Call Me Ishmaelle

Many readers of this column know that I have had a long, complex, and nourishing relationship with Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” My first serious encounter with this book was back in 1961-1962 during my senior year in high school, when I had the privilege of having Dr. Herbert F. Hahn (1924-2009) as my erudite guide through Melville’s 1851 epic – a book at one time dismissed as virtually unreadable, but, beginning in the 1920s, valued to this very day as one of the most significant American books ever written.

One of the many reasons that Dr. Hahn made such an impression upon the 15 or so teenage boys in our Advanced Placement English class is that he treated each of his students with the same profound seriousness and respect with which he treated Melville’s writing.

In particular Dr. Hahn found a way to harness our adolescent need to express our barely repressed sense of rebellious defiance against all those “thou shalts” and “thou shalt-nots” that seemed to be threatening our youthful exuberance. For us teenage boys, Captain Ahab of the whaler Pequod was the model rebel par excellence.

Toward the end of “Moby Dick,” in chapter 119, “The Candles,” Ahab screams at the gods of heaven and hell, “I own thy speechless, placeless power, but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will I dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.” “A personality stands here.” – And in our classroom 15 teenage boys – not quite men at that time – with unseeing abandon scream “A personality stands here.”

A moment earlier Ahab affirms “I know that the right worship is defiance.” DEFIANCE. Pingry School. 1961- 1962. Senior Year. Our adolescent defiance. Against our fathers! Against our teachers! Against our more talented, more successful peers. Against our God?? At least, against our gods…

As I continued to turn back to the pages of “Moby Dick” during stages of continued growing and maturing – young adulthood, fatherhood, middle-age, a not-so-wise old age, I have come to see, as did Ishmael, that Ahab’s defiance had its dark side. His humanity was fatally compromised by the curse of his maniacal obsession to rule the members of his whaling crew with an iron fist. If his entire crew needed to be killed in pursuit of the white whale, then let them all die!!! In my journey through the years, I have learned that Ahab, my fake hero, was, in reality, my anti-hero, a dangerous, toxic, evil scourge to the members of the Pequod’s crew. To my own horror, I realized that Captain Ahab was a predecessor to Adolf Hitler!

But there is another passage in “Moby Dick” that has challenged me even more than Ahab’s defiant cry, “A personality stands here;” this is a passage that I have only truly come to appreciate now that I find myself approaching the age of 82. In the chapter bearing the title “Moby Dick,” Melville writes: “(Ahab) piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of the general rage and hatred felt by his whole race from Adam on down.”

Ever since I read these words about 65 years ago, I have wrestled with their meaning and wondered what, precisely, was the source of humankind’s “general rage and hatred felt by the whole race from Adam on down”? After much soul-wrestling, I would suggest that Ahab’s issue – that is to say, Melville’s issue – is nothing less than our mortality: each of us is born to die. No exit. Each of us is presented with a one-way, non-refundable ticket; we have no hint where the twists and turns of our personal journeys will take us, except that -- in the end, every one of us dies. It is Ahab’s undying sense of the inevitability of his own mortality that makes him insane.

When I finished reading “Moby Dick” in its entirety for the 10th time, I vowed that I would never do so again. But I have recently broken my vow, at least in part, by reading a recent feminist version of the Melville classic, “Call Me Ishmaelle” (2025) by the Chinese author, Xiaolu Guo. In her reworking of "Moby Dick," Guo’s opening three words are not the well-known “Call me Ishmael” but rather “Call me Ishmaelle.”

I confess that my major objection to “Moby Dick” during my lifetime of exploring the book has been the total absence of a feminist – or, at least, feminine – perspective. Xiaolu Guo addresses this issue by changing the narrator Ishmael, a 30-something young man, into Ishamelle, a young woman in her late teens, who, like her male counterpart, lives to tell her story.

I will not spoil the story for you, but I urge you to join Ishmaelle on her journey on the whaler Nimrod, where for several months she passes herself off as a teenage boy! Seneca, the captain of the Nimrod, is an American Indian, who does have his issues; but he is not nearly as troubled or as dangerous as Melville’s Captain Ahab. I find Ishmaelle’s friendship with Kauri, the first harpooner, a “savage” like Queequeg in “Moby Dick,” to be particularly well-drawn.

However, a caveat to the readers of “Call Me Ishmaelle”: the narrator, Ishmaelle, is an intelligent, curious, but naïve and inexperienced young woman in her late teens. The language she uses, as well as the language of the author, reflects that lack of sophistication. Do not expect the soaring, almost Shakespearean rhetoric that you will find in Melville. On the other hand, being less than half the length of Melville’s masterpiece, Guo’s feminist retelling is a far easier read. Sometimes, relative simplicity is its own blessing.

The first words of “Moby Dick” are “Call me Ishmael;” the first words of Guo’s new version are “Call me Ishmaelle” – a difference of just two additional letters of the alphabet.

By way of contrast, let us look at their endings: Melville’s last words, just before his epilogue, are: “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” Xiaola Guo concludes her book with her “vision” of the white whale, to whom she said ‘‘ ‘yes’ to your call and ‘yes’ to life.”

Melville concludes with the sea as “the great shroud,” while Guo ends with “ ‘yes’ to life” – and that difference is everything.

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritius@templehabonim.org.