Samuel Johnson among the Deconstructionists

Abstract

Harold Bloom has called Samuel Johnson ‘the greatest critic in the language’, unexpectedly high praise that tempts me to wonder how — and indeed if — the precursor might have returned the ephebe’s compliment. Such bold fancying leads on to heady ambition. Could it possibly enlighten or amuse us to extend the enquiry beyond Bloom to Geoffrey Hartman (like Bloom, ‘barely a deconstructionist’) and then to Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Hillis Miller, whom Hartman has called ‘boa-deconstructors, merciless and consequent’? And also to their followers, associates and predecessors? I withdraw at once from one of the comparisons hinted at: I simply do not dare juxtapose Johnson and Derrida. If the only slight immodesties of Fielding and Sterne provoked such epithets as these — ‘sad stuff’, ‘nothing odd will do long’ — one recoils from contemplating what the following ‘Derridadaisms’ (Hartman again) would surely have evoked: ‘the phallus is a “privileged signifier”’ and ‘it is difficult to separate writing from onanism’. And what new gesture or action might Johnson make or take to reassert the reality that exists off the printed page were he to encounter what has become virtually the epigraph of current literary speculation: il n’y a pas de hors texte?