The presence of human bodies cen be readily traced in a variety of texts, and indeed through the work of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes the corpus humani has become a focal point of a great deal of contemporary literary criticism. While as a general principle I do not like to include biographical details of authorship as an entry point into textual interpretation, in regard to Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, there can be little to differentiate the author function from the theme of his novel. Each represents the same gesture to transcend a diseased and thus emphatically mortal body. Smollett’s text reflects the growing concern the author had concerning his own deteriorating health. It was in a very real sense a sentimental swan song to his profession, as the vitriolic social criticism of earlier works such as Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom was constrained to a much greater degree in Humphrey Clinker. While some critics have awarded a certain austere respect to the text for being a more muted satire than the author’s previous works, Smollett’s last novel should not be misunderstood as a light social farce lacking a probing critical intention. As I will soon elaborate, the text becomes a locus for an ontological deferral, and as such serves to elaborate a meta-narrative of humanity seeking to postpone an existence which is by definition entropic.
The process of writing is itself key to this deferral, and acts as a mediator between the personal and the public. Like the social conception of the body itself, writing signals the entrance of an individual into public space, and yet simultaneously it is an antisocial activity in terms of its removal – or perhaps more accurately the self-imposed hermetic isolationism, a compartmentalization – of the author from their society. As Barthes was to describe in relation to the Surrealists, sometimes there can be too much literature as the body as res actualis is overlooked. As a foundational device for the narrative – here an epistolary, and thus somewhat fragmentary, structural trope – writing is both a gesture reifying an instant to consequently make it transcendent over the temporality of its initial context, and simultaneously it serves to obliterate the experiential existence of that moment. In other words, the process of writing both sanctifies and annihilates its subject with the same ontological gesture, and thus can be seen to reflect Camus’s notions of ritual suicide as a creative termination as elaborated in The Myth of Sisyphus. It is for this latter reason that the travel metaphor is elaborated in Smollett’s text, as Matt Bramble seeks continual motion in order to cure his degrading health and differ the ultimate sedentary existence as a body interred. At times, he seems to regret the drive to capture his experiences in textual form, and at these instances Bramble seems aware of the Janus nature of language as simultaneously formative and destructive of subjective experience:
My letter would swell into a treatise, were I to particularize every
cause of offence that fills up the measure of my aversion to this,
and every other crowded city – Thank Heaven! I am not so far
sucked into the vortex, but that I can disengage myself without
any great effort of philosophy – From this uproar of knavery,
folly, and impertinence, I shall fly with double relish to the serenity
of retirement ... the hospitality and protection of the rural gods;
in a word, the jucunda oblivia vitae which Horace himself had
not taste to enjoy. (155)
This Zen-like transcendence to which the Horace quotation refers – an exquisite and divine annihilation of the senses precipitated by an absolute and immanent subjectivity – is precisely the differal suggested by both the writing process and Bramble’s own quest for palliative care. It is a state of non-existence, of absolute silence which precipitates from an unending babble of voices. In a similar manner, Bramble terminates contact with his doctor when he is in motion, yet the journey itself precipitates the writing of letters explaining his current ailments in order to seek medical guidance: “as we shall be in motion for some weeks, I cannot expect to hear from you as usual; but I shall continue to write from every place at which we make any halt” (188). As readers, we are meant to question the nature of writing as an instrument for socialization – in this capacity, Bramble’s nephew Jery Melford proclaims the virtues of the growing popularity of female authors, “who publish merely for the propagation of virtue” (160). If writing must be seen as antithetical to the travel motif, at least in terms of their mutual temporal exclusivity, then Bramble’s letters (which, more accurately, should be interpreted as proselytisations and not epistolary documents in the traditional sense of “how are you dear friend?”...) should be seen as attempting to create an insular society tangentially associated with the bustle and turmoil of the urban masses. With Bramble’s complaints, Humphrey Clinker serves to document the growing fecundity of the middle classes and the alterations demanded by such a society: “all is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest” (119). In actuality, just as Bramble’s diseased body gives the text its narrative drive, so too does the “diseased mass” represented by the urban centre precipitate the capturing of Bramble’s thoughts into the physical form of the letters he writes.
It is with the character of Matt Bramble that connections can be made between Humphrey Clinker and the earlier, more overtly critical, of Smollett’s texts. Principally, movement suggests an antithesis to the urban settlement which seems most contrary to Bramble’s ideology. Throughout Bramble’s letters, the spread of urban development is likened to a cancer affecting the body politic, where social success and decay are made concomitant: “we live in a vile world of fraud and sophistication” (67). It is the masses, congregating in the largest urban centres such as London and Westminster, which serve as the locus for this particular discontent. Cross contamination between social classes is an unavoidable prerequisite for urban growth, and it is precisely this aspect of the masses which Bramble finds most objectionable: “the mixture of people in the entertainments of this place was destructive of all order and urbanity; that it rendered the plebians insufferably arrogant and troublesome, and vulgarized the deportment and sentiments of those who moved in the upper spheres of life” (80). Indeed, it is the urban centre as a hybrid entity that is most antithetical to Bramble’s sentiments, and yet Smollett’s subtle satirical impulses juxtapose the elder gentleman’s antisocial proclivities with the pursuit of his health, which is realized fundamentally as a socially dependant phenomenon. The spa represents the fluid boundaries suggested by urban spaces, and as such is a place of absolute biological community, whose organisms intermingle freely and promiscuously: “what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat and dirt, and dandriff; and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies perboiling in the kettle below” (75). This contamination is given a particularly potent satire by involving issues of the rich classes consuming the poor: “as we drink the decoction of living bodies at the Pump-room, we swallow the strainings of rotten bones and carcasses at the private bath” (76). (As a thoroughly inconsequential aside, we can view Tabatha’s dog Chowder as representing the ineffectual complaints of the aristocracy against the presumptions of the merchant and lower classes stepping on their privilege and economic and cultural jurisdiction. In this guise, it is an interesting correlation that Tabatha gives up her dog the day she gives up attacking her servants.)
Bramble’s rejection of normative social discourse initially manifests itself in the fainting spell he experiences upon commencing his treatments. That the elder Bramble swoons at Bath represents a negation of the ontological priority for selfness. His rejection of society is ultimately a rejection of his own body, a jouissance gesturing to the oblivion in which he himself as a subject of social discourse and as a body interpellated as such within the public sphere is given absolute autonomy. As another aside somewhat tangential to this present examination, it is interesting to note that in one of his letters Bramble’s nephew makes it clear that bodies sublimated to public scrutiny, and in particular bodies which transgress social normalization, are mediated as abstract entities separate from the individual consciousness of the person involved. Thus, Humphrey Clinker, when falsely arrested for highway brigandry, enters the penal system not as an individual, but as a concept: “I saw the body [emphasis added] of poor Clinker consigned to the gaoler of Clerkenwell” (183). In light of this, it is possible to deduce, as Foucault has, that bodies gain individuality only when social norms have been internalized and the interpellative process can function in the interest of those who exercise power within social discourse. Bramble is aware of the interpellative controls imposed by society, and in particular that society creates the sense of Self and Body that stimulates health, and yet his aggressive condemnation of the English society of his contemporaries signals the jouissant suicide of the individual entering the public sphere. Indeed the public sphere is rendered organic in its depiction as a vile and corrupt – truly, a diseased – entity. It is disease which bridges the public and the private aspects of human existence. Bramble condemns the decay of the river Thames, itself an ecologically corrupted sign for the prosperity and development of the increasingly financially well-endowed London, as an urban pariah:
If I would drink water, I must quaff the maukish contents of
an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement; or
swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated
with all the filth of London and Westminster – Human excre-
ment is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is
composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in
mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying
carcasses of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings
of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers within
the bills of morality.
(152)
In a very real sense, the urban centre is a hybrid entity of biological and technological organisms; ochre and blood reflect urine and grease, and all are the vital and diseased fluids of urban civilization. It is neither individually but the two in conflation that Bramble criticises. His aggressive condemnation of the daily presses signals that the voice of this hybridity is bastardized in Bramble’s eyes: “the public papers are become the infamous vehicles of the most cruel and perfidious defamation” (134). It is as though the epistolary form justifies the entrance of his own consciousness into the public sphere, whereas editorial content destroys the sanctity of opinion by means of the institutionalization of individual discourse. It is important in this regard that Humphrey Clinker himself is given little room to express his own sentiments. There are no letters written by Clinker, but rather his character and exploits are relayed through interpretation by the other characters. In a very real sense, Clinker serves as the pardoner for the masses to which Bramble is himself reacting. Preaching to improve their station – for example, he seeks to end the widespread use of common profanity, and thus equalize the virtues and sentiments of the different economic classes, to which Bramble responds: “there will be little or nothing left to distinguish their conversation from that of their betters” (132) – Clinker stands as a messianic figure for the soon-to-be-redeemed masses. He seems to be the manifest hybridity of urbanity, the country bumpkin who can mutate his appearance as required. His action, and more importantly his silence, designate him as a thematic inversion to Bramble’s xenophobic and decrepit existence. It is possible to wonder whether it is for this reason that many of the characters feel that he must be saved from the injustices of imprisonment, despite some evidence to suggest his guilt. At the very least, Clinker can be seen as a healthy (and almost universally humorous) alternative to the negational gestures elaborated by Bramble in his letters. By stoically accepting social discourse and obligation, Clinker represents the joie de vivre necessary to truly evade (while not avoiding) death.
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