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 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. Lazaro 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 knight-errantry 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's satiric targets. Even critics who have tried to find unifying strands in the novel's themes and satiric thrusts have presupposed vagueness in Smollett's intention. David Evans, for example, suggests that "Greaves is, from the outset, presented as the representative of two sets of ideals, the spirit of chivalry and benevolent squirearchy."⁴ Evans assumes that Greaves is at best a loosely cohesive work, and hence open to Smollett's casual inclusion of any material that can be criticized by these general ideals. I will argue throughout this essay, however, that Smollett had a much more specific satiric intention, and that this intention reveals not only consistency of message, but purposeful development of characters and plot, and careful and often subtle integration of satire and narrative method.

Greaves's adventures continually reveal the disjunction between individual personalities and the social roles and positions they have adopted. Greaves himself does not represent an ideal conjoining of individual personality and role, but rather a character whose search for the perfect juxtaposition of the two reveals not only the hypocrisy of many of the characters, but, more important, the problems in the very nature of his quest. Greaves himself explicitly expresses his central concern in what may be the novel's clearest example of this disjunction of personality and role, Justice Gobble: "You have abused the authority with which you were invested, intailed a reproach upon your office, and, instead of being revered as a blessing, you are detested as a curse among your fellow-creatures. This, indeed, is generally the case of low fellows, who are thrust into the magistracy without sentiment, education, or capacity" (pp. 97-98). This passage, which occurs near the end of Greaves's wandering and caps the longest of his adventures, makes explicit much that is merely implied in other episodes. Greaves is not the upholder of virtue in general, nor is he the model of the ideal squire; rather he is preoccupied with chastising those who venture above their social level and generally with asserting that public and social positions must be filled by the proper persons.

Smollett's concern for characters who do not fully conform to the social roles they have adopted is equally evident in Greaves's more minor and seemingly incidental adventures. Greaves's first adventure, that with the army recruits, is a somewhat less obvious manifestation of this general theme:

The knight's steed seemed at least as well pleased with the sound of the drum as were the recruits that followed it; and signified his satisfaction in some curvettings and caprioles, which did not at all discompose the rider, who, addressing himself to the serjeant, "Friend, said he, you ought to teach your drummer better manners. I would chastise the fellow on the spot for his insolence, were it not out of respect I bear to his majesty's service." "Respect mine a—! (cried this ferocious commander) what, d'ye think to frighten us with your pewter pisspot on your scull, and your lacquer'd potlid on your arm?" (p. 48)

Here Greaves's ideal definition of the army—a definition which specifies both the role and the person proper to it—conflicts with the actual personalities who fill the roles. The same problem lies behind another of what seem to be merely random adventures included for the sake of action: Greaves's encounter with the London haberdashers. Greaves, when told that Crabshaw had fought with these officers because they "insisted upon having for their supper the victuals which Sir Launcelot had bespoke" (p. 107), chastises Crabshaw rather than defending his right to his dinner (p. 108). Soon, however, these officers are revealed as "'prentices to two London haberdashers" (p. 110), whose improper assumption of a higher social role the narrator points out: "In a word, the two pseudo-officers were very roughly handled for their presumption in pretending to act characters for which they were so ill qualified" (p. 111). Again, Greaves's expectation that people should be properly fitted for their public roles and thus deserve respect is confounded, and the passage satirizes the presumption.

Greaves's discomfort with the discrepancy between public role and private self began long before his knight-errantry. From the first Greaves had trouble "fitting into" normal society. Critics often attribute this failure to Greaves's selflessness and rejection of a corrupt society, but Greaves's dissatisfaction seems to be with the nature of social roles themselves. As Paul-Gabriel Boucé suggests in characterizing Greaves's madness: "The hero is driven by a (potentially) tragic 'Até,' a kind of arrogance of the Good, which leads him to wish to take the law into his own hands."⁵ Greaves cannot accept a role in society and function according to its models of behaviour. Sir Everhard Greaves, although pleased by his son's "feeling heart" (p. 23), is angered by his inability to distance himself from the object of his beneficence: "the old knight could not bear to see his only son so wholly attached to these lowly pleasures, while he industriously shunned all opportunities of appearing in that superior sphere to which he was designed by nature, and by fortune" (p. 24). Young Greaves rejects the "superior sphere" not because of his charitable impulses, but because he dislikes those who treat social roles as superficial rather than a matter of personal responsibility and self-definition: "He had no communication with your rich yeomen; but rather treated them and their families with studied contempt, because forsooth they pretended to assume the dress and manners of the gentry.… I have heard Mr. Greaves ridicule them for their vanity and aukward imitation; and therefore, I believe, he avoided all concerns with them, even when they endeavoured to engage his attention" (p. 21).

To whatever degree Greaves criticizes such imposters, this example suggests that the problem goes far beyond the case of a few people aspiring above their natural position. As young Greaves's attempt to reject the entire social system suggests, individual personalities inevitably fail to coincide with their social roles. The flaw is in the nature of social roles themselves. The impetus for Greaves's knight-errantry—his frustrated love for Aurelia Damel—suggests how the nature of social roles problematizes authentic individuality. Greaves tells Aurelia immediately after her rescue from the runaway coach, "What I have done (said he) was but a common office of humanity, which I would have performed for any of my fellow-creatures: but, for the preservation of miss Aurelia Darnel, I would at any time sacrifice my life with pleasure" (p. 32). The distinction Greaves makes here is the one I have pointed out in the examples above—that between the personal and the social self, the genuine identity and the social or public role the individual has adopted. Previously Greaves rejected the entire social system with its formally defined network of roles. With this rejection came a kind of loss of self; among the peasants Greaves submerges his personality to become a generic force of good. Aurelia represents the individual desires rejected in his decision to live among the common people, where he could be benevolent without ever addressing the issue of his own proper place and identity. Aurelia thus has the potential to reintroduce Greaves to the social world and to re-establish his individuality. Yet, exactly at this point the wider problem of social roles becomes apparent. Greaves meets opposition to his romance:

In the mean time, the mother [of Aurelia] was no sooner committed to the earth than Mr. Greaves, mindful of her exhortations, began to take measures for a reconciliation with the guardian. He engaged several gentlemen to interpose their good offices; but they always met with the most mortifying repulse: and at last Anthony Darnel declared, that his hatred to the house of Greaves was hereditary, habitual, and unconquerable. (p. 35)

At issue here is the validity of Anthony Darnel's generalized hatred of the "house of Greaves"—a hatred which depends solely on Sir Launcelot's social role within his family. Taking up a place in society means accepting a social role; severed from the personal, that role is often defined by the manipulation and play of external social forces beyond the control of the individual.

The asylum and prison exemplify the power of social definition taken to the extreme. In the asylum the capacity of society to thrust an individual permanently into an external role becomes complete. Both Greaves (pp. 186-87) and the narrator note: "The melancholy produced from her confinement, and the vivacity of her resentment under ill-usage, were, by the address of Anthony, and the prepossession of his domesticks, perverted into the effects of insanity; and the same interpretation was strained upon her most indifferent words and actions" (pp. 115-16). As we will see below, language is one of the primary means by which people are reduced to social, external definitions. Aurelia is an asylum inmate and, as such, any personal deviation from this role is read simply as evidence of that role. Mrs Clewlin makes essentially the same point about the degree to which social roles can completely and inescapably define a prison inmate:

Then Felton, advancing to his opponent, "Madam (said he) I'm very sorry to see a lady of your rank and qualifications expose yourself in this manner.—For God's sake, behave with a little more decorum; if not for the sake of your own family, at least for the credit of your sex in general." "Hark ye, Felton, (said she) decorum is founded upon a delicacy of sentiment and deportment, which cannot consist with the disgraces of jail, and the miseries of indigence." (p. 167)

Here the external requirements of society and its laws render impossible what has been throughout the novel the prime measure of personal quality—sentiment and decorum. Prison, like the asylum, confirms an individual within a role which is inescapable, invalidating the possibility of exposing the personal beneath the external roles and determinants. This nightmarish possibility represents the greatest danger and logical end of the generally destructive social roles and codes.

Greaves's quest responds to this danger and is paradoxically consistent with the problem of social roles underlying it. Greaves adopts the most codified and externally defined role he can find—that of a knight-errant—and fully submerges his identity. While this role seems to validate the personal attraction of Greaves to Aurelia, the code in fact places that affection within a system that strips it of all personality. Greaves says to Crowe, "She [a knight's mistress] must, in your opinion, be a paragon either of beauty or virtue" (p. 106). In a sense, Greaves's knight-errantry simply returns to his pre-Aurelian days of personality-less beneficence. Greaves attempts to make this return, however, with an increased recognition of the impossibility of perfectly conjoining personality and social role. As he says to Ferret early in the novel, "I do purpose (said the youth, eying [Ferret] with a look of ineffable contempt) to act as a coadjutor to the law, and even to remedy evils which the law cannot reach; to detect fraud and treason, abase insolence, mortify pride, discourage slander, disgrace immodesty, and stigmatize ingratitude" (p. 14). All of these evils which Greaves will attempt to remedy are personal ones, and by adopting the knight-errantry code he paradoxically attempts to force the characters he encounters to understand and realize the personal consequences of abstract social rules and roles.

Greaves's two longest adventures—those with Farmer Prickle and Justice Gobble—best exemplify his general method of criticism. All of Prickle's relationships derive directly from social duties or, like his "personal" knowledge of the lawyer, are extensions of social and legal codes. The farmer's position in this society relies solely on a formally constituted role: "Others might be easily influenced in the way of admonition; but there was no way of dealing with Prickle, except by the form and authority of the law" (p. 140). In order to force Prickle to recognize the personal consequences of these roles, Greaves puts Prickle into a situation where he cannot rely on such legal constraints and must instead try to find someone to stand bail for him not through social obligations but from personal feelings:

Prickle happened to be at variance with the innkeeper, and the curate durst not disoblige the vicar, who at that very time was suing the farmer for the small tythes. He offered to deposit a sum equal to the recognizance of the knight's bail; but this was rejected as an expedient contrary to the practice of the courts. He sent for the attorney of the village, to whom he had been a good customer; but the lawyer was hunting evidence in another county. The exciseman presented himself as a surety; but he not being an housekeeper, was not accepted. Divers cottagers, who depended on farmer Prickle, were successively refused, because they could not prove that they had payed scot and lot, and parish taxes. (pp. 142-43)

Although Greaves may seem simply to be legally out-manoeuvring Prickle, he is in fact specifically forcing Prickle into a situation where legal duties (and the social roles and codes behind them) do not apply, and in which personal respect operates. In the end Prickle is found to be "so little respected, that [he] cannot find sufficient bail" (p. 144).

A second example, Greaves's encounter with Justice Gobble, makes Greaves's method of dealing with those characters who misuse social roles even more explicit. Evans has suggested that Greaves's action in confronting Gobble is "satiric," since, rather than attempting a kind of "detailed legal argument and recommendations for proper punishment,"⁶ it exposes Gobble's failure to measure up to the ideal Greaves represents. Given the relation between language and social roles, however, there may be a different method in Greaves's "satire": Greaves applies the legal terminology and Gobble's polite cliches to personal circumstances. Gobble comments:

if I had a mind to exercise the rigour of the law, according to the authority wherewith I am wested, you and your companions in iniquity would be sewerely punished by statue: but we magistrates has a power to litigate the sewerity of justice, and so I am contented that you shoulds be mercifully dealt withal, and even dismissed.

Greaves rejoins:

If I understand your meaning aright, I am accused of being a notorious criminal; but nevertheless you are contented to let me escape with impunity. If I am a notorious criminal, it is the duty of you, as a magistrate, to bring me to condign punishment; and if you allow a criminal to escape unpunished, you are not only unworthy of a place in the commission, but become accessory to his guilt, and, to all intents and purposes, socius criminis. (p. 93)

In this passage Greaves does not hold up an ideal, but instead applies Gobble's cliches and abstract role to the practical and personal situation, and assigns Gobble an interpersonal relationship with the criminal, socius criminis.

The problematic effect of social roles and the resulting need to stress the personal and individual behind these roles is Smollett's satiric point. Yet, as Greaves's adoption of the knight-errantry code suggests, the hero does not always fully realize or articulate this point. We must now turn to the relation between the hero and this satiric message, and to the "rhetoric" of this satiric point.

Critics have generally assumed that Greaves is simply a mouthpiece for Smollett. Ronald Paulson, for example, suggests that Greaves, like Roderick Random, is a "satiric observer who recognizes, reacts, and rebukes." Yet Greaves is largely a passive hero, a lightning rod⁷ which attracts and sets off the action and a great deal of the satire; as Tuvia Bloch says, Greaves performs an "essentially catalytic function in the episodes."⁸ Very rarely does Greaves himself punish anyone; he generally allows his adversaries to bring retribution upon themselves. We might take as an example Farmer Prickle, whose punishment is simply to have "received a broken head, and payed two and twenty guineas for his folly" (p. 145)—neither of which punishments was initiated by Greaves. Similarly, Greaves's "satiric" pronouncements about his various adversaries are made only after they have initiated the encounters and revealed their own flaws. Greaves's comments in the case of Gobble are paradigmatic: although the hero's assertions certainly are "satiric," they derive from Gobble's own statements, and simply reveal the flaws already implicit in them. We might take as another example Greaves's encounter with the London haberdashers or the army recruits: in both cases, his adversaries reveal their abuse of their offices long before Greaves himself comments on the scene. Greaves's adoption of the externally determined role of knight-errantry encourages other characters to reveal their own prejudices: they are willing to rely on external roles and rules which they might suppress in the presence of a less easily defined character. The self-revealing quality of the episodes appears to be central to Smollett's satiric method, and related to his basic methods of characterization and his relationship with the reader.

Character language most clearly and pervasively manifests this self-revealing quality. Throughout the novel characters get "caught up" in language. Tom Clarke's use of legal language exemplifies this tendency: "In other respects, he piqued himself on understanding the practice of the courts, and in private company he took pleasure in laying down the law; but he was an indifferent orator, and tediously circumstantial in his explanations" (p. 2). The importance of his circumstantiality becomes clear when we examine its effects on Clarke's general speech:

"Perhaps (said Tom) I do not make myself understood: if so be as how that is the case, let us change the position; and suppose that this here case is a tail after a possibility of issue extinct. If a tenant in tail, after possibility, make a feoffment of his land, he in reversion may enter for the forfeiture. Then we must make a distinction between general tail and special tail. It is the word body that makes the intail—there must be body in the tail, devised to heirs male or female, otherwise it is a fee-simple, because it is not limited of what body. Thus a corporation cannot be seized in tail. For example: here is a young woman—What is your name, my dear?" "Dolly," answered the daughter with a curtsy. "Here's Dolly—I seize Dolly in tail—Dolly, I seize you in tail."—"Sha't then," cried Dolly, pouting. (p. 5)

This passage shows Smollett's most important method of revealing the disjunction between the formal and the personal at the heart of Greaves' s satiric message. A highly abstract character language is recontextualized within a very physical and even scatological perspective, forcing us to see the social as something imposed on and suppressing the personal.

Timothy Crabshaw, virtually an emblem of physicality, is one of Smollett's primary devices for undermining such languages. Crabshaw enters the novel when he interrupts Greaves's story with a groan (p. 9). Crabshaw immediately translates into very physical terms the medical jargon of Fillet's having "performed the operation of phlebotomy" (p. 9) and Crowe's naval metaphor "for, if so be as he had not cleared your stowage of the water you had taken in at your upper works, and lightened your veins, d'ye see, by taking some of your blood, adad! you had driven before the gale" (p. 11). "What, then you would persuade me (replied the patient) that the only way to save my life was to shed my precious blood? Look ye, friend, it shall not be lost blood to me.—I take you all to witness, that there surgeon, or apothecary, or farrier, or dogdoctor, or whatsoever he may be, has robbed me of the balsam of life" (p. 11). Crabshaw deals similarly with the apothecary later in the novel:

When [Greaves] inquired about the health of his squire, this retainer to medicine, wiping himself all the while with a napkin, answered in manifest confusion, That he apprehended him to be in a very dangerous way, from an inflammation of the pia mater, which had produced a most furious delirium. Then he proceeded to explain, in technical terms, the method of cure he had followed; and concluded with telling him the poor squire's brain was so outrageously disordered, that he had rejected all administration, and just thrown a urinal in his face, (p. 132)

Similarly, Crowe's "involuntary impulse" implies a barely suppressed physicality beneath his nautical dialect.⁹

He was an excellent seaman, brave, active, friendly in his way, and scrupulously honest; but as little acquainted with the world as a sucking child; whimsical, impatient, and so impetuous that he could not help breaking in upon the conversation, whatever it might be, with repeated interruptions, that seemed to burst from him by involuntary impulse: when he himself attempted to speak, he never finished his period; but made such a number of abrupt transitions, that his discourse seemed to be an unconnected series of of unfinished sentences, the meaning of which it was not easy to decypher. (p. 2)

As these examples of character language suggest, the resurgence of the physical occurs continuously, forcing the reader to see the social as imposed on the individual. The dialectic between the formality of language (as representative of social roles) and the "deconstruction" or recontextualization of that code by physicality is inescapable. The process by which a character comes to be seen as a complete person by others (and by the reader) entails the dialectic between the assertion and deconstruction of language, between roles and codes. The vivid characterization, for which Smollett is often praised, is partially derived from the "personalization" of a more abstract and informal mode of speech. Personalization comes about through the recontextualizing move from the formal to the physical. Crabshaw is clearly the most physical of Greaves's characters, but that very physicality tends to take him out of contact with other characters; he misses, for example, the reunion with Greaves because of his absorption with the impending death of his horse, Gilbert. Crabshaw is a kind of abstraction, and virtually drops out of the novel and contact with other characters because he is unable to go through this very process of construction and destruction of the formal that leads a character to become "known" both to the other characters and to the reader. Greaves and the reader can know Crowe and Clarke much more intimately because they use (and fail to use) highly formal languages; they thus become Greaves's rescuers and friends.

This general method of personalization is part of Smollett's characterization of Greaves as well. Throughout the novel the hero's formal chivalric role is undermined by his madness; a mental state which, like Crowe's self-destructing language, clearly has overtones of the physical: "These last words were pronounced with a wildness of look, that even bordered upon frenzy" (p. 16).¹⁰ Greaves, Crabshaw, and Crowe have similar animalizing reactions to an attempt to take on completely the "generic" form of knight-errantry. Crabshaw, for example, returns to "Greavesbury-hall, where he appeared with hardly any vestige of the human countenance, so much had he been defaced in this adventure" (p. 47). Similarly Crowe after his first encounter "had no remains of the human physiognomy" (p. 140) and only "regained in some respects the appearance of a human creature" (p. 159) after he had more or less decided to give up knight-errantry. Even Greaves becomes "unnatural" at the mention of Aurelia Darnel, whose love forms the heart of his knightly code (p. 130). In all these cases, adopting knight-errantry entails a correspondingly heightened physicality which deconstructs and recontextualizes that formal role.

Greaves needs to give up his adopted formal role both to succeed in his quest, and for the reader and the other characters to come to know him fully. That the dialectic between establishing and deconstructing a formal role or code is the basis for personal understanding of a character has complex ramifications for the reader's overall interaction with the work of fiction. Smollett avoids presenting Greaves as a character who (like Crabshaw) is simply a figure or ideal by making him grow towards the end of the novel. But another side to Greaves's role in the novel complicates the situation. How can the reader avoid seeing the work's message as a "thing" whose origin is external to any direct personal interaction with the reader, and constituted with the generality of a social law beyond the inescapable barrier between fiction and reality? In a sense, Crabshaw seems impersonal in part because we never see beyond his role in the novel; how does the novel's satiric message transcend its "impersonal" role in the text?

Smollett needs both to unify the satire and, at the same time, to problematize the formal boundaries that can sever the world of the text from the world of the reader. These formal boundaries are analogous to the definitions provided by social roles; Smollett therefore needs to recontextualize his textually produced satiric "point" in the physicality of the reader. This recontextualization guides the overall satiric methods of Greaves.

Smollett realized the importance of having a hero with whom the reader can identify and who can unify the satire:

A Novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groupes, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of his own importance.¹¹

Smollett clearly signals here the degree to which a hero's realizations and experiences help to clarify and summarize the major theme of the novel. Ironically, Ferdinand Count Fathom, where this statement is to be found in the Dedication, by and large failed with its popular audience because it did not provide a "principal personage" attractive to the reader. A reviewer for the Monthly Review 8 (March 1753, 203-14) complained, "In the recital of such a wretch's exploits, can the reader be greatly interested? Or can any emotions be excited in his mind, but those of horror and disgust? And therefore of what use, it may be demanded, can such a recital prove?"¹²

We may see Greaves as a kind of reaction to this criticism. Yet the review also indirectly suggests the danger of building the satire around a single character: how does the writer make the experiences and realizations of that character relevant to the reader? By the end of the novel, when he throws off his armour and accepts the legal help of Clarke in punishing those running the asylum, Greaves seems to have realized the satirical point—the need to establish personal relations in order to make social and legal forms safe. Yet, as soon as the message of the novel and its application become associated with the hero, the author risks making this point an external "thing." Smollett must tackle this dilemma without ignoring the need for his principal personage and losing the reader's sense of authorial purpose. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Greaves was one of the first novels written for serial publication. Writing in this very new format, Smollett faced a greater need to unify the work, but also an increased consciousness of the medium in which he was writing and the physical circumstances of the readers and the text.¹³ To some extent, Smollett addressed these problems by making Greaves into a conventional character type, familiar to his readers. Yet, as critics have noted, Smollett's anticipation and characterization of the reaction of his reader is more effective.¹⁴ In characterizing these reactions, however, he also found a way out of the double bind of the need for and danger of a principal personage. Smollett sensed in this very new publishing method an increased presence and physicality in the reader. Thus Smollett made the reader a kind of gear in the machinery of the plot, and erased the distinction between the fictional message and its application in the real world.

Smollett associates the reader with two distinct elements of the novel: the forces that undermine romance convention or the simple progress of the novel, and the characters who come to know Greaves and who eventually save him. Critics have assumed that title headings and similar devices are meant to involve and sustain reader interest, and to create sympathy for Greaves. While this clearly is one of Smollett's intentions, such an explanation has blinded critics to Smollett's larger designs. The first chapter ends, "But as a personage of great importance in this entertaining history was forced to remain some time at the door, before he could gain admittance, so must the reader wait with patience for the next chapter, in which he will see the cause of this disturbance explained much to his comfort and edification" (p. 7). Critics have noted this as evidence of the fact that we are encouraged to identify with Greaves. Close examination of Smollett's address to the reader throughout the novel suggests, however, that Smollett associates the reader less with Greaves than with interruptions in the story. In the rendition of Greaves's biography, a mise-en-abime of the novel as a whole, chapter breaks are marked by emotional outbursts of impatience from the listeners, a response that Smollett associates explicitly with the reader. For example, after the characters have disturbed Clarke's telling of the story because of his digressions, chapter 3 ends, "But as the reader may have more than once already cursed the unconscionable length of this chapter, we must postpone to the next opportunity the incidents that succeeded this denunciation of war" (p. 30). Similarly, chapter 4 ends with the outburst against Clarke's "definitions … and … long-winded story" (p. 41), and again turns to the reader: "In like manner we shall conclude the chapter, that the reader may have time to breathe and digest what he has already heard" (p. 41). We may also note that Clarke's emotional reaction to seeing Greaves, which provides the break that ends chapter 2, may serve as Smollett's warning that identifying too closely with the hero will ruin the story, while at the same time, through this possibility, tentatively aligning the reader with that which stops the flow of narration.

These early chapter endings exemplify the novel's larger tendency to associate the reader with any movement away from direct romantic development focused on the hero's adventures. The practical reason is obvious: Smollett needs to encourage patience in the reader and tolerance for the temporary lack of a principal personage. When, for example, Smollett ends chapter 17 by anticipating a shift of focus to Sycamore, he says that he will "give some account of other guests who arrived late in the evening, and here fixed their night-quarters—But as we have already trespassed on the reader's patience, we shall give him a short respite until the next chapter makes its appearance" (p. 145). In another place, when Smollett takes us away from the point of view of Greaves to fill in information about Aurelia Darnel, he makes it particularly obvious that such a shift in the movement of narrative derives from the reader's needs: "Yet, whatever haste he made, it is absolutely necessary for the reader's satisfaction, that we should outstrip the chaise, and visit the ladies before his arrival" (p. 114). And again at the end of the chapter before Greaves's interview with Aurelia (chap. 14), the reader is told "but as the ensuing scene requires fresh attention in the reader, we shall defer it till another opportunity, when his spirits shall be recruited from the fatigue of this chapter" (p. 119). This is Smollett's way of justifying his cliffhanger. Yet, in this association, Smollett also begins to characterize readers in terms of their "physicality," their fatigue. Smollett develops a subtext in the novel that makes readers equivalent to the physicality that interrupts Greaves's romantic quest.

In this pattern the ending to chapter 18 stands out: "But the scene that followed is too important to be huddled in at the end of a chapter, and therefore we shall reserve it for a more conspicuous place in these memoirs" (p. 153). The directness here, while perhaps a reflection of Smollett's growing confidence in his ability to write in a serialized format, comes at a key point in the novel: in this chapter (18) Greaves first rejects knight-errantry. These examples suggest that for Smollett the reader's presence functions very much like the physicality that intrudes into character language. As Greaves repudiates his knight-errantry, the need for this deconstruction of the smooth progression of the conventional romantic/heroic narrative lessens, and the reader's associated role in the novel becomes less wrenching. Because physicality exposes the individual beneath the social role, by implication the reader becomes an important part of the process of Greaves's personalization.

The other element of the narrative that Smollett associates with the reader is somewhat less complex. We have already seen that Smollett identifies the reader with that which breaks away from the simple, romantic progression of the story. As the example of outstripping the chaise suggests, Smollett achieves much of this disruption by decentring the novel from Greaves to the peripheral characters. Essential to this decentring is Smollett's association of the reader not with Greaves, but with the characters who surround him. Unlike any of Smollett's previous novels, Launcelot Greaves opens not with the introduction of the hero, but with a description of the community into which the hero will intrude. Throughout the novel Smollett positions readers in so that they are asked not to identify with Greaves, but to react to him. Again, this technique is directly connected to Smollett's use of a new medium. He describes a particularly communal context because he anticipates his readers' increased recognition of, and hence distraction by, the medium. The second chapter establishes the position of the reader by focusing, despite the entrance of Greaves, on the group of minor characters and their perception; Smollett gives the reader no information about Greaves's thoughts or intentions that is not available to the group of fictional characters. More important, Smollett immediately sends Greaves off to bed, leaving these minor characters to join with the reader in assessing him. It is an obvious but little noted fact that Greaves does not "resume his importance" until the seventh chapter, almost a third of the way into the novel. Furthermore, much of the reader's identification with Greaves that might arise from his romantic past is forestalled by the interruptions in Greaves's story and through Crowe's burlesque identification with and imitation of the hero. All these elements help to create the context with which the reader can identify, and in which he or she can read Greaves. In this way the potential distraction which the odd context imposes upon the reader is avoided.

I suggest that this practical technique also has a more subtle application in Smollett's general satiric method. As the novel progresses, the minor characters and the reader come to know Greaves increasingly well. Initially the novel encourages the reader to judge Greaves by a literary model (the characters see Greaves at first only as an imitation of Don Quixote) analogous to social roles; eventually the novel establishes a personal relationship between Greaves, the minor characters, and the reader. That Greaves gives up his armour after he has had his meeting with Aurelia obviously suggests that Greaves has established such relationships. The circumstances of this meeting reflect Smollett's focus on personalization; even though Aurelia is soon lost again after their reunion, Greaves's madness abates because of the relationship that they have established. In order to emphasize that the loss of personal relationships is at the root of Greaves's knight-errantry, Smollett stresses the fact that Greaves believes that Aurelia ended their relationship herself. Once Greaves sees his mistake and no longer feels cut off from Aurelia, he no longer needs his armour and the formal role it provides. While this change is the central one, Greaves's reactions to the minor characters that surround him more subtly manifest this establishment of personal relations. With Clarke, Greaves has one of his first moments of human contact unmediated by role since his assumption of knight-errantry. In their reunion in the madhouse, Clarke's and Greaves's signs of affection are a climax of Greaves's movement towards personal relations:

Capt. Crowe … made no scruple of seizing [Greaves] by the collar, as he endeavoured to retreat; while the tender-hearted Tom Clarke, running up to the knight with his eyes brimfull of joy and affection, forgot all the forms of distant respect, and throwing his arms around his neck, blubbered in his bosom.

Our hero did not receive this proof of attachment unmoved. He strained him in his embrace, honoured him with the title of his deliverer, and asked him by what miracle he had discovered the place of his confinement. (p. 195)

That the novel climaxes in the madhouse is important; here society can place a person within an inescapable "role." Greaves's rescue proves that he has established the personal relations necessary to help him escape from this formal definition. Readers partake of this growing personal knowledge not only because they have been associated throughout with these peripheral characters, but also because, as contemporary readers, they would have gradually come to know the hero through the two years of the novel's serial publication."¹⁵

Relying on this implied personal relation between Greaves and the reader, Smollett juxtaposes in the asylum the two roles played by readers in order to implicate them into the satire of the novel. Clarke and Crowe get information about Greaves's imprisonment though the newspapers. While this may pass as unnoticed by a twentieth-century reader, to Smollett's original audience for whom Greaves's serial publication was a very new format, this must have been a potent metafictional device. This source of information associates Greaves's rescue both with the reader's complete personal knowledge of the hero (in their "willingness" to help retrieve Greaves from the asylum's formal definition), and, more important, with the breaking down of external forms, the crossing of the boundary between fiction and reality. This metafictional turn is only the most explicit example of a general tendency for the novel to use the reader as the "real world" which intrudes into the narrative. The reader's physicality problematizes the hermetic quality of the romantic literary world of Greaves's knight-errantry, and generally destabilizes the distinction between the world of the novel and that of the reader. We can thus see the reader as an embodiment of this deconstructive and recontextualizing physicality that contributes to Greaves's escape from the knight-errantry code and consequently makes possible personal relations. The reader is, therefore, left unable simply to dismiss Smollett's satiric point as formally determined because exactly the opposite—the insinuation of the reader in the fiction—has helped bring about this realization in Greaves.

Modern critics have failed to make the connections that would be realized by contemporary readers, and hence they have failed to understand Smollett's satirical methods. It may well be that The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves is a two-hundred-year-old joke on the critic. If, as we saw above, Smollett uses Greaves to ridicule those characters who judge the hero in terms of formal roles and thus expose their own dependence on such social definitions, why have critics consistently denounced the novel as a poor imitation of Cervantes? G.S. Rousseau suggests the problems of Smollett criticism: "I have in the past tried to make out of Smollett's narratives coherent literary forms, and I could not. Nor could others. If the new prophets of literary studies, linguistic critics exploring stylistics and poetics, can forge out of Smollett's narratives a coherent (this is not to say Jamesian) literary form replete with organic plots, probable characters, and a credible world, they have accomplished what no other school could. What then is left for criticism with regard to this author?"¹⁶ Forcing Smollett into the simple models of literary form and influence that Rousseau criticizes leads critics to condemn Greaves on the grounds of inconsistent wavering between picaresque and romantic world-views. In this essay I have tried to show that a significant part of Smollett's writing analyses such formal systems. We need not thus despair with Rousseau at the impossibility of explicating Smollett's works and methods usefully and validly. We need to turn from the models of narrow formal unity to consider the more reader-oriented methods that I have schematized in this essay. These methods use literary forms and parallels not as templates but as the material for the work's satirical reworking, and in the process demand reconsideration of, and a more complex model for, our understanding of form and unity.

Notes

¹ See in particular Robert Giddings, The Tradition of Smollett (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.

³The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 58.

⁴ Introduction to The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, ed. David Evans (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. xvi. References are to this edition.

⁵The Novels of Tobias Smollett, trans. Antonia White (New York: Longman, 1976), p. 181.

⁶ Evans, p. xviii.

⁷Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 171. Although the phrase refers to Roderick Random, Paulson's discussion of Greaves (pp. 199-200) argues that the characters are similar in this respect. See also Giddings, pp. 129-34.

⁸ "Smollett's Quest for Form," Modern Philology 65 (1967), 106.

⁹ Damian Grant suggests this, noting that "passion and energy supply the place of ordinary grammatical connection," Tobias Smollett: A Study in Style (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 96.

¹⁰ Cf. Greaves's outburst against Clarke, p. 84, and the innkeeper, pp. 128-29.

¹¹ Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. Jerry C. Beasley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 4. See also the review of The Peregrinationis of Jeremiah Grant, Esq; the West-Indian in the Critical Review 15 (January, 1763), 13-14, and James G. Basker, Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), p. 271 for the attribution of this anonymous review to Smollett.

¹²Tobias Smollett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Kelly (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 92-93.

¹³ James G. Basker suggests that public opinion and readers' reactions might have had a very direct influence on the development of the novel: "It has been established that Smollett composed the novel gradually over the two years, sometimes even dashing off an instalment only as the deadline drew near. Thus he had the opportunity to act on readers' suggestions and comments; his sensitivity to public opinion in other contexts (notably the Critical) makes it very unlikely that he would be unaffected by comments from friends or readers who wrote in" (p. 203).

¹⁴ See Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740-1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962), pp. 276-88.

¹⁵ Critics have generally assumed that Smollett's unwillingness to revise Greaves after its initial publication (unlike Roderick Random or Peregrine Pickle) is evidence of the half-heartedness with which he wrote the novel. Yet, the degree to which Smollett integrated the special circumstances of this publication into his satiric methods explains this lack of interest.

¹⁶ G. S. Rousseau, "Beef and Bouillon: Smollett's Achievement as Thinker," in Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1982), p. 90. Published originally as "Beef and Bouillion: A Voice for Tobias Smollett, With Comments on His Life, Works and Modern Critics," British Studies Monitor 7 (1977), 4-56.