Barnes. Pdf

 
Chapters 
57
And yet, despite all this, the whale steals it. We forget the allegorical point of the story (Babylon engulfing disobedient 
Israel), we don't much care whether or not Nineveh was saved, or what happened to the regurgitated penitent; but we 
remember the whale. Giotto shows him chomping on Jonah's thighs, with only the knees and the flailing feet to go. Brueghel, 
Michelangelo, Correggio, Rubens and Dali emblazoned the tale. In Gouda there is a stained-glass window of Jonah leaving the 
fish's mouth like a foot-passenger stepping from the jaws of a car-ferry. Jonah (portrayed as everything from muscular faun to 
bearded elder) has an iconography whose pedigree and variety would make Noah envious. 
What is it about Jonah's escapade that transfixes us? Is it the moment of swallowing, the oscillation between danger and 
salvation, when we imagine ourselves miraculously rescued
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from the peril of drowning only to be cast into the peril of being eaten alive? Is it the three days and three nights in the whale's 
belly, that image of enclosure, smothering, live burial? (Once, taking the night train from London to Paris, I found myself in 
the locked sleeping compartment of a locked coach in a locked hold beneath the waterline on a cross-channel ferry; I didn't 
think of Jonah at the time, but perhaps my panic was related to his. And is a more textbook fear involved: does the image of 
pulsing blubber set off some terror of being transported back to the womb?) Or are we most struck by the third element in the 
story, the deliverance, the proof that there is salvation and justice after our purgatorial incarceration? Like Jonah, we are all 
storm-tossed by the seas of life, undergo apparent death and certain burial, but then attain a blinding resurrection as the car-
ferry doors swing open and we are delivered back into the light and into a recognition of God's love. Is this why the myth 
swims through our memory? 
Perhaps: or perhaps not at all. When the film Jaws came out, there were many attempts to explain its hold over the 
audience. Did it draw on some primal metaphor, some archetypal dream known the world over? Did it exploit the clashing 
elements of land and water, feeding on our anxiety at the concept of amphibianism? Did it relate in some way to the fact that 
millions of years ago our gill-bearing ancestors crawled out of the pond, and ever since we have been paralysed by the thought 
of a return to it? The English novelist Kingsley Amis, considering the film and its possible interpretations, came to the 
following conclusion: 'It's about being bloody frightened of being eaten by a bloody great shark.' 
At bottom, this is the grip which the story of Jonah and the whale still has on us: fear of being devoured by a large creature, 
fear of being chomped, slurped, gargled, washed down with a draught of salt water and a school of anchovies as a chaser; fear 
of being blinded, darkened, suffocated, drowned, hooded with blubber; fear of sensory deprivation which we know drives 
people mad; fear of being dead. Our response is as vivid as that of every other death-dreading generation since the tale was 
first 
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invented by some sadistic mariner keen to terrify the new cabin-boy. 
Of course, we recognize that the story can't have any basis in truth. We are sophisticated people, and we can tell the 
difference between reality and myth. A whale might swallow a man, yes, we can allow that as plausible; but once inside he 
could not possibly live. For a start he would drown, or if he didn't drown he would suffocate; and most probably he would have 
died of a heart attack when he felt the great mouth gape for him. No, it is impossible for a man to survive in a whale's belly. 
We know how to distinguish myth from reality. We are sophisticated people. 
On 25th August 1891, James Bartley, a thirty-five-year-old sailor on the Star of the East, was swallowed by a sperm whale 
off the Falkland Islands: 
I remember very well from the moment that I fell from the boat and felt my feet strike some soft substance. I looked up and 
saw a big-ribbed canopy of light pink and white descending over me, and the next moment I felt myself drawn downward, feet 
first, and I realised that I was being swallowed by a whale. I was drawn lower and lower; a wall of flesh surrounded me and 
hemmed me in on every side, yet the pressure was not painful and the flesh easily gave way like soft India-rubber before my 
slightest movement. 
Suddenly I found myself in a sack much larger than my body, but completely dark. I felt about me; and my hands came in 
contact with several fishes, some of which seemed to be still alive, for they squirmed in my fingers, and slipped back to my 
feet. Soon I felt a great pain in my head and my breathing became more and more difficult. At the same time I felt a terrible 
heat; it seemed to consume me, growing hotter and hotter. My eyes became coals of fire in my head, and I believed every 
moment that I was condemned to perish in the belly of a whale. It tormented me beyond all endurance, while at the same time 
the awful silence of the terrible prison weighed me down. I tried to rise, to move my arms and legs, to cry out. All action was 
now impossible, but 
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my brain seemed abnormally clear; and with a full comprehension of my awful fate, I finally lost all consciousness. 
The whale was later killed and taken alongside the Star of the East, whose crewmen, unaware of the proximity of their lost 
comrade, spent the rest of the day and part of the night flensing their capture. The next morning they attached lifting tackle to 
the stomach and hauled it on deck. There seemed to be a light, spasmodic movement from within. The sailors, expecting a 
large fish or perhaps a shark, slit open the paunch and discovered James Bartley: unconscious, his face, neck and hands 
bleached white by the gastric fluids, but still alive. For two weeks he was in a delirious condition, then began to recover. In due 
course he was returned to normal health, except that the acids had removed all the pigmentation from his exposed skin. He 
remained an albino until the day he died. 

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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½