Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  Jonah.

  “There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein.”

  Psalms.

  “In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”

  Isaiah.

  Job precedes Jonah here. The book of Job, though one of the crowns of ancient Hebrew poetry, remains one of the most curious of sublime performances. Job’s name seems to derive from the Arabic awab, one who returns to God. His accuser is ha-satan, the opponent, who is not at all the Satan of the New Testament. This adversary seems to be a prosecuting attorney welcomed by the heavenly court of Yahweh. After Yahweh starts all the trouble by praising Job’s virtues, ha-satan sneers that Job has been favored by God. Losing His divine temper, God delivers Job into the accuser’s hands, saying that he cannot kill him but may do anything else that pleases him. The results are splendid. All of Job’s children and flocks are murdered, and poor Job is afflicted with sore boils all over his body. Job curses his own existence but does not blame God. Job’s wife admirably tells her husband: Do you still retain your integrity? Curse God and die! Job’s friends or “comforters” assure him that he must be very wicked to deserve all this pain. Despite this immoral idiocy, Job remains stubborn and wants to justify both God and himself, which is simply impossible. Eventually, out of a storm, God speaks and addresses a series of rhetorical questions to His wretched believer.

  1 Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

  2 Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?

  3 Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?

  4 Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

  5 Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?

  6 Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?

  7 Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?

  8 Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

  9 Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?

  10 None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

  11 Who hath prevented me, that I should repay him? whatsoever is under the whole of heaven is mine.

  12 I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion.

  13 Who can discover the face of his garment? or who can come to him with his double bridle?

  14 Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about.

  15 His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.

  16 One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.

  17 They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered.

  18 By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.

  19 Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.

  20 Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.

  21 His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.

  22 In his neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him.

  23 The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are firm in themselves; they cannot be moved.

  24 His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone.

  25 When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves.

  26 The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.

  27 He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.

  28 The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him into stubble.

  29 Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear.

  30 Sharp stones are under him: he spreadeth sharp pointed things upon the mire.

  31 He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment.

  32 He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary.

  33 Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.

  34 He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.

  (Job 41, KJV)

  Confronting this rhetorical power, I myself become another Job. Even a decade ago I would have fought back, but, aged and weakened, I lack the resilience. And yet I began as a scholar of William Blake and of Percy Bysshe Shelley, visionary poets who imbued me in childhood with their apocalyptic humanism. No matter that Blake considered himself a Christian and Shelley thought himself an atheist; both believed in what Blake called “the human form divine” and Shelley termed “shapes too bright to see.” At eighty-eight, I find that their faithless faith has abandoned me.

  I was raised in the Covenant between Yahweh and the Jewish people. Even as a child I winced at this cruel verse: “Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?”

  * * *

  —

  The book of Job is an extraordinary poem, and it is very difficult to interpret. The devastation of “the day of the locust” is counterbalanced by Jonah’s vision of survival. It may seem capricious to speak of a favorite book in the Bible, but mine is Jonah, by far. A sly masterpiece of four brief chapters, Jonah reverberates in Moby-Dick, where it is the text for Father Mapple’s grand sermon. Tucked away in the Book of the Twelve, with such fierce prophets as Amos and Micah, Jonah is out of place. It should be with the Writings—Song of Songs, Job, Qoheleth—because it, too, is a literary sublimity, almost the archetypal parable masking as short story. The irony of the J writer is augmented by the author of Jonah, who may well be composing a parody of the prophet Joel’s solemnities. Joel’s vision is of nature’s divine caprice.

  I first was charmed by Jonah as a little boy in synagogue on the afternoon of the Day of Atonement, when it is read aloud in full. It seemed to me so much at variance, in tone and implication, from the rest of the service as to be almost Kafkan in effect. The author of Jonah probably composed it very late in prophetic tradition, sometime during the third century B.C.E. There is a prophetic Jonah in 2 Kings 14:25 who has nothing in common with the feckless Jonah sent to announce to the people of Nineveh that God intends to destroy their city to punish them for their wickedness. The earlier Jonah is a war prophet, whereas our Jonah sensibly runs away from his mission, boarding a ship sailing for Tarshish.

  No one emerges honorably from the book of Jonah, whether God, Jonah, the ship captain and his men, or the king of Nineveh and his people. Even the gourd sheltering Jonah from the sun comes to a bad end. There is of course the giant fish (not, alas, a whale) who swallows up Jonah for three days but then disgorges him at God’s command. No Moby-Dick, he inspires neither fear nor awe.

  Jonah’s book is magnificent literature because it is so funny. Irony, even in Jonathan Swift, could not be more brilliant. Jonah himself is a sulking, unwilling prophet, cowardly and petulant. There is no reason why an authentic prophet should be likable: Elijah and Elisha are savage, Jeremiah is a bipolar depressive, Ezekiel a madman. Paranoia and prophecy seem to go together, and the author of Jonah satirizes both his protagonist and Yahweh in a return to the large irony of the J writer, whose voice is aristocratic, skeptical, humorous, deflationary of masculine pretense, believing nothing and rejecting nothing, and particularly aware of the reality of personalities.

  The prophet Jonah, awash with the examples and texts of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Joel, rightly
resents his absurd status as a latecomer sufferer of the anxiety of prophetic influence. Either Nineveh will ignore him and be destroyed, making his mission needless, or, if it takes him to heart, he will prove to be a false prophet. Either way, his sufferings are useless, nor does Yahweh show the slightest regard for him. Praying from the fish’s belly, he satirizes the situation of all psalmists whosoever.

  As for poor Nineveh, where even the beasts are bedecked in sackcloth and ashes, Yahweh merely postpones its destruction. That leaves the Cain-like gourd, whose life is so brief and whose destruction prompts poor Jonah’s death-drive. What remains is Yahweh’s playfully rhetorical question: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

  Presumably the cattle (“beasts” in the Hebrew) are able to tell one direction from another, unlike the citizens of Nineveh, Jerusalem, or New York City. Tucking Jonah away as another minor prophet was a literary error by the makers of the canon. Or perhaps they judged the little book aptly, and were anxious to conceal this Swiftian coda to prophets and prophecy.

  Father Mapple, unorthodox as to finalities, is traditional enough in his quirky retelling of Jonah’s story. But the White Whale Moby-Dick in my judgment is all but identical with Job’s Leviathan, king over all the children of pride. If you read Job as Melville did, you, too, might want to answer No in thunder. Yet it may be that the poet of Job was as fierce an ironist as the God he shows us. My friend and former student Herbert Marks acutely points to the ambiguity of Job’s verse in the final chapter:

  Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.

  That myself is not in the Hebrew. Job does not despise himself. He is, as Marks says, fed up. Job holds his ground and pities all of us for having to survive somehow under so dubious a God. The poet of Job is not a Calvinist. Nor is he an Ahab. Call him a skeptic. Ahab, maimed by Leviathan, fights back.

  I think that there will never be general agreement as to Ahab’s bad eminence. I write those last two words and I resent them. Yes, he owes much to Milton’s Satan and more to Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Cleopatra, Antony, not to mention the Prometheus of Shelley and of Byron. And yet he is an Emersonian American despite Melville’s acute ambivalence in regard to the Sage of Concord.

  Read Emerson’s last great book, The Conduct of Life (1860), particularly the essays “Fate,” “Power,” and “Illusions.” I do not think Emerson ever read Melville, yet I wish he had read Moby-Dick (1851). Melville attended all of Emerson’s lectures in New York City, and he owned and annotated the two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. He bitterly satirized Emerson as Plotinus Plinlimmon in Pierre (1852), a disaster of a novel, and as Mark Winsome in The Confidence-Man (1857), which is rather a mixed bag. Probably his most effective rejoinder to Emerson is “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” one of the best of The Piazza Tales (1856).

  Nevertheless, both Ahab and Ishmael are Emersonians, American Adams puzzling out their fates in our Evening Land. And so is Herman Melville, despite his vexed relationship to Emerson. Describing the first mate, Starbuck, Ishmael could as well be Emerson or Walt Whitman exalting the greatness of the common man:

  But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!

  If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder from higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

  John Bunyan, a tinker and the son of a tinker, served in Cromwell’s army, where he absorbed the many currents of nonconformist Protestantism. After the Restoration, he was imprisoned for twelve years, during which he attained spiritual illumination. The Pilgrim’s Progress: From This World to That Which Is to Come (1678) resulted from this experience. Cervantes, who lost use of one arm at the naval Battle of Lepanto, survived poverty, imprisonment, and neglect to write The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (1605, 1615). Andrew Jackson, known as Old Hickory, served as the seventh president of the United States of America (1829–37). He inaugurated what we still call Jacksonian Democracy, which was celebrated by Walt Whitman and by Melville.

  Captain Ahab is anything but a democrat in his absolute rule, not only over the Pequod and all its crew, but in kinging his will over all the humanities in his nature. In response to Starbuck’s sane protest at vengeance against what he calls “a dumb brute,” Ahab proclaims his quest to strike through the mask:

  “Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than friends’ glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think
of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ’Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremost-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.”

  Who among us has the right to oppose Ahab? High Romantic poetry relies upon the power of the imagination over a universe of death. Moby-Dick, who heaps Ahab, sets a limit beyond which even the most heroic of questers cannot go. The White Whale is a daemonic agent, a Demiurge whose principal is the God imposing nature upon us. Captain Ahab, who indeed would strike the sun if it insulted him, is a rival daemonic agent, a human aspiring to be a counter-Demiurge. Whose book is it anyway? Melville’s? Ahab’s? Ishmael’s? The grand chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” is Ishmael’s meditation:

  Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

  Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

  But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.