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An Althusserian Reading On Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller
Doohyun Park, Doctoral Candidate, English

This paper argues that Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller can be best understood not as the product of Nashe’s conscious design but as a historical phenomenon. On the whole this theory is explained by the Althusserian notion of ideology as the theoretical basis.

Louis Althusser’s view of ideology is that we are constituted as subjects through ideology. The Althusserian definition of ideology denies that ideology is simply the product of a conspiratorial power group. Rather the ideology is omnipresent; it inheres in every representation of reality and every social practice, and all of these qualities inevitably confirm or naturalize a particular construction of reality. His theory of ideology is useful in reading Nashe’s book, first, because the challenges to the established hierarchical order and degree of the hero, Jack, can be seen not as the reflection of a unitary world view, but as parts of a heterogeneous social process, and second, because Nashe’s response to the process is ideological.

Nashe's ideological responses to contemporary authority and epistemology and his ideological discourses are presented in the first part. The first part of the book mainly highlights the sharp ideological conflict between Jack and Surrey. The difference between Surrey's idealistic Petrarchanism and Jack's realistically chameleonic narrative shows how the text reveals the breakdown of the old order and its participation in the resulting heterogeneous ideological turomoil of the Elizabethan age. The breakdown of the social order and ideals leads to linguistic instability, which means that Nashe's language calls social stability and a well-ordered world into question.

Just as Althusser said that it is in ideology that human beings become conscious of their place in the world, so Surrey is placed and positioned in the society through such ideology as an idealistic humanist as seen by his Platonic love for Geraldine and his Petrarchan sonnet; on the contrary, Jack becomes conscious of himself as a radical realist as seen in his practical critique of the Anabaptists. In other words, ideology enables them to identify their beings as idealist (Surrey) and radical (Jack). Their expressions expose, in the Althusserian term, the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will (idealist or radical) rather than describing a reality.

The characters in the latter section of book can also be understood as the decentered subjects. The fact that they are decentered by ideology means that the humanistic faith in a human being’s rational potential (the idea of individual dignity) and spiritual essence would be broken by ideological social relations. The characters subvert the ideology of Christian humanism.

According to Althusser’s theory, a theory of history and politics based on the humanist view that there is “a universal human essence and that this essence is the attribute of each single individual who is its real subject” (For Marx 228) should be replaced by new concepts: “the concepts of social formation, productive forces, relations of production, suprastructure and ideologies” (For Marx 227). The latter sections of the text (the Venice and the Rome episodes) convey the image that there is no essential human nature. The section reveals that the consciousness and experience of human beings are shaped by social relations and institutions. The emphasis on social relation leads to an Althusserian antihumanism which replaces “the old couple individual/human essence in the theory of history by new concepts” (like political, economic and religious forces) (For Marx 229). The Althusserian antihumanism means that human beings appear merely as a support for certain impersonal forces at work which determine their activity. The antihumanism leads, inevitably, to the decentered subject.

The work veers from jest book to farce to sermon, from burlesque epic to encomium to tragedy through the use of fictional history. The incoherence of The Unfortunate Traveller can be understood by the Althusserian notion of ideology in the sense that the challenges to the relationship between God and humankind and between the temporal authority and the decentered human beings reflect the real relation between Nashe’s world and the characters.