Abstract
Critical response to Rasselas has not extended to the lunatic extremes of interpretation to which Utopia has been subjected, but it is surprisingly wide for a work clearly intended as a moral fable or apologue. Some have found the tone anguished; others serene. Some think it a profoundly gloomy book; others a very comic one. Some think it is about a fruitless search for happiness in this life, culminating in a decision to hope for it in the next; others think it is more about the nature of the human mind, that its concerns are psychological rather than metaphysical. Some read it as if it were by a satirist like Swift; others (inevitably) as if it were an absurd comedy by a precursor of Beckett. All these views (even the last) have been expressed by critics of considerable sophistication: I am not groping in the critical detritus to dredge up Aunt Sallies. With a work as unexplicit as, say, King Lear, such variety is obviously to be expected, but although its fictional mode is crucial to its meaning, Rasselas also has a degree of affinity to Johnson’s periodical essays which might incline one to suppose that the room for doubt would be small.
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Notes
This has been discussed interestingly by Earl Wasserman in ‘Johnson’s Rasselas: Implicit Contexts’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 74 (1975), pp. 1–25.
Luis de Urreta, quoted by Donald M. Lockhart in ‘“The Fourth Son of the Mighty Emperor”: The Ethiopian Background of Johnson’s Rasselas’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association, vol. 78 (1963), p. 522, n. 21.
W. Jackson Bate, ‘Johnson and Satire Manqué’, Eighteenth-Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. W. H. Bond (1970), pp. 145–60.
Arieh Sachs, in Passionate Intelligence (1967)first pointed out the function of the analogy. The aviator says, ‘How must it amuse the pendent spectator to see the moving scene of land and ocean…’. His fall prepares us for the failure of the philosopher.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Discerning the Signs of the Times (1946), p. 115. For reference to this passage of Niebuhr I am indebted to the essay by John Hutchings cited in note 4 above.
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© 1985 Peter New
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New, P. (1985). Rasselas: Form as Model. In: Fiction and Purpose in Utopia, Rasselas, The Mill on the Floss and Women in Love. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_6
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