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.