Satiric Method and the Reader in Sir Launcelot Greaves

Satiric Method and the Reader in Sir Launcelot GreavesDaniel Punday Tobias Smollett is best known for his picaresque social satires, such as Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker. Critics have generally considered Sir Launcelot Greaves a failed experiment, an unhappy mixture of his characteristic mode with chivalric romance conventions.1 Although Smollett seems to use his hero as a satiric mouthpiece whose exemplary nature implicitly criticizes the age,2 critics have considered the clash between romantic and picaresque world views a major fault in the novel and its satiric methods. This essay will attempt to explain how this clash functions as part of the overall satiric method of the novel. That Smollett both uses and criticizes the romantic conventions embodied by Greaves should not surprise us; interpretive tradition has assumed that Greaves is careless because of the conditions under which it was conceived and executed, and consequently critics have failed to investigate the conflict between romantic 1 See in particular Robert Giddings, The Tradition ofSmollett (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 127— 39. Although Robert Donald Spector defends Greaves in a number of ways, he nonetheless censures its satiric method. See Robert Donald Spector, Tobias George Smollett, updated ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1989), pp. 85-103, esp. 92-97. 2 James Beattie provides an early example of this tendency: "Sir Launcelot Greaves is of Don Quixote's kindred, but a different character. Smollet's [sic] design was, not to expose him to ridicule; but rather to recommend him to our pity and admiration. He has therefore given him youth, strength, and beauty, as well as courage, and dignity of mind, has mounted him on a generous steed, and arrayed him in an elegant suit of armour. Yet, that the history might have a comic air, he has been careful to contrast and connect Sir Launcelot with a squire and other associates of very dissimilar tempers and circumstances." "On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition," Essays (Edinburgh, 1776), pp. 350-51. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 2, January 1994 170 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION and picaresque perspectives. Such a clash is, in fact, part of the definition of the picaro; as Ronald Paulson suggests: "In a sense the picaro represents ... an ironic structure embodied in a character: a prudential awareness is joined to a moral obtuseness. Lázaro does not see the truth, but his peasant cunning makes him see something close to it, and so his observations betray himself and his surroundings simultaneously."3 While Greaves clearly does not have "peasant cunning," I will suggest below that he does have a dual nature—as critic and as satiric butt in his own right. The critical failure to recognize this dual role and integrate it into interpretation of the novel has led to a perception of the novel and its methods as sloppy and piecemeal. Greaves's seemingly random adventures reiterate a basic theme— the problematic and antagonistic relationship between social roles and individual personality. By adopting the highly formal code of knighterrantry in order to expose individuals who fail to be socially responsible, Greaves attempts to reaffirm the balance between the social and personal. Greaves's dual nature—as a critic upholding the connection between such external forms and the self, and as a character who is defined by just such a formal role—is a way of obviating a problem central to Smollett 's satiric method. For Smollett, the formal relations constituted by the text can, like social roles, seem cut off from their "personal" meaning to the reader. Greaves's dual role partially enables Smollett to collapse the distinction between the satirist and the objects of that satire. Yet Smollett must overcome a far greater barrier—that between the lesson of the text and its application in the real world of the reader. We will see that Smollett finds the solution to this problem in the very writing and publishing context that critics have assumed accounted for the novel's carelessness. The bulk of the satire in Greaves exposes the way in which society fails to live up to the hero's expectations. This focus has led critics to assume that the novel's adventures are a loosely joined collection of Smollett...