“Call me Ishmael.”
Considered one of the greatest opening lines in all of literary history, it must have been almost irresistible for the acclaimed novelist Xiaolu Guo to resist using it for the title of her 2025 retelling of the world’s most famous whale tale, “Moby-Dick”. But Guo makes a major change; for in her story, the young and sometimes gloomy male protagonist has been transformed into an adventurous young woman.
This has been such a great few years for retellings of the classics — from Barbara Kingsolver’s updated David Copperfield to Salman Rushdie’s zany Don Quixote. And Percival Everett’s novel “James,” a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, took the lion’s share of the literary prizes in 2024, including the Pulitzer. There is so much pleasure to be had in rereading old favorites — and part of the joy is meeting beloved characters, who have been updated or somehow arrive in a new form to resist old tropes and types.
Guo’s recasting of Ishmaelle is no exception. Orphaned as a teenager in an impoverished fishing village in Kent, Ishmaelle takes to the seas, disguising herself as a boy to do so. This is not as improbable as it might seem, as there is a long history of women masquerading as men to go journeying into the world. As explained in the note at the end of the book, Guo based her novel’s protagonist on the real diaries of a number of 19th century female sailors. And as it turns out, the author herself hails from a poor fishing village in southern China, where, as it was in England and America during Melville’s day, it was considered bad luck for a woman to go on board a ship. Guo’s own grandmother never once stepped on board the boats on which her grandfather toiled.
Not so unlike the protagonist in her novel, Guo also flung herself out of a difficult childhood in a village with few opportunities for women, launching into the wider world in search of wisdom and adventure. First moving to Beijing where she studied film, and then finding her way to London where she became a successful filmmaker and novelist. Somewhere along the line, she also became extremely adept at writing in English, as her novels are not written in her native tongue.
Returning back to the opening line of Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” novelist Ta-Nehisi Coates insisted in a 2021 essay in the Atlanticthat in his opinion (and it is my opinion as well) that the entire first paragraph, not just the famous opening line, was “the greatest paragraph in any work of fiction at any point, in all of history. And not just human history, but galactic and extraterrestrial history too…”
You probably remember it:
“Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
Nowadays people suggest that Ishmael was depressed — and maybe even suicidal — during that dark and drizzly November of his soul. But what if what Melville meant was more akin to how Guo interprets it? A person feels themselves trapped by what is demanded by society.
In Ishmaelle’s case that meant toiling away in poverty for the rest of her life back in Kent. And what if the young woman had a curiosity to see the world? A desire to live big and have adventures?
As Melville writes:
“By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. “
To re-read a favorite book: Is it not one of life’s great pleasures? Especially if decades, not just years, have passed between one’s first reading and the next; when the reader can’t help but wonder: Is this even the same book? Or is it the world with myself in it that has not changed?
In Guo’s re-reading, it is not just Ishmael that was recast, as Ahab now appears in the form of a freed black man named Seneca. This is also a change that Melville himself might have recognized as a possible alteration, as by Melville’s day, there were former enslaved men who found themselves on board whaling ships, some even serving as captains. And it is from Seneca’s mouth where some of the best writing in Guo’s novel appears. Like a Chinese emperor who spends his days and nights re-cataloguing the bronzes in his collection, despite the fact that invaders are at the gate and the country on the brink of war, Seneca too feels that, if he could just kill the white whale, then, well, yes, he would be doing his part in fighting evil. That is, if he could only sort out the problem of the white whale, then he would be sorting out the entire world.
“O how many times [my father] told me about his sea voyage from Africa and how he had come to the new land with whipped bleeding back and starved like a dying ostrich and sold from one farm to another … hear me whale this is the world of us men not the mindless life of fish … Fish what would you know of rage …”
Like Guo’s version of Ishmael, Ahab, and the “cannibal” Queequeg, all who keep beautifully to the spirit of Melville’s characters, Guo’s inclusion of a Chinese sage to the story is another fascinating innovation. Muzi, a Taoist monk and sailmaker, joins the crew partway through the novel and guides the captain using divinations from the “I Ching,” something which the rest of the crew finds understandably strange.
As their perilous and ultimately futile journey continues, Ishmaelle and the monk become closer, somehow finding the words to speak to each other across the ocean of linguistic difference between English and Chinese. Ishmaelle finds this man’s presence a comfort and his otherness to be reassuring in the way it mirrors her own exile from home, her gender and from land itself.
When the sage tells her that a wise man possesses three treasures, compassion, frugality and humility, Ishmaelle wonders if she has those qualities. “As I looked out at the distant lights glimmering on the horizon, I thought, we can only know ourselves by acting in the world. It is our conduct, the way we treat others, their men, whales, or fish, that our character will show itself. And I had not yet been fully tested.”
Cast into the world in disguise, she struggles to refashion herself aboard that ship as she strives to become true to the calling of exile and sailor. Traveling between worlds, like the author herself, she not only survives but thrives. But on board that ill-fated ship, it is in her friendship with the sage, as well as in her deepening connection to the whale and the wonders of the natural world that will transport readers back to Melville and his glorious “Moby-Dick.”
Ogasawara is the translation editor for the Kyoto Journal and a writer in Pasadena. She previously lived in Japan, where she worked as a translator for two decades.
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