RESSELAS
By
Samuel Johnson
The premise of Rasselas is simple:
Rasselas, a young prince, lives with his family and servants in the Happy Valley.
All of his needs are met. Every want and desire is catered to. He leads a perfect
life of luxury, and yet something is lacking. He begins to wonder about the
world outside of the kingdom in which he lives and feels discontent.
Partially
to alleviate boredom through novelty, but mainly to explore the
notion of what it means to be ‘happy,’ Rasselas leaves the Happy Valley
with two companions for his travels: his sister, Nekayah and the philosopher,
Imlac. Together they travel through the world, and have many adventures and
encounters throughout the journey. These encounters create opportunities for
philosophical debate amongst the travelers. At one point for example, they
debate novelty and change as a necessary component for happiness.
Rasselas is a
deceptively simple work, but it is packed with wisdom and insight into the
human condition. Each of the situations encountered influence and shape
Rasselas’s desire to understand the nature of happiness, and of course,
the answers prove as elusive as happiness itself. In doggedly pursuing his
desire to understand and define the quest for happiness, Rasselas and his
companions explore the fundamental conditions of the human state, and while Rasselas is a
deeply philosophical work, ostensibly it reads like a simple tale of travel and
adventure. Although Johnon’s wonderful example of Orientalism was
written in the 18th century, the philosophy is amazingly prescient, and this of
course says a great deal about the immutability of the human condition.
Introduction
The History of
Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, originally titled The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale, though often
abbreviated to Rasselas, is an apologue about happiness by Samuel Johnson. The book's
original working title was "The Choice of Life".[1] He
wrote the piece in only one week to help pay the costs of his mother's funeral,
intending to complete it on 22 January 1759 (the eve of his mother's death).[1]
The book was first published in April 1759 in England. Johnson is believed to
have received a total of £75 for the copyright. The first American edition
followed in 1768. The title page of this edition carried a quotation, inserted
by the publisher Robert Bell, from La Rochefoucauld: "The labour or
Exercise of the Body, freeth Man from the Pains of the Mind; and this
constitutes the Happiness of the Poor".[1]
Johnson was
influenced by the vogue for exotic locations. He had translated A Voyage to
Abyssinia by Jeronimo Lobo in 1735 and used it as the basis for a
"philosophical romance".[2] Ten years prior to writing Rasselas
he published "The Vanity of Human Wishes" in which he describes the
inevitable defeat of worldly ambition. Early readers considered Rasselas
to be a work of philosophical and practical importance and critics often remark
on the difficulty of classifying it as a novel.[1] Johnson was a
staunch opponent of slavery, revered by abolitionists, and Rasselas became a
name adopted by emancipated slaves.
Overview
While the story
is thematically similar to Candide by Voltaire, also published early in 1759 – both concern young men
travelling in the company of honoured teachers, encountering and examining
human suffering in an attempt to determine the root of happiness – their root
concerns are distinctly different. Voltaire was very directly satirising the
widely read philosophical work by Gottfried Leibniz, particularly the Theodicee, in which
Leibniz asserts that the world, no matter how we may perceive it, is
necessarily the "best of all possible worlds". In contrast the
question Rasselas confronts most directly is whether or not humanity is
essentially capable of attaining happiness. Writing as a devout Christian,
Johnson makes through his characters no blanket attacks on the viability of a
religious response to this question, as Voltaire does, and while the story is
in places light and humorous, it is not a piece of satire, as is Candide.
Plot
The plot is
simple in the extreme. Rasselas, son of the King of Abyssinia
(modern-day Ethiopia),
is shut up in a beautiful valley, "till the order of succession should
call him to the throne". He grows weary of the factitious entertainments
of the place, and after much brooding escapes with his sister Nekayah, her
attendant Pekuah and his poet-friend Imlac. They are to see the world and
search for happiness, but after some sojourn in Egypt, where they encounter various
classes of society and undergo a few mild adventures, they perceive the
futility of their search and abruptly return to Abyssinia.
Local color is
almost nonexistent and episodic elements, e.g. the story of Imlac and that of
the mad astronomer, abound. There is little of incident, no love-making, with
few endeavours to charm the fancy, and with but slight recognition of the
claims of sentiment.
Themes in Rasselas
Destructive
capacities of the human imagination: imagination is the wellspring of vice.
Humans need to labor, engage in the world.
The
text ostensibly takes the form of a travel adventure set in an
"exotic" location, but the narrative turns into a platonic dialogue
between genderless individuals, which reflects the didactic nature of Johnson's
project. In this sense it can be seen as a satire of 18th-century travel
narratives and of "novels" in general.
Imlac's
theory about poetry: it's the highest literary form. Poetry communicates a
knowledge that no one today really believes in. We have inherited the idea of
the lyric from Wordsworth, which is usually very personal. Imlac's theory of
poetry is that it embraces everything from the high to the low. Remember that
lots of novels have come out by this time and have begun to replace the epic in
the hierarchy of literary forms. Johnson's defense of poetry is almost
anachronistic in a sense. Imlac says that the poet has to know everything, but
Rasselas says, then no one could ever be a poet. Johnson's point is that we
should not get lost in "the streaks of the tulip": don't get caught
up in the minor details and be blinded to the larger truths. If something is
going to be effective as art, it has to speak to the universal, the human
condition in some way, deal with general truths in some way. Today we wouldn't
agree, but in the eighteenth century, that's still the idea. That's what
Clarissa is saying to Belinda. The romantics turn that on its head, saying that
you can see general truths in the particular. You can see larger truths in the
streaks of the tulip.
Rasselas
is on a quest to find his "choice in life," the one that will make
him happy. Even before we get to the mid-point of the novel, however, we can
see that he isn't going to find it. Along his journey, we hear a number of very
interesting conversations. What do they seem to be saying in general about the
pursuit of knowledge and/or happiness?
The
astronomer in Rasselas is a direct link to Swift's flying island in Gulliver's
Travels. But Johnson sees the astronomer as the lot of all of us who
become so introspective and isolated that we lose sight of living in the world.
Johnson is very modern in his assertion that individuals must pour their energy
into the external world; otherwise, the imagination festers inside and creates
inner demons and imaginary problems. Left to oneself, with no specific purpose,
the imagination preys upon one's mind. Life in the Happy Valley,
where no labor is necessary, is not conducive to a productive, meaningful life.
Johnson's
views on marriage expressed in Rasselas
are quite notable within the context of 18th-century British literature as a
whole. Rasselas says, "Marriage is evidently the dictate of nature; men
and women were made to be companions of each other, and therefore I cannot be
persuaded but that marriage is one of the means of happiness." Johnson
uses a male character to vocalize these beliefs and expose their naïveté.
Rasselas describes marriage in a series of "ideal pictures," the kind
of sentimental images that one would expect to hear from a young girl saturated
with conduct books and romantic novels from this period.
No comments:
Post a Comment