioned only in Ishmael's back story but has died by the time of the main story. His family was killed in the Holocaust, during which he migrated to the United States. While visiting a menagerie, he comes across a gorilla called Goliath. Sokolow buys Ishmael from the zoo and after he figures out that he and Ishmael can mentally speak to each other, the two study a vast array of subjects together. He is the one who gives the gorilla the new name of "Ishmael".
;Rachel Sokolow
Daughter of Walter Sokolow. She becomes Ishmael's benefactor after her father dies. She supports Ishmael for a span of time, but her death ends Ishmael's financial support.

Chronology of events in the ''Ishmael'' trilogy

The following is a list of the events in the interrelated time frame of Ishmael, The Story of B, and My Ishmael. Much of the chronology remains ambiguous in the former two, though is specified in much more detail in My Ishmael.