Cathedrals of discourse

Graded on the rubric established by Gustave Flaubert—that loyal partisan of observation, quiet detail, and literary form—Samuel Johnson's 1759 novel Rasselas is an unmitigated failure. Of course, such an expectation is anachronistic, with Johnson's book having been published almost 100 years before Madame Bovary. Rasselas unsettles our expectations for what a novel should be. The plot develops not through causation but from a combination of tropes and whim: the title Prince escapes the confinement of the Happy Valley to see the world, accompanied by the princess Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the sage Imlac. Seeking to understand the "choice of life," they discourse with learned men, explore the Pyramids of Egypt, and lose and then recover Pekuah from her captivity among Arab bandits. Johnson's novel eschews interiority and subtle psychological development; instead, characters stage philosophical disputations in chapters like "The Danger of Prosperity" and "Disquisition Upon Greatness." There is a parodic descriptive quality to many of these titles, such as "The Princess Pursues Her Inquiry with More Diligence Than Success." Others bristle with irony, as in "A Dissertation on the Art of Flying", with the Engineer's experiment ending rather poorly.

What Rasselas lacks in novelism, it provides in essayism. The voices of Johnson's characters are in fact a single voice: balanced, Latinate, antithetical. When Imlac, having described the delusions of an Astronomer, expatiates more generally on "The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination," he does so in stately paragraphs:

To indulge the power of fiction and send imagination out upon the wing is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation. When we are alone we are not always busy; the labour of excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of inquiry will sometimes give way to idleness or satiety. He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is? He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire, amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion. The mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights which Nature and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.

This is the voice of Johnson's essays, and this passage echoes a section of The Rambler, No. 2 published 9 years earlier:

That the mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity; and that we forget the proper use of the time, now in our power, to provide for the enjoyment of that which, perhaps, may never be granted us, has been frequently remarked; and as this practice is a commodious subject of raillery to the gay, and of declamation to the serious, it has been ridiculed with all the pleasantry of wit, and exaggerated with all the amplifications of rhetorick. Every instance, by which its absurdity might appear most flagrant, has been studiously collected; it has been marked with every epithet of contempt, and all the tropes and figures have been called forth against it.

Yet among these cathedrals of discourse runs a melancholy, a pessimism. Johnson wrote the novel in one week to pay for his mother's funeral, and that submerged longing surfaces in many scenes. It is there in the "Wise and Happy Man" that Rasselas finds reduced to tears after his only daughter dies, in the Princess's lamentation after the kidnapping of Pekuah, and in the conclusion, in which the characters resolve to return to the Happy Valley with the knowledge that their great plans for "the choice of life" are simply the vanity of human wishes. For readers convinced that the realist novel is how fiction must bear emotional weight, I recommend Samuel Johnson's Rasselas.