Of Tombs and Wombs, or, The Whale, Part III

The image of a human stuck in the belly of a whale has currency. It recirculates through Jonah, medieval poetry and art, Pinocchio, a handful of Batman comics, a Bruce Springsteen song, yarns from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century whalers––among other places––and, of course, Melville’s Moby-Dick. This essay is two-stranded. To account for why the Jonah trope has such resonance, I first follow the narrative of ingestion by, in utero entombment within, and deliverance from a whale, this narrative appearing in a wide range of texts. I then consider Jonah’s “rhetorical velocity,” the frequent repurposing and retelling of his narrative, in order to speak to the interplay between, and malleability of, metaphor, narrative, and the belly of the whale.