In Quest of the Self: Masquerade and Travel in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Fielding, Smollett, Sterne by Jakub Lipski (review)

In 1770, Theresa Cornelys organized a masquerade at her house in Soho Square in London. According to Gentleman’s Magazine, it was a splendid occasion during which the Duke of Buccleugh dressed as the figure of “Nobody,” Colonel Fitzroy’s costume was “Somebody,” and Sir Richard Philips appeared as “A Double Man.” Jakub Lipski cites this account in the introduction to his rich exploration of novels by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne. For Lipski, what is important are the figures of “Nobody,” “Somebody,” and the “Double Man” (31). The masks suggest how the stability of personal identity was in question at a masked ball, and, as Lipski goes on to show, in the eighteenth-century novel itself. While Lipski’s focus is on the paradigms that make up a “novelistic discourse of the self” (12), I found, as I read through his book, that I did not lose sight of Buccleugh, Fitzroy, and Philips—those real bodies that seem, almost as if by accident, to have been caught in the act of expressing it.

Lipski’s starting point is the “ancien régime of identity,” a term he draws from Dror Wahrman’s The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (2004). Having situated his work in eighteenth-century debates about the nature of personal identity, Lipski turns to the novel as a form of engagement with the consequent destabilization of sociocultural categories (24). The novel, accepted as an exploration of individual experience, is shown to be organized by two main metaphors: the journey and the masquerade. Lipski aims to demonstrate how these two metaphors work together as “complementary paradigms constituting the discourse of identity” (19–20). To this end, Lipski structures his book into three parts, with each part dealing with one of his chosen authors and exploring, in turn, travel, masquerade, and their interrelationship. This approach allows Lipski to do detailed work with single authors, but it also means that the book gathers in momentum, accumulating layers of readings and contexts that build into a thought-provoking analysis of literary form.

As someone interested in Smollett’s literary work, I found myself drawn to the second section of this book. Here, the “chaotic and fragmented world” (95) of Smollett’s novels is rightly affirmed as the very poetics of his fiction—as it might also be seen to characterize the vast extent of his critical and historical writing. Lipski draws on previous work on dislocated and protean Scottishness in order to present two of Smollett’s novels, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), as representations of the “ancien régime of identity.” In terms of travel, what this means is that Roderick and Peregrine do not so much go on a journey to find their “true selves” as to experience the shaping of them (103). In terms of masquerade, it means that the “stratagems and practical jokes,” which feature heavily in these novels, become the very language of “identity play” (135). These discourses converge in an engaging form of carnivalesque writing—something that is supported by Bakhtin’s work on carnival and revealed in the “mutability” of the protagonists’ bodies (132–33). All this is presented in sharp contrast to what Lipski refers to as the “dichotomous organisation” of Fielding’s novels. Focusing on The Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742) and The History of Tom Jones (1749), Lipski describes the ways in which the protagonists reveal themselves in opposition to a masquerading world (37). As travellers, they search for a “substantial self” that they never really lost (58). Although Lipski resists developing the inference that the “carefully structured binary system” of Fielding’s world is destabilized (by, for example, the masked ball in Tom Jones [91]), the hint is a good one. It suggests...