The History and Adventures of an Atom, and: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (review)

REVIEWS 81 Tobias Smollett. The History and Adventures of an Atom. Edited by Robert Adams Day. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. lxxxv + 360pp. US$45.00. ISBN 0-8203-1073-5. Tobias Smollett. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Edited by Thomas R. Preston. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Ix + 500pp. US$45.00. ISBN 0-8203-1203-7. These handsome volumes are part of the new edition of The Works of Tobias Smollett, which, after initial difficulties, is now being produced at an admirable rate. The editors' decision to issue "all of the works by which Tobias Smollett was best known in his own day and by which he deserves to be remembered" bespeaks the importance of this edition, especially for those of us who think of Smollett as fully the peer, in imaginative, moral, and political terms, of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Indeed, given the current critical interest in the irregular and the complex, we may find potentially more to say about Smollett than Fielding. And, if we take Robert Adams Day's reminder that Smollett and Sterne quite self-consciously saw each other as rivals, we may also be more patient with Smollett's daring, if usually flawed, formal experiments. The slight uncertainty in the editors' principle for selecting which of Smollett's works to publish also affects the critical protocols of these very different volumes. Why, for example, will the edition include Smollett's translation of Gi/ Bias, but not, apparently, his translation of Don Quixote! While the volumes will all benefit from O.M. Brack, Jr's scrupulous textual editing, what will make them viable—as against the hitherto standard Oxford editions—will be the quality of the introductions and the annotations. Thus I regrettably report that of the two editors, Robert Adams Day quite puts Thomas R. Preston in the shade. With Day's edition of the Adventures of an Atom we have a major contribution to our understanding of Smollett's peculiar and violent imagination, one that comes to us with model explanatory material, which provides a window onto an entire generation of political events in the mid-eighteenth century. On the other hand, Humphry Clinker disappoints not only in its rather lack-lustre introduction, but also in its annotations, which in many cases are fussy rather than illuminating. Day has set standards that will be difficult to match. Although he knows that the History is a little-known text, he unapologetically draws attention to its great formal and historical interest. The Adventures ofan Atom starkly reveals the interpretive difficulties in satire, especially in a highly allegorical satirical vehicle: Smollett's powers of grotesque description find their expression in a narrative ostensibly about Japan, but actually aimed at the politics of the conduct of the Seven Years' War. The point of view is provided by an atom—that irreducible particle of narrative as well as physical matter—which, in travelling through the bodies of various political figures (inter alia), provides a most peculiar vision of the political world. The atom recounts its experiences to Nathaniel Peacock, whose manuscript is recovered by one S. Etherington. As in his other works— Roderick Random above all—Smollett's rage at political humbug both fuels and obstructs the formal success of the device. At moments, the atom provides an ironic perspective on the absurd or revolting—such as those moments where the Dairo applies his toenail vehemently to Fika-kaka's posterior, producing "an orgasm of pleasure" (p. 16), later supplemented by a doctor's sucking Fika-kaka's anus, an activity which in turn becomes institutionalized. This is stuff to rival Swift's imagination. At other moments, however, Smollett's anger—about the execution of Admiral Byng, for example—disposes more fully of narrative mediations. Such strange fiction requires careful glossing; and that is what we get. Day's introduction is a model of its kind, supplying an admirable commentary on the Seven 82 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:1 Years' War, on Smollett's relation to contemporary events, on the sources of and influences on the form of the Adventures ofan Atom, on composition, attribution, and so forth. The notes, exhaustive as they must be...