CALL ME ISHMAELLE, by Xiaolu Guo
There ought to be an award for artistic audacity — Goethe believed audacity was integral to talent — and it ought to go to Xiaolu Guo for her new novel, “Call Me Ishmaelle.” It’s an astonishingly ambitious undertaking that even when it stumbles does so with vivified striving.
Consider the Promethean daring it must take to reimagine Herman Melville’s American prose monument “Moby-Dick,” absolutely alone in its capacious grasp of the American Sublime. Now consider it again when that imagining comes from a Chinese-born British author better known for oblique, personal stories about exile, identity and language.
While hewing close to realism, Guo immediately settles into the tenor of enchantment, a subtle register of near fairy tale that lets you know you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller. The narrator’s father had hoped for a boy to call Ishmael; instead he got a girl and altered the spelling. By 1860, when Ishmaelle is a teenager living on the coast of Kent, both her parents and her baby sister have been buried and her older brother has absconded for better days.
Ishmaelle tweaks the pronunciation of her name, chops her hair and disguises herself as a cabin boy on a merchant ship bound for New York. She is soon in New Bedford, Mass., intent on becoming a whaler, an indefectible initiation into the manhood she seeks. “What a curse to be a woman, to be a girl,” she tells us. After that, if you know the plot of Melville’s novel, you know Guo’s.
She has devised her narrative as Melville devises his, in short, potent chapters, though only a handful of her characters correspond directly to Melville’s. After Ishmaelle finds a place on a whaling ship, Guo skillfully delays the captain’s peg-legged entrance as Melville delays Ahab’s. Half Black, half Wampanoag, the hellbent Captain Seneca rhapsodizes in biblical snippets, Melville’s own prose and wrath-racked metaphysics. “There was,” remarks Ishmaelle, “an infinity of determination and willfulness in his pose and in his gaze.”
The conceit that affronts your credulity here is that Seneca’s quarry is still a white whale that he and his crew call Moby Dick, even though, presumably, there is no Melville or an 1851 novel known as “Moby-Dick” in the world of this book. (The title was Melville’s modification of Mocha Dick, the name of a real sperm whale with a grudge off the coast of Mocha Island.) Characters also refer to the calamity of the Essex, a ship sunk by another malcontented whale in 1820 and an inspiration for Melville’s novel.
Also, if you’re going to christen your characters with big names (Seneca, Moses, Hawthorne, Pound) those characters had better have an umbilical, however thin, to the mighty ones who made the names immortal, or else the christening is just a trail of breadcrumbs leading nowhere, as it is here. Guo does well with the ship’s name, Nimrod, and not because it rhymes with Ahab’s ship, Pequod: Nimrod is the idolatrous God-hater of biblical legend.
The meaning of Melville’s novel, if meaning is what you must have, is found in the only element that makes literature literature: the language — high-register sentences tantamount to the High Romantic epic of a self-begot captain intent on vengeance beneath a heaven that will not hear. Guo’s ecology of language does not approach Melville’s, but then who could possibly uphold the legacy, as Melville did, of Tyndale, Shakespeare and Milton, the holy trinity of “Moby-Dick”’s ancestry?
One must be patient with the foibles Guo allows to trespass upon her talent, from clichés (“as clear as day,” “warm smile”) to tautologies (“sinking down,” “following behind”) to anachronisms (“hopefully” wasn’t perverted into a sentence adverb until the mid-20th century, and “trauma” didn’t refer to every emotional pinprick until the late 20th).
The central misstep, built into the very armature of Guo’s narrative, is that when you have a Black captain raging after a white whale, and during the hecatomb of the Civil War no less, it’s all too easy to take Seneca as a cartoonish symbol for the enslaved and the whale as one for white iniquity. Seneca then cannot be apprehended as a man, which was the whole problem with slavery in the first place. He and the whale both become mere allegorical instruments, and these in jarring juxtaposition to Guo’s other characters, many of whom do read as authentic individuals. (Kauri, the Polynesian harpooner based on Melville’s Queequeg, though entirely lovable and protective of Ishmaelle and her male disguise, is an exception: almost all stereotype who speaks in me-Tarzan-you-Jane pidgin.)
Accept the invitation to experience Guo’s novel solely through the prism of political piety and you will occlude what is best in it: the masterly scene construction, the galling details of whaler life and whale slaughter, the portrayal of Ishmaelle’s dolorous yearning and inviolate hope, the sinew of its storytelling sensibility, the stabbing finale. You may not get Melville’s aesthetic majesty and visionary power, nor what Camille Paglia referred to as his novel’s “operatic gigantism,” but you will get a bold new version that sends you back to its numinous source.
CALL ME ISHMAELLE | By Xiaolu Guo | Black Cat | 429 pp. | Paperback, $18
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