R E V I E W ILANA PARDES Melville’s Bibles Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. viii+ 192 pages. F or astonishing undergraduate students in a Moby-Dick seminar I teach, nothing succeeds quite like reading the Book of Jonah. Though usually at least passingly familiar with the story of a man swallowed by a whale, students revel in unpacking the narrative’s surprising details, its absurdist relation to time and space, the Ninevites’ lavish repentance, Jonah’s miserable pouting. But when God steps forward to end the story espousing universalism and cracking a terrific joke, they nearly rub their eyes in disbelief to find a book of the Hebrew Bible telling what seems to them so frankly unbiblical a story. Despite being as Father Mapple says “one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures,” the Book of Jonah delivers a bracing indication that the biblical canon is not ideologically unified. And since the one thing most of my students know for sure about the Bible is that it is a “canon”—a monolithic set of traditions and teachings devoted to establishing and enshrining its own authority—the evidently contrarian Jonah’s inclusion in the canon forces them to consider what the Bible is after all. Such a reconsideration is precisely what Ilana Pardes identifies in Melville’s Bibles as the larger aim in Moby-Dick, through which, “with unparalleled verve,” Melville “opens up the question of what counts as Bible and what counts as interpretation” (1). A Hebrew and Biblical scholar and comparatist, Pardes has published books on the canonical heteroglossia of female Biblical traditions such as Miriam’s song, Rachel’s dream, and the Song of Songs (Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach [1992]), and on the national imagination within the patriarchal narratives (The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible [2000]). In such work as well as her new book on Melville’s Biblical imagination, Pardes regards the Bible as a “cultural” text, one constituted in a fluid process of on-going textual assertion, interpretation, and reinterpretation that she designates as “exegetical.” Pardes signals with this term the need for critical commentary, the leading out of a text’s obscure or latent meaning, but her Hebraic sense of the critical enterprise of exegesis has less to do with explication (producing definitive answers or interpretations) than C 2009 The Authors Journal compilation C 2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 88 L E V I A T H A N R E V I E W it does with the compounding of story-telling. The “sacred knowledge” of the Hebrew community that produced the Biblical text, “is not the invention of a select circle, but rather the product of extensive negotiations between different socio-ideological groups, different beliefs, and different dreams.” While the Biblical text invariably “bears the stamp of [an] official religion,” it remains “the product of collective imagination and collective work” and thus “gives expression to a whole gamut of perspectives” (Biography of Ancient Israel 90, 92). In persuasively identifying the driving aesthetic force behind the creation of Moby-Dick as Melville’s exegetical impulse—his tendency to receive and think through Scriptural narratives by retelling them—, Pardes follows Robert Alter’s observation that the Hebrew “culture of exegesis” that produced the variety of the Hebrew Bible continued over two millennia later to inspire modern literary artists such as Faulkner, Kafka, and Joyce. Modern novelists work exegetically when they acknowledge Scripture’s authority by responding to its puzzles, rewriting its narratives, and extending the range of its validity within the imagination. In this welcome redefinition of Scriptural authority, a text’s “canonicity” (its mattering, its enduring importance) is determined neither by cult nor by ancient decree but rather by its “intrinsic need to be grasped through exegesis” on the part of later readers (Alter, Canon and Creativity, [2000] 15–6). Pardes constructs Melville against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Biblicism as an exegetical writer whose Moby-Dick records his encounter with Biblical tradition. Buoyed by its own intrinsic “canonicity,” Moby-Dick itself emerges in her final pages as an “ark” both all-inclusive in its aims...
Read full abstract
Jun 1, 2012
H Bajas + 3
Open Access
