The
Classics (4): The History of
Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, Samuel Johnson
One of the themes of this set of essays, at least on the Pops
side, has been the character of genre fiction. Popular genres of fiction,
however, didn't suddenly burst onto the scene in the twentieth century. When
Samuel Johnson found himself in a pinch for cash in early 1759 he dashed off The
History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia in a week, dressing up what is
essentially an extended dramatic essay (the kind of thing he could dictate in
his sleep) as a popular Eastern tale. That is to say, the kind of thing readers
of the day thought of as genre fiction.
When I think of Rasselas as genre fiction, however, I
think of it as a horror novel. No, not a ghost story. Though Johnson, through
his mouthpiece Imlac, doesn't want to categorically deny the existence of
ghosts. As a conventional Augustan intellectual, the evidence - a general,
universal consensus of opinion - is compelling:
"That the dead are seen no more, said Imlac, I will
not undertake to maintain against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all
ages, and of all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom
apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which,
perhaps, prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could universal only by
its truth . . ."
But there are no ghosts in Rasselas. In fact there are no
supernatural or exotic elements at all. Even the Arab bandit who kidnaps Pekuah
is simply a man on the make ("the purpose of my incursions is to encrease
my riches"). Instead of going for Gothic thrills, what Johnson creates is an
atmosphere of psychological terror.
Or perhaps intellectual terror would be even better. Johnson's
fear weren't as imaginary as they were overly rational. His fear of death and
how much time he had left was a precisely calculated obsession. According to
Boswell and Piozzi he often indulged in exercises in computation as a form of
relaxation. Mathematics can become morbid, however.
"In life, said he, is not to be counted the ignorance of
infancy, or imbecility of age. We are long before we are able to think, and we
soon cease from power of acting. The true period of human existence may be
reasonably estimated as forty years . . . ."
And time is running out! Life for Johnson can be likened to the
unhappy condition of one of the captives in the Saw movies, with each of
us "playing the game": Having to somehow prove or at least affirm the
value or meaning of our lives while somewhere a clock is ticking and a dreadful
judgment awaits.
Another thing that make me think of a horror novel while reading
Rasselas is its imagining of psychological grotesquerie. Johnson, we all
know, placed a high value on ties of social affection. In so far as Rasselas
has a consistent message regarding the choice of life, it is that we need to
connect to others, even if only as a way of drawing us outside ourselves. When
the princess loses Pekuah, for example, she observes that without friendship,
"she wants the radical principle of happiness." Solitaries like the
astronomer and the hermit are at best eccentrics and at worst deeply warped. No
man is an island and no one is truly happy in the happy valley, shut off from
real correspondence with an outside world. The married state may be
uncomfortable, but the alternative leads to a warping of human nature. Witness
The Bachelor (or Bachelorette, I suppose), a figure fit for allegory but for its
lack of long claws and feral breath:
"I have met, said the princess, with many who live
single . . . but I never found that their prudence ought to raise envy. They
dream away their time without friendship, without fondness, and are driven to
rid themselves of the day, for which they have no use, by childish amusements,
or vicious delights. They act as beings under the constant sense of some known
inferiority, that fills their minds with rancour, and their tongues with
censure. They are peevish at home, and malevolent abroad; and, as the out-laws
of human nature, make it their business and their pleasure to disturb that
society which debars them from its privileges. To live without feeling or
exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of
others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy
than solitude: it is not retreat but exclusion from mankind."
In the best sort of eighteenth-century way, this is a general,
timeless portrait of human nature that goes back to Spenser and forward to our
own day. We can imagine the Bachelor sitting in his gloomy man-cave, jerking off
to internet porn and writing computer viruses among other childish amusements
and vicious delights. Such are the consequences of solitude and introversion:
imagination feasting on "luscious falsehood," the fancy grown
"first imperious, and in time despotick," and life passing "in
dreams of rapture or of anguish."
The only thing that makes Johnson's world view tolerable is his
hope that God (not the Jigsaw killer) exists as a kind of backstop to all of the
otherwise senseless misery, doubt, and fear that makes up our daily lives. One
simply has to take it on faith that the world makes moral sense in the eyes of
the Almighty. When Rasselas asks Imlac why Europeans are so powerful, lording it
over Asia and Africa by means of trade and conquest, the poet (not having read
Jared Diamond) can only offer the following shrug:
"They are more powerful . . . because they are
wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance, as mans governs the
other animals. But why their knowledge is more than ours, I know not what reason
can be given, but the unsearchable will of the Supreme Being."
Well, we might expect to find some opinions that have dated in
the last quarter-millennium.
The "conclusion, in which nothing in concluded" seems
to me deliberately ambiguous. And like all deliberately ambiguous textual
cruxes, scholars tend to come down firmly on one side or the other. In the
introduction to my paperback edition J. P. Hardy writes: "Critics who
maintain that the travellers return to the Happy Valley not only have no textual
support for their view, but seem to have badly mistaken the book's tone and
message." To which one can only respond that critics who maintain that the travelers
don't return to the Happy Valley have no textual support for their view,
either (and I would throw in that the "return to Abissinia" that the
book closes with offers at least some textual support for supposing a return).
I've heard both sides argued with conviction, but think that in the end Johnson
opted for the Godot-like ending because he really didn't want to say. The choice
of life goes on.
