Warning: Today’s post is not for the squeamish. I am undergoing a colonoscopy midmorning and so spent yesterday prepping for it. Prepping involved eating clear jello and drinking laxatives and a couple of quarts of what can be best described as liquid slime. (I gorged on bitterness–actually unbearable sweetness–without a name.) The work that came to mind was a novel included in my dissertation: Humphry Clinker.
This 1771 epistolary novel, written by the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (or Tobias Smellfungus, as his rival Laurence Sterne called him), is also not for the squeamish. In the very first sentence we encounter crotchety-but-with-a-heart-of-gold Matthew Bramble complaining to his doctor about his constipation:
The pills are good for nothing—I might as well swallow snowballs to cool my reins—I have told you over and over how hard I am to move; and at this time of day, I ought to know something of my own constitution. Why will you be so positive?
In the pages that follow we encounter more references to excrement than most people want in a novel, including a doctor claiming that he can diagnose any disease from examining his patient’s feces. The eponymous hero of the book, meanwhile, has a name that is a scatological pun: “Clinker” is another word for dingleberry. Our first glimpse of Humphry is of his bare buttocks—he is the postilion on a coach (the postilion’s posterior) and the passengers looking through the window can tell that his pants have split.
But Humphry is a figure who promises that the world can be cleansed of its blockages. The passengers are dazzled by the whiteness of his skin and by the fact that he has no hair on his buttocks. If the book begins with talk of constipation, with an old man complaining not only about his health but also about all the changes going on in society, it ends with images of free circulation. Class barriers come down as Humphry turns out to be Bramble’s illegitimate son. There is a tearful reunion and, rather than continue to hold on to the past (and everything else that he is holding on to), the prickly Bramble makes peace with the world.
And so I plan to have done with this subject by the end of today. My mind will turn to other subjects, and this blog will become safe reading again.
