Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson

by William C. Dowling

Overview

In this deconstructionist interpretation of a major eighteenth-century work, William Dowling analyzes Boswell's Life of Johnson as a paradigm of antithetical structure in narrative, and develops a grammar of discontinuity" for interpreting other texts as well.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691615202
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1041
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.60(d)

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Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson

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By William C. Dowling

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06455-0

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CHAPTER 1

WORLD AND ANTIWORLD

One of the last great puzzles in the serious study of eighteenth-century literature is the vast and complex structure of Boswell's Life of Johnson. If recent years have brought considerable advances in our general understanding of Boswell's literary achievement — and this now includes the journals as well as the three narratives published during his lifetime — they have at the same time brought us only to the threshold of an understanding of the Life. The Life, which seems to enclose and body forth in its pages an entire literary age, a teeming world of thought and speech and action, of high intellectual and historical drama, may be said to stand in relation to later eighteenth-century English literature much as Joyce's Ulysses stands in relation to modern literature: it is a nexus, an ideal or abstract cross-roads, of so much that is essential to its literary moment.

To say that Ulysses in some sense gives form to what we should want to call modern consciousness or modern sensibility is to introduce another puzzle: in what sense do the wanderings of Bloom and Stephen, the wise innocence of Molly, enact a drama we recognize as distinctively modern? In the case of the Life of Johnson, this sort of puzzle, at least, does not exist. The Life is not simply a work we range on our shelves with other great works of the eighteenth century, with Tom Jones or Clarissa or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for it encloses all those works: Tom Jones and Clarissa are precisely what are at issue when we hear, within the pages of the Life, Johnson debating with his company the relative merits of Fielding and Richardson; it is Gibbon, in the wake of the literary triumph marking the publication of the Decline and Fall, who along with Johnson and Boswell attends meetings of the Club.

In the same way, the Life may be said to enclose the larger intellectual and historical drama of the age to whose literature it belongs. To see Johnson's conversation in the Life as an abstract conflict with the freethinkers and philosophes of the European Enlightenment, with Voltaire and Rousseau and Hume and a hundred more, is inevitably to glimpse in the background the great sweep of ideas and events carrying Europe toward the upheaval of the French Revolution. To understand why Pope looms as so large a presence in the Life, a central character absent so to speak only by reason of his death, is to understand Johnson as a survivor of the Augustan moment, speaking, in a world where speech is itself a world, in accents growing daily more alien.

If we have begun to understand all this, it is paradoxically because we have learned to see Boswell's literary achievement in purely literary terms, to see that the world bodied forth in the Life exists on just the same terms, as problematic as literary reality itself, as the worlds of Hamlet or Paradise Lost. The older notion of the Life as a window on some actuality the atoms of which have long since dispersed, the idea of Boswell's biographical story as a mere document or record or transcript of "historical" reality, has given way to a perception of the Life as a self-contained world of motive and speech and action. The Life is a work we gaze not through but into, and it is this we mean when we say it bodies forth a world.

Yet to assert even this is to raise the problem of what we mean when we speak of the world of Hamlet or Paradise Lost or the Life of Johnson — indeed, of how we can speak intelligibly about the world of any literary work, or of literary works as composing the simultaneous order we call a literary universe. If we are doing anything more than employing crude or empty metaphors in such contexts, it is obvious that our terms must refer to something essentially true of the sort of reality embodied in literary works, or, at the furthest reach of implication, to something we intuitively perceive as being true about the ontological status of literature as a whole. And our best evidence that this is so, that our terms are neither crude nor empty (and perhaps not even metaphorical), is that they function with perfect intelligibility in critical discourse; if everything behaves as though a sign had meaning, wrote Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, then it does have meaning.

When we consider the concept of a literary world in this light, a number of considerations arise. Some, however interesting in themselves, are tangential to my present concerns. The possibility that our use of the term "world" in critical discourse is not metaphorical, for instance — as though, possessed of some immediate sense of what the world is, we were led to speak of a world of Hamlet as one speaks of the warrior as a lion or the lady as a rose — suggests that we may be using the term much as the term "space" is used in physics or mathematics: as the relation between physical space and Hilbert's n-dimensional space is not metaphorical, one might argue, neither is the relation between our world and the world of Hamlet. Yet since it can also be argued that metaphor controls relations among such concepts at a deep level, such issues promise only to detain my inquiry.

The simple observation that "world" seems perfectly intelligible when we use it to describe Hamlet or Paradise Lost raises one possibility that, while it need not keep us, must not be overlooked. This is the possibility that the concept, by virtue of its intelligibility to those who pursue literary study, may be unanalyzable, that it belongs to what Michael Polanyi, in Personal Knowledge and other writings, calls the tacit dimension of our knowledge — in this case, of our knowledge about literature. For the student of literature, as much as any inquirer, is the inhabitant of a methodological universe, and in any such universe much of what is known is discovered, as Polanyi says, "by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them." It may well be that the concept of a literary world, governed by rules invisible to those of us who use them, belongs precisely to the tacit dimension of our inquiries into literary meaning.

Even should this turn out to be so, however, it would in no way frustrate my inquiry, for there remains the question — more than enough to go on with, so to speak — of what exactly it is about literary reality that makes the concept of literary worlds intelligible. Most immediately, we are likely to guess, the question directs our attention to what modern critical theory terms literary autonomy, with which we associate a conception of literature as a self-contained sphere of reality existing separate from anything we should want to call our world. The theory of literary autonomy, and the standard objections to various elements of the theory, are too familiar to demand much comment. What is significant 'to my purpose is that the theory, on some level at least, satisfies an intuition: the world of Hamlet, whatever we mean by the term, is not the same as our world.

Though we associate the theory of literary autonomy with the classic period of formalist critical theory (the period, roughly speaking, stretching from Warren and Wellek's Theory of Literature to Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, and including such masterpieces of theoretical inquiry as Wimsatt and Beardsley's The Verbal Icon), it is worth noting that attempts to account for literature as a sphere existing separate from ordinary existence, as embodying a reality apart from the ordinary world inhabited by successive generations of men, go back at least as far as Aristotle's Poetics. This, or something like it, is what Aristotle has in mind when he says that poetry is a higher and more philosophical thing than history, what Sidney means when he says that literature gives us a golden world and nature only a brazen one, what Shelley invokes when he calls poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.

From Aristotle's Poetics to the aesthetic doctrines of Wilde, that is, we may in some sense consider the long history of western poetics as being composed of related attempts to account for an intuition of literary autonomy, as revolving around the central problem of what we mean by literary worlds or a literary universe. Viewed in this light, the interest of various poetics is precisely the way in which they manage to draw attention to various features of the problem. Thus Blake's typically brusque assertion that every work of art is necessarily a perfect unity, like Coleridge's account of organic form, takes literary autonomy for granted and directs attention to something else, the internal coherence or self-containedness of the literary world.

In the same way, the aesthetic doctrines developed by Wilde a hundred years later merely assert the autonomy of the literary universe in more extreme terms than formerly. To a generation living in the shadow of the grim concluding remarks of Pater's The Renaissance, the tragic insubstantiality of human life viewed as "the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways" made art, and especially literary art, appear in the light of a reality more substantial, more coherent and permanent, than human existence. Thus Wilde, in The Critic as Artist, describing the heroes of the Iliad: "Phantoms, are they? Heroes of mist and mountain? Shadows in a song? No: they are real. Action! What is action? It dies at the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. The world is made by the singer for the dreamer."

A conception of literature as a permanent and timeless reality existing outside the flux of atoms and unstable perceptions we call human existence is, of course, as much a literary theme as a matter of poetics. Shakespeare's "not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme," expressing a thought already old at the time of Horace, represents literature meditating on its own autonomy, gazing outward at the flux and insubstantiality of the ordinary world. This is, roughly speaking, the perspective that Wilde has transformed into doctrine: to assert that the world is made by the singer for the dreamer is to say nothing other than that the world of literature is, during the short period we exist as conscious beings, the only real world we may inhabit. Not to see this, to assume that the purposeless flux we call the ordinary world is what is real, or that the world of the Iliad or Hamlet is shadow or mist or dream, is itself to live a dream.

In any such work as The Critic as Artist, then, we find ourselves poised on an invisible line between poetics and metaphysics, gazing outward from a certain conception of literature to a glimpse of the ultimate nature of things. And it is the innocence of that gaze, the readiness of writers like Wilde to make rather breathtaking claims for the centrality of art in human life, that makes aestheticism seem now, at best, merely an important cultural episode, and at worst a body of attitudes merely curious or quaint. Yet modern critical theory, though its ostensible concern is with method rather than metaphysics, has never managed to relieve itself of a certain metaphysical burden; though it does so in ways less daring than Wilde, ways more considered and complex, it is no less concerned to explain the ontological status of literature.

And yet there has been, in the twentieth century, a genuine revolution in literary studies, a development that separates us from Wilde as dramatically as Einstein's relativity papers divide the modern physicist from his eighteenth- or nineteenth-century counterpart working and living in the universe of classical or Newtonian physics. This was the gradual discovery of a method of interpretation — one might say, without overstating the case, the emergence of a new methodological universe — that projects literature as a state of affairs mirrored in propositions about literary meaning. And like Wilde's permanent and timeless world of literary reality, literature as projected by modern interpretation is self-contained, internally coherent, and complete.

To perceive the revolution in modern literary studies as a triumph of method — the method, roughly speaking, of formal or objective interpretation — is to assign a curious place to critical theory. For now one may see that the works of greatest theoretical import were not themselves theoretical: from I. A. Richards's Practical Criticism to Cleanth Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn and beyond, they were the works that demonstrated, in a way that could be absorbed and used by students of literature, the method that projected literature as an objective state of affairs. When such works pretended to theoretical rumination, as in Richards's psychomechanical theory of literature as a sort of therapy for the central nervous system, they are likely to seem now slightly bizarre; it was on actual interpretation that they exerted so profound an influence.

In this context, such works as Warren and Wellek's Theory of Literature and Wimsatt and Beardsley's The Verbal Icon may be viewed as attempts to explain the results or consequences of the objective method in interpretation — not, that is, as breaking new theoretical ground, but as moving in the wake of a methodological breakthrough that was seen as needing theoretical justification. Thus, for instance, the long debate over any such issue as "the intentional fallacy" may be viewed as an a posteriori pondering of something that had already occurred: just as the notion of God as creator or originator of the physical universe became an expendable hypothesis at a certain point in the history of scientific method, the author, or authorial intention, had become unnecessary to explain the results of objective interpretation.

Yet the attempt to explain these results or consequences, though enormously suggestive in the first instance, was ultimately doomed to theoretical failure. To justify objective interpretation, theorists of the formal approach offered not arguments but metaphors, with the metaphorical assertion that the literary work was a "closed" form leading to endless controversy over such matters as whether interpretation could go "outside" the work in search of clues to its meaning, as opposed to remaining "inside" or adhering to an "internal" approach. The reason that such metaphors carried conviction is that, even in the eyes of those who opposed an objective approach to interpretation, they referred in some obvious way to something actually occurring in literary studies.

In avoiding any direct assertions about the ontological status of literature, formalist theory seemed to have escaped the metaphysical implications always present in traditional poetics (though the early association of the theory with T. S. Eliot's poetics of impersonality and the "new criticism" urged by the poet John Crowe Ransom made clear its affinity with such poetics). Yet in reality the metaphor of "closed" form, as much as Sidney's Neoplatonic "golden world" of art or Coleridge's "organic form," was relentlessly ontological in its implications. If the metaphor insisted on something quite new, on literature existing in relation to interpretation as an objective state of affairs, it also asserted a very traditional view of the relation between literature and the world.

There is no great mystery, then, about why formalist theory at a certain point seemed exhausted, seemed outdated or limited or inadequate to explain what was occurring in actual interpretation. For the method that the theory aimed to justify in one sense needed no justification: just as physics after Newton needed no theory of physics, only the Newtonian paradigm and an established method of experimentation and hypothesis, objective interpretation needed no theory of interpretation to explain literature as a state of affairs or object of inquiry. The metaphors of formalist theory, along with their inescapable ontological implications, were never in any genuine sense confuted or supplanted; like all metaphors posing as axioms, they simply expired as vital 'theoretical imperatives, and survive now only as exhibits in the history of critical thought.

Yet the conception of literature as an objective state of affairs remains as central today as it was in critical theory twenty-five years ago, and is really what is at issue when we speak now of the literary work as a world in itself. If we now see Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism as completing the formalist program in critical theory, for instance, it is less because of its theoretical contributions — e.g., Frye's demonstration that evaluative criticism was simply a prominent instance of the affective fallacy — than its assumption that literature exists as a universe within which every literary work may be seen as a world in relation to other worlds. This is precisely the universe literary study has undertaken to map and explain down to the present moment, a universe of infinite complexity and endless significance.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson by William C. Dowling. Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• ONE: World and Antiworld, pg. 1
• TWO: Structure and Structurality, pg. 35
• THREE: Structure and Absence, pg. 66
• FOUR: The World as Speech, pg. 98
• FIVE: Audience as Antithesis, pg. 131
• Epilogue, pg. 165
• Index, pg. 183