{"id":83085,"date":"2012-11-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/an-old-fashioned-picaro\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:16:59","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:16:59","slug":"an-old-fashioned-picaro","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/an-old-fashioned-picaro\/","title":{"rendered":"An old-fashioned picaro"},"content":{"rendered":"

O<\/font>ne upon a time, and a very good time it was in many ways, people with a broad education in the humanities would routinely encounter novels like Roderick Random<\/i>.1<\/a><\/span> All round the world, students taking courses on Brit Lit had little chance of avoiding Tobias Smollett, unless they managed to track down some alternative option that allowed them to go off piste into a subject like Old Norse. He figured among the early masters of English fiction (women didn\u2019t get a look in, prior to Fanny Burney and Jane Austen). But today the syllabus of a literature program may well include film noir, graphic novels, rap or vampire videos\u2014in most schools it would be easier to get specialist instruction on fans\u2019 responses to Buffy the Vampire Slayer than on the work of, say, George Meredith. This is particularly bad luck for Smollett, who was in fact more popular among lit majors (or so it was reported) than any of the other founding fathers of the novel. But he has few liberal credentials, and he has been expelled from the canon along with some greater writers. Of all those dead white males who once arrogated eighteenth-century literature to themselves, he is now close to the deadest, since he was always the most obviously \u201cmale\u201d in his outlook and approach to writing.<\/p>\n

Why did he rank so highly with those coming to the period for the first time? One reason lies in the very circumstance that has ensured his swift dislodgment from the historical pantheon: he wasn\u2019t much of a technical innovator. Unlike Richardson, he did not divert the focus of his works to the inner life of characters, especially women. Unlike Fielding, he did not engineer meticulously organized plots, or set up elaborate mock-heroic allusions to the classics. Unlike Sterne, he did not subvert conventional expectations of narrative, twisting the time sequence and proceeding through rapid shifts in mood and linguistic register. Rather, Smollett stuck to traditional patterns of storytelling, with an uncomplicated first-person narrator in the case of early books like Roderick Random<\/i>, and a healthy dose of sex and violence. This made him an easier read for absolute beginners. It used to be said that teenagers demanded three things of a movie: nudity, damage to property, and flouting of authority\u2014all supplied by Random<\/i>, together with toilet humor. That list of requirements may have applied more to boys than girls, but then Smollett never ran any risk of being coopted into chick lit. Sometimes, indeed, he is regarded as a misogynistic writer\u2014but we shall come back to that.<\/p>\n

All these attributes of a book by Smollett can be sampled in his first novel. Roderick Random<\/i> (1748) appears as the latest volume in the excellent Georgia edition of his works, which has manfully kept going since the 1980s\u2014a fine achievement for this relatively small press in an epoch when academic publishers have had to face an unparalleled stress test. Random<\/i> was the work of a young man\u2014no more than twenty-six, though he had already seen plenty of the world, including warfare in the Caribbean region after medical training in Glasgow and a fruitless spell trying to enter the London literary world. His life took a restless course, and energy is the first quality most readers notice in the novel\u2014a proliferation of action and a remarkable verbal exuberance. The tale may not qualify as picaresque in the strictest definition, but for practical purposes that\u2019s what it is. And the narrative resembles the nature of the picaro at its heart (Roderick is the only character half-way developed): it is wild, undisciplined, excessive, wandering, inconsistent, full of itself. Since picaresque generally tells the story of a juvenile delinquent, the narrative is laced with various modes of criminality on the hero\u2019s part and, unlike Tom Jones for instance, he is never troubled by scruples.<\/p>\n

He also undergoes almost every form of chastisement imaginable, as the victim of several assaults\u2014getting mugged in the street more than once. Beyond this he is pressganged into the navy, seized by smugglers, cheated at cards, cast adrift on shore when his ship runs aground, fondled by a homosexual lord, accused of being a spy, sent to the debtor\u2019s prison, and a lot more. He catches yellow fever, that recurring scourge of the tropics during this period, and he is forced to fight two duels. A third is narrowly averted, after which Roderick thrusts his opponent\u2019s sword into \u201csomething (it was not a tansy) that lay smoaking on the plain,\u201d this time a Smollettian circumlocution for cow-dung that he would not always choose to employ. Any stray pisspot is liable to be emptied on his person. When he wishes to turn playwright, he is harshly rebuffed by the manager Marmozet, a name that conceals the identity of the great David Garrick\u2014one of many celebrities whom the quarrelsome Smollett contrived to antagonize in real life.<\/p>\n

Almost all of Roderick\u2019s dealings with women turn out disastrously until near the very end. He is tricked by a woman of the town, finds his fianc\u00e9e in bed with a man, is taken up by a sluttish bluestocking, meets a gold-digger at a politician\u2019s levee, and embarks on an affair with a young beauty who is then revealed as \u201ca wretched hag turned of seventy,\u201d who \u201cogled [him] with her dim eyes, quenched in rheum.\u201d A notorious bawd has him arrested along with his companions for retaliating after her girls rob one of the johns. At the theater he meets an apparently \u201cvery handsome creature, genteelly dressed,\u201d in reality a gin-sodden courtesan who screams at him to pay her coach-fare when he decamps. Another one-time flame relays scandalous aspersions about him to his current love. On the way to Bath he takes up with an heiress who suffers from severe bodily deformation. This is turned into a kind of joke, as usual: \u201cI perceived that Miss had got more twists from nature than I had before observed, for she was bent sideways into the figure of an S; so that her progression very much resembled that of a crab.\u201d All the same, he is momentarily tempted by the size of her fortune. In the end he wins the hand of the virtuous Narcissa, thanks to the help of her servant Miss Williams, a fallen woman on whom he had had designs when she presented herself as a fine lady. This represents just a sample of the scrapes into which Roderick is led in pursuit less of sexual pleasure than of financial security and social advancement. Hard to find a feminist message there.<\/p>\n

O<\/font>f course, the picaresque hero must give as good as he gets. In Random<\/i> he beats up several annoying people he has encountered, and he has a rival whom he\u2019s just assaulted left naked, then taken off into the custody of the local watch. The narrator makes no attempt to disguise his motives: \u201cNo body can doubt my gratification, when I had every day an opportunity of seeing my revenge protracted on the body of my adversary, by the ulcers of which I had been the cause; and indeed I had the satisfaction of having flead him alive, but another also which I had not foreseen.\u201d He also engages in a variety of sharp practices, such as forging a letter, and ultimately a fraud on his tailor, when he sells off some fine clothes for which he never paid. It is this which leads him into the Marshalsea jail, the scene of his first acquaintance with the poets, and an obvious model for the prison scenes in Pickwick Papers<\/i>\u2014as is well known, Dickens regarded Smollett as one of his most important precursors. The hero reports these feats with a certain deadpan relish, and the author\u2019s narrative method is too unsophisticated for us to know whether we are supposed to approve of these retaliatory urges. The local comedy suffices, and we simply have to take such fun and games as the way the world goes.<\/p>\n

This is certainly \u201cthe most elaborate scholarly edition of Roderick Random<\/i> yet undertaken,\u201d as the Preface a shade unnecessarily claims. For one thing, the textual editor, as usual for the series, is O. M. Brack, Jr., pretty much the best in the business, and the bibliographical content marks a great advance on anything we have had before. The annotation is full and accurate\u2014maybe too full, as it\u2019s hard to imagine someone capable of plowing through almost 200,000 words of great verbal density who would stumble over some terms explained here, like Hymen, Elysium, \u201cextasy,\u201d Torrid Zone, and Golgotha. Modern scholarly decorum requires that every word in French be translated, down to \u201csi, moi qui vous parle.\u201d All the character\u2019s names are scrutinized for a drop of implication, as \u201cJack Rattle: the surname suggests empty noise: a vacuous character.\u201d But this falls into line with the modern idea that it is better to underestimate rather than overestimate the knowledge and intelligence of your audience, so the procedure will have its defenders.<\/p>\n

A <\/font> long introduction by James Basker presupposes a slightly higher level of response, and serves its purposes all the better for this. The treatment is effective on most aspects of the book, including its biographical background, its literary genesis and its influences. Three points raised here call for discussion. First, Basker reprints as an appendix Smollett\u2019s account of a failed military expedition on Carthagena in 1741, at which the author was present and which figures early on in the novel. The narrative was published in 1756, but Basker claims to have established that it was written as early as 1744. In sum, the evidence would lead his case to prevail in a civil suit, on the clear balance of probabilities, but I don\u2019t think it reaches the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that would be needed in a criminal trial.<\/p>\n

Second, the editor seeks to placate a missing audience when he argues that \u201cFor all its male-centeredness, Roderick Random<\/i> is surprisingly attentive to the condition of women.\u201d The main reason adduced is the fact that women \u201care often granted a degree of sexual agency.\u201d This is true, but as the earlier summary indicates, they generally use this freedom as a license for deception or extortion. Basker concludes that \u201cSmollett is not Austen, but there is here an intuitive understanding of the ways that women are subjugated in his world and the kinds of injustice and suffering that they endure as a result.\u201d Others might take the view that most of the women are as unjust and exploitative as the men, and that they exist as rough caricatures rather than sympathetic studies of the female condition. Similarly, when Roderick finally achieves prosperity after a slaving trip from Guinea to Buenos Aires, and writes, \u201cOur ship being freed from the disagreeable lading of Negroes, to whom I had indeed been a miserable slave\u201d (as ship\u2019s surgeon), the note reads, \u201cRoderick\u2019s ironic (and tasteless) play on the word \u2018slave\u2019 and his pronounced aversion to the actual conditions of the trade again signal his, and perhaps Smollett\u2019s, uneasiness about the ethics of traffic in slaves.\u201d Perhaps. Basker knows more about slavery in eighteenth-century literature than anyone, but some will miss any sense of irony here, since the author has never convincingly distanced himself from the narrator.<\/p>\n

Last, Basker asserts that the novel \u201cdaringly expanded the possibilities of fiction,\u201d not just for writers such as Dickens and Melville, but also for twentieth-century writers. He cites names such as Conan Doyle, Faulkner, Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Burgess, Vonnegut, and John Barth. Some of these made approving noises once or twice, but display no influence of any substance in their own work. Barth especially did find in Smollett a useful stalking horse, but even he reworked his model towards satiric and debunking ends. As for Orwell, he is selectively quoted, and actually gave a mixed verdict. He wrote that \u201cInevitably a great deal that [Smollett] wrote is no longer worth reading, even including, perhaps, his most-praised book, Humphrey Clinker<\/i>,\u201d and though he praised Random<\/i> highly, he called Smollett \u201ca writer of long, formless tales full of farcical and improbable adventures,\u201d not what modern academic defenders of the novels tend to assert. Perversely, Orwell\u2019s essay on \u201cScotland\u2019s Best Novelist\u201d omits all mention of a vastly more influential figure in the history of the novel, Walter Scott.<\/p>\n

The point is worth laboring, since Basker uses the authors that he cites to support an earlier judgment: \u201cIn 1814 William Hazlitt, in one of his most prescient comments, said that in contrast with Tom Jones<\/i>, Roderick Random<\/i> had \u2018a much more modern air with it.\u2019 The twentieth century would bear him out.\u201d Well, possibly: but to make a proper comparison we need to set it alongside of Basker\u2019s list of the many creative writers from Coleridge to Kingsley Amis who have spoken in equally glowing terms of Fielding. (And Dickens christened his most promising son Henry Fielding, as well as others named for Bulwer Lytton, Alfred Tennyson, Walter Landor and Sydney Smith\u2014but none was called Tobias Smollett.) Even Ford Madox Ford, who harbored a strong distaste for Tom Jones,<\/i> acknowledged its centrality to the art of fiction in English. As did Virginia Woolf, with her dry comment in an essay on modern fiction, sending up unspoken assumptions about progress within the novel: \u201cWith their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better, but compare their opportunities with ours!\u201d<\/p>\n

One reason that students often prefer Smollett lies in his unwillingness to impose anything resembling a distinct form on his material\u2014characters like the Welsh pharmacist Morgan are brought back in the manner of Bob Newhart\u2019s neighbors Larry, Darryl, and Darryl to reprise their amusing catchphrases, but they don\u2019t supply any larger coherence, as does the lawyer Dowling when he flips in and out of the plot in Tom Jones<\/i>. Such formlessness is easily taken for brave resistance to convention. It takes time to discover the purpose of Fielding\u2019s symmetries and repetitions in setting up the providential drama shadowing the external action, just as it requires patience to trace the buried connections spread across the interminable spaces of Clarissa<\/i> and readerly skill to tease out the wonderful interanimation of separate threads in Tristram Shandy<\/i>. Smollett was a major talent who appealed to generations of readers and writers, and Roderick Random<\/i> is up to the very best he ever produced. He doesn\u2019t need investing with a bogus and special \u201cmodernity\u201d to regain, or retain, his audience at the present day.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

1<\/a> The Adventures of Roderick Random<\/i>, by Tobias Smollett, edited by James G. Basker; University of Georgia Press, 640 pages, $89.95.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On The Adventures of Roderick Random<\/i> and Tobias Smollet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1658,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[635],"department_id":[563],"issue":[2984],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":10,"value_formatted":10,"value":"10","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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