A Reader on Reading

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.