The Little Spark and the General Blaze: Speech, Narrative and Fact in James Boswell’s "Life of Johnson"

Abstract

The thesis performs an explorative reading of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) in order to interrogate assumptions about the function, use and epistemological limits of direct speech in Boswell’s work, and the Eighteenth Century more generally. Rather than ignoring the problems posed by the competing and contradictory epistemological and ontological claims of the presentation of speech in text, the thesis reads Boswell as engaging with these problems at different scales. Each narrative scale carries with it different assumptions about facts and events, and different conventions with which to represent speech as a combination of both. The thesis aligns the problems of narration at different scales with different forms of narrative intervention and manipulation of the putatively raw materials of Johnson’s speech and their transition into the text published in the Life. It does this by drawing on archival research investigating the many states of Johnson’s speech in Boswell’s records, drafts and the final version of the Life. Chapter One investigates Boswell’s attitude to the project as a whole, seeing in his ideal of journal-keeping and personal affinity a vision of biography that draws on the non-narrative conventions of different genres. Chapter Two traces Boswell’s engagements with connected events and sustained scenes before investigating his own role as a nodal point constructing extended analogue conversations between Johnson and other figures over many years. In these chapters the print technologies of quotation marks and dashes are read as the mechanism that allows narrative connections at these different scales. Chapter Three investigates the workings of dialogue through Boswell’s use of parenthetical stage directions, reading them as a method of massaging his journals into narratives. Chapter Four turns to Boswell’s writerly interventions on the surface of words, seeing in italicisation a blunt tool for marking conceptual and textual as well as aural differences in speech, and considers the stress this places on interpretation. Chapter Five considers Boswell’s interpretive interventions within the orthography of words themselves, investigating his attention to the potential of type to convey aberrant or historically particular sounds through the representation of laughter, accents and onomatopoeia. Each level of analysis reveals both the contingency of the whole enterprise and the inescapably preemptive interpretive choices made by Boswell in the course of his composition. Boswell emerges as a writer engaging constantly with the demands and contradictions of what remains an under-theorised yet crucial aspect of non-fiction narrative in a context of changing ideas about truth and narrative.