3 - Exemplifying deviant speech: murmur in Patience

Summary

“Et surrexit Ionas, ut fugeret in Tharsis a facie Domini” [And Jonas rose up to flee into Tharsis from the face of the Lord]. So the Vulgate's Jonah answers the abrupt, unglossed, and absolute imperative of God: “Surge, et vade in Niniven, civitatem grandem, et praedica in ea” [Arise, and go to Ninive the great city and preach in it]. In contrast, the Jonah of the anonymous fourteenth-century Patience responds to this imperative to preach not by taking to his heels, but by speaking. In direct defiance of God's “Nym þy way to Nynyue wythouten oþer speche” – the prohibition is the Patience poet's addition – Jonah uses speech to invent, first a probable grim future for himself in Nineveh, then a god who would ordain such a future for his prophet, and finally a way to evade such a god. In this way, he replaces the word of God which he is called to utter with words about God. This major addition to the spare biblical account begins a narrative in which different types of speech about God are juxtaposed with each other and with the events they interpret so that their authenticity – their reliability and their claims as to what they do – may be judged. All the while, these divergent acts of speech are contained within the controlling discourse of a catechist which presents the story of Jonah as an exemplum of impatient speech.