Tobias Smollett Novelist (review)

504 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:4 Roulston calls her last chapter "Le langage imité des livres," echoing SaintPreux in La Nouvelle Héloïse. The questions ofrepetition and imitation, crucial in the representation of the sentimental experience, are crucial in our critical efforts as well. I believe it is time to stop reading novels only in relationship to each other and to the social ideologies they embody, and to look more carefully at the complex literary culture thatthey are a part of. As Hofkosh says in the last sentence of her introduction, we must be alert to "the possibility that we can always read otherwise" (p. 12). We have "read" eighteenth-century novels in one way; let us begin looking for other possibilities. Elizabeth Wanning Harries Smith College Jerry C. Beasley. Tobias SmollettNovelist. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1998. xii + 259pp. ISBN 0-8203-1971-6. Michael Rosenblum claims in his essay on Smollett in John Richetti's recent Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1996) that "it no longer seems quite so pressing to make a case for one ofhis [Smollett's] 'neglected' novels , or to assess his achievement in relation to that of his rival Fielding's, or to ask whether the novels are best described as 'picaresque,' or romance, or satire, and in just what amalgam. At least for now, these questions, framed from the traditional perspective of 'literature,' have yielded to a different set of concerns" (p. 175). Well, I have a surprise for Mr Rosenblum. These are precisely the questions that Jerry Beasley addresses in his new book Tobias SmollettNovelist, a book frankly devoted to the task of seeing to it that Smollett's novels "might be properly estimated—and, yes, admired" (p. 5). It is nothard to see the hopes ofBeasley, the General Editor of the University of Georgia Press's series The Works of Tobias Smollett in this aspiration, or, in reading his book, to find the seasoned hand of the college teacher. Beasley's book entertains formalist concerns that may no longer charm ambitious graduate students, but it addresses, like it or not, practical concerns that these very graduate students will face in their classrooms (if they getjobs). The sheer difficulties in reading Smollett's fiction—his unorthodox narrative disjunctions, the inevitable questions about "disorganized" plots, deliberate anachronisms of time and place, mythic endings—all seem to need more attention than recent "culture" criticism, no matter how apt, provides. Tobias SmollettNovelist takes up the five novels separately, each in a chapter to itself dealing with those hurdles in reading Smollett (more or less the ones mentioned above) that the critical history of each novel has isolated as problematic. The prominent thread that runs through Beasley's individual close readings ofthe novels is his insistent consideration of the visual. He finds his model for Smollett 's narrative strategies in comparisons with the narratives in Hogarth's paintings REVIEWS 505 and prints, particularly the Hogarth progress. Drawing on Joseph Frank's theory of spatial narrative (also David Mickelsen and, of course, Mikhail Bakhtin), Beasley describes an essentially anti-Aristotelian structure for narrative, one that diminishes or subverts chronology and linearity. He argues that Smollett's irregular narrativeprocedures in his novels are deliberate experiments to give precedence to "simultaneity, or disjunction and the disordering ofevents" (p. 37). In a contemporary world that Smollett literally sees ruled by disorder and chance, the narrative method and the message are deliberately matched. In his first chapter, on Roderick Random, Beasley makes the case, via Hogarth, for the reading order of Smollett's disorder. With the necessary risk of oversimplifying Beasley's analysis, it will have to suffice to say that he compares the narrative strategy of the great social tableaux in Smollett's novel, where characters "are all gathered, like the figures in a comic history painting" (p. 58), to the narrative operations of Hogarth's tableaux in, as an instance, A Rake's Progress. Smollett's tableaux, claims Beasley, like Hogarth's, can be read individually, with no need for narrative connection to the novel's other tableaux. In this sense, Smollett 's narrative, like Hogarth's, develops synchronically: the several tableaux of Roderick...