Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson (review)

Abstract

Reviews William C. Dowling, Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson . Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981. 185 pp. $16. The foreground of the literary critical scene today appears to be dominated by the polemical exchanges between the modernists and the postmodernists, the formalists and the poststructuralists, the objectivists and the deconstructionists, the old "new Critics" and the new avant-garde. While the debate rages unabated, however, a significant body of work is being produced which promises not only to displace traditional methods of interpretation and to inaugurate a new beginning in the reading of familiar texts but also to revise literary history and construct a version of the tradition to compete against the inherited one. It is this revisionist impulse, often regarded as the fulfillment of the Nietzschean injunction to break and condemn the past, that gives rise to the polemics among literary critics and explains their vehemence . For much more is at stake in these debates than the shifting of positions, the change of emphases, or the modification of certain principles ; the very foundations of the mainstream of western thought are being assailed. Derrida's work arouses such extraordinarily heated passions not because it posits a new metaphysics to counter or supplant the dominant orthodox system of metaphysics, as William Dowling believes , but because it challenges the very ground of all metaphysics. Those critics who cling faithfully to the critical theories and interpretative methods which dominated the academy prior to the emergence of poststructuralism and deconstruction do not exaggerate when they de- 268 biography Vol. 5, No. 3 clare that the avant-garde threatens to change the study of literature so radically as to make it unrecognizable. The perception that the formalist , objectivist theory of interpretation cannot be reconciled with deconstructive , poststructuralist theories is correct, notwithstanding Mr. Dowling's assertions to the contrary, and stems from a good understanding of at least the major elements and implications of the supposedly incomprehensible and impenetrable new theories. In the "Epilogue" to his latest book on Boswell's Life of Johnson, William C. Dowling admits to being mystified by the "vocabulary of conflict or crisis" which pervades the literary scene and by the vigour with which deconstructionist theory is frequently resisted. Dowling positions himself above the fray and urges everyone to stay calm and "think cooly and rigorously through the claims of competing theories" (p. 165). After all, the current sense of crisis is transitory and, what is more, "all signs point unwaveringly toward the emergence of a humanism as momentous in its implications as that of Erasmus and More" (p. 181). Mr. Dowling is able to remain so sanguine because he does not subscribe to the general opinion that the basic positions of the two main conflicting critical schools (if one can appropriately speak of "schools" here) are irreconcilable. In both his "Preface" and "Epilogue " he declares that "the assumptions of the objective and deconstructionist theories of interpretation are not irreconcilable after all" (p. 165). In his Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson he proposes "to move interpretation closer to that stage of theoretical synthesis that is, as I see it, a happy inevitability in any case" (p. ix). Far from being threatened by Derrida and the Yale critics, Mr. Dowling finds that he can hold on to his assumptions, derived though they are from the "objective or formal tradition," while at the same time refining them with the help of deconstructive practice. So, he picks and chooses some ideas and terms from deconstructive criticism and employs them to solve an interpretative problem which cannot be handled as effectively or satisfactorily by direct recourse to Wimsatt, Beardsley, and Richards . In the end, though, Dowling's study is an unmistakable, albeit not very convincing, affirmation of the fundamental New Critical assumptions to which he pledges allegiance at the outset. There is no sense of crisis in this book, for the author moves with equanimity from Wimsatt to Derrida and back to Wimsatt. The problem which provides William Dowling with the occasion to embark on his purportedly syncretist project concerns narrative continuity . The concept of the literary work as a coherent world complete in itself—a concept traditionally...