DECENTERING ANTHROPOCENTRISM: AN ECO-CRITIQUE OF DANIEL QUINN’S
ISHMAEL
ABSTRACT:
What can an author do to make man realize his infinitesimally diminutive position on earth and
its enormous ecosystems in comparison to millions of other species of living organisms? Daniel
Quinn, America’s top bestseller fiction writer takes up the challenge and authorizes a primate – a
gorilla named Ishmael, also the titular protagonist at the centre of narration of his novel. Animal
narrators conducting didactic lessons for human friends are as old as Aesop’s Fables. Why does
this discourse eternally fascinate the human mind and is not thrown into oblivion? The purpose
of such a choice of discourse is that it helps the writer to pose an indirect mode of resistance to
the megalomaniac attitude that preoccupies man’s psyche, in his greediness to consume the
world’s resources, unthinking the ecological balance or the great web of life.
The novel displays a deliberately plotted surface structure but when read with a
considerable degree of ecological consciousness, a complicated web of deep structures emerge
that sets in motion an array of reversals that form the matrix of popular and dominant cultural
phenomena. A reorganization of positioning takes place within the domain of creation and man
is thrown out of his pinnacle-of -creation syndrome. Through Ishmael, Quinn facilitates a critical
shift of hierarchy, the descent of man happens and a primate is endowed with power and
intellect. The genesis myth is revisited in order to democratize all living creatures’ right to
survive and through this realization of man’s proper place in the world ecological catastrophes
could be minimalised. By reiterating the idea that man belongs to the world and not the other
way round, Ishmael proves a case on behalf of the entire humanity, to reconsider man’s
impression about culture, civilisation and the world itself. The paper tries to discuss a few points
of departure, Quinn makes in his novel amongst various other animal narrative discourses that
exist already in the literary realm. It also examines how several age-old literary techniques like
parody, animal fable, allegory, didactic discourse can become relevant and powerful in a genre
like bestseller fiction, even in the present modern age.
FULL PAPER:
Genesis holds the idea, that God created the universe, its plants, animals and all other living
things and finally created man in his own image and considered him the completion of creation.
With this creation stopped. So says religion and the scriptures. The universe evolved out of
various physical and chemical reactions, the earth, earlier a semi-solid bolus; gradually solidified
and living forms appeared one by one by degrees of their cellular composition. From
microscopic bacteria, there evolved various orders of life and man’s appearance was the latest
evolution and creation or evolution seems to have came to a halt with this. This is what science
says.
“How can you be so sure?” asks a gorilla named Ishmael to the human being who is so full of his
pinnacle-of-creation ego. Why did evolution of life stop with man? Why hasn’t anything
appeared after man has? And how is man completely so sure on these perceptions? However
these are simple questions that neither religion nor science could answer to.
All that has been done to the planet has taken place only from a single point of view –the
anthropological. Such an anthropocentric approach towards almost everything has been
identified as the prime reason for ecological devastation. Literary theory and studies which are
human inventions, today finds an intervention from the non-human counterpart and a relocating
of subject has taken place. This has given rise to nature writingeco-writing. Why does a popular
bestseller take this mode? Why does it allow a non-human voice to intervene and do all the
narration? These are a few questions this study tries to answer.
Man has acquired enough sources of energy to dominate nature and has achieved a high, but
nevertheless a transient level of wealth. He holds a worldview extolling growth which is led by
the highly industrialized nations, but is now being emulated in the developing countries and all
this has committed the world to an unsustainable path. However, a wide range of choices is
available for an alternative lifestyle that supports sustainability. Wise choices will depend upon
good scientific understanding and must be based upon a deep respect for the non-human world
and a concern for the future. The environmental meaning of different world views, whether
founded in the world religions or in non-religious philosophy, share a common concern to
promote an equitable, harmonious, and sustainable relationship between humanity and nature.
How do we locate literary studies in the midst of all this eco-discussion? Has literary creativity
been sufficiently focusing on the issues of sustainability and ecological balance? In an attempt to
answer these questions, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, a contemporary bestseller has been selected as
the frame of negotiation in this study.
In 1989 Ted Turner created a fellowship to be awarded to a work of fiction offering positive
solutions to global problems. The winner, chosen from 2500 entries worldwide, was a work of
startling clarity and depth: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, a Socratic journey that explores the most
challenging problem humankind has ever faced: how to save the world from ourselves.
Quinn gains a unique perspective on humanity through the main character of the novel, Ishmael.
Ishmael is a gorilla. And Ishmael is a teacher who communicates with humans telepathically. On
the surface, this hardly seems to be a character who would appear in a serious book; more likely
a children's story, a fable, or perhaps a science fiction. Yet Ishmael is none of these, and Ishmael
is a strong character, with a powerful intellect and a serious purpose. The character of Ishmael
needs to be non-human in order to be effective. Looking in on civilization from the outside gives
him a perspective from which to criticize humanity without hypocrisy. To hear the oppressor
repent is not nearly so effective as to hear the voice of the oppressed demand freedom and
restitution.
The novel Ishmael, "an adventure of the mind and spirit," opens with a disillusioned and
depressed man in search of a teacher, and not just any teacher.- He wants someone to show him
what life is all about.- And so he finds Ishmael, a meiutic teacher (one who acts as a midwife to
his pupils, in bringing ideas to the surface), who turns out to be a large telepathic gorilla of
extraordinary intelligence.- The largest part of the book consists of their conversations, in which
Ishmael discusses how things got to be this way (in terms of human culture, beginning with the
agricultural revolution). As Ishmael opens, the author writes of a day in his life when he found
what he thought a truly ludicrous advertisement in the personals section of a newspaper:
Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in Person (Quinn 4).
Investigating with the purpose of exposing fraud, he came upon Ishmael in Room 105 of a
nondescript office building. Ishmael was sitting calmly, nibbling on a slender branch.
Momentarily shocked, Quinn stumbled towards a chair. He glanced into the gorilla's eyes, and
much to his disconcertment the eyes calmly spoke to him. Nodding in answer to an unuttered
question, Ishmael spoke silently “I am the teacher” (Quinn 10).
In a language of the sort one might expect from a well educated man speaking with a friend,
Ishmael told Quinn the story of his life. A large portion of it was spent in captivity, before a
wealthy elderly man befriended and educated him. At the end of Ishmael's tale, Quinn was still
somewhat befuddled.
I sat there for a minute, and then I said, "I'm trying to figure out what this has to do with saving
the world."
Ishmael thought for a moment. "Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the
world?"
"Which want to destroy it? As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world."
"And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the
world."
"Yes, that's so."
"Why don't you stop?"
I shrugged. "Frankly, we don't know how."
"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the
world in order to live."
"Yes, that's the way it seems."
"So. You are captives - and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake,
isn't it? - your captivity and the captivity of the world." (Quinn 25)
This dialogue is only a prologue to the topics the book examines, a foundation on which
Ishmael's theories are built. It may not seem meaningful out of context, but it is vital to the ideas
proposed later in the book. The issue of captivity is something that preoccupies the readers’ mind
when Ishmael begins his narration. He feels that human beings are forced by their culture and
civilisation to be anti-nature and every human being has a strong conviction that the world
wasn’t created for jellyfish or salmon or iguanas or gorillas. It was wholly created for man only.
Ishmael's paradigm of history is startlingly different from the one wired into our cultural
consciousness. For Ishmael, our agricultural revolution was not a technological event but a moral
one, a rebellion against an ethical structure inherent in the community of life since its foundation
four billion years ago. Having escaped the restraints of this ethical structure, humankind made
itself a global tyrant, wielding deadly force over all other species while lacking the wisdom to
make its tyranny a beneficial one or even a sustainable one.
That tyranny is now hurtling us toward a planetary disaster of pollution and overpopulation. If
we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to work our way back to some fundamental truths:
that we weren't born a menace to the world and that no irresistible fate compels us to go on being
a menace to the world.
Many ecological or sociological books are urgent, bombastic, overflowing with dramatic
exclamations of forthcoming disaster. But Ishmael takes the other route of indirect resistance. By
endowing power and intellect to an animal narrator and making him speak all the time in the
novel, the author attempts for a deliberate but clever dismantling of the already-essentialised
hierarchic structure of living organisms in the world. By revising the ranking system, a primate is
brought in center and man, accordingly, decentralized.
Man is no longer at the center of spotlight; he is dethroned strategically of his pinnacle-ofcreation position and is reduced to a mere entity who has, in spite of his unique rationality, all the
way blundered by ruining his dwelling place. The aim of the novel does not seem to be focused
on arriving at a short-term, immediate solution to all the ecological catastrophes. Instead of
discussing the present problematic milieu of things, the book strikes at the root of all problems
and suggests a change in man’s attitude towards culture, civilisation and science. Similarly, it
does not offer sociological insights or statistics of the loss of forests or the size of the hole in the
Ozone layer, but probes into the mental and psychological attitude which causes man to engage
in such destructive processes.
On a first reading of this novel one can very easily trace a systematic, deductive pattern in
dialogue and argument. For example, the following statements made by Ishmael could help
proving our principle. The world was made for man. So the world belongs to man. If the world
was made for us, then it belongs to us and we can do we damn well please with it (Quinn 194).
Ishmael’s tirade against man’s behaviour reminds us of Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest, when
he says, “You taught me language and my profit on it is to curse you.” Contrarily, it is not
cursing that one finds here, but a thoughtful investigation of cause and effects. Though Quinn
seems to be recycling an old technique, he employs it in a different way to bring in the desired
effect.
It is impossible, in a paper of this length, to fairly represent the multitude of ideas Ishmael
presents. They range from fundamental laws of ecology to a relevant examination of biblical
stories as historical documents; from the effects of modern civilization's megalomaniacal
science-as-morality attitude to the cause of society's epidemic of cultural amnesia. Ishmael is a
critic of human civilization, but not of the human species itself. Humans existed for about three
million years without "civilization," and only became globally destructive after 10,000 years of
it. Ishmael, then, sees ecological damage as a result of modern society, not human nature. For
this reason, Ishmael turns to what "primitive" societies remain, and compares "civilized" and
"primitive" cultures. From an ecologist's point of view, he attempts to discern which differences
between the two could be responsible for the potential for ecological destructiveness
characteristic of one.
It is important that Ishmael does not believe the solution to the world's woes is a return to a
hunter-gatherer existence. It seems impossible that any attempt to solve global problems would
succeed with the support of only those who were willing to dismantle every element of society.
Ishmael also does not rely on technological advances to solve the most important ecological
problems we face. It was important to me that Ishmael did not represent technology as having
any inherent flaws; he did not attempt to persuade me that science should be abandoned. He
instead presented a clear argument as to why it was simply not the appropriate tool for the
restoration of the environment. What Ishmael does argue is necessary for the continued survival
of the species is something much subtler. He asks for humans to begin to look at them without
the distorting lens that "civilization" has placed before their eyes. Ishmael removes this lens. And
this view is astounding.
The difficulty is that we are embedded in our myth, breathing it like air, without a second
thought. In Quinn’s novel, it took someone outside the human species to recognize the roots of
our “civilized” story and to lay out the blind and crazy logic driving our modern technological
societies. Ishmael, the teacher, is a gorilla—a wise being who has mastered and transcended the
limits of human knowledge. With cryptic and ironic wit, Ishmael poses the ambiguous question:
“With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?” (Quinn 263).
Ishmael shows the narrator exactly what doesn't work in our society: the reasoning that there is
only one right way to live, and that that way is with humans conquering the planet.- Daniel
Quinn points out that many other cultures, most notably those who have- a tribal lifestyle, work,
in that they do not destroy their resources, have no need for crime control or other programs, and
do not have population problems.- He insists that our culture is not based on humans being
human, it is based on humans being gods and trying to control the world.
In fact, Ishmael says that it is "Taker" civilization itself, the hierarchical structure that locks up
food and spreads through the idea that people must live the same way that is actually inferior.Why?- To put it simply, we grow more food than we need, which causes our population
somewhere on the Earth to increase.- Now we need to grow more food, which means we clearcut a forest or plow up a prairie to grow it, but that only causes more people to survive and
reproduce.- This puts us back in the same situation we were before, and causes the diversity of
the world to be diminished.- Why?- As any farmer knows, anything that eats or competes with
the crop needs to be controlled or eliminated.- As any rancher or sheepherder knows, anything
that competes with or eats the herd or flock must be controlled or eliminated.- This process,
occurring for thousands of years since the agricultural revolution, all over the world, has caused
the reduction or elimination of countless species.
-So is there a solution?- Yes, there is.- It has nothing to do with sacrificing our lifestyles or going
back to being hunter gatherers.- Rather, it deals with leaving, with walking away from the
hierarchical structure of civilization.-The awareness that we are in a hierarchical system called
civilization which, by its very existence, is declaring the control of humans over the Earth, is
eye-opening.- The challenge that Ishmael leaves the reader with is not to sit with this knowledge
and do nothing, but to teach others what we have learned.- Ishmael is not a program, it is not a
call for an armed revolution, and it is a compilation of ideas.-- These ideas are the only thing that
will change our situation: not legislation, not the sainthood of humanity, not the halting of our
population.--The Bushmen of Africa are living in a way that is just as right and works just as
well as ours, and possibly even better, as they are capable of living without destroying
everything in their paths.- These "Leaver" cultures are in no way inferior to ours though we
consider them to be uncivilized.
When man, in his utter ignorance, asks the gorilla for a program of redemption and rectification
in order to stop the devastation, the answer is:
Then here is a program: the story of Genesis must be reversed. First, Cain must
stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you are to survive. The leavers are the
endangered species most critical to the world – not because they are humans but
because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there is no one right
way to live… you must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know
who should live and who should die on this planet. (Quinn 248)
Thus decentering of the human position takes place and Man with a capital ‘M’ is consciously
made to feel small by making him realize the fragility of the structure of his lifestyle and his
civilization and how it has failed in offering him a sustainable living. There is also an attempt to
find an alternative to anthropocentrism and Quinn succeeds by making the primate propose a
substitute mode in which all creatures in this world are equal and have equal rights to live. Man
has been obsessed in the past years fighting for equality among himself and his equals,
conveniently forgetting of a greater democracy which includes all living beings. It is also the
author’s intention to pin down a valid perspective of an outsider (of man’s community) who has
for long observed, criticize the faltering arguments man has been successful in making. If
anthropocentrism has man at the center of things, then how does one coin a term for considering
animals at the center? This is one question that emerges when one finishes the novel. How close
are we in arriving at the answer? Then this temporal and spatial fissure would demarcate how
earnest we are in creating a harmonious world.
Reference
Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. Bantam and Turner: New York, 1992.
Dr. Shoba K.N. teaches Technical English, Communication and Career in Velammal
Engineering College, Chennai. She has also been one of the content writing members for the Soft
skill courses for textbooks at the Postgraduation level for the University of Madras. Her area of
specialisation includes teaching language for special purposes and is a certified Business English
Certificate trainer. She has presented papers in National and International Conferences and
published articles on Language and Literature. Her areas of interest are Indian Writing in English
and ELT.
A member of OSLE (Organisation for Studies in Literature and the Environment), and other
language-centric forums like the ELTAI and FORTELL, she writes on such themes concerning
the cross-sections of literature and environment. She also correlates the juxtaposing
characteristics of postcolonial texts with various emerging critical perspectives.
A UGC-JRF doctoral fellow in English from the University of Madras and a certified BEC
trainer with a flair for teaching and research. Handled Bachelors and Masters programmes for
English in the Distance Education mode and authored modules for the Soft-Skills Course for the
University.