30/3/10 seminar with Jesper Gulddal

Jesper Gulddal’s lecture of the 30^th of March was entitled “To rouse the CIVIL power from its present lethargic state” Mobility, Identity and the Literary Passport Regime in Henry Fielding. Gulddal explained in his introduction that his lecture was a part of a greater study he is undertaking which examines the ways in which mobility and identity are used and presented in literature. The passport is an image that he uses to illustrate these ideas. Gulddal views the passport as being a tool that is used to control an individual’s movement and stabilise their identity.

Gulddal used biographical criticism to analyse Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones. Biographical criticism uses the life of the author in order to extract meaning from their texts. Gulddal conceded that, at first glance, using biographical criticism to read Tom Jones might appear to be problematic. The professional and artistic lives of Henry Fielding appear to be in conflict with one another, however Gulddal argued, “we should study the two together and see how they become productive.” In studying both identities of Henry Fielding Gulddal has produced a reading of mobility and identity in Tom Jones that reconciles both facets of Henry Fielding’s life.

Henry Fielding was both a magistrate and a politically active member of society, writing political pamphlets. As a magistrate his job was to enforce the law and uphold social order. As a writer of political pamphlets Fielding was concerned with what Gulddal referred to as the “Unsettled Poor” an emerging class of travelling workers, vagrants, gypsies etc. The transient lives of the “Unsettled Poor” made them difficult to police, as they could easily evade the law by anonymously moving between towns. Gulddal also cited Fielding's pamphlet “An Enquiry into the Causes of Late Increase of Robbers” to illustrate Feeling’s concern with the ability of criminals to conceal their identities and evade the law. In his life as a magistrate and political writer Fielding campaigned for law reforms that would perform the same functions as passports, restricting the movement of the unsettled poor and thus stabilising their identities.

In contrast to his political and legal work, Feeling’s literary work, Tom Jones, points to a man who is fascinated with social disorder. The major characters are outlaws and members of the “Unsettled Poor’. Gulddal refers to Bakhtin’s theory or the chronotope, pointing out that much of the novel’s action occurs in places where the unsettled poor converge; on the road and in inns and in masquerades, a place in which identities are deliberately concealed. In short Tom Jones is a novel that is driven by the same characters and concepts that Fielding found so disturbing: the ease with which poor and criminal members of society could move between towns and the notion of identities being changeable and concealable.

Gulddal resolves the conflict between Fielding’s life and Fielding’s art by focusing on the narrator of Tom Jones. He argued that the narrator guides the narrative arc to an ending in which the protagonist has discovered his true identity and established himself in a stable, middle class life. Gulddal therefore identifies the narrator’s voice as a literary passport because it directs the reader to a conclusion in which both major themes of the novel, mobility and identity are stabilised. By utilising his own theory of the literary passport Gulddal is able to defend his use of biographical criticism as a reading practise. In using the two theories in partnership one can understand the life of the author through his novel and the novel through the life of its author.