ILANA PARDES 

                    REMAPPING JONAH'S VOYAGE: MELVILLE'S MOBY-DICK AND 
                    KITTO'S CYCLOPEDIA OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE

ONE CANNOT OVERESTIMATE the importance of interpretive obsessions in Moby-Dick. From the very outset, Ishmael, whose voice often seems to merge with that of Melville, defines himself as the commentator on different extracts regarding whales provided by the “Sub-Sub Librarian”—from biblical verses in Genesis, Job, Jonah, Psalms, and Isaiah, to the “whale statements” of great writers and thinkers such as Montaigne, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Hobbes, to encyclopedia entries, newspaper accounts, and an anonymous whale song. The list is a mock-list of sources that calls into question our capacity to cover any hermeneutic question whatsoever—be it a theological problem or one that pertains to “gospel cetology.” However, it is at the same time a preliminary expression of Melville’s strikingly broad conception of exegesis and insatiable passion to fathom the stubborn vitality of interpretive endeavors.

The same kind of obsession and openness, I propose, characterizes Melville’s perception of biblical exegesis. For Melville, the Bible is a cultural text whose interpretation is carried out in highly diverse realms. Much like Ishmael, he does not limit himself to canonical mappings of interpretive boundaries, eager as he is to consider “any book whatsoever, sacred or profane,” any biblical interpretation whatsoever—high or low, ancient or contemporary, of any religious bent or scholarly tradition. Challenging normative interpretive politics, he engages in an intricate dialogue with a dizzyingly diverse array of interpretive discourses that range from literary exegesis of the Bible (be it Milton’s Paradise Lost or Goethe’s Faust) to traditional commentaries (the writings of major Christian thinkers from Augustine to Calvin, rabbinic and medieval religious lore), popular sermons, political speeches, comparative accounts of religions/mythologies, and biblical encyclopedias. To explore Scripture, Melville seems to suggest, means to pursue every imaginable mode of biblical interpretation, for any mode of interpretation may prove valuable in probing the riddling silences of the biblical text.

In constructing his grand interpretation of the Book of Jonah in Moby-Dick, Melville, true to his hermeneutic position, responds to diverse readings of Jonah: Calvin’s commentaries on Jonah, popular sermons of a Calvinistic bent (Mapple’s sermon is modeled on this genre), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (Crusoe is regarded as a sinful Jonah from the very opening of the book), Pierre Bayle’s account in Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), and John Eadie’s entry on “Jonah” in Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature (1845), among them. Less traceable Jonahs also peep out at different junctures. Ishmael’s ruminations about the possibility of painting Jonah’s eye looking through the “bow window” eye of the whale in Captain Colnett’s picture may be an allusion to the famous midrash on Jonah’s sightseeing through the window-like eyes of the big fish while traveling in the deep.  And one could conjecture, in light of Sterling Stucky’s studies on Melville’s exposure to African-American culture, that Melville was not unaware of Jonah’s major role in African-American spirituals in his shaping of Pip as Jonah

I single out John Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature for various reasons. First, the endeavors of nineteenth-century biblical scholars and biblical geographers to reconsider Jonah’s route offer, I believe, an indispensable key to understanding Melville’s virtuoso projection of the terse tale of Jonah onto the gigantic canvas of the epic voyage of the Pequod. Second, Melville’s dialogue with biblical scholarship sheds light both on his special fascination with contemporary exegetical discourses and on his ongoing attempt to redefine the Bible’s cultural role in antebellum America. .