Books
Back to the Future
Houston novelist Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael—the basis of the new film Instinct—calls for a return to primitive ways. But we get to keep our modern pleasures.
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Ishmael follows in the literary tradition of the preachy pseudo-novel—of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Carlos Castaneda’s don Juan books—with less literary atmosphere but a clearer and perhaps even more subversive message. It is the clarity of Quinn’s ideas, “the terrible lucidity,” as one reviewer put it, of his indictment of modern man, that makes Ishmael a prize-worthy page-turner. Is something wrong with modern culture’s relationship to the world, the gorilla wonders? Yes, the hapless narrator is forced to conclude after much debate. Is man inherently bad? No. Then what happened? Page by page, the gorilla teases the narrator—and, by extension, the reader—to enlightenment: “No one species shall make the life of the world its own.”
Mysteriously, despite the lack of plot, the Socratic dialogue between gorilla and pupil makes Ishmael suspenseful: Will this narrator ever figure it out, the reader wonders—and what is it, anyway? By the book’s end, I began to notice that my own view of the world had changed: The stream of horrific headlines in the daily paper seemed to validate Quinn’s charges; the idea that we’ve been doing the wrong thing for 10,000 years seemed not so far-fetched.
Young people have become the book’s most enthusiastic audience. A teenage boy I know, a hip seventeen-year-old who plays guitar in a rock band, says he has been more influenced by Ishmael than any other book he has ever read. “It has changed the way that I think drastically,” he told me. “I realized how much I take for granted and how interconnected everything is.” Ishmael is taught in more than two hundred schools nationwide, including ten colleges and universities and half a dozen high schools in Texas, in courses ranging from ancient civilizations to zoology. Its questioning message seems to resonate with teens, who flock to Quinn’s Web site and post rave reviews on Amazon.com using onscreen names like “hungrykid” and “xjeremiahx.” “I hear from a lot of young people who have no sense of purpose,” Quinn says. “I call them the Lost Kids. They want to do something. But what?”
Though Quinn has taken the book’s success in stride, even he was unprepared for its translation to film. “I tried for a while to write a screenplay based on Ishmael,” he admits, “but I concluded it was essentially unfilmable.” Hollywood producers Michael Taylor and Barbara Boyle were fans of the book, however, and sent it to Gerald DiPego, the New Age screenwriter of the moment (Phenomenon, Message in a Bottle). “A lot of people had read it,” DiPego recalls, “and no one could see it as a film unless you did ‘My Dinner With Andre the Gorilla’ or something like that. But I was very moved by the philosophy of the book, by the idea of pinpointing exactly where we as a species went wrong, so I asked for permission to reinvent the story, keeping the philosophical underpinnings.” Taylor and Boyle optioned the screen rights. “Disney still has the merchandising rights, I think,” Quinn says, laughing, “in case they want to market little gorillas.”
DiPego came up with the idea of delivering the gorilla’s message through a human character. Anthony Hopkins was cast as a brilliant anthropologist who develops ideas much like Ishmael’s from living with mountain gorillas. When poachers murder and kidnap members of his simian family, though, the scientist goes postal; Cuba Gooding, Jr., playing a psychiatrist who finds him in an American prison, tries to get through to him.
Although Quinn praises Taylor, Boyle, and DiPego for a sincere attempt to convey his ideas, he sounds relieved that the film was not called Ishmael. After all, the stand-in for his gorilla becomes a violent murderer in the film, which is just the sort of thing he avoided in the nearly plotless Platonic dialogue of his novel. “Instinct is said to have been ‘suggested by’ my book,” Quinn says with an exasperated shrug. “But I suppose anything can suggest anything else. The encyclopedia could suggest Instinct, for that matter. In a way, I feel blessed that no one will confuse the movie with the book.”
So it continues: People are always getting Daniel Quinn wrong. Some have mistaken his unconventional and philosophical bent for a wholehearted alliance with the counterculture, the hippie movement, Earth First!, and other “ninnyhammers, noodleheads, [and] gawkies,” as the narrator of Ishmael puts it. Even those who recommended Austin as a hometown to Quinn back in 1986 were mistaken about him. “Everyone told us Austin was the perfect place,” he says. “Turned out, it was perfect only for a certain type of person.”
Which type is that? I wonder. “Oh, you know, ex-hippies, bohemians,” Quinn says. “When the flower children came around, I was already over thirty, one of those people you couldn’t trust.”
“We could never find a decent restaurant in Austin,” Rennie complains. “We work at home, and going out is important to us. We had to join the Austin Club [a private dining club] to get an adult meal. We were in our mid-fifties then but still the youngest people there.”
In 1997 the Quinns moved to Houston and found their proper spot. They live in the Montrose area in a three-story townhouse with fourteen-foot ceilings, and much of their social life revolves around a neighborhood Italian restaurant called Riva’s. “The owner has all his customers reading Ishmael,” Quinn says.
Houston has even become an icon in Quinn’s new book, Beyond Civilization, due out in September. “Houston appeals to me,” he writes, “because it isn’t zoned, making it a crazy quilt of residential and commercial districts, and no one fusses if you run a business from your home.” After following Ishmael with a few less-successful novels on the same themes, including Story of B and My Ishmael (a sequel), Quinn has abandoned the fictional form in his new book, a series of one-page essays he describes as a nonfiction “mosaic.” In it Quinn finally addresses the question so many of his readers ask him: What can we do to change the world? Beyond Civilization calls for a “New Tribal Revolution,” with work-based communities connecting us to one another and the rest of the natural world.
As we slip out of Sardine Rouge into the blue night, it is apparent that the New Tribal Revolution has not yet begun. For this happens to be April 15, and Sixth Street is jammed with the cars of people trying to file their 1040’s in the downtown post office’s special drive-through lane. There is something apt about the scene, an on-cue dramatization of how we are captives of our culture, slaves to our very modernity, and Quinn can’t resist a chuckle at the expense of the poor taxpayers. Lines from his books tend to come back to you at moments like these. “People will still be living here in one hundred years,” Quinn writes in Beyond Civilization, “if we start living in a new way soon.
“Otherwise, not.”
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