The rhetoric of Smith, Boswell and Johnson: Creating the modern icon

Katherine Witek

doi:10.1080/02773949409391018

Rhetoric Society Quarterly Aug 1994

The rhetoric of Smith, Boswell and Johnson: Creating the modern icon

Katherine Witek Saint Xavier University

Abstract

When James Boswell first meets Samuel Johnson in London in 1763, Johnson has already written the Rambler (1750-52), the Dictionary (1755), and Rasselas (1759), and dominates the publishing marketplace. They become close friends, and, until Johnson's death in 1784, Boswell often records in his journals Johnson's conversations, documenting his Wisdom and Wit and describing Johnson's encounters with his contemporaries. After Johnson's death, Boswell augments his own collection of Johnsonian memorabilia by soliciting anecdotes and letters from many of Johnson's friends, accumulating a mass of material which he pieces together and publishes in 1791 as The Life of Johnson, perhaps the most powerful and controversial biography ever written. In this influential biography of Johnson's life, Boswell presents Johnson as the great sage and philosopher, the composing genie who could dash off brilliant, eloquent essays and verse, seemingly without planning, revising or even rereading them. With this picture Boswell tries to create Johnson as the ideal writer of the age, whose writing method and style perfectly exemplify the paradigm of composition that prevailed in eighteenth-century Scottish rhetorical theory, particularly that of Adam Smith. Influenced by Smith's lectures, which he had attended while a student at Glasgow University, Boswell constructs Johnson as writer within this paradigm and thus fosters both a narrow view of invention and a mythological image of Johnson as inspired speedwriting genius. In the process, he misrepresents Johnson's theory of writing, tying Johnson too closely to what W.S. Howell calls Smith's new rhetoric (541), which focuses on style and views invention as an autonomous activity based on introspection and imagination rather than as interactive, systematic inquiry, Aristotle's conception of invention. A careful reading of the Life of Johnson reveals major contradictions in the picture Boswell sketches of Johnson as writer and indicates that Boswell's mythical image of Johnson's spontaneous writing ability tends to rest upon thin and questionable anecdotal evidence, upon the clever way Boswell arranges and phrases his material, upon the narrow conception of invention he inherited from Adam Smith, and upon his need to canonize Johnson into literary sainthood and even to make him the secular Godhead of the age, the Father of modern writing. At the same time, it is difficult to avoid concluding that most contemporary critics remain mesmerized by Boswell's myth and impelled by his same motives.

Journal: Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published: 1994-08-01
DOI: 10.1080/02773949409391018
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Open Access: Closed
Topics: classical rhetoric modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism writing pedagogy
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The rhetoric of Smith, Boswell and Johnson: Creating the modern icon

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References (30) · 1 in this index

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