JoLIE 2:2 (2009)
“THE SQUINTASENSE OF SATIETY”
CORRUPTION AND COMIC CURE IN HUMPHRY CLINKER
John McRae
School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, UK
Abstract
Tobias Smollett’s final novel, his masterpiece from 1771, The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker, is one of the first novels to explore (and question) the concept of the “United
Kingdom” created by the Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England in 1603 and the
Union of the Parliaments in 1707.
Now that the Scottish Parliament has achieved its own autonomy, the “writing
back” which started with Smollett has perhaps reached some kind of fruition. What he
deconstructed in the novel, which bears what has often been seen as the rudest title in
English literature, is no less than the sense of a national identity, and its concomitant, the
idea of a national language.
This paper will look at Smollett’s range of language in the multi-vocal epistolary
novel, examining his play on language, society, class and region, and his risqué use of
every kind of “low” allusion to bring out the Rabelaisian satire and carnival subversion of
cherished notions of British-ness.
Key words: Wordplay; State of the nation; Epistolary; Eighteenth century.
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) was a major novelist, a major translator, and
originally by profession a physician, travelling around the world as a ship’s doctor
before settling down in London and later near Livorno in Italy, and becoming one
of the most prolific writers and political commentators of his time: translator,
historian, polemicist and poet, as well as a novelist. He was a Scot at the heart of
the Enlightenment, author of the great poetic lament The Tears of Scotland, written
after the defeat at the Battle of Culloden of the last Jacobite Rebellion in 1746, and
a pivotal figure in British and European culture; he was to be the favourite novelist
of Dickens and Thackeray. But strangely, now, he does actually need an
introduction.
He was the first translator into English of Le Sage’s Gil Blas, Cervantes’
Don Quixote and Voltaire’s Candide. His own novels include Roderick Random,
Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, Sir Launcelot Greaves, and his final
masterpiece Humphry Clinker, published a few months before his death in Italy in
1771. Like his contemporary Laurence Sterne he also wrote a Travels through
France and Italy, getting much further on the journey than Sterne ever did!
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He lived in a time of considerable political, social, cultural and linguistic
flux in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, a time when questions of the Union of
the single nation were a of great concern, the time just before the new age of
revolutions was to herald such enormous changes in America, France and
elsewhere.
Great Britain was during his lifetime and in the decades that followed, “a
country and a time when anxieties about sex, nudity and bodily functions were
mounting” (Wilson 2007: xiii). Smollett, as both a physician and political
commentator, diagnosed the health of the nation in his novels, focusing often on
the less socially acceptable aspects of the body politic and the body personal. His
final novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker to give it its full title, is one of the
first of what would later come to be called “state of the nation” novels.
Smollett was called “Smelfungus” by Laurence Sterne, and something of
the distaste implied remains. Tobias Smollett has never really been accepted in the
canons of English Literature as a great novelist – and not just because he was
Scottish. There is something slightly distasteful, something not altogether decent
about his works, and almost all critical writing on him contains a touch of regret
that this is so – almost as if to say that if it were not for this slight letdown or
blemish in taste we might just possibly consider admitting Smollett into the
pantheon of greatness.
Smollett’s own use of distaste, strong language, graphic vulgarity and
explicit sexual reference was fully intentional, however, and cannot be excused
away. Humphry Clinker is about as explicit as you can get: “to dine with Duke
Humphry” meant to eat nothing, and clinker meant (and is still used in this sense in
some dialects) a small piece of shit. There is no getting away from the fact that the
society Smollett is describing in the novel is changed, brought to self-awareness,
and improved by “a beggarly foundling taken from the dunghill.” (May 24, HC:
85) The “expedition” of Humphry Clinker, in the full title of the novel, can be seen
to apply in the first instance to expedition in the sense of a journey (it is on one
level fairly traditional travel journal, a variation on Daniel Defoe’s Tour through
the Whole Island of Great Britain, published 1724-1727. The full journey can be
traced in the map in the Appendix). It applies also in the sense of “to expedite”:
Humphry does indeed expedite matters considerably for the travellers, the Bramble
family, as soon as he encounters them, and will continue to do so for the rest of
their journey. His own career is no less conveniently expedited by the end of the
novel, with the finding of his true father and of the love of his life. But, to start
with the first encounter – a fair way into the novel – we find the presentation of the
eponymous hero is singularly unheroic: his backside is literally hinging out of his
trousers, and both the reader and the fictional travellers are given a posterior view,
(in the unpropitious circumstances of the overturning of the carriage), of the
character who is to be the model, the catalyst, the element of positive change for all
the society of the novel. There is no point in reading this as some kind of symbolic
innocent nakedness, like Joseph Andrews’ on the encounter with the coach which
“The squintasense of satiety”...
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marks the turning-point in his fortunes and in the progress of Fielding’s novel that
bears his name. Here the author’s purposes are comic in the earthiest sense.
Mikhail Bakhtin has given us the clearest rationale on this kind of humour,
in his theory of a mixed form of writing that is always anti-authoritarian, satirising
and travestying the canonised genres, and by implication, the hierarchies of power
in the society those canonised genres tend to reinforce. The novel he describes is
therefore a mixture of discourses, which draws on discourses which are not
necessarily those of “high” literature. Bakhtin discusses Cervantes and Rabelais in
particular: not by chance, as we have seen, Smollett’s great translation of Don
Quixote had been published in 1755, and the influence of the language of Sir
Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais (1653/1693) is clear, especially in
Smollett’s earlier novels – the violent use of language in Roderick Random being a
good example (see Grant 1982: 136-145). Smollett learns from his fellow-Scot
Urquhart a use of words, an enjoyment of invective, an exploration of the
possibilities of multi-voiced language which he experiments with more and more
as his writing career develops. This leads him to play masterfully with the
corruption of language in Humphry Clinker, anticipating, as Giorgio Melchiori
(1956: 47) has pointed out, a Joycean joy in flux and flexibility.
David Lodge affirms that this kind of writing “performs a very valuable
hygienic cultural function: it makes sure that institutions are always subject to a
kind of ridiculing criticism. Bakhtin associates this with the assertions of the body:
eating, excreting, copulation, which religious and governmental institutions try to
suppress in the interests of mind and power. Comedy reasserts the body – and the
collectiveness of the body is what really unites us, rather than ideologies.” (Quoted
in Haffenden 1985:166-187) Smollett is interested in the body social as a mirror of
the body politic – laughter at bodily functions, bodily embarrassments, and bodily
characteristics is the most natural and humanising laughter. This relates, as Bakhtin
suggests, the main events in the life of the grotesque body to elemental forces of
matter, linking the confines of the human body, and its mysteries, with folk culture,
and the ways in which folk culture overcomes cosmic fears through laughter.
It is a kind of humour that the Augustan Age had politely excluded from
literature. It is low, popular, physical, rather than refined, social, or intellectual. A
kind of humour openly enjoyed in literature from Chaucer through Shakespeare
and Jonson to the Restoration dramatists and Rochester is seen to become socially
unacceptable: unsuitable for polite company. No less an authority than Lord
Monboddo in the 1780s bemoaned the fact that language is “degraded and debased
by its necessary connection with flesh and blood” (quoted in Smith 1984: 22). Ben
Wilson (2005; 2007) usefully traces the spread of this censoriousness into the
Victorian period until Victorian “values” set the seal on its exclusion from
Literature, along with anything else that, as Mr Podsnap put it in Our Mutual
Friend, might “bring a blush into the cheek of the young person.”
The tradition did not disappear so totally in Scottish literature – from
Dunbar we can trace a direct line to Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns
(contemporaries of Smollett) and James Hogg. Smollett is not the heir of
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Richardson and/or Fielding, despite learning many lessons and techniques from
them. His natural affinity is with Dunbar, with Henryson; deeply influenced by
Scottish Calvinism, his scepticism leads to that constant switching from one
emotion, one style, one register, to another, which has so often been considered
crude and unfinished. But this mixedness is essential to his writing: contradictions
in human nature, overspilling into the massive contradictions of all society, all
ambition, all behaviour, are the meat of his work. This is a deliberate breaking of
the moulds of the sentimental and of the picaresque novel, using a mastery of
eighteenth century forms to reaffirm a deep-rooted Scottish tradition. Only the
caricatures of Hogarth and Gillray maintained something of this scabrousness –
and that was soon toned down as the nineteenth century took over.
It is my contention that Smollett was trying to assert the strength of this
natural tradition, was trying, especially in this his final novel, to bring back an
acceptance of natural functions, and of natural behaviour, in writing of the
harmony of Union – Union of the separate entities of the so-called United
Kingdom, which 65 years after the Union of the Parliaments was as disunited and
mutually incomprehensible among its component parts as was the Bramble family
in Humphry Clinker.
*
The multi-viewpoint epistolary novel, wherein the nominated hero never actually
puts pen to paper, gives Smollett the chance to air a wide range of views on
society, from Matt Bramble’s irascible hypochondriac to Jerry’s blasé young
Oxford intellectual, from Lydia’s Richardsonian romanticising and languishing, to
the letters of the frustrated spinster Tabitha and the servant Win. It is with these
two women’s letters that I will concentrate on the use of corruption, linguistic and
philosophical, to examine the novel’s aims, which I see, in Smollett’s own words
from the preface to Roderick Random, as “to animate the reader against the sordid
and vicious disposition of the world.”
In this, Smollett is directly visual: we are given Hogarthian pictures of
characters and events, in sequence, rather than in contrast. The frame of the
narrative is therefore different from that in Fielding or Dickens: opposites tend to
be actions/reactions, opinions (strongly held) and reflections; characters are seen as
humours, caricatures – opposites between them are constant and more or less
invariable, both in the sense of character against character and of character and
against society. This conflict between the individual and an alienating social
system contains something of Derrida’s “presence” and différance: “the system of
language associated with phonetic-alphabetic writing is that within which
logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been
produced” (1977: 43). It is important to remember that there are several worlds in
this novel – the worlds of the individual correspondents give a clear sense that
there is always a larger world outside the letters too. The “presence”/différance
contrast is fundamental to Smollett’s purpose. The reader has to close the gap.
In closing the gap the reader is helped by the author’s “knowingness”;
when an unmarried lady of a certain age writes to the male members of her staff
“The squintasense of satiety”...
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about checking “slits and holes” for instance; the “nudge nudge, wink wink” tone is
used precisely because he wants to make the joke obvious, to make the reader
thereby complicit in the judgement of the character. Levels of judgement of
character are as vital as levels of judgement by character.
The subversiveness of Smollett’s writing is linguistic, social, and
philosophical: each character creates his or her own linguistic world, and in doing
so creates and illustrates many of the rules of the society he or she is writing about.
But it is highly significant that the main catalysts or influences on the action,
Humphry and Lismahagow, do not contribute to any of the letters. Their words and
deeds are always reported, frequently from more than one point of view.
Lismahagow’s long diatribe on government (September 20, HC: 275-281) is the
most explicit analysis of how society might be run (and we might be forgiven for
overhearing the voice of the Scot Smollett here – his political writings are not very
far removed in tone from this long excursus) – it comes, as does Humphry’s
“expedition”, from outside the family of correspondents. When these outsiders’
influence has been assimilated, they will become members of the extended
Bramble family. But, in the course of the novel, the distance between Humphry,
Lismahagow, and the letter-writers is vital. It is to some extent a difference
between nature and culture: the correspondents’ writing places them (pace Derrida
on Rousseau) on the level of “culture”, whereas the “enthusiast” and the “natural”
are in fact the men who move “society” forward in time, place and action, rather
than the people of culture.
The novel moves by contrasts – Lydia’s love for the actor Mr Wilson is
contrasted with Tabitha’s sexual frustration, until Lismahagow comes along and,
like Humphry earlier on, rescues the family, with his “posteriors exposed to the
wind”.
Tabitha’s letters have a rather different kind of linguistic corruption from
Win’s. Where Win is a precursor of the Dickensian speech renderings which
characterise Sam Weller, Mrs Lirriper, and their successors, Tabitha’s letters reveal
overtly an obsession with sex and sexuality. Win’s concern is with literacy and
expression – her mistakes, like those of Mrs Hornbeck in Peregrine Pickle (1751)
and of the more famous Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775), are
revealing, yes, but are more due to ignorance than Tabitha’s, and create a different
kind of comic response. Win is, to use the jargon expression, upwardly mobile,
concerned with class and social status, and this will become important at the very
end of the novel.
Tabitha just wants a man, and is spinsterishly antagonistic towards anyone
else’s sexual success. When Win talks of “damp shits at Sir Tummas Ballfart’s”
(October 4, HC: 307), her social aspirations are just as interesting as her
unintentional rudeness.
Tabitha, on the other hand, does not observe and comment very much on
the places and events of the journey as Win does – rather she is commented on, in
various references to “Tabby’s progress in husband-hunting (by Matt, July 15, HC:,
202) and “she has been employed constantly in spreading nets for the other sex”
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(Liddy October 4, HC: 308). Indeed, an early letter from Jerry (May 6, HC: 59-64)
gives a clear character presentation of the lady, full of sexual rapaciousness, wiles
and scheming.
So she is to be seen by the reader as a visible target of comedy. Win, on the
other hand, is very little mentioned in the letters of the family, her concerns for
fashion and what she sees as social status emerging from her own words. She
writes a total of ten letters, compared to Tabby’s five (out of a total of 82). Tabby’s
are concerned with the management of the Bramble estate during the family’s
absence; Win’s are expressions of innocent and ignorant discovery. The climax of
Win’s progress towards self-knowledge comes when she is taken for a whore in
Newcastle (July 18) by a group of colliers “that could bare no smut but their own”
and “called me hoor and painted Issabel” (HC: 219, italics in the text, therefore to
be read as her own). Not by chance it is the ubiquitous Humphry, with his
“pyehouse” ways and his “byebill” (two of Win’s most common transliterations),
who shows her the way to “grease” and salvation. It is, above all, Win’s innocence
that is stressed, most comically when she covers her shame: discovered swimming
in Loch Lomond (the high point of a recurring theme of the purifying influence of
water on the naked) in her “birth-day soot”, and again after “having been to bed
with a man” (her new husband Humphry), she holds her hands in front of her eyes.
On the first of these occasions she says it is not to hide any part of herself, but so
that the man will not know who she is, quoting “as the saying is, all cats in the
dark are gray” (September 7, HC: 261). This gives a whole new complexion to her
continual references to her “kitten” in her early letters!
Tabitha’s very first words reveal a great deal, as do Matthew Bramble’s.
His first concern is constipation, so the theme of excrement is taken up
immediately, not just in the novel’s title: “how hard I am to move” (April 2, HC:
5). But he will move, in both senses, before very long, and his mental and physical
health will improve on the expedition – “I am equally distressed in mind and body”
he says in that first letter; by the end of November he is able to say “I have laid in a
stock of health” in his final letter to Dr Lewis. (November 20, HC: 350-351)
Constipation (she calls it “constupration”, and its cure, appositely, is a
“lacksitif”) is also a concern of Tabitha’s, but more in relation to her dog Chowder
– the love-object that this unfortunate animal represents for Tabitha sets bowel
disorder on a par with emotional disorder. But, as Win will later asseverate, “This
is all suppository” – a high level of punning on the lowest of subjects! A fixation
with lavatorial experiences will be a continuing theme of the novel.
Sexual innuendo is rather more immediately obvious in the first words we
read of Tabitha’s – “When this cums to hand be sure to pack up the trunk male that
stands in my closet” she instructs her housekeeper (April 2, HC: 6). The rest of the
novel is a continuation of the theme of packing up a trunk male for her closet. Her
final instruction to “Good Mrs Gwyllim” (November 20, HC: 351-352) is “to get
your accunts ready for inspection ... and the beds well tousled” – success in her
stated aim!
“The squintasense of satiety”...
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Tabitha’s letter of September 18th is the classic of double entendre, just as
the love plots of the novel are beginning to come together. All the subliminal
concerns come to the surface just as they are about to be resolved or cured:
Humphry has “laboured exceedingly” and his good offices should now “penetrate
and instil his goodness, even into your most inward parts.” (HC: 274-275) The
context is blatantly sexual, the cure physical as well as moral.
The concern with health is paramount – Matt Bramble’s constant
correspondent is his doctor. This recalls Sterne’s dig at Smollett in A Sentimental
Journey through France and Italy, “ ‘I’ll tell it’, cried Smelfungus, ‘to the world.’
‘You had better tell it’, said I, ‘to your physician.’ ”. Bramble’s state of health
alters with the experiences of the journey. Bath, London, Yorkshire and Edinburgh
lead to the quasi-Utopia discovered at Loch Lomond (hardly by coincidence, only a
very short distance from Smollett’s own birthplace near Dumbarton), and, on their
return to England, the characters’ own Utopia is confirmed, as the family, and the
nation, are united for the first time. Incidentally, there is also a disquisition on the
state of the language, worth quoting at length (July 13, HC: 199): “... that the
English language was spoken with greater propriety at Edinburgh than in London –
… what we generally called the Scottish dialect was in fact, true genuine old
English…. That the modern English, from affectation and false refinement, had
weakened, and even corrupted their language, by throwing out the guttural
sounds…..” That is a debate that has never been resolved! (See Janet Sorensen,
Thomas Miller for different views on linguistic assimilation at this time.) Put this
together with Robert Crawford’s assertion that this was the time of the Scottish
“invention of English Literature” and we begin to see a great deal of importance in
the Scottish Englishness of Smollett and his work. Colin Kidd’s important concept
of “Anglo-British identity” becomes significant here.
Humphry Clinker is a “state of the nation novel” some 74 years before
Benjamin Disraeli began to examine the Two Nations syndrome (north and south
being the two). But where Disraeli wanted to pontificate, showing “that our
political institutions were the embodiment of our popular necessities” (Preface to
the Fifth Edition of Sybil, or the Two Nations), Smollett’s point is a rather more
subversive one, “the transcendence of false politics by the true” (Sekora 1977:
223). When national values have been corrupted, only personal choice remains.
By the time the expedition of Humphry Clinker has been successfully
completed, the gentry and the low, the past and the present, the regions of Britain,
friends and lovers, the mind and the body, all have been joined in a vision of
harmony and joy.
Smollett mixes his modes from the sentimental to the farcical, from coarse
to cosmic, from scatological, dare I say, to eschatological. The world for him is
man’s torment and man’s titillation: torture and toy, pain and plaything.
The finding of fathers and sons, the ritual marriages, and the recognition of
human values which ensues, all lead to a Utopian conclusion, one that is almost a
parody of the traditional happy ending. It recalls Umberto Eco’s words on
Finnegans Wake: “richiede per essere compreso non la negazione del già detto, ma
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il suo ripensamento ironico.” (Eco 1983: 40) [It requires in order to be understood,
not the denial of what has already been said, but an ironic rethinking of it.]
But in the last letter, the very last words of the novel take us right back to
the beginning: class difference and social presumption rear their ugly heads, in this
brave new world of 1771. Win writes to her confidante (as was), inferior (as is,
now that Win is married to Matthew Bramble's natural son Humphry), the
immortal words "our satiety is to suppurate". (November 20, HC: 352-353)
The author, knowingly again, tells us this Utopia was a fiction: the family’s
journey and the nation’s journey goes on. The “squintasense” is a necessary point
of view, a prism, of all that is best and worst in society. And the journey goes on
despite the author’s intervention, wit and wisdom. The fungus still smells.
Clinkers are still part of life’s normal functioning, as Dominique Laporte
has graphically illustrated. And as the original title page of Humphry Clinker
reminds us, quoting Horace, Quorum haec tam putida tendunt/Furcifer? Ad te
inquam. We ignore them at our peril.
Author’s note:
This is a considerably revised and expanded version of an article with the same title
first published in V. Marengo, C.P. Bertinotti, & G. Cortese (Eds.), (1990). Le
forme del comico (pp.433-440). Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.
The edition of the novel used is the Oxford World’s Classics, 1966/1984,
edited by Lewis M. Knapp, revised by Paul-Gabriel Boucé. It is referred to
throughout as HC with date references for the letters as well as page references.
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Appendix
Figure 1. The Bramble family’s journey in Humphry Clinker (adapted from HC)