Johnson and Fideism

Although the previous chapter was titled, “The Fideist Reaction,” there were several earlier hints of a “Protestant reaction” extending forward into the nineteenth century. That complete history does not appear in this chapter, as Parker analyzes Samuel Johnson’s works as part of the initial return of fideist art. Although the concept of a divided Samuel Johnson is not new, Parker provides us with new terms for that split in naming the two halves of Johnson’s literary nature—one part is Humanist curiosity about the world (and literature in particular), and one part is fideist skepticism about the value of earthly activities (literature among all others). This latter impulse is seen most strongly in The Vanity of Human Wishes and Rasselas, in which diverse human activity leads to the same sense of futility and exhaustion (with Solomon the representative, non-classical figure of spiritual weariness). This chapter really should be read with the previous chapter for full appreciation of the fideist motifs that Parker identifies in Johnson’s work. Among other motifs, Johnson’s work emphasizes futility, meditation, and stasis. This fideist element extended to Johnson’s perception of his own activities; his literary output stimulated and amused him, but could achieve for him no higher value: “For Johnson poetry (and every art) is a diversion, a toy…and a bauble” (238). Likewise, for Johnson private devotions, though a necessary and sober duty, could provide no sense of certainty, no knowledge of divine intentions. Parker argues that Johnson’s relationship to God, and hence to God’s works, is fideist in a specific and limited: “the form of imagination in which the divine is understood is infinitely remote from sensation, analogy, and all discursive knowledge” (231 n. 3). To seek, or rather linger patiently, is pious, but to expect certainty outside of the promises of the Bible is foolish.

This image of a fideist and un-analogical Johnson affirms the thesis of the book, which is that analogical representations of God became impossible after the Augustans had done their work. The contrast between Johnson in this chapter and the account of Edward Young in the previous chapter is meant to be instructive: one incorporates modes of inquiry despite pessimism about its relevance, and the other is meditative to the point of total absence/departure. The other part of this argument is that Johnson, by systematically (dialectically?) opposing his Humanist influences to his fideist beliefs, was in fact two—creating and sustaining a paradox, to the point that “Johnson was not a man of his time” (248).

This last assertion should be closely pondered for its historical implications. If Johnson combines all of these Augustan, Humanist and fideist influences, yet is not of his time, then how does he come to appear at the end of this book? It seems strange to conclude a historically situated reading with this kind of flourish, which shows respect for Johnson as a thinker and writer but leaves us in an odd place. We are told that “Johnson solved the problem that divided the literary culture of his day”—that is, the problem of reinstating religious expression in art—“by dividing himself” (249). The last time we saw such a division was in the account of Abraham Cowley, of whom it was said “He was one of the first to feel the failure of analogy. …one of the first to reckon with the problem of a necessary revision of consciousness” but also one who “left behind an indecipherable legacy” (78-9). If Johnson represents a solution to the problems created by the Augustans, where should we look for a continuation of that solution? If he is not of his time, what is his relevance? To put it another way, is Johnson a transitional figure like Cowley, a representative figure like Pope, or a revolutionary figure like Butler? This account seems in some ways to lean towards a transitional definition: Johnson looks back to Humanist authors “now obscure” and presides over the revival of “fideist art,” albeit without being able to fully occupy the fideist mode in the manner of Edward Young. I find myself wondering what might be the relationship of this final figure to subsequent fideism in Parker’s account.

Finally, I’d like to add on to Kirsten Wilcox’s final question in the previous post by asking frankly what our own assessment might be of the relative readability of Night Thoughts and The Vanity of Human Wishes. Wilcox asks whether Johnson and Young are “united in their turn against the Augustan empirical project”—if they are/if they are not, how might readability (or familiarity—the degree to which either is read these days) affect our ability to judge the similarity or difference of the impulses behind the two poems? And what then would be the relevance of such a comparison?

What would you like to see in new editions of novels?

Strictly hypothetically, if a publisher were to produce a new line of 18c novels, what would you like to see in terms of editorial policy?

There are of course a dozen ways to buy, say, Robinson Crusoe. The market is competitive. You have the Penguin edition, the Norton, the Oxford World's Classics, the Bedford Cultural Edition, and the Broadview. There are still others for general readers--Signet, Barnes & Noble, Everyman, etc.

If there were to be one more available, what would you like for it to include or exclude that would set it apart from the other editions? Do you and your students actually use the substantial textual and critical support routinely included in the Nortons and the Broadview editions? Do you find the current scholarly editions limiting or overwhelming? Are your students happy with their prices, the format, etc.?

Specifically, how would you feel about the return of the hardback edition? If Penguin, for example, were to publish the same text, introduction, and notes in a hardback edition with more durable paper within $5 or so of their paperback price, would you order that book for your students instead and do you think they would be glad you did?

The Enlightenment and Universal Law

I just told my class a few weeks ago that the European Enlightenment was characterized by, among many other things, a healthy skepticism for dogmatism, a rejection of blind authority to traditional sources of power and knowledge, an openness to different ideas and opinions from the New World and beyond, and a driving curiosity to explore selfhood and subjectivity (seen best in the 18c novel, via Locke).

But just the other day we were reading Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man," and I heard myself telling the same students that the poem is a representative Enlightenment text for its assertive appeals to Universal Truth and an unchanging "Nature" (human and otherwise) that parallels Newton's "laws" of gravity and physics and the subsequent confidence in the culture at large that God's ways could finally be explained as a function of Reason.

So which is it? Is Pope's poem an Enlightenment text for its foundation in Unchanging Universal Truth, or is it a kind of anti-Enlightenment text for its completely trusting capitulation to an (albeit Reasonable) God and its refusal to acknowledge that different people might have different angles on Truth?

Domestic histories: another perspective

Much to my regret, I won't have time to participate in this week's reading event. But let me offer you instead a few mostly half-baked thoughts on a different kind of 'domestic' sphere - livestock husbandry - which also has an important place in the long 18th century.

Yesterday's Guardian had a review of Jenny Uglow's biography of the engraver Thomas Bewick. The paper version was illustrated with one of Bewick's engravings, the Leicestershire Improved Breed (from A general history of quadrupeds).

Bewick's interests ranged far beyond portraits of prize livestock; but the genre was much in vogue from the late 18th century onwards and well into the 19th century, until prints and paintings were superseded by photography. This went in step with the rise of livestock improvement and 'new breeds' (now of course very old breeds, and most of them very rare to boot).

Fashions of the time dictated that size (no doubt contrasting with the general run of small, skinny, scrubby mongrels at the time) was everything - the John Bulls of the animal world, you might even say. Vast cattle, fat sheep and long pigs, all perfectly groomed and set against a backdrop of idyllic pastures, sometimes tended by equally well-groomed, plump, smug yokels. No real sheep ever looked quite like these: the animal portrait was intended to advertise, and idealise, a breeder's wares.

They look so strange and quaint to us. But in the late 18th century these animals were at the cutting edge of scientific farming. They can be seen as symbols of 'progress', and a domestic and practical application of 'the Enlightenment'. And I think the impulse to have them painted was both hard-headedly commercial and sentimental.


A few links:

Thomas Bewick
Bewick Society

Livestock in Art
A matter of good breeding
Farm animal portraits

Effeminate women

[Xposted to my blog]

Yesterday in my graduate seminar we discussed Margaret Cavendish's Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions. It was a lively discussion — they are an interested group — and at one point someone brought up the ways in which the two armies in Bell in Campo are described. "Masculine" is used to describe the army of men, while "feminine" and "effeminate" would seem to be used interchangeably to describe Lady Victoria's army of women. It is also used to insultingly refer to men who prefer to stay home rather than fight. This led to a sweeping pronouncement from me about the ways in which the definitions of words often narrow and focus over time; it would seem that at one time "effeminate" could have been used to mean more or less "feminine" without any shading — though it was also used in our contemporary sense — but now it is used pretty exclusively as a pejorative applied to gay men who are perceived as lacking in "masculine" traits. We discussed various female equivalents and unpacked the some of the meanings "Amazon" held in the period.

This is one reason, among many, that I like the 18thc: English, always in flux, is just at enough of a remove after three centuries, give or take, that it is deceptively familiar. But upon closer examination there are significant little moments of vertigo, moments which can be useful as an entrée into a discussion of, say, gender roles.

[Speaking of language, awhile back on C18-L Jim Chevalier linked to a useful glossary of 18thc terms. I downloaded the list myself but have mislaid the link and invite you to post it again, Jim, if you are reading this.]

ESTC online

[Xposted to my blog]

Just found out that the British Library is offering free online access to the English Short Title Catalogue. Most, most excellent. Heads up from Stephen Karian on C18-L.

"Clarissa" and every fourth female reader

It is estimated that one in every four women will experience rape or attempted rape at some point during their four years in college. According to the latest numbers from the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, one in six women overall will experience some variety of attempted or completed rape, and 80% of these are women under the age 30. Almost two-thirds of all rapes were committed by non-strangers, and 17% are committed by someone the victim knows intimately.

And the situation for young women attending college parties and dance raves has gotten much, much worse. The most alarming development since the 1990s is the easy availability of what the Drug Enforcement Agency calls “predatory drugs.” These include Rohypnol (commonly known as “roofies” or the “date rape drug”), GHB (“liquid ecstasy” or “grievous bodily harm”), and Ketamine (“special K” or “cat tranquilizers). The most common of these, Rohypnol, is a sedative ten times stronger than valium, and in the year 2000, four million doses were intercepted coming from Mexico alone. Since the effects can last up to eight hours, women at parties who have perhaps accepted drinks containing the tasteless and odorless drug can wake up in a basement or fraternity house with no recollection whatsoever of what has been done to her, by whom, and how many times.

If you typically have twelve women in the classroom when you teach Clarissa, the odds are that three of them has, or will have, an experience with rape or attempted rape. It’s also a safe estimate that at least one of those three will have had that experience connected with a predatory drug. That bears repeating: every time we teach Clarissa, we need to assume that at least one of the women in the room has experienced something similar to, or even worse than, what Clarissa experienced in her rape.

Do we have a responsibility, therefore, to adjust our approach to class discussions of this still-controversial novel? If so, we are forced to juxtapose two dangerously contradictory messages in our common pedagogy of the eighteenth-century novel. On the one hand there are the familiar feminist and Marxist readings that Clarissa’s death, while certainly objectionable, is nevertheless the victory of the spirit over the polluted body, the dominance of an independent will over the oppression of the patriarchy, and the rise of the empowered feminine bourgeoisie against the fall of the corrupt masculine aristocracy. Clarissa is admired, and rightly so, for seizing her right to self-determination in the way that she sees fit. On the other hand, these same feminist readers would surely endorse the counselors, crisis centers, and ministers that give these same students a radically different message about healthy reactions to rape: anorexia and thoughts of suicide are the wrong path; the victim is not to blame; the body has been violated, but not ruined; virginity is a state of mind, not a state of being; and sins need not be atoned for because the victim has done nothing which God needs to forgive.

How can, and should, the rape of Clarissa be taught to today’s students in light of Richardson’s aims to portray her as an ideal Christian martyr and the essence of virtuous femininity?

Royal Society Journals Online

[Xposted to my blog]

In case any of our readers does not subscribe to C18-L:

Over 340 years of landmark science available for first time: "The complete archive of the Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically for the first time today (14th September 2006) for a two month period" (heads up from Kevin Berland at C18-L).