Jonah presents the question of whether we can discover something unexpected in the text – and life. Or whether there is just the predictable singular story, in which we are trapped.
There is something of Joel and Clementine’s struggle (from the film ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind‘) against the narrative in which they are trapped: the erasure of their memory.
There is also something of Truman Burbank’s attempts (From ‘The Truman Show‘) to escape the happy-happy, ever tidy, nice’n’shiny little island town at the seaside.
The following reading looks to highlight these aspects of the narrative, whilst drawing on Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and The Truman Show as inter-texts (inter-films).
The following quotations from Yvonne Sherwood, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000) were an inspiration for this reading.
‘The plot of traditional story is preclusive –because the hero, in fact, has little chance of influencing the narrative…’
‘Seen in this light, story becomes a way of exposing ourselves to our own powerlessness: a way of exploring (in a safe, unterrifying arean) the constraint of the human individual as he/she is trapped in an enchainment of consequences, and held in a web of connections. The meaning of Jonah seems to lie in the ‘unalterability’ of the plot and the tenacity of the hero’s struggle against it.’
‘Jonah can be seen as an experiment in what it would feel like to occupy the strangely defamiliarising world of prophecy – albeit a world that in this case is taken to exaggerated comedy-insulated, extremes. Jonah is the quintessential story, and the quintessential prophetic text, in that the central character is subjected to a strange world from which no ‘digging’ or resistance will release him.’
Jonah
Jonah Tries to Run Away from God
As the story has it, Jonah son of Amittai, was told to ‘Go go as a hero to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah, had heard this one before so he set out to get as far away as he could . He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to the edge of the world; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to the back of beyond, away from all storytelling.
But Christof had scripted a great wind upon the sea, preferring to risk his death rather than loose him to the outside world. Then the mariners, oblivious to the plot, were afraid, and each cried to his god. They dutifully threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship, content with newly created plot-turn, and had lain down, and was fast asleep. The captain came to remind him of his story and said to him, ‘What are you doing skipping your lines? Get up, act like the protagonist and enact your tale! Perhaps there will be a late revision to spare us so that we do not perish.’
The sailors said to one another, ‘Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know whose account we have landed ourselves in’. So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they said to him, ‘Tell us why this nightmare has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what story are you?’ ‘I am from a Hebrew legend,’ he replied. ‘The one about the creator of the sea and the dry land.’ Then the men were even more afraid, and said to him, ‘What is this that you have done!’ For the men knew that he was fleeing to the very edges of his text, because he had told them so.
Then they said to him, ‘What shall we do to you, that we might escape this story?’ For the sea was growing more and more nightmarish. He said to them, ‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then you can return to your own tales; for I know it is because of the story that hounds me that this great storm has come upon you.’ Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to land themselves back on message, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them. Then they cried out to the author, ‘Please, we pray, do not fracture our tales on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty; for you, have ordered these chapters.’ So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the nightmare was over. Then the men realized the scale of the story they had meddled with, and they offered their own endings in honour of what they had seen.
As in all good stories, the author had a plan. A large mechanical fish for was waiting to swallow Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.
A Psalm of Thanksgiving
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying,
‘I called to the author out of my powerlessness and predictable life,
and he answered me;
out of enchainment and inalterability I cried,
and you heard my voice.
You cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the story,
and the text surrounded me;
all your twists and turns
passed over me.
Then I said, “I am written out
of your sight;
how shall I look again
upon your long ending?”
The words closed in over me;
the pages surrounded me;
tangents were spinning though my head
at the edge of the world.
I reached the land
whose tales closed upon me for ever;
yet you brought up my life from the Pit,
O writer of my saga.
As meaning was ebbing away,
I remembered my lines;
and my prayer came to you,
into your long ending.
Those who flit from legend to legend
forsake their true loyalty.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will play my part for you;
what I have vowed I will perform.
Resolution is found by the author!’
With the press of a button, the fish spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.
Conversion of Nineveh
The story began a second time, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’ So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the script. Now Nineveh was an mysteriously large city, a three weeks walk across. Jonah dutifully began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out his lines, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ And the people of Nineveh believed the story; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
As Jonah had guessed, when the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And unsurprisingly for Jonah, he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: ‘By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily. All shall turn from their nasty little violent stories. Who knows? There may be space in this tale for a happy ending’
When author saw what they did, how they turned from their own stories to his, he changed his mind about the calamity that he had written; and he cut the whole scene.
Jonah’s Anger
But this was just what Jonah had sickeningly predicted, and he became angry. He wrote to the author and said, ‘I knew this would happen, This is why I wanted to escape this stupid tale at the beginning; I knew it would yet again become a meaningless web of grace, mercy, slow anger, and steadfast love. The very things that hold me captive day and night. I’d prefer to be stricken from the record than play any part in this ’ And the author said, ‘You just don’t appreciate the story’s subtle sub-text’ Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see if they would finish the story without him.
Another button press, and a bush appears, hanging in the air over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; ‘Perhaps they do value their talent after all’, thought Jonah. But when dawn came up the next day, a site hand came and took the bush away. Sun rise had been written with a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and again asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’
Jonah Is Reproved
But Christof said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the author said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not sweat blood and tears over; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about my great story, in which there is meaning for hundreds of people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many performing animals?’
Andy Robertson
