Call Him Ishmael

Amadman, convinced he can fly, jumps off a hundred-story building. As he passes the 10th floor, he thinks to himself, “Well, so far so good.”

One of the two characters in Daniel Quinn’s novel, “Ishmael”--to be published next month by Bantam--tells that joke but with this difference: All mankind, he says, is the madman.

As I read this deeply engaging philosophical (or, more accurately, anthropological) dialogue, loosely framed as a novel, I recalled a turn-of-the-year publishing retrospective that I attempted five years ago. As we entered 1987, the three 1986 books that I couldn’t shake were ones that I had read earlier in a state of something like paralysis. Quinn’s “Ishmael” is about that paralysis and why I felt it.

The three were William Ashworth’s “The Late Great Lakes” (Alfred A. Knopf), Les Kaufman and Ken Mallory’s “The Last Extinction” (MIT Press) and Andrew W. Mitchell’s “The Enchanted Canopy” (Macmillan). “The Enchanted Canopy,” one of the first trade books on the destruction of the rain forest, warns that our oxygen supply is shrinking. “The Late Great Lakes” is a similar warning about our supply of fresh water. “The Last Extinction,” the broadest of the three, is about the fraying of the web of species that supports the human species. Kaufman and Mallory claim that within our lifetime more species will disappear than have disappeared since the birth of the planet.

Collectively these books say, simply but terrifyingly, that the conditions of continued human life on this planet are acutely threatened. Human intelligence can now foresee the time when not only will the human species be extinct but human action on the biosphere will have extinguished the conditions for life itself.

How did things get this way? That question, asked in just those words, recurs again and again in “Ishmael.” Things got this way, Ishmael tells his interlocutor, our narrator, when mankind presumed to decide, 10,000 years ago, which species would live and which would die. At the agricultural revolution, mankind decided that food plants would live and weeds would die. Livestock would live, predators would die. And so forth through the centuries to the era of the clear-cut forest and the drift-net-emptied ocean.

In a hunting-and-gathering society, nature is the only farmer. Mankind plants nothing but only reaps some of what nature sows. Far more important, however, man exterminates nothing; everything continues to live. Only a small human population can be supported in this way, but it can be supported indefinitely.

Early agriculture set in motion a process--as long as human history but still just a moment in evolutionary time--by which larger and larger human populations could be supported by dint of a progressive simplification of the initial biological diversity. Like the madman flying past the window, we are in the last, irreversible stages of a suicidal “conquest of nature.”

“Ishmael” is less concerned with biology, however, than with ideology. All this didn’t just happen to us, Quinn insists, any more than Nazism just happened to Germany. We have chosen it. The conquest of nature has been an ideal as well as an outcome.

Quinn reads the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis as the criticism of an agricultural society by a hunting-and-gathering or, at most, a pastoral one. Adam and Eve in the garden are hunter-gatherers; agriculture is their punishment, not their triumph. Cain, the farmer, slays Abel, the shepherd. Quinn insists that primitive society and civilized society are not Chapter One and Chapter Two in the human story. In a few places, hunter-gatherers live on in unbroken continuity with the earliest past of the species. Their way of life is still viable. As for ours, our ten-thousand-year leap forward turns out to be a plunge into the abyss. Like the madman leaping off the roof, we may be proud of the figure we have cut on the way down; but the state of the biosphere makes it clear that our way is a way down.

To Quinn’s credit, his book rejects any specifically spiritual celebration of the Noble Savage. Materially, Quinn says, following Marshall Sahlins and others, hunter-gatherers may have lived a life of far greater plenty and leisure than we realize. But his essential claim for them is simply that while they were not doomed, we are. Depressingly, he offers no advice whatsoever about how we might turn our way into something more like theirs. His one flicker of hope comes in a comment on the unprecedented speed with which the Soviet Union has changed course. (And at that, he does not linger over the fact that as the Commonwealth of Independent States gets “up to speed,” as we say, it will become an immensely greater drain on global resources than it has been hitherto.) And yet, if Quinn has not framed a solution, he has certainly given fresh expression to a problem.

The strangest feature of “Ishmael”--so strange that to have mentioned it first would be a disservice to the book--is that the title character is a gorilla. The narrator and Ishmael do not speak to each other. They communicate by mental telepathy. This calls, to put it mildly, for a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader; but Quinn asks this suspension for a reason.

How did things get this way? The answer is that our species refused to live in its ecological niche and insisted, instead, on turning the entire planet into a niche for humans. If any animal did this (Quinn uses the hyena as an example at one point), death for all animals would be the eventual result. No species can survive as a species alone, only as a species among other species. Ishmael, saying this, says what any gorilla might say if gorillas could think and talk.

And the talk is wonderfully earnest and engaging. Think of Robert Pirsig in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” or B. F. Skinner in “Walden Two.” Written with some of the elan of a college bull session, “Ishmael” is a book that a teacher of college freshmen or high school seniors could assign in hopes of showing the students how ideas matter. One can imagine it becoming the center of a word-of-mouth, student-to-student cult.

And yet there is plenty of room for a teacher. Quinn’s intellectual debts are many: to Socrates, for the manner of exposition; to Kierkegaard, for the concept of cultural despair (the despair that knows not that it is despair); to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, for a vision of myth and social program as reflexes of each other (the “rise of man” reflecting the “conquest of nature,” and vice versa); and on down an admirable list.

‘Ishmael” was named, last spring, winner of the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Award. The award, set up to encourage fiction that offers solutions to global problems, was presented by Ted Turner at a formal dinner in the Hall of the Marine Mammals at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where the awesome principal tenant is a life-size sculpture of a gray whale suspended from the ceiling. In this setting, Turner explained his reasons for sponsoring the competition.

Running through a list of dystopian films from “On the Beach” through “Soylent Green” to “Blade Runner,” he said that he wanted to invite the country’s writers to exercise their imaginations in a more positive direction. For his troubles, Turner was denounced on the following day by two of the five Turner Tomorrow Prize judges, Peter Matthiesen and William Styron. Neither thought “Ishmael” deserved $500,000; $50,000 was enough, they said, claiming that Turner Publishing had broken its word to them by awarding the larger amount. Styron publicly accused Turner of “exploitation.”

There will be no Round Two in this competition, regrettably, but I must say I agree with Ray Bradbury, another judge: Given what the publishing traffic will bear these days, Quinn, whose book has gone through seven complete drafts, deserves his money. And I agree as well with Turner: Doom has indeed become an artistic cliche even as it threatens to become a physical inevitability. There is, therefore, every reason to attempt a revival of utopian writing. “Ishmael” may be “Utopia Lost” rather than “Utopia Regained,” but like earlier works in this tradition, it has the key capacity to waken sleepers in the burning house. The news about nature is, in general, so bad we don’t want to hear it. Young people, especially, don’t want to hear it. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. But maybe, just maybe, from a gorilla. . . .

Arthur Koestler, in an essay in which he wondered whether mankind would go the way of the dinosaur, formulated what he called the Dinosaur’s Prayer: “Lord, a little more time!” “Ishmael” does its bit to answer that prayer and may just possibly have bought us all a little more time.