Unfortunate Travellers: Fiction and Reality

Abstract

Thomas Nashe's best known work, The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton, is the most brilliant and baffling of his writings. It eludes all attempts to define its essence, as (for example) an exercise in the picaresque, in burlesque, or grotesque, because its consistency within itself has proved impossible to establish; and its moral center is as puzzling to locate as its literary kind. Jack Wilton tells his own story: Let me be a historiographer of my own misfortunes, he writes (281).1 It is the protean shape of this exuberant narrator which causes most trouble in the search for the work's identity. The unprincipled insouciance with which the page relates his practical jokes in the camp gives way to the growling and heavy moralizing on the evils of Anabaptism and then to the raptures on the spirituality of poetry. The subsequent adventures in Italy seem to be more of a piece. Wilton's sex-life (good with Diamante but terrible with the Pope's concubine) and his narrow escapes from being used for the anatomy lecture and being hanged for the death of Heraclide, are written about with a gusto that makes the work a classic of victimography. But even in this second half of the book, the instability of tone is a continuing problem. The Unfortunate Traveller seems always ready to deride the response it evokes, whether that response is laughter or disgust. Is the rape and death of Heraclide really told for laughs? Or the torture of Zadoch? Sado-comedy? Burlesque? Satire? The presentation of Cutwolfe's obsession with and glorification of revenge is powerful and moving; it is followed by the nauseating relish with which the details of his mutilation are described by Jack. Whatever is to be said of the stance of the narrator, it is easy to perceive consistency in the perpetual exorbitance of the language, in the tumbling profusion of words over-describing everything with an amplitude of grotesque