In the Belly of the Fish
Let’s start by reading this old story together.
It’s pretty easy to dislike Jonah. He thinks only of himself, he’s petulant, he’s like a rebellious teenager, angry, discontent, overly dramatic (“God, just kill me already!“) or maybe genuinely suicidal and deeply depressed; nonetheless I have always found him a sympathetic character, easy to identify with in a human way. A couple of years ago I decided to try to build an exhibition around his story, which is the work I want to share with you today.
My idea of working with Jonah started a few years earlier, when I was proposing a project for a museum in Seattle and got into a frustrating situation with the curators. I had previously made a project with this museum that had gone well. It was a temporary, collaborative exhibition program occupying the museum’s old bookshop, which had closed down and was being used for storage.
A few years later, after there was a change in curators at the museum, the new curator invited me to propose a new project. The way I understood it was that we would work together to make something happen. The way it went, however, was that I proposed something and they said they didn’t like it and they rejected it. Then I proposed something else which they didn’t like. This went on for a few more cycles—me proposing and them rejecting—until I became quite angry at how I was being treated. So my final (unrealized) proposal was to build a giant sea monster sculpture in their lobby to swallow up visitors as they entered. I think this was supposed to be a comment on the experience I was having of being trapped in a bad relationship with this institution.
The phrase ‘in the belly of the beast’ was what kept coming to mind. It’s something people say when they feel trapped in difficult circumstances inside of an unjust system. This phrase appears to have been put into use recently, in the 1980s, by the title of a book by a guy named Jack Henry Abbott, who wrote a series of letter from prison describing the brutalities of the American penal system.
Of course museums are not prisons (although Robert Smithson wrote an essay in 1972, “Cultural Confinement”, trying to draw out this analogy). Nonetheless, for artists, art institutions are often places where we experience unequal power relationships: in invitations, compensation, artistic control, access to resources. Trying to create successful work requires a whole variety of methods for negotiating these power differences. There’s nothing necessarily sinister about this. Power differentials may just be a precondition for making something happen. However, I think some conditions promote further entrapment within an institution and some in a release of generative energy.
The image of being ‘in the belly of the beast’ is confusing in relation to Jonah’s story, because there are two different giant mythological sea creatures in the Hebrew bible. One is the benevolent large fish we just heard about in the Jonah story; the other is the Leviathan. The Leviathan is some sort of apocalyptic sea serpent creature, swimming around the depths, waiting for the end of time. In Christian imagery, the Leviathan is often represented in the process of swallowing sinners—literally the mouth of hell.
Detail from Giacomo Rossignolo’ fresco The Last Judgment, c. 1555. Source: Wikipedia.
In popular culture, Jonah’s big fish and the Leviathan have become conflated into the image of a giant malevolent whale. For example, there is the Disney version of Pinocchio where Giuseppe is swallowed by Monstro (a terrifying giant blue whale) and has to be rescued by the cleverness of Pinocchio, who lights a smoky fire in the monster’s belly to get him to sneeze them out. What connects the Leviathan and Jonah’s big fish (besides both being giant biblical sea creatures) is the theme of punishment, which I’ll talk more about in a minute.
A few years after that bad experience with a museum, I was invited to develop an exhibition for an artist–run space. This idea of building a giant walk–in sea monster was still on my mind. My question was: what is this space inside of the belly of the beast? I had started with a vague idea that the image of being trapped inside the beast had something to do with institutional spaces, anger, injustice and punishment. I began figuring out how to construct a large belly space, and started researching, which led me to the Jonah story, the origin of this image. Jonah doesn’t play a big role in Jewish liturgy, but we do read the story every year on Yom Kippur (which incidentally was just a few weeks ago), a holiday of fasting, communal confession and repentance.
But the prevalent interpretation of Jonah in the United States comes from a protestant Christian tradition.
Coloring book page, artist unknown. Source: fablesfromthefriends.com.
For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just.... And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.
“Grateful for punishment” is the key phrase. The belly is not just a place of punishment, but a place where you are supposed to feel grateful for punishment because you have recognized your behavior as bad and wish to correct it. The belly is where you’re sent for a “time out”, to think about the wrong you have done, to reconcile this wrongness with your own ideas about right attitudes towards authority, to internalize the norms of behavior, and to emerge ready to obey. This is a form of discipline that tries to instill self–discipline. It’s an extremely common form—ubiquitous even—in Western society’s various institutions for enforcing laws, rules and standards. One of Michel Foucault’s insights in the 1970s was that this form of discipline, a discipline that uses surveillance and feedback mechanisms to inspire self–discipline, creates what he called “docile bodies”. These are the bodies necessary for an industrial society, that become effective factory workers, soldiers or students.
I really dislike this interpretation of Jonah. I decided to try to make a belly space that could represent a different relationship to authority, and maybe propose a different kind of institutional power. My project became an attempt to decolonize Jonah, wresting interpretation away from dominant Christian meaning. (By Christian meaning, I also mean the more general unmarked category of American and European cultural tradition considered secular.) Of course, as is the case with colonized knowledge, there’s no Jewish interpretation that isn’t deformed by Christian interpretation; no path to an original archeology, unless based in complete fantasy, that could peel Judeo- off its Christian suffix. What I do think is possible, however, are spaces of resistance that create the possibility of new meanings by refusing conditions that seek to partition, enclose and control.
Trying to figure this out.
In the studio I was playing around with PVC pipe, which is a great, cheap material to build large things easily. I made this kind of arched space with the pipe and I realized that the thin pipes I was using had a lot of flex and bend to them. If you bumped into this structure it would move quite nicely. I had the idea of hanging things from it to make sounds when it is put in motion, objects like bells and chimes, so that the whole structure became a kind of musical instrument.
Experiments in fish construction.
Sound-making things.
Meanwhile I was very excited to come across the work of a French poet, translator and theorist named Henri Meschonnic. Meschonnic made a translation of Jonah in 1981 to demonstrate his iconoclastic theory of biblical translation.
Here’s a couple pages of his translation, the beginning of chapter two, the episode in the fish belly:
Henri Meschonnic, Jona et le signifiant errant (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
Meschonnic thought all previous translations of the Hebrew bible had been deficient because they ignored the te’amim. This is a Hebrew word that means ‘senses’ or ‘tastes’. It is also the name of the system of accents that guides how the Hebrew bible is chanted out loud, as it is communally read each Saturday morning in the Jewish liturgy. Meschonnic wanted to give his translation some of the sense of the oral experience of the text, the “taste of it in one’s mouth” as he put it. To do this, he used this poetic device of different sized spaces between phrases.
In his theoretical work he focused on rhythm, but not rhythm as we usually think of it—regular, repeated patterns like waves reaching a shore, or heartbeats. Instead, Meschonnic reached back to an earlier pre–Platonic meaning of rhythm that understood it as a kind of mobile, fluid form, the disposition of things in motion, a living arrangement. Rhythm is the flux that only arises from livings bodies. So, in spoken language, Meschonnic identified rhythm as everything that are not the words—the pauses, the hand gestures, the shifts of tone and emphasis, laughter, grunts, giggles, stutters, accents, sobs—all the individual things bodies do to language. For Meschonnic, rhythm in language meant almost the same thing as subjectivity or personhood.
Jonah is begrudging with his words. He says hardly anything at all, except suddenly, when he is in the belly of the big fish, his words start flowing. He composes that beautiful prayer. In an essay that accompanies his Jonah translation, Meschonnic proposes that the belly space is a space of “wandering significance” or “errant meaning” (“le signifiant errant”). It is a primal place of rhythm, of this process of improvising patterns of sound and gesture.
While these patterns might seem arbitrary, particular to an individual, they draw from a great pool of shared patterns—a reservoir into which we are continually dipping and pouring back. The shape of this reservoir is specific to a cultural and historical moment, bringing together “that which a subject forms and that which forms a subject”, as Meschonnic put it. For us highly communicative animals, language is inseparable from living, and our individuality is inseparable from the collectivity of the rhythms of our languages.
To me, Meschonnic’s ideas suggest a different way to understand the relationship of authority and the big fish’s belly. Perhaps it is not a space for punishment, self–discipline, reconciliation and internalizing of authority—but, rather, a space of collective creation, of pleasure in difference, of ongoing discovery of the permeable boundaries between our subjectivity and the subjectivities of others. The belly is the place where Jonah can compose his prayer. We take his words into ourselves, into our collective languages and understandings of what it is to be human. My idea is that in the belly feelings and affects are digested, broken down by the gastric juices of language and all that bodies do to language. This is the process which, perhaps, allows for the invention of new feelings and affects.
I happened to be reading Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition while working on this exhibition and I think her concept of ‘action’ is related. Arendt puts ‘action’ as the last of three categories of human activity. The first, ‘labor’, describes the cyclical activities of fulfilling immediate basic needs, the second, ‘work’, is the fabrication of durable objects—while ‘action’ (which includes speech acts) is how we disclose our human individuality to each other. Our ability to act comes from being endowed, as humans, with the capacity to do something new, to do the unexpected. Action only happens in the context of a public of some kind. The introduction of something new always has unexpected consequences in the network of relations between individuals.
Two problem with action that Arendt identifies is that it is unpredictable and irreversible. Once an action is set into motion, it is impossible to know its consequences as it moves through networks of relations, and it is also impossible to take back. Arendt poses two solutions to these two problems. To counter action’s unpredictability, she proposes using promises. To counter action’s irreversibility she suggests forgiveness. Promises and forgiveness play a big role in Jonah’s story, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But first, let’s look at some photos of the finished installation.
Installation view at INCA, Seattle. In addition to the big fish sculpture, there were paintings on the walls using spray paint on black plastic, to represent the skin of the fish.
Also: blocks of foam to represent blubber, and water balloons, plastic buckets and an exercise ball to represent internal organs.
On the foam block to the left you can see a stack of pamphlets containing my version of Meschonnic’s Jonah translation.
This is a video documentation of a music performance that happened inside my Jonah installation:
Documentation video of Byron Au Yong’s Water Partitas performed in the fish.
Documentation video of Byron Au Yong’s Water Partitas performed in the fish.
Byron Au Yong composed the music, which was improvised by the performers based on the scores you see posted around the fish installation. This is what one of the scores looks like.
Byron Au Yong, score for Water Partita Coco D, 2016. For string instruments and vocalization. If you’re curious, here is more information on Byron’s website.
Byron’s composition was one of several performances, events, and discussions that I commissioned for the fish belly, to try it out as a kind of institution for exploring this different relationship to authority and bodies, inside of which to share subjectivities, making metaphors that remain active, creating new feelings, and maybe new forms of action.
Documentation excerpt of Dylan Ward’s Jonah performed in the fish.
Documentation excerpt of Dylan Ward’s Jonah performed in the fish.
The last chapter of Jonah is peculiar. He’s sitting there on the hill outside Ninevah, super upset (“he burned with anger”) because God spared the city from destruction. In response, God stages this little educational drama, growing a shade plant which Jonah quickly becomes fond of. Then God sends a worm to destroy the plant, enraging Jonah further. The story ends with God asking Jonah: you had compassion for this plant, for which you did nothing to grow—why shouldn’t I have compassion for all the people and animals in Ninevah which I created?
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, who led a discussion program during the exhibition, pointed out the central tension here is one between justice and compassion. The people of Ninevah were wicked. God insists that Jonah go to Ninevah to tell the people they have been judged and will be destroyed. Jonah is furious when, in the end, God is compassionate and preserves the city. Jonah “burns” for justice above all else. God is trying to teach Jonah that ethical forms of judgement must temper justice with compassion. Rules, laws, institutions—the abstract structures which make human relations more accountable—should flex to allow for what arises from the awkward movement of humans towards other humans. Maybe Jonah’s problem is that he is the ultimate loner. He composes his psalm in the belly, reaching out, at his most desperate moment, towards the collective reservoir of language. Back on solid land, however, does God’s lessons convince him to value people as well as abstractions? We never find out.
Arendt suggests that the unpredictability and irreversibility of human action requires both promises and forgiveness—the promise of justice balanced against the forgiveness of compassion. For Arendt, the human ability to do something new and unexpected is the basis for a politics of action within communities. She invents the word “natality” to describe this special human affinity for new beginnings. Natality is “what we share against death” (in Arendt’s words), an image I think nicely corresponds to Meschonnic’s rendering of Jonah’s description of the fish belly as “the womb of death”. Poet Lisa Robertson (who has written excellent scholarship on Meschonnic) puts Arendt’s idea of natality this way: “The citizen’s body, in its charged relationships to other bodies, is the temporal matrix and radical mediator of politics. Each body, each birth, each coming into speech, bears the radically unquantifiable potential of co-transformation.”