Of Tombs and Wombs, Or, the Whale, Part III
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Of Tombs and Wombs, or, The Whale, Part III PETER WAYNE MOE The University of Pittsburgh The image of a human stuck in the belly of a whale has currency. It recirculates through Jonah, medieval poetry and art, Pinocchio, a handful of Batman com- ics, a Bruce Springsteen song, yarns from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century whalers––among other places––and, of course, Melville’s Moby-Dick. This essay is two-stranded. To account for why the Jonah trope has such resonance, I fi rst follow the narrative of ingestion by, in utero entombment within, and deliverance from a whale, this narrative appearing in a wide range of texts. I then consider Jonah’s “rhetorical velocity,” the frequent repurposing and retelling of his narra- tive, in order to speak to the interplay between, and malleability of, metaphor, narrative, and the belly of the whale. Extracts (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Cetologist) Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick The idea that the victim might have been aware as he was swal- lowed was too terrible to contemplate; although in secret his fel- low sailors may have wondered what it was like to be within the belly of the whale, to slither down its gullet like a whiting down a gannet’s neck and into the nameless horror of the leviathan’s maw. Philip Hoare, The Whale Two or three times on my visit I sat under the blue whale’s jaw, or even within the cage of its chest, the thick portcullis of its ribs descending around. Kathleen Jamie, “The Hvalsalen” Then the LORD commanded the fi sh, and it vomited Jonah up onto the dry land. Jonah Vol. 17.1 (2015): 41–60 © 2015 The Melville Society and Johns Hopkins University Press L EVIATHAN A J OURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 41 PETER WAYNE MOE Now buddy get up and come here to your pap I’ll tell you a story, climb up on my lap ’Tis better than the story of Daniel or Ruth Although it is fi shy, it’s every bit truth Now listen right good while I tell you this tale How Jonah the prophet got caught by this whale That whale caught poor Jonah and bless your dear soul It not only caught him, it swallowed him whole The New Lost City Ramblers, “The Old Fish Song” t is rare that humans ever see an entire whale in the wild.1 More often, it is a snout here, a fl uke there. Naturalist Philip Hoare notes that humans I have only recently even been able to see wild whales swim underwater: “It was only after we had seen the Earth from orbiting spaceships that the fi rst free-swimming whale was photographed underwater. The fi rst underwater fi lm of sperm whales, off the coast of Sri Lanka, was not taken until 1984; our images of these huge placid creates moving gracefully and silently through the ocean are more recent than the use of personal computers. We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like” (31). This is the animal Herman Melville chooses as the central fi gure of Moby-Dick, an animal that spends a fraction of its life at the surface, an animal humans seldom, if ever, are able to see. The “Extracts” opening Moby-Dick can be read as the beginning of an inquiry into this unseen animal, Melville searching anywhere and everywhere for anything and everything he can fi nd that would enable him to fi gure the whale. I note Hoare’s use of “huge”; it departs from its four appearances in Melville’s “Extracts.” For Hoare, the underwater footage reveals a sperm whale peaceful, even-tempered, “placid”––a far different whale than the one of Mel- ville’s “Extracts,” a whale Melville knew from his own whaling expeditions, a whale fl eeing or attacking, a whale fl ensed and cleaned. Hoare’s whale is not prevalent in the “Extracts;” there, Melville fi gures the whale in terms of its fear-inducing nature. “Great” appears 14 times in the “Extracts;” variations of “monster” eight times; “mouth” fi ve times; variations of “jaw” six times. Laden with biblical weight, “leviathan” appears 12 times, modifi ed by such adjectives as “great,” “that sea beast,” “huge,” and “dread.” Consider, for example, how the “Extracts” handle the circulatory system: “Ten or fi fteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a stroke, with immense velocity” and “The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the water-works at London bridge” (Moby-Dick 13). These two references (John Hunter’s account of the dissection of a whale and Paley’s Theology) stem 42 L EVIATHAN O F T O M B S A N D W O M B S from the Industrial Revolution, and both marvel at the whale in language that can be read through the lens of mechanical progress: the whale is more “immense” than anything industrious man has yet forged, and the appropriate response is awe––and fear. And there is a tension here, the immense whale humbling the diminutive human, the narrative of industrial progress feeding into the human’s desire, and capacity, to hunt the whale and triumph over nature. But consider too an alternative fi guring of the whale and its circulatory system, coming from Brian Doyle, one that, like Melville’s, relies on the whale’s size but does so for a differ- ent end: “The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long” (26). Doyle, like Melville, asks that readers mar- vel at the whale’s size, though Doyle fi gures that size not through metaphors of industry, but via a four-chambered house with a child walking around inside. For Melville, via Hunter and Paley, the heart and its veins transport fl uids; for Doyle, they hold a human. Melville and Doyle resort to metaphor to make sense of the whale, but in Doyle’s fi guration of the whale’s heart, I hear bits of a Jonah narrative, the whale housing a human. This image of human inside a whale’s belly accomplishes the same work as Melville’s “Extracts”: both function as a means of inquiry into an animal humans know little about, an animal humans rarely see in full. In what follows, I look in and beyond Moby-Dick to consider how the story of Jonah recirculates in multiple media and multiple contexts. This essay is two-stranded. First, I borrow from Ilana Pardes’s characterization of Ishmael: “He tries to fathom the mysteries of Jonah’s head within the enigmatic head of the whale, to cap- ture the experience of being swallowed up by a gigantic marine creature and entrapped in its inner spaces” (62). In that spirit of “captur[ing] the experience of being swallowed up . and entrapped,” I begin with an exchange between Ishmael and Captain Peleg that introduces a desire to be within the belly of a whale and from there follow the same narrative as appears in my extracts of ingestion by, in utero entombment within, and deliverance from a whale, this narrative retold in a wide range of texts. Second, I consider why Jonah’s tale has such “rhetorical velocity,”––Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle DeVoss’s phrase describ- ing a text’s recirculation. Rhetorical velocity speaks to my method: this essay is an archive of tales of humans within the belly of a whale. It is, in a sense, argumentation by catalogue, this corpus of stories speaking to the recirculation of Jonah, their rhetorical velocity prompting a reconsideration not only of how the various repurposings of the trope bear upon each other, but also of why Jonah’s narrative has such resonance. A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 43 PETER WAYNE MOE Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales: Ingestion n his fi rst conversation with Ishmael, Captain Peleg, fearful Ishmael is a fugitive, attempts to discern his motives for going to sea: “But fl ukes! man, Iwhat makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?––it looks a little suspicious, don’t it, eh?––Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?––Didst not rob thy last Cap- tain, didst thou?––Dost not think of murdering the offi cers when thou gettest to sea?” (Moby-Dick 71). In light of Father Mapple’s sermonic treatment of Jonah, Ishmael becomes a Jonah fi gure in this exchange with Captain Peleg, the Captain following a line of questioning not unlike that faced by Father Map- ple’s Jonah. The Jonah parallels continue when the Captain, unsure whether Ishmael is fi t for service, asks a question that would put Ishmael inside the belly of a whale: “Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!” (72). Captain Peleg’s question suggests a whaler would (and even should) voluntarily “jump after” that har- poon hurled “down a live whale’s throat.” Just as Jonah goes into the sea to save his shipmates, Captain Peleg seeks a whaler willing to throw himself down a whale’s gullet.