Johnson--On
Fiction, Rasselas, & Preface to Shakespeare
Damn, I like
Johnson! even though I disagree with him when he insists that
art serve a morally uplifting purpose, I just like his style:
learned without being pedantic, and pleasantly curmudgeonly.
Johnson's
general ideas on art's moral function are summed up in
this statement: "It is therefore to be steadily
inculcated, that virtue is the highest proof of understanding,
and the only solid basis of greatness; and that vice is the
natural consequence of narrow thoughts, that it begins in
mistake, and ends in ignominy." Art is to function,
almost in a Skinnerian sense, as a continual psychological
conditioning program--positively reinforcing desired behaviors,
while negatively reinforcing undesirable behaviors. Virtue must
always be portrayed as receiving its just rewards, and Vice must
always be portrayed as receiving its just punishments.
After he gets
away from the "Family Values" pulpit, Johnson becomes
much more to my liking. He considers the "business of
the poet" to be the examination "not [of] the
individual, but [of] the species" (a position which
Blake--normally a kind of idol for me--will describe as
foolishness). By capturing the general truth--that of the
species--rather than the more limited particular truth--that of
the individual--the poet's work will have (all other things
being equal--and they never really are, are they?) a greater
chance at achieving universality and timelessness than it would
were the emphasis reversed.
Johnson
illustrates both his preference for morally uplifting art and
for art with universal, general aims in his Preface to
Shakespeare: "Nothing can please many, and please long,
but just representatives of general nature." Shakespeare
embodies this principle in his work; he is "above all
writers . . . the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his
readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life . . . . In the
writings of other poets a character is too often an individual;
in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species." Shakespeare's
great strength is his ability to show life as it is, yet somehow
in larger and less time- and culture-bound terms than an
absolutely mimetic realism would allow.
His weakness,
according to Johnson, begins with the fact that he does not
always hold strictly to Johnson's ideas about the moral
functions of literature: "He sacrifices virtue to
convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to
instruct, that he seems to write without any moral
purpose." Johnson also finds fault with what he
considers the too hasty endings of Shakespeare's plays, the
sloppiness in the use of time and place which resulted in Hector
quoting the much-later Aristotle in Troilus and Cressida,
and Shakespeare's fondness for punning and wordplay.
Johnson also
uses his Preface to pronounce an harrumphing end to the
wearisome debates over the classical unities. Rubbish,
says Johnson. The audience knows it is sitting in a theater,
and not in a Venetian town or a French court, so fastidious
concerns over whether the audience will "believe"
changes of scene are simply silly. Similarly, the
audience is perfectly well aware of the fact that it is watching
a fiction, one that will pleasantly spin away two or three hours
with "a certain number of lines recited with just gesture
and elegant moderation." The action presented and
narrated may easily be imagined by the audience to take place
over a long period of time; audiences are not so gullible as
to think that the rise and fall of Henry V actually took place
over a period of three hours, yet they may enjoy such a dramatic
presentation precisely because of the artful compression of the
events of decades into the hours of a play. The only one of
the classical unities which Johnson values is that of the
unity of action; this is, with the exception of certain high
modernist and postmodernist works, still the primary unity we
observe in drama today. |
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