4 - The Antinomies of Progress: Johnson, Conrad, Joyce

Summary

It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established.

Samuel Johnson, Rambler 156

Introduction

Anomalies of literary reception and periodization surround Samuel Johnson. He embraced such key features of domestic progress as the ability of the public sphere to problematize neglected social issues: domineering fathers, cruel rural landlords, inadequate clothing for French prisoners of war, resistance to the rise of women authors, and the list goes on. Johnson (1709–1784) was caricatured as retrograde by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) precisely because he opposed a certain very particular “progress”: that is, imperial domination. Even worse, Johnson dared in Rasselas (1759) to endow “filthy savages” (Africans) with rationality.Some critics and literary historians have similarly found it more enticing to focus on Johnson's superlatively witty biographical presence than to engage fully with his provocative written oeuvre. A vast discrepancy separates Macaulay's version of Johnson, still far too influential, from the author known to the sizeable enclave of Johnson Studies.

One exception to this ungenerous reception of Johnson, however, is the moment of High Modernism in the early twentieth century. It is well known that Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) admired his eloquent brother in stylized gloom. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was likewise alive to Johnson's extraordinarily bracing oeuvre. Exploratory connections and comparisons, even when not directly intertextual, remain to be teased out. Indeed, because Johnson's nimble critique of progress is still sometimes misunderstood, it can usefully be brought into focus through comparison with closely related reflections about leading exemplars of Modernist fiction as Joyce and Conrad. The obvious breaks that separate the eighteenth- century Enlightenment from twentieth-century High Modernity obscure illuminating links. This recognition, indeed, might serve subtly to reposition Johnson as a presence in the broad arc of literary history.

A New Constellation

As is also noted by the editor of this volume, Woolf in her Orlando (1928) presents Samuel Johnson through the eyes of her time-traveling narrator Orlando. Johnson figures as a “great rolling shadow, who now rose to its full height and rocking somewhat as he stood there rolled out the most magnificent phrases that have ever left human lips.” Woolf 's links to eighteenth- century art and literature are indeed strong and pointed.