A Film Canon

Roderick Random attempts to extrapolate a social realist aesthetic from the picaresque tradition, with varying degrees of success. The second half, in which Roderick searches for a wealthy wife, is quite close to traditional picaresque, throwing Smollett's primitive narrative structure and characterisation into uncomfortable relief, and forcing the reader to identity with the hyperbolic, idiotic credulity of Roderick's sidekick, Strap. However, the first half, which is more autobiographical, contains three relatively discrete sections that feel more serialistic than primitively episodic, and all capture that "sordid and vicious disposition of the world" that seems to be the cornerstone of Smollett's social realist ambitions. The first describes Roderick's early years, and represents the closest the novel has yet come to a sentimental depiction of childhood, explaining the particular place Smollett had in Dickens' library. That said, this sentimentality is offset by the designation of childhood as the genesis of the revenge ethic that forms the novel's fundamental motivating factor, frequently outpacing love in it's compulsions, and never completely distinguished from gallantry, as will occur in Peregrine Pickle. The second section describes Roderick's arrival in London, and delightfully evokes the voyeuristic fascination of the Scotch with the capital of their recently United Kingdom, as Roderick learns that bribes and favours are the only lubricant for "the snares young people are exposed to daily in this metropolis". The third section describes Roderick's early career as a naval surgeon and, combined with the second, provides an extraordinary elaboration of the diseased, disfigured eighteenth-century body, whether in the form of those panoramas of abject, visceral horror that constitute the novel's most original aesthetic gesture, Smollett's particular taste for olfactory imagery (with the result that the supposedly contemptible captain who insists upon being surrounded with perfume is perhaps not so far from the contemporary reader's requirements), or a pervasive equation of gossip with the spread of (sexually transmitted) disease. All of this is pointedly defined against the more lurid 1740s fascination with death and decay, both by an extended episode in which Roderick encounters one of its most ludicrous embodiments, and, more generally, by Smollett's comic, irreverent, bathetic tone, which is less preoccupied with affected citation (as occurs in Fielding) than abject citation, only invoking the classical corpus to curb pathetic, pedantic squabbles over credit.