[Series] In the Belly of the Whale

NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar. This page will be updated regularly to reflect changes to the schedule.

Myths across times and cultures often involve similar narrative features. One such feature is a protagonist who survives death--frequently depicted as being swallowed by a whale or dragon, or making a descent into hell or the underworld--before victoriously re-emerging into the sunlit realm.

In Jungian theory, these stories are not mere amusements, but symbolic representations of psychological processes. The temporary defeat and subsequent revival of the protagonist (part of what Joseph Campbell terms "the hero's journey") is thought to dramatically portray the universal struggle for self-actualization. Even the modern notion of depression (lit. "press down") retains a hint of underworld visitation. For the Biblical Jonah, the belly of the whale marks the turning point from a rebellion against God to a rebellion against ungodliness.

For this series, we will explore cetacean spelunkers and gastronauts: ancient and modern, literal and metaphorical, realistic and fantastic, sublime and ridiculous--and their relationship to despair and overcoming.

Series schedule:

• Pinocchio - Carlo Collodi - 1/25
• The Swallowed Man - Edward Carey - 2/1
• Redburn: His First Voyage - Herman Melville - 2/8, 2/15, 2/22
• Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth - Carl Jung - 3/1
• The Book of Jonah - 3/8
• The Dark Night - St. John of the Cross - 3/15
• A Narrative of Captivity - Ethan Allen - 3/22
• The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine - 3/29, 4/5
• Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile - Herman Melville - 4/12, 4/19
• Peleg Nye: The Jonah of Cape Cod - Nils Bockmann -4/26
• [Movie] In the Whale - 5/3
• Whalefall - Daniel Kraus - 5/10
• Melville's Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia - Edward F. Edinger - 5/17
• A True History - Lucian of Samosata - 5/21 [Thu]
• [Author Event] Inside the Whale - Joseph G. Peterson - 5/24
• The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen - Rudolph Erich Raspe - 5/31
• Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut - 6/7
• [Movie] Children of the Sea - 6/14
• Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke - 6/21

Supplemental:

• The Mariner's Revenge Song song by The Decemberists
• Swallowed Up (In the Belly of the Whale) song by Bruce Springstein
• Malm Whale lounge in Sweden
• Marlin and Dory inside the whale scene from Finding Nemo (2003)

Extracts:

• "The ribs and terrors in the whale, / Arched over me a dismal gloom, / While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, / And lift me deepening down to doom." (Moby-Dick, 9)
• "Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!" "I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so..." (Moby-Dick, 16)
• "The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God." (Moby-Dick, 93)