Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

aimed for something higher. Johnson thought that a poet should write for all the men of his century. This is why with
Rasselas
, besides there being a geographic reference—it mentions the father of waters, the source of the Nile, and there’s one or another geographic reference to the weather—and that everything takes place in Abyssinia, it could take place in any other country. Johnson didn’t do this, I repeat, out of negligence or ignorance but because it corresponds to his concept of literature. We must not forget, moreover, that
Rasselas
was written more than two hundred years ago, and in the interval, literary conventions have changed greatly. For example, there is one literary convention that Johnson accepts and that now seems awkward to us: the monologue. His characters abundantly indulge in soliloquies. Johnson did not do this because he thought that people were given to monologue, but because it was a convenient way of expressing what he felt and, at the same time, expressing his own eloquence, which was great. Let us remember the analogous example of the speeches inTacitus’s historical works. In that case, naturally, Tacitus did not suppose those barbarians would have addressed their tribes with such speeches, but the speeches were a way to express what those people may have felt. Tacitus’s contemporaries did not accept his speeches as historical documents, but rather as rhetorical pieces that helped them understand what Tacitus was describing.
    The style of
Rasselas
, at the beginning, runs the risk of seeming a bit infantile and overly adorned. But Johnson believed in the dignity of literature. It will seem slow, the style faltering. But after eight or ten pages, that slowness feels pleasant to us—or to me, in any case, and to many other readers. There is a tranquility in reading it, we have to get used to it. And then Johnson opens the work up by using a fable. Through the fable—which is quite tenuous, of course—we feel melancholy, gravity, sincerity, integrity, all of which are fundamental in Johnson.
    Now, the fable in
Rasselas
is as follows: the author imagines that the Abyssinian emperors had isolated a valley from the rest of the kingdom, a valley called “Happy Valley,” which was near the source of the Nile—the father of waters, as he calls it—and surrounded by high mountains. The only access to the world from this valley was through a bronze gate, which was constantly under guard, very strong, and quite massive. It was really impossible to open. Then he says that everything that can make men sad has been excluded from this valley. There are meadows and forests surrounding the valley, and it is fertile; there is a lake, and the prince’s palace is on an island in the middle of the lake. And there live the princes until the emperor dies, then it is the oldest prince’s turn to become the emperor of Abyssinia. In the meantime, the prince and his people devote their lives to pleasure—not only, of course, physical pleasures, of which little is mentioned in the text (Johnson was an author who respected his readers; if we remember fromBoileau, “The French reader / must be respected,” and this was applied to all readers at the time), but also intellectual pleasures, the pleasure of the sciences and the arts. Now, this idea of a prince condemned to a happy imprisonment has resonance—Johnson himself was probably ignorant of it—in the legend of Buddha, though it would have reached him through the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, adopted as the subject of one of Lope de Vega’s comedies: the idea of a prince who has been brought up surrounded with artificial happiness. 4 The legend of Buddha, we might remember, can be summarized as follows: there was a king in India about five centuries before Christ—a contemporary of Heraclitus, of Pythagoras—who has it revealed to him, through the dream of a woman who is giving birth to his son, that his son can become the emperor of the world, or he can become the Buddha, the man destined to save men from the endless cycle of reincarnation. The father, naturally, would rather he be emperor of the world than the savior of mankind. He knows that if the son finds out about the miseries of mankind, he will refuse to be king and will become the Buddha, the savior—the word “Buddha” means “awake.” So he decides that the boy will live in reclusion in a palace, never learning anything about the miseries of mankind. The prince is a