Thoughts on Eighteenth-Century Authorship,
Chiefly concerned with Samuel Johnson======================= ramblings/research1 #2, from cbier, Fri Apr 1 10:18:36 1994 --------------------------TITLE: Johnson versus Boswell
In defense of my aversion to Johnson, I will offer an example. On page 236 in Boswell's Tour To The Hebrides, this passage appears:
Dr Johnson owned he was now in a scene of as wild nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my inaccurate observations. 'There,' said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' JOHNSON. 'No, sir. It would be called so in a book; and when a man comes to look at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top; but one side of it is larger than the other.'Another mountain I called immense. JOHNSON. 'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'Consider here the differences in taste and visual accuity. Men know what a cone is and can therefore imagine the mountain more clearly by Boswell's description. On the other hand, Johnson's "considerable protuberance" could be anything ranging from our present-day large hills of garbage in landfills to Mt. Washington. Of course, the more mentally stimulating is the protuberance which leaves the reader to define for himself exactly what that is in size and shape. However, the cone shape of Boswell's description is more easily grasped. Perhaps a part of eighteenth-century authorship includes not only what the readers of the day looked for in literature, but also how each writer felt compelled to express his/her self in words. I can now safely state, since Johnson obviously liked Boswell's journal, that the conversational style and visually stimulating portrayal of people, places, and events that Boswell gives us was also an element of eighteenth-century authorship.
========================== research2 #12, from cbier, Tue May 3 12:15:46 199 --------------------------TITLE: A Johnsonian Sound-byte
Almost every man, if closely examined, will be found to have enlisted himself under some leader, whom he expects to conduct to renown; to have some hero or other, living or dead, in his view, whose character he endeavors to assume, and whose performance he labors to equal. When the original is well chosen, and judiciously copied, the imitator often arrives at excellence. . . . " (From Samuel Johnson & the life of Writing by Paul Fussell)This is taken a little out of context here because Johnson was speaking a man named Herman Boerhaave whom he (it is presumed) aspired to equal, and imitate. My insertion here is an extension of my paper, but I wonder if Boswell read this passage? If he did, I'm sure he would agree, with a smirk on his face.
========================= ramblings/research1 #3, from cbier, Thu Apr 14 10:15:09 1994 There is/are comment(s) on this message. --------------------------TITLE: Did Boswell Hide Something?
Here is an interesting tid-bit I fould in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. by James L. Clifford, on page 99.
What Boswell omits to mention is that among the passages he had transcribed from Johnson's private Prayers and Meditations was one, a year after Tetty's death, which begins, 'As I purpose to try on Monday to seek a new wife'--a fairly important piece of information, one would have supposed. But Boswell in his wisdom decides that it is better for his readers not to know about it. James L. Clifford, in his Young Sam Johnson, describes briefly . . . an interview with Elizabeth Desmoulis, in which she tells how, during Tetty's last years, Johnson would sometimes call her into his bedroom--she was in her early thirties--make her sit on his bed, and kiss and fondle her ardently, though never going any farther. This last note of Boswell's he labeled 'Tacenda'--things to be hushed up. . . . Why hush them up? Was he simply incurably conventionally minded? Did he feel a little guilty about his own compulsive infidelity to poor Margaret Boswell? Was he perhaps reluctant to make Johnson seem a little too human?This, indeed, is a topic of concern. Boswell, as author of the Life, was not an unbiased observer. In fact, one could almost call his dedication to Johnson a sort of worship. If Johnson held intellectualism and scholarly knowledge in reverence then Boswell was guilty of holding Johnson in the same esteem. Why else would he omit such a human, particularly such an eighteenth-century human, attribute from Johnson's bibliography?
I remember a part of a lecture in our Johnson & Boswell class where T. Kinsella stated that the reason most biographies fail is because they are too concerned with presenting the audience with positive and public type of information--perhaps even manufacturing information for public acceptance and approval. Was Boswell attempting to cover up Johnson's more unconventional elements so that public opinion of Johnson's higher than average morals, ethics, and intelligence would not be associated with the baseness of basic human behavior? And even though Boswell stated that he wanted to show Johnson in all colors of the spectrum, was this only to cover his desire to keep his Master's whole person suppressed and his covert mission undetected? Was part of eighteenth-century authorship the ability to, perhaps, have the gift of the pen so that he may pass a false impression in what may seem truth? This is to say that an author may tell the truth, NOT the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, because the entire truth is "too human," and so obscuring the full circle is easier than explaining the dark side. This idea is kin to the realization in life that, like what Franny Burney did in Evelina, skating around the issues is easier than frankly stating the black and white facts, for the public palate and authors private esteem.
========================== ramblings/research1 #4, from tkinsell, Tue Apr 19 14:04:26 1994 This is a comment to message 3. --------------------------COMMENT: Boswell's biographical selectivity
Cris has argued in Research1/#3 that Boswell consciously selected the details of Johnson's life, suppressing some that would have rounded out Johnson's human character. Yes, Boswell does this, but given the limits of the biographical format, any biographer must sift through details. More interesting to me is why Boswell would do this?
Cris suggests at Boswell wanted to only show the moral and 'good' side of Johnson. For the most part yes. But why?
Two contrasting abilities of eighteenth-century literature are its need to present realistic details, but also its need to teach (to be didactic). Johnson's characterization, as presented by Boswell, is filled with realistic detail. But perhaps by leaving out certain things Boswell could also teach through his characterization. So Johnson might be seen as a didactic character: one who taught in life and, strangely enough, taught even better after life because of Boswell's eighteenth- century craftsmanship.
========================== ramblings/research1 #5, from rdavis, Mon Apr 25 16:21:29 1994 --------------------------TITLE: Learning, Thinking, and Samuel Johnson
Research from: Samuel Johnson and Biographical Thinking Catherine Parke
Although teaching was not Sam Johnson's first choice as an occupation, didacticism permeates most of his writing. Johnson had an extraordinary interest in challenging and teaching his readers. Catherine Parke observed that, "As Johnson analyzed Shakespeare, so he analyzed himself" (4). Johnson echoed the opinions of his contemporaries by being very much concerned with objectivity (12). Johnson's interest in objectivity afforded the eighteenth-century reader an important role in his work.
The writers of the eighteenth century and specifically Johnson were not just thinking on the page, but were expressing their thoughts with their audience in mind. Furthermore, Johnson was not merely interested in giving his readers a "how to" guide on how to live a more moral life. Instead, he was much more interested in challenging his readers and not oversimplifying the complex situations that life often presents. Johnson knew that it was unrealistic to move his readers from innocence to experience purely by his own intellectual power. Catherine Parke felt that Johnson knew that,
. . . literature is most useful to those who know something about life . . . Literature is both temporally and topographically complex in its educational routes. (63)Instead of explicitly telling his readers the answers, Johnson hid his lessons of life within his literary writings. By doing this, he challenged his readers to think about his writing, and he provided a context for the lessons he was trying to relate. Johnson really wanted his readers to attack literature like he attacked Shakespeare. He wanted his readers to critically examine his work and then apply it to their own lives.
========================== ramblings/research1 #6, from tharteli, Tue Apr 26 10:26:22 1994 -------------------------TITLE: response to Bob
I was relieved, reading your comment on C. Park, who said writers in the eighteenth century were expressing their thoughts with their readers in mind. None of my outside research dealt with that idea, but I find that an author's awareness of audience recurs throughout most of what we have read for the class. Sometimes the awareness of audience, in some of the new prose forms makes for a kind of easy communication with the reader, but it seems to me that sometimes the writer is uncomfortably self-conscious. I think the best example of marked discomfort on the part of an author is in Johnson's Tour, when after he discourses on an "unfit" subject, the lack of proper ventilation in some Scottish homes, he says something like 'these diminutive observations seem to take away something of the dignity of writing' and that he his a little afraid of abasement or contempt by writing about such things. Johnson is here aware of audience, all of whom are possible critics, and he is aware that he has digressed from the neoclassic decorum, and he is obviously uncomfortable in this digression.
I hope I am not alone in thinking that authorship in the eighteenth century is one of the most recurrent themes and subjects in all of the literature we have read.
========================== ramblings/research1 #11, from cbier, 1189 chars, Tue May 3 13:19:21 1994 --------------------------TITLE: A View of Eighteenth-Century Literature
Finally, a decent quotation about the eighteenth-century literature we've been reading. This is from Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing by Paul Fussell.
[The] proximity of the law to literature stems from the very eighteenth-century idea that the act of literature is necessarily an act of argument, that the writer, even when he assumes the role of poet, is most comparable to a barrister arguing a case. Like the barrister, the poet is skilled more in selecting and arranging objective points with an eye to their impact on the audience, a jury of readers, than in exposing his personal singularity or unlocking his heart in public. What the advocate actually thinks about the case in hand is irrelevant: what he says about it publicly determines the failure or success.From this legal, rhetorical, and affective conception of writing emerge many of Johnson's most impressive literary perceptions. (46)This is an idea I started to play with in my paper but too late to insert it into my "text." I find that many of the moral writings, and even a lot of the renaissance works that I've read contain the same conceptions.
========================== ramblings/research1 #12, from cferrett, Tue May 3 13:42:52 1994 --------------------------TITLE: Writing on Greatness
In The Achievement of Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate paraphrases Johnson: "almost every writer finds it 'not only difficult but disagreeable to dwell much on things really and naturally great.' He becomes subtly degraded in his own eyes by standing in comparison to which he can hope to add nothing from his imagination."
Boswell must have been an exception to this . I think he basked in Johnson's glow as much as in recalling their time together as when they were actually together. This would seem to refute the "jumping on Johnson's coattails" line of thought because if that were the case, we would surely see some bitterness on Boswell's part even if only that Johnson had the audacity to die and leave him rudderless. Which I don't think was completely the case.
========================== ramblings/research1 #13, from cferrett, Tue May 3 13:55:36 1994 -------------------------TITLE: Notes to text (Shakespeare)<.P>
In Johnson's Intro to his Shakespeare:
Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. . . . When the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness, and read the commentators.========================== ramblings/research1 #14, from cferrett, Tue May 3 14:02:48 1994 --------------------------TITLE The Wisdom of the Ages
The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises . . . not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.Just something to keep in mind.
========================== ramblings/research1 #15, from cferrett, Tue May 3 14:23:35 1994 --------------------------TITLE: Johnson on Paradise Lost
The want of human interest is always felt . . . the reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged, beholds no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself.I, personally, was on the "edge off seat" several times during my reading of Paradise Lost, especially when Satan deceives Raphael into revealing the location of Eden. The recriminations thrown back and forth between Adam and Eve after their unparadising are almost a template of every argument my girlfriend and I have. To say it is inaccessible to humans is absurd; there is a large human element in the poem (even forgetting our sympathy for Lucifer).
Thoughts on eighteenth-century authorship, chiefly concerned with Samuel Johnson
Two Views on Boswell
Authors are like Bakers
Correspondence
Thoughts on eighteenth-century authorship, chiefly concerned with Mary
Miscellaneous Research
Introduction