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= Ishmael_(Quinn_novel) =
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Introduction
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'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 1994
autobiography, 'Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest'.
Yet another related book is Quinn's 1999 short treatise, 'Beyond
Civilization'.
Plot summary
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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 (before
living permanently in a private residence), 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:
* A 'story' is an interrelation between the gods, humans, and the
earth—with a beginning, middle, and end.
* To 'enact' is to behave in such a way to make a story (however true
or not) come true.
* A 'culture' is a people who are enacting a story.
* 'Takers' are "civilized" people, particularly, members of the
culture that first emerged in an Agricultural Revolution starting
10,000 years ago in the Near East that has developed into today's
globalized society (the culture of Ishmael's pupil and, presumably,
the reader).
* 'Leavers' are people of all other non-civilized cultures existing in
the past and the present; often derogatorily referred to by Takers as
"primitive".
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:
*Humans (especially Takers) are the pinnacle of evolution.
*The world was made for humans, and humans are thus destined to
conquer and rule the world.
*This conquest is meant to bring about a paradise, as humans increase
their mastery over controlling nature.
*However, humans are always failing in this conquest because they are
flawed beings, who are unable to ever obtain the knowledge of how to
live best.
*Therefore, however hard humans labor to save the world, they are just
going to go on defiling and destroying it.
*Even so, civilization--the great human project of trying to control
the whole world--must continue, or else humans will go extinct.
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 (later dubbed the
"law of limited competition"): 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 ("humanity") were to eat from this tree, he might
'think' that he gained the gods' wisdom (without this actually
happening) 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 (dubbed by Quinn "totalitarian agriculture" in a later
book) 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". They can adopt an
alternative story that has humans as the first, not the final,
fully-conscious creature. We can support evolution and diversity.
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 ("With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?")
has a backside with another message: "With gorilla gone, will there be
hope for man?"
Reinterpretation of biblical stories
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Ishmael proposes that the story of Genesis was written by the Semites
and later adapted to work within Hebrew, Christian and Muslim 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 (i.e. Takers) 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 (i.e. food chains)--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.
Main characters
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* Ishmael is a gorilla, born in the 1930s, when he was captured from
the West African wild and sent to an American zoo. After the zoo sold
him to a menagerie, Walter Sokolow bought him and discovered that they
could communicate telepathically. A few years after Sokolow died in
1985, Ishmael sets up an office and newspaper advertisements in search
of pupils, with the help of Sokolow's daughter, in order to begin
teaching the subject of "captivity". The narrator and Ishmael meet in
1991.
* The narrator and protagonist is 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 Ishmael's 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
discovers this new teacher: Ishmael. The narrator never reveals his
name in the novel, though it is revealed in the sequel 'My Ishmael' to
be Alan Lomax.
Unseen characters
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*Walter Sokolow is a wealthy European 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 Sokolow
fled to the United States. While visiting a menagerie during World War
Two, he came across a gorilla called Goliath (Ishmael's given alias at
the menagerie). After figuring out that he and Ishmael could mentally
speak to each other, Sokolow renamed the gorilla "Ishmael" and bought
him from the zoo. The two studied a vast array of subjects together
and, after his death in 1985, Sokolow's adult daughter Rachel funds
Ishmael's upkeep, though she herself dies from AIDS in 1991.
References in popular culture
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The opening credits for the 1999 film 'Instinct', starring Anthony
Hopkins and Cuba Gooding Jr., indicate that it is inspired by
'Ishmael'. Daniel Quinn did not approve of the script or movie before
transferring the rights, which were transferred as part of the Turner
Award, though he may have had some minor input on the script, though
to a degree he personally considered trivial. The movie and book share
no common story elements, and the philosophical connection to the book
is reduced to some pictorial format and a few seconds of on-screen
dialogue.
Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam has cited the book as an influence on their
album, 'Yield'. Quinn responds to the album's significance in relation
to the book on his website.
In Rise Against's album 'The Sufferer and The Witness', 'Ishmael' is
on the album notes' recommended reading list.
The song "The Taker Story" on Chicano Batman's 2017 album 'Freedom is
Free' describes the global colonization of the "Taker" societies based
on the use of the term in 'Ishmael'.
The name of prog metal band Animals as Leaders was inspired by the
book.
Chronology of events in the ''Ishmael'' trilogy
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The following is a list of the (fictional) events in the interrelated
time frame of 'Ishmael' (published in 1992), 'The Story of B' (1996),
and 'My Ishmael' (1997). Much of the chronology remains ambiguous in
the former two, though is specified in much more detail in 'My
Ishmael'.
* 1930s: Ishmael is born in "equatorial West Africa", captured, and
sent to live in a U.S. "zoo in some small northeastern city" for
"several years"
* Late 1930s: Ishmael lives in a traveling menagerie for "three or
four years"
* 1939 or 1940: Ishmael is sold to Walter Sokolow, a wealthy European
Jewish émigré and merchant in the U.S.
* 1955: Art "Artie "Owens is born Makiadi "Adi" Owona in the Belgian
Congo (renamed Zaire in 1971)
* c. 1950s: Charles Atterley is born in the U.S
* 1960s: Walter Sokolow marries Grace, who bears a single child,
Rachel
* 25 February 1979: Julie Gerchak is born in the U.S.
* Early 1980s: Art Owens studies in Belgium, becomes a dual citizen of
Zaire and Belgium, travels to the U.S., and attends Cornell
University, where he meets Rachel Sokolow, who is completing her
master's degree in biology
* c. 1980s: Charles Atterley becomes Ishmael's pupil
* 1985: Walter Sokolow dies and Ishmael begins living in a variety of
new locations
* 1987: Art Owens returns to Zaire, leaving his U.S. investments with
Rachel Sokolow
* 1989: Ishmael sets up his office in Room 105 of the Fairfield
Building, located in a "little [American] city"
* 2 March 1989: Art Owens participates in the new Republic of Mabili's
secession from Zaire; he becomes Mabili's minister of the interior
* November to December 1989: Art Owens flees Mabili and returns to the
U.S., beginning work with the Darryl Hicks Carnival and eventually
buying off the Carnival's animal menagerie
* 1990: Art Owens becomes acquainted with Ishmael through Rachel
Sokolow
* c. 1991: Charles Atterley begins lecturing in Europe
* January 1991: Rachel Sokolow tests positive for HIV and dies that
same year
* 1991-2: Events of 'Ishmael' and most of 'My Ishmael':
** 1991: Alan Lomax (the previously unnamed narrator of 'Ishmael') and
then Julie Gerchak become Ishmael's pupils
** 29 October to 2 November 1991: Julie Gerchak, with the secret help
of Art Owens, visits the Republic of Mabili and successfully persuades
its president, Mokonzi Nkemi, to authorize Ishmael's entry into his
country and subsequent release back into the African jungle
** Late 1991-1992: Ishmael begins living in the Darryl Hicks Carnival
menagerie and becomes ill with pneumonia
** 1992: Alan Lomax believes Ishmael to have died from pneumonia and
ultimately publishes 'Ishmael'
** March 1992: Ishmael recuperates and by this date has returned to
Africa
** Summer 1995: Julie Gerchak begins writing 'My Ishmael'
* 10 May to 8 June 1996: Events of 'The Story of B':
** 19 or 20 May: Jared Osborne becomes Charles Atterley's pupil
** 22 May: Charles Atterley is assassinated while aboard a train in
Germany
** 26 May: Jared Osborne and close associates of Charles Atterley
survive the bombing of Schauspielhaus Wahnfried, a theater in Radenau,
Germany
* 28 November 1996: Julie Gerchak completes all but the final chapter
of 'My Ishmael'
* 1997: Julie Gerchak adds a final chapter, "The Waiting Ends", to 'My
Ishmael' and finally publishes the book with permission from Art Owens
See also
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* Anarcho-primitivism
* Cultural diversity
* Deep Ecology
* Ecosophy
* Evolution of societies
* Green anarchism
* Intentional Community
* Jared Diamond
* Law of rent
* Limits to Growth
* List of fictional primates
* Mother culture
* Permaculture
External links
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* [
https://www.ishmael.org https://www.ishmael.org] - The official
homepage about the book and author: a new site launched in August
2019, superseding the earlier [
http://ishmael.com http://ishmael.com]
License
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License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(Quinn_novel)
