Regulating Confusion (1996)
Chapter 1: The Desire for Fame: The chapter begins with an analysis of the sentimental trope of the small society (such as that portrayed in Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple. According to theorists like Shaftesbury and Hume, the small society is the place in which man’s natural moral impulses come to full flower because in isolation man has no opportunity to be moral and in crowds individual morality dissolves away, leaving something like social interest or social welfare (i.e. something that is not concerned with morality so much as the general welfare of the society). Reinert then segues into an examination of Johnson’s thoughts on (particularly writers’) desiring fame. One of the reasons that fame is desirable is because the crowd has a certain authority that rests on their connection to probability. For instance, Johnson says that a good measure of the value of a literary work is the length of time in which it is held in generally high esteem; if a large number of people have esteemed a work for a long time then the odds are that that work does have some value. Finally, Reinert contrasts the personal familiarity of domestic life with the “oblivion” of a public life in which general inattention to a person in some measure annihilates their identity. While Johnson characterizes this public life as a kind of oblivion, he hardly idealizes the private sphere; in the Lives he attributes Pope’s and Addison’s preference for private life to personal weakness and his own domestic life was almost a parody; he rarely kept a proper household, and when he did he populated it with prostitutes and derliects.
Chapter 2: Periodical Moralizing: In this chapter Reinert argues that Johnson used his career as an essayist in order to practice constant moral reflection, which he believed would shield him against what Reinert calls the “multifariousness” of the crowd. While there are some moral questions that have obvious answers (should I kill people? no. should I worship God? yes.), for most moral questions the answer is not always clear. For instance, should one love his country? On the one hand we view patriotism as a virtue, but the other hand nationalism is at the root of a lot of the conflict and suffering in the world. Instead of simply answering questions like this, Johnson thought that one could “regulate” his or her response to these types of moral dilemma’s with a practice of constant reflection, which he did through his periodical essays, which he had to churn out on an extremely regular basis. However, one problem with this strategy is that it seems to breed a certain type of compulsiveness. In one of his essays Johnson refers to a gambler who spent a weekend alone rolling a pair of dice several hundred thousand times in order to figure out which numbers come up most often; his strategy of reflection can degenerate into the same thing if, in the fact of tragedy, all one can do is repeat to one’s self moral maxims and precepts.
Chapter 3: The Vanity of Human Wishes: Critics have long commented on Johnson’s deftness in moving between and negotiating the general and particular; in his best work particular examples give his generalities an “emotional urgency” and the weight of generality adds poignancy to his particular examples. However, the theme of the crowd throws a wrench into this relationship; “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” as a case in point, is characterized by what Reinert calls a “sarcastic impersonality” that questions the validity of individual examples in understanding general truth (if, in fact, that truth exists in the first place). Reinert dissects Johnson’s metaphor of character serving as the wings that keep the arrow of suffering on course; without character suffering is just some ill-defined, incohate generality. However, when character is added (and it is “added,” as character does not really have its own autonomous existence in the poem) it makes the theme of suffering complete, giving it its full weight and impact. However, individual characters and individual objects of desire also seem to evaporate within the poem; desire does not enhance accomplishment, according to Reinert it “dries it out.” In other words, the infinite nature of desire assures that any individual object of desire always dissolves in the face of desire in general. Reinert also notes that one of Johnson’s prime literary devices for depicting this conflict is synecdoche, or letting a singular nound stand for the plural (”the hireling judge distorts the laws,” in which “hireling judge” stands for “hireling judges” in general).
Chapter 4: Exemplary Self-Sacrifice: In this chapter Reinert critiques the idea that Johnson’s realism grew out of his skepticism about generality. Reinert argues that while Johnson clearly was, indeed, skeptical about general truths, the opposite of general truth is not necessarily vivid, realistic particularity. As a case in point, Reinert examines Johnson’s Life of Savage as a portrait of someone who lives constantly and completely in the public eye, within the crowd. However, rather than a heightened sense of everydayness, Reinert argues that Life of Savage portrays a “purely negative” breakdown in one’s ability to make sense of the world. For instance, Savage tells and retells the story of how his mother abandoned him, but his suffering does not cause a particular attention to detail or a sensitivity moral concerns (as it does with, say, David Simple); rather, it causes a breakdown in his moral character that manifests itself in his choice to live his bizarre, homeless, hand-to-mouth existence throughout his entire life no matter what his circumstances were at any given time. Reinert then argues that Johnson was, to some degree at least, projecting his own fears onto his biography of Savage. In particular, the “spooky isolation” of the biography is not apparent in other biographies of Savage, and seems consistent with Johnson’s other thoughts on public life and the crowd. In addition, Johnson relates two anecdotes that Reinert analyzes at length: in one, Johnson talks about how Savage became very upset when a benefactor sent over a tailor to measure him, and in another Johnson talks about Savage’s obsession with proofreading. Reinert argues that both of these anecdotes reflect about measurement and definition; in the first anecdote Savage is resistant to the idea that his benefactors can measure or describe him, and in the second he has an almost obsessive concern about punctuation, or the way that words are measured and categorized into sentences. Finally, Reinert looks at “On the Death of Dr. Levet” as proof that it was not Savage’s irascibility and egotism that was his problem; rather, any rhetoric involving someone living so publicly is bound to ring hollow.
Chapter 5: Probability and Conjecture: Reinert argues that in the face of the unexpected, Johnson’s strategy was to constantly conjecture about the possible outcomes. For instance, Johnson would constantly make charts explaining what reading 10, 50 or 100 lines of poetry would amount to in a week, a month or a year, when in reality it is impossible to predict how much one can read in any given day, much less read an assigned amount on every single day. The only problem with this strategy is that it is stifling to action; if one is constantly considering future possibilities, one never takes the risk of making actions in the present. Reinert argues that rather than taking these risks himself, Johnson relied upon deadlines in order to force him to commit to decisions and subject himself to chance. Reinert also analyzes Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare, in which he talks about the editing process as being rooted in futility. On the one hand, editing is useless because the power of a great work (such as Shakespeare’s) will come through even in a poorly-edited edition; however, all authors’ work is subject to decay over time thanks to the statistical fact of human error, thus even though editing doesn’t really matter we must keep doing it so that it continues not to matter. Reinert also discusses how Johnson confined his notes to the works margins, insuring that they remained separate from the text and thus take little chance of incurring great praise or blame.
Conclusion: Reinert returns once again to the theme of politics as introduced in the introduction. He argues that Johnson’s political authoritarianism is disappointing to readers because, as an oversimplification, it is inconsistent with the thought the he put into his other writing. Johnson has a deep-seeded skepticism about political matters (he basically says that we have no real, useful knowledge of politics, sociology, etc.) and his conservativism is a sort of reaction to that, not in the sense that he thinks that adherence to tradition should override pseudo-scientific knowledge of politics, but because in the face of such a complicated, unsolvable problem Johnson simply forces the problem to be simple (sort of like a heuristic). Reinert concludes by arguing that this is the reason that Johnson’s political writing seems unsatisfactory; in a sense, he just kind of gave up on ever understanding politics.
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