Wrestling with the weight of Tom Jones. A novel by Henry Fielding.
“There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.”
Wowzers. This book was an absolute chore to finish. I brought this in my suitcase in a trip to Kenya, adding maybe a good few hundred grams but thinking that I would have more time to read there and have a bit of focus. I opened this book on a train to Mombasa, less than shoulder to shoulder with other passengers who were very much jolly. Trains, though could be a picturesque place to read, may not be the best place for it at the best of times.
I managed to read about 200 pages of this behemoth around Mombasa and Nairobi but I couldn’t say that I enjoyed it. I don’t know. It’s either the sardonic and at times the preachy tone of Allworthy’s monologues, not to mention that the most prominent character in the book isn’t really Tom Jones as the title character, but Henry Fielding as the author of the novel. I guess I wasn’t well at that time and I couldn’t enjoy the wit, the complexity of the language and plot.
When I came back to Malaysia, I was able to read at home, over places that I usually read over coffee and that’s when I really started to enjoy Tom Jones. I think the book merits your concentration, but it is not a book to be taken too seriously. It is after all, a comedic work and it should be enjoyed as such. But I won’t lie that towards the end of this book I was exhausted with it and there had been no greater relief this year when I finished reading the introduction to the book which I left for last, which also made me appreciate the book a little bit more now knowing about Fielding’s life and career.
Tom Jones, Underdog
Allworthy, being an all worthy man, found a baby in his estate and though he wanted to bounce it off to the parish, decided to care for it and take him under his wings. They found the mother in due time, or at least a young girl who claimed to be the baby’s mother and she got an absolute ear lashing for it. Jones grew up a fair boy, he was pretty handsome. He’s also got some playmates in Allworthy’s nephew little Blifil and the neighbour’s daughter, Sophia. The former would prove to be his nemesis in the story, the latter would be the love of his life.
A sickness to the patriarch left Jones in a bit of an emotional conundrum, but when Allworthy recovered or was about to, Jones perhaps celebrated a little bit too hard. Drama was just about brewing when Sophia’s aunt, Partridge mixed up her signals and assumed that she was in love with the gimpy Blifil when in fact, she was enamoured with Jones all along. But Sophia’s supposive guardians are already caught up in the momentum and they’re in the fourth gear arranging a marriage between Sophia and Blifil.
Jones would have had no chance as he was a mere runt, a bastard even and thus had no claims over worthy Sophia’s hand. But Sophia, completely opposed to the idea of even touching Blifil with a forty foot pole decided to run away with her maid, Honour. Blifil schemed Jones’s exit from Allworthy’s protection, citing his unruly celebrations for the patriarch’s impending death.
So begins Tom Jones’s wanderings where he very briefly joined the military and a bit later, joined by the harlequin-like Partridge, who a long time ago, was accused to have fathered Jones himself. Jones in the course of his adventures, fell on in the way with women, almost crossing paths with his beloved and eventually tracking her down all the way to London. Jones has his heart set on Sophia, all others who are against him were mere impediments, including Sophia herself.
An imperfect hero laying the foundations for what comes after
I did say that we shouldn’t take this book too seriously, but at the same time we shouldn’t take Tom Jones too lightly either. This is a book that preceded Don Quixote, the Austens, the Brontës, all Dickens’s opus. In fact, it’s difficult to think of an English novel which came before Tom Jones’s publication: Richardson’s Pamela (published in Fielding’s lifetime and which he satirised in Shamela), Crusoe’s works, Behn’s Oronooko are among the more prominent names. The novel at this point in time, is still novel. Yet, the shit Fielding tried to pull is as refreshing today as any other experimental shit any contemporary writer would ever pull in this day and age.
Its refreshing nature is jarring. It is in the end a far from perfect novel, but perhaps in Fielding’s on way, perfect. Like Dickens after him, there are way, way too many coincidences which drive the plot, in a plot structure that is as messy as it is wonderful. Pulp Fiction’s got nothing on Fielding’s jumping around the past and the present, where these two barriers of time will weave in and out in a chaotic but colourful narrative. I wonder whether at the time, whether readers were blown away by these coincidences, or we are just too sanitised to appreciate coincidences from happening in the narrative?
The messiness of this narrative is necessary as it is intertwined with Tom Jones’s own imperfect nature. Jones, in the wildness of his youth, (seemingly) got a girl pregnant and in a way, defended her honour, got tangled with his “mother” by accident and had a brief yet cold affair with an older woman. All this behind Sophia’s back. But on the other hand, he is an honourable man when it comes to anything but women. Jones is principled and when he keeps Molly in mind, can remain faithful to her.
But the twisting and turning of the narrative is second only to the jarring nature of the narrator’s own voice. As mentioned, Fielding exists as his own character with the strongest voice in the book. But he is actively engaging, actively questioning the reader, labelling the readers as critics and then attacking them. I think that there has never been such direct questioning from an author to the reader as Fielding took on his readers in basically every introductory chapter.
“Bestir thyself, therefore, on this occasion; for, though we will always lend thee proper assistance in difficult places, as we do not, like some others, expect thee to use the arts of divination to discover our meaning, yet we shall not indulge they laziness where nothing but thy own attention is required; for thou are highly mistaken if thou dost imagine that we intended, when we began this great work, to leave thy sagacity nothing to do; or that, without sometimes exercising this talent, thou wilt be able to travel through our pages with any pleasure or profit to thyself.”
But Fielding’s message does not apply only to Tom Jones, but to the action of reading. Fielding challenges the readers to be thorough, to question but to question fairly and ultimately, to enjoy.
He spares no love for the critics however, in an ultra-defensive spiel of the book, calling the critics “slanderers” and that an attack on the book is really an attack on the author, and by that stretch, the author’s mother. Perhaps this is a bit over the top, but it does remind us, as readers and like me, readers who write about the books we read (no, I don’t call myself a critic), it is a reminder to read books with no expectations, even if the book has a notoriously shite reputation such as Fifty Shades of Grey or Eat, Pray, Love. Honestly yes, I would most likely read these books one day just because they’re on stupid ass book lists I’m trying to clear and that’s just my nature.
Fielding’s little intermissions before the start of each book in the novel is a meditation of the novel as a form. Jones questions not just the readers but also himself. For example, he questions himself whether it is necessary to include an introductory chapter as it was (at the time) somewhat of a convention. Though some of these introspections may seem like fillers, some of Fielding’s thoughts and questions still echoes to how we understand the novel today.
For example, in Book VII he compares the world to a stage, something that has been explored by Shakespeare but found fresh ears in the novel. It is something that will be explored much later by another English contemporary in Maugham when he wrote Theatre. Fielding also contemplated whether having knowledge of the subject matter will make the author’s writing better. It does seem like a loaded statement, but any author starts with an empty page, and though the debate goes on, one can agree that having knowledge on the subject matter does elevate the fiction. However, Fielding admits that where knowledge of the matter is missing, conjecture is necessary.
Do the right thing: philosophy and religion lock horns
In its eight hundred plus pages, Tom Jones not only explore the nature of literature and fiction, but also the nature of ethics and morality, and how man (the very, very imperfect man) interacts with these. Though we will not get into the nitty gritty of ethics and morality, the push and pull between the erudite Square and the religious Thwackum. Respectively, both are the representatives of what idealistic virtue and religious dogmatism can be when taken to the extreme. Both these characters water different plants on the same soil, becoming the early mentors for Tom Jones and Blifil. The growth of these two plants were starkedly different.
Through Square and Thwackum, we also see how these ideas can be misrepresented and exploited. Blifil, in his self-interested nature were able to use the ideas of both whenever it suits him to achieve his manipulative goals. It is the question of nature versus nurture again perhaps. Jones, the black sheep of the family, is in the core a good person. Yet Blifil, coming from similar vines became the villain of the story as he vied for Sophia’s hand (though he was not really in love with her) come what may. Both men were brought up in the same way by the same people, yet bearing different fruits. Neither of whom really followed the philosophical dwaddle of Square or the religious fanaticism of Thwackum.
Yet, these paragons of virtues were only straw men filling themselves with curated ideas; Square from his philosophical books and Thwackum from his religious doctrines. Square is no better than a debaucher as he was caught in the act sleeping around with Molly Seagrass clandestine while Tom Jones copped the blame for Molly’s pregnancy. Thwackum himself failed to show the most Christian compassion to Tom Jones when he needed it the most as Tom was being evicted from his Allworthy’s estate.
What we will know as right and wrong will continue to be debated to the end of days; a book like Tom Jones will not be able to answer this question sufficiently. However, it is from the principled actions of its protagonist that we see this righteousness, perhaps independent from morals or ethics, perhaps influenced a little from the teachings of Square and Thwackum. But the resulting Tom Jones as a man who would defend a lady in distress, who would treat the daughters of his landlady kindly and putting his friend accountable to marry one of these daughters: these are difficult actions we know to be right, regardless of philosophical or religious debates.
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I loathed the start of Tom Jones, but maybe the conditions for my reading weren’t ideal. In the end, it is not a truly difficult book (though not an easy one) but it is a book which one must follow word by word the twist and turns of the plot, and in an even more erratic manner, the author’s meanderings. Fielding speaks in a conversational tone to the reader, something that we rarely get in literature these days. But I think he does it to also keep the reader accountable, and not just merely to read.
Unfortunately, I can’t fully comply with his demands. I have a full time job and I have other books to read. There are other questions left unanswered here, such as the gender roles in the novel (the early writers such as Fielding and Defoe were delightfully feminist in their writing and though far from perfect, were ahead of their time), the context of England during the time of writing and during the time the book was set, where it seems, plenty of different people wanted different things for their country, and comparing this to other works it heavily references, such as The Odyssey. In some ways, Tom Jones is also the English Ulysses from way back when.
But as Fielding forewarned in the book, don’t pick up the book to slander it, to find faults with it. No book, no matter what their classical status may be, is perfect. As readers, we have to be forgiving of the author, unless of course they really, really, fucked up — in which case it would be our job to call them out. It is a call for us to be a better reader and we know that better readers, by nature, tend to make for better people.
