The Intention and Reception of Johnson's "Life of Savage"

Abstract

Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage is among handful of eighteenth-century works that allow a historical test of hypothesis underlying our most challenging recent criticism. Michael Riffaterre suggests that the response of reader to a text is causality pertinent to explanation of literature, because only by analyzing that response is it possible to identify formal characteristics of any work.' Hans Robert Jauss argues that if there is to be any more literary history, the traditional approach to literature must be replaced by an aesthetics of reception and impact. 2 Stanley Fish persuasively argues case for an affective stylistics based on consideration of temporal flow of reading experience as it unfolds during each encounter with a text.3 At 1970 English Institute conference, Wolfgang Iser discussed Indeterminacy and Reader's Response in Prose Fiction. He points out that since eighteenth century there has been in narrative prose a striking increase of indeterminacy, that is, of works allowing a variety of conflicting but mutually admissible interpretations. He also contends that what distinguishes literature-good literature-from other things is the fact that it does not state its intentions, and therefore most important of its elements is missing, an element to be found only in the reader's imagination.4 All such criticism builds upon assumption that any text's form, meaning, and intention are most clearly reflected not by words on its pages, but in responses it elicits from readers. This hypothesis is difficult to apply when dealing with pre-twentieth-century works, however, because there is so little detailed evidence of how they were read. The most famous response to Johnson's Life of Savage illustrates that predicament. It is hard to infer much about biography's form, meaning, or intentions from Sir Joshua Reynolds's account of starting to read it while standing with his arm leaning against a chimney piece, finding book too fascinating to put down, and discovering after he had completed it that his arm was totally benumbed.'5