The “Plexed Artistry” of Nabokov and Johnson

Carrie D Shanafelt’s “The ‘Plexed Artistry’ of Nabokov and Johnson” notes how in the 1962 experimental novel Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov invokes Samuel Johnson as the prototype for the poet John Shade. Shade is described as a rather old-fashioned but brilliant poet whose last poem interrogates his own subjective experience of meaning-making in a world that stubbornly refuses either to make sense or to be meaningless altogether. Nabokov’s affinity for Samuel Johnson, Shanafelt argues, operates in important ways as a recognition of the latter’s similar aesthetic resistance to the dominant secular empiricist models of linguistic meaning of his time. Exploring their epistemological contexts as well as literary productions, her chapter delineates parallels between Johnson and Nabokov with respect to their similar investment in the aesthetics of desire and trauma in relation to linguistic meaning.

The Antinomies of Progress

Clement Hawes’s “The Antinomies of Progress: Johnson, Conrad, Joyce” examines its three authors from a post-colonialist perspective. Hawes discovers affinities among Johnson, Conrad, and Joyce that valuably involve the long arc of British expansion, North American dominance in the New World, and the freighted notion, on at least three levels—personal, literary, and political—of “progress.” Deploying analyses of periodization, rhetorical strategies, and colonial exploitation, Hawes’s chapter subtly repositions Johnson as a presence in the broad arc of literary history.

“Saint Samuel of Fleet Street”

Both Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf excelled in several genres—fiction, essay-writing, journals and diaries, biography, and criticism—and both held common attitudes toward a number of important topics. Furthermore, Woolf’s writings betray an admiration for and attraction to Johnson, as is suggested in the title of the chapter, “‘Saint Samuel of Fleet Street’: Johnson and Woolf,” which contrasts and compares a number of topics linking the two. The chapter then looks more closely at two particular genres, literary criticism and biography, and concludes with a meditation upon Johnson and Woolf’s intertextual engagements.

Johnson and Borges

Greg Clingham’s “Johnson and Borges—Some Reflections” considers whether (and how) Johnson’s cultural value changes when he is placed in relation to Jorge Luis Borges, the great modern fantasist, conversationalist, essayist, poet, and director of the National Library of Argentina. It explores Borges’ life-long love of and imaginative engagement with Johnson found not only in his literary and cultural criticism, but also in fifty-five years of recorded conversations with his Argentine colleague and friend Adolfo Bioy Cesares and others, such as Willis Barnstone, and in the fact that Borges and Bioy translated the Lives of the Poets into Spanish (a work, lamentably, that was never published). Clingham argues that Borges saw in Johnson not the embodiment of enlightenment hegemony, and thus a figure to be spurned or patronized, but (along with Shakespeare) the quintessential writer of the English language, and a radiant image of the blind modern writer’s own magical poetic and expansive self.

Samuel Beckett and Samuel Johnson

In “Samuel Beckett and Samuel Johnson: Like-Minded Masters of Life’s Limitations,” Thomas M. Curley reminds us that Johnson’s overall philosophy of life was traditionally and emphatically Christian. But he was a fearful believer, part of whose anxiety, Curley argues, stemmed from a sense of existential emptiness flowing from his abiding vision that we do not really live in the present but, exist primarily by means of past or future apprehensions of living. Perhaps no famous modern author, Curley contends, was more fascinated by Johnson and his anxieties than Samuel Beckett. Beckett turned a blind eye to the traditional magisterial figure of the Great Cham and instead focused upon a doubt-ridden and phobia-filled persona, a subversive Johnson, wrought in the Irishman’s own image and serving as a formative influence on his canon. Johnson’s influence upon Beckett—however unlikely—proves upon deeper scrutiny to be profound.

Ernest Borneman’s Tomorrow Is Now (1959)

In “Ernest Borneman’s ‘Tomorrow is Now’: Thoughts about a Lost Novel, with Glances toward Samuel Johnson and other Modernists,” Robert G. Walker situates Samuel Johnson with the German writer, film-maker, and jazz critic Borneman, who, due to the rise of Nazism, fled to Britain, where he assimilated Anglo-American Modernist currents. Posing the question how we can apply the slippery term “Modernist” to someone who falls so far outside the chronological limits as Samuel Johnson, Walker suggests that the empirical approach that Johnson often used can lead to valuable and interesting insights about a twentieth-century writer largely unknown to mainstream criticism, yet one who is undoubtedly a Modernist. The chapter contends that Johnson would be among the very best readers of Borneman, since both showed themselves to be comfortable with mixing compositional conventions and defying narrative expectations.

“Intellectually ‘Fuori del Mondo’”

In “Intellectually ‘Fuori del Mondo’”: Pound’s Johnson,” Joe Moffett observes that, despite Ezra Pound’s repugnant anti-Semitism and questionable support for the Mussolini regime, he continues to be viewed as one of the Modernism’s most influential artists. In works such as The Spirit of Romance, The Guide to Kulchur, and ABC of Reading, Pound argued for the literature and ideas he felt were most vital for preservation and study. Among these great works and writers stands Samuel Johnson. Pound praises Johnson as “admirable because he will not lick boots, but intellectually ‘fuori del mondo,’ living in the seventeenth century, so far as Europe is concerned.” The chapter explores the connection between these two writers, with special attention paid to direct citations of Johnson in Pound’s poetry and prose.

Introduction: Modernity Johnson?

The traditional view of Samuel Johnson has been that of a quaintly nostalgic figure redolent of days long past, or that of a narrowly bigoted High Anglican Tory, insular and xenophobic, resistant to innovation and experimentation. Many mid-twentieth-century scholars and critics worked indefatigably to undermine the simplicity of the stereotype; in the process, they have enriched our understanding of this complex human being and inexhaustibly fecund writer....

Johnson Goes to War

Jack Lynch’s “Johnson Goes to War” observes that literary histories conventionally link the rise of literary modernism to the collective physical and psychological trauma inflicted by the war of 1914-18. Lynch observes that when we think of Great War literature, we include writers who wrote during the war, like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; those who reflected on it shortly afterward, such as Ford Madox Ford and Erich Maria Remarque, and those who said little about the war itself but whose sensibilities were shaped by what happened there, a category that contains nearly all the writers usually grouped under High Modernism. But Johnson was there too and played a series of important roles. These include how he sometimes served as a reassuring reminder of the civilized world to which the country hoped to return, while others viewed him as a harsh critic of war and empire. If Johnson influenced thinking about the war, thinking about the war also influenced Johnson. It was the year after the end of the Second World War that the Great Cham became Johnson Agonistes, but that was the culmination of a process of rethinking literary icons in general and, Johnson and particular, that began in Flanders Fields.

Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and the City

In “Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and the City,” Melvyn New reexamines Johnson’s relationship to Modernism by discussing the shared experience of two young writers adjusting to life in the city, an adjustment worked out respectively in Johnson’s London and Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The essay argues that Christianity plays a more important role in their poems than the label Modernism might otherwise suggest. For both poets, the city represents science, progress, and Enlightenment, but equally the delusions of pride and perfection that tie both poems to Paradise Lost and the Fall in the Garden. New concludes that Johnson and Eliot shared a Modernism that looked backward in despair over an ever-receding sea of religious faith and ahead in equal despair over the Enlightenment secular faith that was replacing it.