6 - Double jeopardy: the provenance and reception of Jubilate Agno

Summary

For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the name of the Lord.

Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, B 1

In being confined to an asylum, Christopher Smart suffered a dramatic shrinking of his own prospects – indeed, something akin to homelessness. like homeless people, at any rate, he had to endure a peculiar limbo, typical of homelessness, between public and private space. Smart was at once confined to a quasi-public space – one where, indeed, madhouse tourists apparently passed by him “on their tour,” as he bitterly writes – and yet largely excluded from the public sphere of communication. Stigmatized as mad for praying loudly in public, Smart had lost much of his own privacy and his status as a public man of letters.

The history of such confinement and stigmatization offers an essential context for understanding Smart's rhetorical strategies in Jubilate Agno. By Smart's time, a profound privatization and medicalization of madness was well underway. Much of Jubilate Agno, indeed, may be seen as a response precisely to the new understanding of “madness.” I refer not to the history of a disease, a timeless psychiatric entity, but to the history of a label, a reified category: that “madness,” strategically opposed to “reason,” whose career Michel Foucault traces in Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique.