Rasselas - Samuel Johnson

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (Johnson, 1749)

When I started reading this, I almost immediately thought of Candide. I figured it had to be a response to it, sort of an anti-Candide, but it turns out they were both published the same year, so both authors were writing in a similar style for opposite purposes at roughly the same time. Craziness!

Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century British man of letters famed for his dictionary, essays, biographies of modern poets, and an annotated, authoritative edition of Shakespeare, produced only one work of creative fiction. Rasselas reads as a fable, similar to Voltaire's aforementioned classic, but it starts from the opposite end:  where the everyman Candide starts with a fixed idea of the world that is successively challenged by the vicissitudes of life until he has to abandon it, the privileged Rasselas starts with no fixed concepts, just an undefinable yearning. Raised in luxurious seclusion as Abyssinian (Ethiopian) royalty, he yearns for something beyond meaningless pleasures. With his sister Nekayah and the wise poet Imlac, he goes out into the world to seek the type of life that will produce lasting happiness.

The story elements here are fairly simple and none too memorable. The characters are merely mouthpieces for the competing philosophies of Johnson's day, and while there is certainly wisdom in these pages, the work as a whole did not strike me as a powerful piece of writing. The climax, where Imlac discourses on the soul, is the weakest part, and it is supposed to be the strongest, since Johnson's message is that we should focus on the eternal rather than the temporal. (Definitely the anti-Candide). In his desire to evaluate all of human experience for its ability to produce earthly happiness, Johnson spends more time negating the world than expounding the eternal, and the overall effect is a lack of focus.  Though I agree with Johnson's conclusions, I have to give the writing prize to Voltaire's focused, incisive satire, rather than Johnson's meandering Platonic dialogue.

Arbitrary rating: 3 out of 5 anti-Candides