A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

Jonah and the whale
Books as business

“You don’t know how to manage Looking-Glass cakes,” the Unicorn

remarked. “Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 7

OF ALL THE SNARLING OR moaning prophets who haunt the pages of the Old Testament, I believe that none is so curious as the prophet known as Jonah. I like Jonah. I have a fondness for Jonah, in spite of his posthumous reputation as a purveyor of bad luck. I think I’ve discovered what it was about Jonah that made people nervous in his presence. I think Jonah had what in the nineteenth century was called an artistic temperament. I think Jonah was an artist.

The first time I heard the story of Jonah, it was from a great-uncle of mine, who had the disagreeable habit of spitting into his handkerchief when he talked. He had a small claim to Jewish scholarship, which we believed did not go far beyond the few verses he taught us to memorize for our bar mitzvah. But sometimes he could tell a good story, and if you didn’t look too closely at the spittle forming at the corners of his mouth, the experience could be quite entertaining. The story of Jonah came about one day when I was being especially pigheaded, refusing to do something or other I had been asked to do for the one hundredth time. “Just like Jonah,” said my great-uncle, holding his handkerchief to his mouth, spitting heartily, and tucking the handkerchief deep into his pocket. “Always no, no, no. What will you grow up to be? An anarchist?” For my great-uncle, who in spite of the pogroms had always felt a curious admiration for the tsar, there was nothing worse than an anarchist, except perhaps a journalist. He said that journalists were all Peeping Toms and Nosy Parkers, and that if you wanted to find out what was going on in the world you could do so from your friends in the café. Which he did, day in, day out, except, of course, on Shabbat.

The story of Jonah was probably written sometime in the fourth or fifth century B.c. The book of Jonah is one of the shortest in the Bible — and one of the strangest. It tells how the prophet Jonah was summoned by God to go and cry against the city of Nineveh, whose wickedness had reached the ears of Heaven. But Jonah refused because he knew that through his word the Ninevites would repent and God would forgive them, and thus escape the punishment he thought they deserved. To escape the divine order, Jonah jumped on a ship sailing for Tarshish. A furious storm arose, the sailors moaned in despair, and Jonah, somehow understanding that he was the cause of this meteorological turmoil, asked to be thrown into the sea to calm the waves. The sailors obliged, the storm died down, and Jonah was swallowed by a great fish, appointed for this purpose by God Himself. There in the bowels of the fish Jonah remained for three long days and three long nights. On the fourth day, the Lord caused the great fish to vomit the prophet out onto dry land and, once again, the Lord ordered Jonah to go to Nineveh and speak to the people. Resigned to God’s will, this time Jonah obeyed. The king of Nineveh heard the warning, immediately repented, and the city of Nineveh was saved. But Jonah was furious with the Lord and stormed out into the desert to the east of the city, where he set up a sort of booth and sat and waited to see what would become of the repentant Nineveh. The Lord then caused a plant to sprout up and protect Jonah from the sun. Jonah expressed his gratitude for the divine gift but, next morning, the Lord caused the plant to wither. The sun and the wind beat hard on Jonah, and faint with heat he told the Lord that it was better for him to die. Then the Lord spoke to Jonah and said: “You are upset because I killed a simple plant and yet you wished me to destroy all the people of Nineveh. Should I have spared a plant but not spared these people ’who do not know their right hand from their left,’ and also much cattle?” With this unanswered question, the book of Jonah ends.

I am fascinated by the reason for Jonah’s refusal to prophesy in Nineveh. The idea that Jonah would keep away from performing his divinely inspired piece because he knew his audience would repent and be therefore forgiven must seem incomprehensible to anyone except an artist. Jonah knew that Ninevite society dealt in one of two ways with its artists: either it saw the accusation in an artist’s work and blamed the artist for the evils of which the society stood accused or it assimilated the artist’s work because, valued in dinars and nicely framed, the art could serve as a pleasant decoration. In such circumstances, Jonah knew, no artist can win.

Given the choice between creating an accusation or a decoration, Jonah would have probably preferred the accusation. Like most artists, what Jonah really wanted was to stir the languid hearts of his listeners, to touch them, to awaken in them something vaguely known and yet utterly mysterious, to trouble their dreams and to haunt their waking hours. What he certainly did not want, under any circumstances, was their repentance. Having the listeners simply say to themselves, “All’s forgiven and forgotten, let’s bury the past, let’s not talk about injustice and the need for retribution, our cuts in education and health programs, our unequal taxation and unemployment, our financial schemes that ruin millions; let exploiters shake hands with exploited, and on to our next glorious money-making hour”—no, that was something Jonah certainly did not want. Nadine Gordimer, of whom Jonah had never heard, said that there could be no worse fate for a writer than not being execrated in a corrupt society. Jonah did not wish to suffer that annihilating fate.

Above all, Jonah was aware of Nineveh’s ongoing war between the politicians and the artists, a war in which Jonah felt that all the artists’ efforts (beyond the efforts demanded by their craft) were ultimately futile because they took place in the political arena. It was a well-known fact that Ninevite artists (who had never tired in the pursuit of their own art) grew quickly weary of the struggle with bureaucrats and banks, and the few heroes who had continued the fight against the corrupt secretaries of state and royal lackeys and investment bankers had done so many times at the expense of both their art and their sanity. It was very difficult to go to your studio or to your clay tablets after a day of committee meetings and official hearings. The bureaucrats of Nineveh counted on this, of course, and one of their most effective tactics was delay: delaying agreements, delaying the attribution of funds, delaying contracts, delaying appointments, delaying outright answers. If you waited long enough, they said, the rage of the artist would fade, or rather mysteriously turn into creative energy: the artist would go away and write a poem or do an installation or dream up a dance. And these things represented little danger to banks and private corporations. In fact, as businesspeople well knew, many times this artistic rage became marketable merchandise. “Think,” the Ninevites often said, “how much you’d pay today for the work of painters who in their time hardly had enough money to buy paint, let alone food. Think of the protest songs by musicians who died in the poorhouse, sung today at national festivities. For an artist,” they added knowingly, “posthumous fame is its own reward.”

But the great triumph of Ninevite politicians was their success in getting the artists to work against themselves. So imbued was Nineveh with the idea that wealth was the city’s goal and that art, since it was not an immediate producer of wealth, was an undeserving pursuit, that the artists themselves came to believe that they should pay their own way in the world, producing cost-efficient art, frowning on failure and lack of recognition, and above all, trying to gratify those who, being wealthy, were also in positions of power. So visual artists were asked to make their work more pleasing, composers to write music with a hummable tune, writers to imagine not-so-depressing scenarios.

In times long gone by, in short periods during which the bureaucrats slumbered, certain funds had been granted to artistic causes by soft-hearted or soft-headed Ninevite kings. Since those times, more conscientious officials had been redressing this financial oversight and vigorously pruning down the allotted sums. No official would, of course, recognize any such change in the government’s support of the arts, and yet the Ninevite secretary of finance was able to cut the actual funds allotted to the arts down to almost nothing, while at the same time advertising a committed increase of those same funds in the official records. This was done by the use of certain devices borrowed from the Ninevite poets (whose tools the politicians happily pilfered, while despising the poets who invented them). Metonymy, for instance, the device by which a poet uses a part or an attribute of something to stand in its place (crown for king, for example), allowed the secretary of provisions to cut down on the funds spent on subsidizing artists’ work materials. All any artist now received from the city, whatever his needs, was a number 4 rat-hair paintbrush, since in the secretary’s official vocabulary brush was made to stand for “the ensemble of an artist’s equipment.” Metaphors, the most common of poetic tools, were employed to great effect by these financial wizards. In one celebrated case, a sum of ten thousand gold dinars had been set aside long ago for the lodging of senior artists. By simply redefining camels, used in public transport, as “temporary lodgings,” the secretary of finance was able to count the cost of the camels’ upkeep (for which the city of Nineveh was responsible) as part of the sum allotted to artists’ lodgings, since the senior artists did indeed use subsidized public camels to get from place to place.

“The real artists,” said the Ninevites, “have no cause to complain. If they are really good at what they do, they will make a buck no matter what the social conditions. It’s the others, the so-called experimenters, the self-indulgers, the prophets, who don’t make a cent and whine about their condition. A banker who doesn’t know how to turn a profit would be equally lost. A bureaucrat who didn’t recognize the need to clog things down would be out of a job. This is the law of survival. Nineveh is a society that looks to the future.”

True: in Nineveh, a handful of artists (and many con artists) made a good living. Ninevite society liked to reward a few of the makers of the products it consumed. What it would not recognize, of course, was the vast majority of the artists whose attempts and glitterings and failures allowed the successes of others to be born. Ninevite society didn’t have to support anything it didn’t instantly like or understand. The truth was that this vast majority of artists would carry on, of course, no matter what, simply because they couldn’t help it, the Lord or the Holy Spirit urging them on night after night. They carried on writing and painting and composing and dancing by whatever means they could find. “Like every other worker in society,” the Ninevites said.

It is told that the first time Jonah heard this particular point of Ninevite wisdom, he drummed up his prophetic courage and stood in the public square of Nineveh to address the crowds. “The artist,” Jonah attempted to explain, “is not like every other worker in society. The artist deals with reality: inner and outer reality transformed into meaningful symbols. Those who deal in money deal in symbols behind which stands nothing. It is wonderful to think of the thousands and thousands of Ninevite stockbrokers for whom reality, the real world, is the arbitrary rising and falling of figures transformed in their imagination into wealth—a wealth that exists only in their imagination. No fantasy writer, no virtual-reality artist could ever aspire to create in an audience such an all-pervading trust in fiction as that which takes place in an assembly of stockbrokers. Grownup men and women who will not for a minute consider the reality of the unicorn, even as a symbol, will accept as rock-hard fact that they possess a share in the nation’s camel bellies, and in that belief they consider themselves happy and secure.” By the time Jonah had reached the end of this paragraph, the public square of Nineveh was deserted.

For all these reasons, Jonah decided to escape both Nineveh and the Lord, and jumped on a ship headed for Tarshish. Now, the sailors in the ship that carried Jonah were all men from Joppa, a port not far from Nineveh, an outpost of the Ninevite empire. Nineveh was, as you have no doubt surmised, a society besotted by greed. Not ambition, which is a creative impulse, something all artists possess, but the sterile impulse to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. Joppa, however, had for many decades been a place where prophets had been allowed a tolerable amount of freedom. The people of Joppa accepted the yearly influx of bearded, ragged men and disheveled, wild-eyed women with a certain degree of sympathy, since their presence procured Joppa free publicity when the prophets traveled abroad to other cities, where they often mentioned the name of Joppa in not unkind terms. Also, the recurrent prophesying season brought curious and illustrious visitors to Joppa, and neither the innkeepers nor the owners of the caravanserais complained of the demands made on their bed and board.

But when times were hard in Nineveh and the economic hardships of the city rippled out all the way to the little town of Joppa, when business profits were down and the wealthy Joppites were constrained to sell one of their ornamented six-horse chariots or close down a couple of their upland sweatshops, then the presence in Joppa of the prophesying artists was openly frowned upon. The tolerance and whimsical generosity of wealthier days seemed now sinfully wasteful to the citizens of Joppa, and many of them felt that the artists who came to their quaint little haven should make no demands at all and feel grateful for whatever they got: grateful when they were lodged in the frumpiest buildings of Joppa, grateful when they were denied appropriate working tools, grateful when they were allowed to finance themselves their new projects. When they were forced to move out of their rooms to accommodate paying guests from Babylon, the artists were told to remember that they, as artists, should know that it was an honorable thing to lie under the stars wrapped in smelly goat hides just like the illustrious prophets and poets of the days before the Flood.

And yet even during those difficult times, most Joppites retained for the prophets a certain sincere fondness, somewhat akin to the affection we feel for old pets who have been around since our childhood, and they tried in several ways to accommodate them even when the going was not good, and attempted not to hurt their artistic sensibilities by being too blunt in their dealings. Thus it was that when the storm rose and the ship from Joppa was tossed by furious waves, the Joppite sailors felt uneasy, and hesitated before blaming Jonah, their artistic guest. Unwilling to take any drastic measures, they tried praying to their own gods, who they knew commanded the heavens and the seas — but with no visible results. In fact, the storm only got worse, as if the Joppite gods had other things to think about and were annoyed by the sailors’ whiny requests. Then the sailors appealed to Jonah (who was in the hold, sleeping out the storm, as artists sometimes do) and woke him and asked him for advice. Even when Jonah told them, with a touch of artistic pride, that the storm was all his fault, the sailors felt reluctant to toss him overboard. How much of a gale could one scraggy artist raise? How angry could one miserable prophet make the deep, wine-dark sea? But the storm grew worse, the wind howled through the riggings, the planks groaned and cried out when the waves hit them, and in the end, one by one, the sailors remembered the old Ninevite truisms, learned in Joppa at their grandmother’s knee: that all artists were, by and large, freeloaders, and that all Jonah and his ilk did all day was compose poems in which they kvetched about this and moaned about that, and said threatening things about the most innocent vices. And why should a society in which greed is the driving force support someone who does not contribute to the immediate accumulation of wealth? Therefore, as one of the sailors explained to his mates, don’t blame yourselves for bad seamanship, simply accept Jonah’s mea culpa and throw the bastard into the water. He won’t resist. In fact, he just about asked for it.

Now, even if Jonah had had second thoughts, and had argued that perhaps a ship, or a ship of state, could in fact do with a few wise prophecies to serve as ballast and keep it steady, the sailors had learned from long familiarity with Ninevite politicians the craft of turning a deaf ear to artistic warnings. Zigzagging their way across the oceans of the world in search of new lands on which to conduct free and profitable trade, the sailors assumed that whatever an artist might say or do, the weight of money would always provide a steadier ballast than any artistic argument.

When they threw Jonah overboard and the sea became calm again, the sailors fell on their knees and thanked the Lord, the God of Jonah. No one enjoys being tossed about in a rocking boat, and since the rocking had stopped as soon as Jonah hit the water, the sailors immediately concluded that he was indeed to blame and that their action had been fully justified. These sailors had obviously not had the benefit of a classical education or the gift of foresight or they would have known that the argument for the elimination of the artist had once enjoyed and was again to acquire in the centuries to come a venerable reputation. They would have known that there is an ancient impulse, running through the very foundations of every human society, to shun that uncomfortable creature who keeps attempting to shift the tenets of our certitudes, the rock on which we like to believe we stand. For Plato, to begin with, the real artist is the statesman, the person who shapes the state according to a divine model of Justice and Beauty. The ordinary artist, on the other hand, the writer or the painter, does not reflect this worthy reality but produces instead mere fantasies, which are unfit for the education of the young. This notion, that art is only useful if it serves the state, was heartily embraced by successions of diverse governments: Emperor Augustus banished the poet Ovid because of something the poet had written which Augustus felt was secretly threatening. The Church condemned artists who distracted the faithful from the sacred dogma. In the Renaissance, artists were bought and sold like courtesans, and in the eighteenth century they were reduced (at least in the public imagination) to garret-living creatures dying of melancholy and consumption. Flaubert penned the nineteenth-century bourgeois view of the artist in his Dictionary of Clichés: “Artists: All clowns. Praise their selflessness. Be astonished at the fact they dress like everyone else. They earn fabulous sums but they squander every last cent. Often invited to dinner at the best houses. All female artists are sluts.” In our time, the descendants of the Joppite sailors have issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie and hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria. Their motto regarding artists is the one coined by the Canadian immigration officer in charge of receiving Jewish refugees during World War II: “None is too many.”

So Jonah was thrown into the water and was swallowed by a big fish. Life in the dark soft belly of the fish was actually not that bad. During those three days and three nights, lulled by the rumblings of ill-digested plankton and shrimp, Jonah had time to reflect. This was a luxury artists seldom have. In the belly of the fish there were no deadlines, no grocer’s bills to pay, no diapers to wash, no dinners to cook, no family conflicts to be dragged into just as the right note comes to complete the sonata, no bank managers to plead with, no critics to gnash teeth over. So during those three days and three nights Jonah thought and prayed and slept and dreamed. And when he woke up, he found himself vomited onto dry land and the nagging Voice of the Lord was at him again: “Go on, go seek out Nineveh and do your bit. It doesn’t matter how they react. Every artist needs an audience. You owe it to your work.”

This time Jonah did as the Lord told him. Some degree of confidence in the importance of his craft had come to him in the fish’s dark belly, and he felt moved to put his art on display in Nineveh. But barely had he begun his performance piece, barely had he said five words of his prophetic text, when the king of Nineveh fell on his knees and repented, the people of Nineveh ripped open their designer shirts and repented, and even the cattle of Nineveh bellowed out in unison to show that they too, repented. And the king, the people, and the cattle of Nineveh all dressed in sackcloth and ashes, and assured one another that bygones were bygones, and sang Ninevite versions of “Auld Lang Syne” together, and wailed their repentance to the Lord above. And seeing this orgiastic display of repentance, the Lord withdrew His threat over the people and cattle of Nineveh. And Jonah, of course, was furious. What my great-uncle would have called the “anarchic” spirit rebelled inside Jonah, and he went off to sulk in the desert at some distance from the forgiven city.

You will remember that God had caused a plant to grow from the bare soil to shade Jonah from the heat, and that this charitable gesture of God’s made Jonah once again thankful, after which God withered the plant back into the dust and Jonah found himself roasting in the sun for a second time. We don’t know whether God’s trick with the plant — first placing it there to shade Jonah from the sun, and then killing it off—was a lesson meant to convince Jonah of God’s good intentions. Perhaps Jonah saw in the gesture an allegory of the funds first given to him and then withdrawn after the cuts by the Nineveh Arts Council—a gesture that left him to fry unprotected in the midday sun. I suppose he understood that in times of difficulty—in times when the poor are poorer and the rich can barely keep in the million-dollar tax bracket — God wasn’t going to concern Himself with questions of artistic merit. Being an Author Himself, God had no doubt some sympathy with Jonah’s predicament: wanting time to work on his thoughts without having to think about his bread and butter; wanting his prophecies to appear on the Nineveh Times best-seller list and yet not wanting to be confused with the authors of potboilers and tearjerkers; wanting to stir the crowds with his searing words, but to stir them into revolt, not submission; wanting Nineveh to look deep into its soul and recognize that its strength, its wisdom, its very life lay not in the piles of coins growing daily like funeral pyramids on the financiers’ desks but in the work of its artists and the words of its poets, and in the visionary rage of its prophets, whose job it was to keep the boat rocking in order to keep the citizens awake. All this the Lord understood, as He understood Jonah’s anger, because it isn’t impossible to imagine that God Himself sometimes learns something from His artists.

However, though God could draw water from a stone and cause the people of Nineveh to repent, He still could not make them think. The cattle, incapable of thought, He could pity. But speaking to Jonah as Creator to creator, as Artist to artist, what was God to do with a people who, as He said with such divine irony, “don’t know their right hand from their left”?

At this, I imagine, Jonah nodded and was silent.