TRAVELLERS AND TRAVELOGUES

Tobias George Smollett.

Laurence Sterne
 Tobias George Smollett
Travels Through France and Italy
 relevant biographical details:
 Smollett’s training as a physician: he served as a surgeon on the Chichester during
the naval war against Spain and, upon his return to England, while seriously
embarking upon writing novels, he also continued to practise (at least for a while)
the medical profession as a distinguished figure of the group of doctors concerned
especially with the system of midwifery.
 His reactions to a number of less fortunate events that marked his personal life and
his career as a writer revealed his ‘systema nervosum maxime irritabile’, his being
prone (unlike Fielding or Sterne) to anger, paranoia, persecution mania and
hypochondria, which added to his poor physical health, undermined by consumption
and rheumatism. ↓
1. the overlapping of medical and literary discourse in his travelogue (actually
structured as a collection of letters);
2. the Grand Tour represented as therapy, moral remedy and pathology.
Following in the footsteps of an entire generation of travel writers blending, the
scientific and the sentimental, tourism and medicine in their accounts, Smollett
designed his letters so as to both provide an accurate representation of his
medical condition and its evolution under the influence of different
environmental factors and, going beyond the mere description of institutions,
buildings, scenery or customs, cast a new light on cross-cultural encounters,
on the relationship that thus establishes between auto- and hetero-images.
 Laurence Sterne
A Sentimental Journey through
France and Italy by Mr. Yorick
 relevant biographical details:
 Health problems (consumption) forced Sterne to embark on a recuperative
continental grand tour together with his wife and daughter in 1762. The
next year, while still in France, he met Tobias Smollett in Montpellier. In
1765, he took a second tour of the continent and travelled in France and
Italy for 8 months.
 However, Sterne’s engagement with travel literature is completely
different from Smollett’s: the scientific is almost completely eliminated in
favour of the sentimental; though motivated by health problems, the
travel across the continent is not represented as therapy; medical
vocabulary is completely absent from the narrative discourse. A
parodic/satirical reaction to Smollett’s Travels, Sterne’s ‘travelogue’
(actually, a work of fiction) casts a new light on how travel accounts
should be written, while anatomising sentimental aesthetics and
questioning its moralising power. In A Sentimental Journey, the
interaction between the narrating and examining I and the examined
other provides the background for the redefinition, in Sternean terms, of
key sentimental concepts such as nature, sentiment, sensibility and
compassion.
 Grand Tour Itineraries (as presented in the travelogues):
 Smollett: Dover – Calais – Boulogne – Paris – Lyon – Montpellier – Avignon – Nice –
Genoa – Florence – Rome
 Sterne: Dover – Calais – Montreuil – Amiens – Paris – Moulines – the Bourbonnois –
Turin.
 Tobias George Smollett
Travels Through France and Italy
 Travel as therapy and the more personal dimension of the travelogue:
 in the beginning: an obvious juxtaposition of symptoms of both physical –
the ‘inflammation of the lungs’ – and mental – grief over the untimely death
of his daughter – distress;
 individual perspective on suffering, based on self-examination + three
dimensions of medical treatment by travelling: change of air/ climate, the
(non)therapeutic effects of water and change of place.
 Smollett, the climatologist (comments on the quality of air in different locations,
on the healing or, on the contrary, damaging effects of different climates on the
touring patient);
 the effects of bathing in cold water as well as to the role played by the quality of
water in maintaining good health and cleanliness;
 the change of place or ‘continual motion’ as a form of exercise for the body that
also allows for the delightful discovery of a variety of objects taking the traveller’s
mind off the places/ people/ surroundings causing his affliction (with physiological
and psychological benefits);
 the change of place or ‘continual motion’ as an exhausting, stressful, even
dangerous and unhealthy (owing to unpredictable accidents or the quick changes
of climate and diet), all in all, inadvisable experience.
 Conclusion: Assessing the overall effect of the Grand Tour as a positive one
despite its numerous vexations, Smollett failed to realise that the journey
mainly contributed to restoring the vividness of his mind, while its benefits
for the physiological system were rather short lived.
 Laurence Sterne
A Sentimental Journey through
France and Italy by Mr. Yorick
 The journey as a form of education
 The Preface:
 different travellers – different expectations from the foreign space
they discover → particularly critical of “Idle Travellers, Inquisitive
Travellers, Lying Travellers, Proud Travellers, Vain Travellers,
Splenetic Travellers”. Lacking the awareness of the differences in
terms of mental software between people coming from different
environments, such travellers remain deaf and blind to the
relativity of manners and turn out incapable of intercultural
communication. E.g. Smollett’s persona satirised in Smelfungus.
 The Sentimental Traveller: His purpose will not be to collect
facts or to acquire knowledge he could anyway find at home, but
to get rid of any national prejudice his behaviour might be
marked by, to learn more about the other and implicitly about
himself and, having interiorised the differences, to eventually find
out more about human nature in general.
 Delimitation of the spatial frame
 the borderline separating the native land from that of the foreign other: the
English Channel – crossing points: Dover in England and Calais in France.
Tobias Smollett Laurence Sterne
- extensive detail regarding travel on land - little detail about either the reasons for
and accommodation at Dover → travelling or the travelling conditions →
malcontent awareness of differences between
mentalities and cultural environments,
but also certain open-mindedness and
willingness to interact with the other’s
culture
- stereotypical views of the French other: - Stereotypical views of the French other:
e.g. French government – les droits e.g. French government – les droits
d’aubaine; food and drink d’aubaine; food and drink
↓ ↓
the auto-image of the English traveller: the auto-image of the English traveller:
typically bourgeois self-sufficiency, typically bourgeois self-sufficiency,
nationalistic bias, intolerance (gallophobia) nationalistic bias, intolerance and the
and the inability to spontaneously react to inability to spontaneously react to
external stimuli external stimuli – BUT with availability
for moral and emotional improvement.
 The travelogue as an anthropological document
Smollett Sterne
- inspecting ‘like a doctor’ the ‘body’ of the
other’s culture: - a lesson of tolerance and religious harmony
-recurrent criticism of the Catholic Church and between Protestants and Catholics.
its influence on the people’s behaviour.
- a radiographic examination of the French - interest in the human ‘geography’, in the
society: social hierarchy; government; ‘nakedness’ of the French other’s heart: social
patterns of behaviour, with specific reference hierarchy and phenomena, patterns of
to gender differences → drawing attention to behaviour – e.g. begging; women → aimed at
the exaggerated artificiality, affectation, discovering both the strengths and the
unnaturalness degenerating in some men’s weaknesses of different cultural patterns,
case into effeminacy (i.e. the petit maîtres) → eventually bringing about acculturation.
revealing the numerous flaws in the moral
stereotypical portrait of the French always
from a position of rejection of what is foreign.
- use of classical languages (Latin) in - frequent use of French words, which
specialised medical texts as well as in the contributes to reducing the cultural shock and
study of the Roman heritage (only little favours acculturation.
French and Italian).
- stress on physical detail: travelling and - stress on feelings, emotions, sensations:
accommodation conditions; town/ travelling and accommodation conditions
countryside; modern/ ancient art. looked upon more tolerantly; town/
countryside.
 Metaphor/allegory-based hetero-images
Tobias Smollett Laurence Sterne
- architectural heritage of the Roman rule in -the town with its aristocratic circles, artistic
Southern France and Italy / vs./ the ruin to entertainment, games of flattery and ‘love’/
which it was abandoned and the vs./ the countryside in the mountainous
modifications brought by modern architects area, the latter functioning, in a
to suit their contemporaries’ tastes → past Rousseauist sense, as a symbol of man’s
glory versus present decrepitude. innocence and harmonious communion
- absolute monarchy and Catholicism with nature.
plague an otherwise naturally well-
endowed country in which the poverty of
the peasants is indicative of the advanced
stage of the ‘disease’ affecting the body
politic.
↨ ↨
high uncertainty avoidance on the low uncertainty avoidance on the
observer’s behalf, hence he seeks more the observer’s behalf
company of English travellers than that of
the foreign hosts
 Conclusions
Sterne and Smollett do not share the same views regarding the contact between base and
target cultures.
Despite the accuracy of the descriptive and topographical detail, the touch of erudition lent by
the numerous quotations in Latin, French and Italian, Smollett’s travel account has hardly
elicited any positive responses from the critics and the readership at large precisely because of
the xenophobic attitude that pervades the entire narrative: trapped in his ethnocentrism,
looking down upon the French other and considering it inferior to his base culture, despite the
latter’s imperfections, Smollett’s narrator manages but to offer a distorted image of the foreign
space that might appeal only to readers holding nationalistic views and end up telling, as
Sterne rightfully observed, more about the traveller’s spleen and about an Englishman seeking
the company of other Englishmen than about the target culture.
Sterne’s images, on the other hand, though moulded in a fictional pattern, turn out
revolutionary in many ways. Rejecting the traditional conventions of travel literature insisting
upon the systematic registering of circumstantial concrete detail, he chooses to focus his
representation on the image of the people the traveller gets in contact with, which, for the
journey to function indeed as an efficient educational instrument, should be studied with an
open mind, in perfect awareness of the differences between cultural environments and their
corresponding mental programming. At the same time, the ensuing account of the journey
should reflect the inner changes caused by the contact with the foreign other at the different
phases of euphoria, culture shock or acculturation and the way in which the auto-image
evolves in direct relationship with the modifying hetero-image. The universal essence (if that
really exists) can be reached only by comparing two or even more particular universes. And
when that essence is precisely human nature, the travelling pattern may combine
harmoniously with the unconventional investigation of the sentimental aesthetics, with its
stress on the ambiguities of sentiment and sensibility, sympathy and compassion. Reality is
laughable and imperfect, marble-like, men and women are flesh and blood and soul, they are
different and prone to error, but diversity must be accepted as such and studied for a better
understanding of identity: this is the message that Sterne’s unfinished, though challenging,
sentimental (or rather mock-sentimental) novel conveys to the readership.