Decolonizing ‘Moby-Dick’

On a structural level, one can see what might have drawn Guo to Moby-Dick—a work that refuses containment, braiding together travelogue, philosophical inquiry, cetological taxonomy, and lyrical examinations of everything from race and slavery to the “masculine sublime.” The historian C.L.R. James observed in 1953 that “the whale and whaling turn out to be a thread on which is hung a succession of pictures portraying the history of the world … [Melville] wishes to include in his book everything.” Closer to our time, the literary critic James Wood wrote that Melville, in his encyclopedic work, “nearly touched every word once, or so it seems.”

A sense of Melvillean wandering and restlessness—geographical, linguistic, formal—animated Guo’s earlier work. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers milks mondegreens and other linguistic errors made by a non-native English speaker for comedy and insight. Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is a bildungsroman of a young Beijinger. Radical abandons linear storytelling almost entirely, unfolding as a cascade of fragmentary reflections from the author’s time in New York. Part diary, part essay, and part linguistic meditation, the book traces Guo’s thinking across questions of desire, migration, artistic freedom, and the constraints on women’s lives—revealing a writer unafraid to dissolve narrative form to faithfully map the movements of her mind.

In contrast to those earlier works, Call Me Ishmaelle feels curiously contained. If Guo’s departure from China once answered a desire for artistic latitude, this novel suggests a different pressure at work, one that leans toward legibility, as though the freedom she sought has been exchanged for a more dutiful accessibility.

The sea has long held Guo’s fascination but reaches its own saturation point as a metaphor in Ishmaelle. What should feel like a boundless imaginative field often collapses into a narrow symbolic loop. Time and again the narrative pauses to declare the ocean a mirror of human interiority: Standing at the shoreline near the novel’s end, Ishmaelle reflects that “the sea has a great pull, we are of the land but still the sea is within us,” as thoughts flood “like a tide.” In such passages, the sea becomes less a living environment than a rhetorical device endlessly reiterating its own vastness.

Where Guo strives to distinguish her version of Moby-Dick is in the way she interpolates the I Ching. The ancient Chinese divination text—often translated as the Book of Changes—has for centuries served as both philosophical treatise and oracle. Practitioners consult it by casting sticks or coins, generating hexagrams that symbolize shifting patterns in the cosmos. Each hexagram corresponds to commentary about change, balance, and the cyclical nature of events. In the novel, a Chinese sailor named Muzi performs such rituals aboard the Nimrod. He explains that they reveal the “movement” of the universe, the unseen flow through which human lives pass.

This device might have provided Guo with an opportunity to stage an encounter between philosophical traditions: Melville’s Calvinist cosmology, haunted by predestination and divine wrath, alongside Taoist notions of flux and harmony. Yet the I Ching episodes rarely deepen the novel’s intellectual texture, functioning more as exotic garnish. When Muzi and Seneca perform a divination in the captain’s cabin, the ritual seems poised to illuminate Seneca’s obsession with the white whale. Instead, the moment fizzles into abstraction. The reader is told that the universe is changeable and mysterious, but the narrative itself remains stubbornly linear, bound to the rails of Melville’s plot.

A similar flattening occurs with the novel’s multicultural crew. Guo clearly intends the Nimrod to resemble a floating microcosm of the 19th-century maritime world: Sailors from Polynesia, China, Africa, and Europe share cramped quarters, exchanging fragments of macaronic language. At moments, this cosmopolitanism produces flashes of interest. The Polynesian harpooner Kauri, for instance, carries with him burial customs from his homeland. When he falls ill, he asks the ship’s carpenter to build a canoe-coffin in which his body can be set adrift on the sea, according to his people’s rites. The scene is strange and memorable: A coffin fashioned for death becomes an object of speculation among the sailors, even a potential flotation device if someone falls overboard.

Yet even here the writing lists toward the declarative. Cultural difference is explained rather than dramatized; characters speak as if summarizing their own anthropological significance. Muzi patiently expounds Taoist philosophy. Kauri recounts the punitive rituals of his tribe. The most disturbing subplot—the repeated sexual assault of Ishmaelle by the steward Mr. Flaherty—also illustrates this tendency toward bluntness. In one harrowing passage, Flaherty forces himself on Ishmaelle while she debates whether killing him would lead to her own execution by the crew. Ishmaelle curses a world in which men rule through “absurd desires and pointless ambitions,” denouncing God and patriarchy in the same breath. Even the resolution of this storyline arrives in schematic fashion. Flaherty disappears on a stormy night, apparently swept overboard—though the narrative hints that a crew member may have helped the sea claim him as punishment.

These episodes suggest the difficulty Guo faces in adapting such a heterogenous novel. Moby-Dick thrives on digression, contradiction, and linguistic extravagance; its symbols expand outward until they threaten to engulf the narrative itself. Call Me Ishmaelle, by contrast, is driven by a centripetal force that leaves little room for ambiguity. One can sense Guo’s admirable intention: to open Melville’s maritime epic to readers who might find the original forbidding, and to refract its myth through a global perspective. But in smoothing away Melville’s excesses, she also smooths away the friction that gives his book its wild electricity. What remains is a narrative that echoes the shape of Moby-Dick while rarely capturing its unruly spirit.

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael observes that “some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher.” The phrase “some certain” sounds a note of hesitancy: The significance that “lurks in all things” is not immediately apprehensible or describable. Other recent adaptations of and meta-forays into the novel have tended to work with rather than against that instability or else have sought to distill its sprawl in ways that preserve, rather than foreclose, its interpretive richness.

The behemoth has inspired any number of works across media, including puppetry, theater, and fiction. Sena Jeter Naslund’s 1999 novel Ahab’s Wife: or, The Star-Gazer, for instance, retells the story from a woman’s vantage, using its revisionary premise to spin out an independent life for its narrator that both converses with and escapes the gravitational pull of Ahab’s quest. Jake Heggie’s production at the Metropolitan Opera last season focused on the emotional countercurrents provided by one crewmember’s resistance to Ahab’s obsessive pursuit, while translating Melville’s expansive cosmos into choral surges and shifting musical textures.

Artists, it’s safe to assume, will continue to return to this touchstone of American literature because it carts not a single meaning but a surplus of meanings—an unsettled field that each new version must navigate by deciding what to change, what to heighten, what to deemphasize, and what to leave eloquently unresolved.