the comic art of the book of jonah

THE COMIC ART OF THE BOOK OF JONAHAuthor(s): JUDSON MATHERSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 1982), pp. 280-291Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178218 .

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THE COMIC ART OF THE BOOK OF JONAH

JUDSON MATHER

np he comic," wrote Theodore Roethke, " - the really funny -^ before the eye of God -is harder to achieve than the lyric; more anguishing, more exacting, more exhausting to its writer."1 If this is indeed true of comic writing (as I suspect it is), it should apply equally to the reading of comedy . Without stressing anguish or exhaustion, I want to look carefully at the book of Jonah in this paper: to regard it as a story that is really funny before the eye of God, a rich comic invention that merits attention and appreciation as a work of art. In the first section I shall discuss the book's aesthetic form, the characteristics of the story that give it artistic coherence. Part II moves on to consider the ways in which the form shapes the content of the book; in particular I shall reflect upon the book's comic handling of the themes of iconoclasm and mercy. Finally, in Part III, I want to suggest something about the interplay between story and reader which this odd, engaging tale invites.

I

Modern interpretive approaches to the book of Jonah have most often characterized the form of the book as that of a parable.2 This view of the book, I suspect, is influenced by its canonical status: it reflects a certain expectation of what biblical books should be like. Because it seems very improbable that the author of the book of Jonah intended his tale to be taken as a

Judson Mather, Associate Professor of Humanities at Michigan State Uni- versity, teaches interdisciplinary courses on both Eastern and Western culture. By training an intellectual historian, he has a strong interest in epistemological and ethical quandaries (e.g., his article "On Being Part of the Problem: Moral Assumptions, Social Institutions and Sociology" in Soundings, Winter 1977). The present essay is part of a larger project on comic characterization in religious biography.

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THE COMIC ART OF THE BOOK OF JONAH 281

factual, historical account, it is concluded that he must have intended a story-with-a-message.3 The obtrusive comic elements of the story, on such a reading, have only a minor importance. They are treated as an attractive "container" for the book's message, but extrinsic to it. The message could be packaged differently without being altered.

Close examination of the story, however, raises some question about this tidy separation of form and content. When one reads the book of Jonah primarily as a "work of art," it becomes apparent that the author has written not a parable but a situation comedy. Its action (one can hardly call it a plot) is governed by a succession of situations rather than the developing character of the actors. The interest in the story is maintained by the anticipa- tion of surprise: what sort of situation one actor (God) will bring about and how the other actors (Jonah in particular) will re- spond. As with most situation comedies the ending seems rather arbitrary, for the actors' roles are fixed. If these roles were altered at the end to bring about a sense of denouement, the story would no longer be a comedy.4 It would become either a tragedy or merely a morally edifying tale.

Within the general framework of situation comedy, two stylis- tic features of the book of Jonah stand out. The first is the frequency and audacity with which the author uses the devices of burlesque and parody. The second is the artistry of his use of the structural features of farce. By this I mean not only the ridicu- lous improbability of the succession of situations that make up the story but also the fixed role of Jonah as straightman to God.

The exaggeration of burlesque is most obtrusive in the open- ing chapter of the book. God not only summons Jonah to preach - he calls him to preach to the worst of all cities. Jonah not only demurs; he attempts to get away to the end of the world. Jonah's flight mobilizes divine providence in its most impressive form, a "mighty tempest" (which nonetheless is tempered to cause terror and damage but not destruction). An exemplary crew of sailors fall to ecumenical prayer while carrying on the pragmatic activity of lightening ship, and the skipper wakens the slumbering Jonah to assure that no possibly useful supplication will be missed. The well-timed casting of lots infallibly deter- mines that Jonah's God and Jonah's presence are the cause of the difficulties. The sailors deal with this information with great tact and piety, asking Jonah what they should do; Jonah recom-



282 SOUNDINGS

mends the extreme expedient of his being thrown overboard. The sailors make every effort to avoid following his recom- mendation, attempting to row to shore. When all else fails, they take care to pray that they will be spared from shedding innocent blood. And when the deed is done and the sea calmed, they offer fitting vows and a sacrifice. God, for his part, providentially provides the right-sized fish at the right time to swallow Jonah and save him from drowning- an unpleasant salvation that re- wards Jonah's generous self-sacrifice and punishes his disobedience simultaneously.

The burlesque of piety begun in Chapter I is carried to even greater lengths in Chapter III. The people of Nineveh, "from the greatest to the least," on hearing Jonah's message of destruction, immediately "proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth."5 The king, hearing this, rushed forth to lead his already marching populace. Hfe commanded them to do what they were doing and (as if to demonstrate the reach of his authority) extended the wearing of sackcloth and ashes and the ban on food and drink to cattle as well as humans. Bewer remarks (ironically?) that the conversion of Nineveh "was a more astounding miracle than the miracle of the fish."6

Chapter IV makes it clear that the troubled relationship between God and Jonah, depicted throughout the story, is not simply a burlesque, but essentially farcical. Because the Nine- vites repent, God decides to spare the city - thus making Jonah appear to be a false prophet. Jonah becomes mortally angry at having been used again: he had disobeyed God and was discredited; now he has obeyed God and is again discredited. As in Chapter I, Jonah is at odds with God, and as in Chapter I, God swings into a flurry of providential activity. But here ordinary providence - not special effects - predominates: it is the stiletto rather than the sledgehammer. God "appoints" a plant to grow up to give Jonah the comfort and pleasure of shade; then he "appoints" a worm to kill the plant; then he "appoints" a hot east wind to further cook the already overheated prophet. (The shift in providential technique may suggest the change in providential purpose. In Chapter I God is trying to get Jonah to do something; in Chapter IV he is trying to get him to understand something.)

Though Jonah's role as straightman is highlighted in Chapter IV, it has obtained throughout the tale. Like the story of the Fall,




the story of Jonah begins with a divine command and an act of human disobedience. But Jonah, as a result, is not so much a sinner in the hands of an angry God as a foil in the hands of a puckish one. Life for Jonah becomes a series of disconcerting surprises and frustrations. He tries to escape from God and is trapped. He then gives up, accepts the inevitability of perishing, and is saved. He obeys when given a second chance, and is frustratingly, embarrassingly successful. He blows up; his frus- tration is intensified. (The straightman's lot never has been a happy one!)

In all this, the author skillfully maintains the reader's comic distance from the long-suffering Jonah. The abuse Jonah suf- fers is (from the standpoint of the reader) less life-threatening than it seems to Jonah: the disasters that come upon him stop short of completeness. The reader "knows" this through a sense of the conventions of the genre; he knows that the farceur has a stake in the preservation of his straightman. If the straightman perishes, the farceur is no longer in control. Likewise, the con- troller's sense of humor is a kind of guarantee that he will not take his agent's failings too seriously. There is also a certain lack of ultimate seriousness to these failings, for the most prominent defect exposed in Jonah is not so much a moral defect as a defect of imagination. Jonah's hopes and plans proceed from too nar- row and unrealistic a picture of his situation. Thus they are vulnerable to exposure as frivolous and self-regarding. Fur- thermore, because of this defect of imagination, the straightman also lacks the capacity to learn from experience in a way that will better protect his vulnerability - and this is perceived by the reader as Jonah's own fault. Cumulatively, these various devices enable readers to dissociate themselves from the plight of Jonah; they understand the larger picture and see what is going on from the standpoints of the author and the farceur who are entertain- ing them. Of course, there may also be an element of "purging fear and pity" in this dissociation: the relief of hearing a story where one could in all likelihood act more wisely and imagina- tively than the victim and thus avoid his demeaning or shattering experience.

Along with maintaining the reader's comic distance from Jonah, the author keeps attention focused on Jonah. When the book is read as a comic tale rather than as a parable with a point, its focus is clearly Jonah himself and Jonah's relationship to



284 SOUNDINGS

God.7 The idealized sailors and Nine vites are not actors; they are (like the big fish) props that through their exemplary behavior furnish a foil to the bumbling and all-too-human prophet. In the operative world of the story, it is as if the whole of nature and society - storms and crew, fish and urban sprawl, ritualized ab- jection and the life-cycle of plants - have been arranged by God for the manipulation and potential edification of Jonah.

The one portion of the book of Jonah that does not seem, at first sight, to fit the book's overall comic tone is in Chapter II, the psalm of praise that Jonah intones from the belly of the big fish. Almost all commentators think this passage is an interpolation- not because it is unfunny but because it breaks the story's narrative flow. Perhaps. But if that is the case, the joke may be on the redactor, for whoever wrote the passage has furnished an insertion that, in the context of the story, can be read as one of the story's most audacious parodies.8

The treatment of the seamen in Chapter I and the Nine vites in Chapter III makes it clear that the author has no qualms about parodying piety. But in these cases, the piety is attributed to foils and non-Israelites. Is the expression of true faith also to be subject to such indignity? The psalms of Israel, undoubtedly, are one of the high points of human religious expression, touching the heights and depths of religious experience. The articulation of this experience, not surprisingly, returns with some frequency to certain stylized metaphors: calling out of the deep where all God's waves and storms pass over one, being brought forth from the pit when one's soul faints within him, offering the sacrifice of thanksgiving for deliverance.

The prayer of Jonah is a pastiche of these and other phrases from the psalms. Their oddity- and the difficulty that troubles the commentators - lies not in what they say but in where they appear. Bewer, for example, comments that "there can be no doubt that he who placed the psalm here interpreted the phrases connected with drowning literally," but that "it is not certain that the original poet intended them to be taken literally."9 This, to my mind, gets at the point: the context is reshaping the meaning. Because the psalm is intoned from the belly of the fish, its moving, metaphorical language is burlesqued by being rendered literal. Without denying a certain heartfeltness to Jonah's psalm, it is clearly his outward circumstances rather than his inner experience to which the words most immediately refer. This




primary reference has the effect of demystifying the words. They are no longer solely the expression of the deepest yearning of the inner self; they can be seen as pious stock phrases comi- cally appropriated by the literal-minded Jonah in his most comic fix.

II The audacity of the burlesque that permeates the book of

Jonah suggests that the author's intent was essentially satirical:10 the puncturing of conventional pictures of God and established understandings of piety. There are other biblical writings that utilize the iconoclastic propensities of humor in this way. One thinks of the prophet Isaiah, who wields the scalpel of satire with telling effect as he describes the man who makes an idol, warms himself and cooks his food over the scraps of lumber, and then worships his idol and calls upon it to save him (Isaiah 44:9-20). The author of the book of Jonah, however, has set himself a more complex task than that of Isaiah, for he is not satirizing an idolatrous paganism. Rather he is burlesquing, iconoclastically, an already iconoclastic tradition to which he himself is commit- ted.

Viewed in this way, the book of Jonah comes to grips with one of the problems inherent in iconoclastic religious traditions: their penchant for idealizing what they recognize as beyond comprehension. In the quest to express the inexpressible, analogies are brought into play. If we cannot say who or what God is, we can at least suggest who or what he is like. At their most sophisticated, these analogies are qualified by the consid- eration of supereminence. It is granted that Goďs ways are not ours, but asserted that we can at least say that they are superemi- nent: better than the best we can know or imagine.

Idealizations of this sort push the problem of idolatry back a step rather than solving it. The most obvious difficulty is that pictures of what is highest and best arise from a cultural context, and these pictures are as subject to idolization as graven images. But the real problem of idealization lies more in its structure than in its content: a point perhaps less obvious in theology than in certain other disciplines. Utopian political thought furnishes a good example. Utopias are theoretical constructs displaying- ostensibly - a supereminence of the best social and political pos- sibilities. But utopias almost inevitably lack one characteristic



286 SOUNDINGS

and one good of real societies: the characteristic of change and the good of freedom. Because utopias are conceived of as ideal, there is nowhere for them to go but downhill. Hence part of their being ideal is their capacity to prevent change, their estab- lishment of thorough socialization and minute control. Ironi- cally, the "ideal" society turns out to be utterly conservative and markedly totalitarian. These shortcomings have nothing to do with the particular cultural projections that underlie various Utopian schemes; they are inherent in the ideal Utopian structure.11

A parallel problem exists, I would hold, in theological idealizations. Preoccupied as it is with maintaining the highest possible picture of God, such theologizing tends to project onto God the consistency of idealized human rationality. To the ex- tent that it does this, it is apt to create an image of him as a kind of Utopian philosopher-king who is at peace with those of his subjects who submit to the socialization and control of his ideal, changeless kingdom (to their benefit and the benefit of others, of course) and who is at war with those among his subjects who do not so submit. This is to say that the consistency of God is maintained at the expense of his freedom. The idealized God lacks flexiblity, initiative, the capacity to surprise. The resulting picture of God is a sophisticated idol, but still an idol.

If something like this ideal image of God was inspiring the iconoclastic dissent of the author of the book of Jonah, then the form of the book is as theologically significant as its content. Farce provides a counteranalogy to the analogies of idealization. Its analogy is more experiential than intellectual: that of the glorious freedom - usually brief and sometimes dangerous - of cutting loose from expectations and rules. Where idealization struggles to stay close to the loftiness of iconoclastic insight, and to suggest the otherness of God by maintaining the highest parallels, farce lets go and raucously falls all the way from such heights. In a sense, the analogy here is the analogy of the freedom that comes with not worrying about one's dignity. Idealizations worry much about the dignity of God. Farce suggests the pretentiousness of such effort- suggests that dignity need not be a divine worry.

The unpredictability and humor of God are iconoclastic in their impact. But the basic iconoclastic theme in the book of Jonah seems to be developed more through the depiction of




Jonah as God's prophet. Jonah is, as it were, the representative iconoclastic believer: the believer who is repeatedly surprised by God, who finds God to be both unnerving and unthwartable. Even what Jonah thinks he knows about God (e.g., that God is merciful) turns out to be a problem for him. Knowing that Goďs ways and thoughts are not his is small comfort; it remains con- tinually disconcerting to be the chosen prophet of an iconic God.

In this sense, the mercy of God and iconoclasm are not two themes in the story of Jonah; they are two sides of the same theme, woven together as the fabric of the story. The following eight points suggest something of the complexity of the pattern thus formed.

1. God appears only to Jonah. Other figures who appear in the story - sailors and Nine vites - are related to God's activity only through Jonah; it is Jonah's presence and what Jonah says that makes believers of them. Indeed, the evidence of God's relationship to them is accessible only to belief. It is based on what did not happen: the storm did not continue; Nineveh was not destroyed. There is no direct evidence that the ship or city would have gone under if the auditors had not listened to Jonah.

2. God consistently appears to Jonah as, above all, Jonah's troubler. He lays hard tasks on him, and shows him up as disobe- dient, uncomprehending, small-minded and hardhearted.

3. As God is to Jonah, so Jonah is to the world (the seamen, the Ninevites- and perhaps even the fish). In the argot of the American South, a Jonah is a troublebringer; when a Jonah appears, the normal course of events is disrupted; disaster threatens.

4. God is eventually merciful to both Jonah and the world. As suggested earlier, some modicum of mercy is intrinsic to the structure of farce. God needs to "save" Jonah in order to keep his project on track.

5. Though God is eventually merciful to both Jonah and the world, he waits upon Jonah to be merciful first. Waits upon, indeed, is too weak a term - he corners Jonah into doing the merciful thing. Jonah's choice is not one of looking out for himself or looking out for others. The choice - particularly in the shipboard scene- is one of whether or not to bring others down with him.

ô.Jonah's appreciation of God's mercy, from this cornered position, is a very qualified one. He says that he knows God is



288 SOUNDINGS

merciful, and he praises God for his mercy when he is in the belly of the fish. But (understandably) he resists and increasingly resents being the butt of God's mercy - having God be merciful at his cost.

7. Although Jonah's shortcomings are many and apparent, he is endowed with one virtue quite essestial to his role in the story: the virtue of resilience or durability. He is not utterly crushed by his difficulties. So he remains available for the next round of divine surprises.

8. Something similar to this last point can be said about divine character as it is depicted in the book. God's comic sense and his penchant for surprise are dimensions of his long-suffering pa- tience with Jonah. The story's image of God is the image of a God who has the will and capacity to cope with the inanities and hard-heartedness of his prophet- to accomplish what he wants, and to do so with panache.

When the divine-human relationship depicted in the book is laid out in this way, a rather curious pattern seems to emerge. In every instance, Jonah himself is in some fashion a mirror of God's character or activity. When Jonah is troubled by God he troubles the world. When Jonah acts mercifully he is the sign and forerunner of God's mercy. Thus mercy is not pictured as a virtue that contributes to the divine-human relationship: it con- stitutes the substance of that relationship. When God corners Jonah into acting mercifully and then presses him further to appreciate what has happened- all this is divine mercy in opera- tion, not merely the preparation for it. On the other side, in acting mercifully Jonah is responding positively to God, not just laying the groundwork for that response. If Jonah could come to like being merciful, so much the better. But the crux is the doing, not the feeling. The polemic of the book of Jonah, seen in this way, is thoroughly anti-utopian. It ignores all questions of how the best of all possible worlds would be organized and would operate; it burlesques idealizations and dwells upon im- mediacies. Given the imminent sinking of the ship or destruction of Nineveh, what is to be done? In both cases the thing to be done is clearly the merciful thing.

In the story, mercy is possible because both God and Jonah persevere. Indeed, it may be that the basic icon of the story of Jonah - the quality of Jonah that mirrors the character of God- is this resilience and long-suffering endurance. Even after




repeated bad experiences Jonah remains available as the object and agent of God's mercy. It is Jonah's durability that enables the even more persevering God to display and actualize his will to mercy through Jonah. "Faith" and "mercy" come close to being identified in the story of Jonah. The author creates a scenario in which to act mercifully is to trust, in a practical way, that God is on the side of those in need of mercy, and therefore - however quixotically - on the side of those acting mercifully.

HI At the outset of this inquiry, the suggestion was made that

Roethke's dictum on the demandingness of the comic form is applicable to readers as well as writers of comedy. This is so, I think, because of the peculiar freedom intrinsic to the form. A joke explained ceases to be one; the writer cannot guide the reader in too heavy-handed a way. Instead he must leave the reader to discover- or be discovered by - the humor of his work. What Susan Sontag says of art in general is supremely true of comic art: it "is seduction, not rape"; it depends upon the reader's "complicity."12 The complexity of the book of Jonah is such - I would hold- that its comic seduction can be experi- enced on a number of different levels, each a kind of comic reversal of the preceding experience of the story.

I suggested at the outset that the most common reading of the book of Jonah makes a sharp distinction between the "funny story" and the religious significance - the comic form and the serious message. Interpreters, of course, explicate the details of the book's serious message in a variety of ways. But generally they hold that the author has created a parable about divine grace and human obedience. The sailors and the Ninevites are thus the heroes, the good examples, and Jonah (at least in his self-assertive and unrepentant spells) is the bad example. The book's message, in short, contains no surprises; it meets the expectations conventionally brought to a canonical text. If the reader has any sense of "complicity" in reading the text this way, it is probably a sense of being privy to the author's "real" purpose. The reader is not fooled by the story's humor, the attractive package which contains and conceals its meaning.

A deeper level of complicity with the story is suggested by the first part of this study. Attention to the form of the story leads a reader into a perception of it that relativizes key features of the



290 SOUNDINGS

initial reading. As the essentially parodie and farcical character of the story comes into focus, the heroes of the first reading fade into the background- and with them, the conventionality of the book's message. Rather the story comes to be appreciated as an audacious, almost blasphemous satire of conventional piety and conventional religious understanding. Readers find themselves pleasurably complicit with the iconoclastic humor of the sar- donic author and his antic God, enjoying the repeated unsettling of the literal-minded and reluctant prophet.13

At least one further comic reversal may lurk in the story. Part II of this study suggests that, despite all the conflict between God and Jonah, the cross-purposes of these two figures are deeply intertwined. In spite of Jonah's truculence, God continues to keep after him. And Jonah's preferences and efforts not-

withstanding, he repeatedly turns out to be the agent of God's mercy and not just the object of God's unsettling attention. It is as if, through their durable persistence, God and Jonah have found worthy antagonists and friends in one another.14

When the story is seen in this light, the comic distance between the reader and the figure of Jonah begins to be undermined, to be transformed into a kind of comic immediacy. One's sense of being in complicity with the author and God over against Jonah takes on a certain comic air. Indeed, one might sense an eerie parallel between Jonah's comic effort to distance himself from God and the reader's quite natural proclivity to maintain comic distance from the figure of Jonah. The suspicion arises that Jonah may not be the story's only straightman, that the author's artistry has seduced the reader into the illusion of distance only to allow this illusion to collapse. The reader has been taken in by the author as Jonah has been taken in by God.

NOTES

1. Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-1963. Selected and arranged by David Wagoner (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1972), p. 258.

2. James D. Smart's view is typical: "The form of literature into which the book of Jonah fits most naturally is that of parable." The Interpreter's Bible (New York and Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1956), VI, 872. For a brief but excellent summary of scholarship on the book of Jonah, see Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress




Press, 1979), pp. 417-27. Childs prefers the term "parable-like" in describ- ing the book.

3. Even Von Rad, for example, who has illuminating comments on the book's genre, speaks of "the literary form in which its message is clothed." Gerhard Von Rad, Old Testament Theology. Volume II: The Theology of Israel's Prophetic Traditions (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 289.

4. McFadden argues convincingly that such persistence is the distinguishing characteristic of comedy: "We can feel the right comic gratification" when the pressing "threat of change is overcome, and as long as the parties have continued to be themselves in essential ways despite their openness and even propensity to alteration." George McFadden, Discovering the Comic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 244.

5. Biblical quotations throughout this paper are from the Revised Standard Version.

ô.Julius A. Bewer, The Literature of the Old Testament. Third edition, com- pletely revised by Emil G. Kraeling (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 423.

7. This view of the book's focus is argued (on "serious" rather than "comic" grounds) by Robert R. Wilson, "Jonah in the Biblical Tradition," Reflection 76/1 (November 1978), pp. 6-8.

8. The problem of Jonah's psalm received thorough attention seventy years ago in The International Critical Commentary (Julius A. Bewer, A Criticai and Exegetical Commentary on Jonah (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1912), pp. 21-24). It continues to be a live issue (see Childs, Introduction, pp. 422-25). Controversy centers around the questions of why the psalm was added and whether it is now located in the proper place. The issue of whether its impact is comic (either by intention or inadvertence) does not arise. E. Good comes closest; he considers the psalm to be "ironic" because the. proclamation of "loyalty" it expresses "is precisely what Jonah subsequently abandons." Edwin M. Good, Irony in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1965), p. 54.

9. Bewer, Commentary on Jonah, p. 23. 10. Good, Irony in the Old Testament, p. 41. 11. This argument is derived from Ralf Dahrendorf, Essays on the Theory oj

Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 107-28. 12. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: barrar, Mraus and Oiroux,

1966), p. 22. 13. Crossan gives a lively explication of the story along these general lines. John

Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Niles, Illinois: Argus Communications, 1975), pp. 72-77 '.

14. Something of this atmosphere attends Wiesel s meditative recreation ot the figure of Jonah. Elie Wiesel, Five Biblical Portraits (Notre Dame and Lon- don: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 129-55.



the comic art of the book of jonah

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