Samuel Johnson as Intertextual Critic

Theft is always dangerous.

—"Life of Gray"

I. Introduction

Intertextuality considered in its simplest form refers to a silent, invisible assembly of linkages between individual texts, linkages based upon such properties of resemblance as repetition, formal similitude, generic affiliation, semantic identity, reversal, and assimilation and substitution.¹ Pragmatically, the notion of intertextuality urges critical readers to focus upon the relationships between texts with an equal or greater attentiveness than what is frequently given to the formal, biographical, or historical properties of literature. Intertextuality can be considered positively or negatively. Positively, it represents an interlocking grid of connection, representing filiations of human contact. This perspective sees the course of literary history as a continuous line in which all texts are aspects of the same ontological order, intact and inclusive. The concept can also bear the negative weight of divisiveness and agonistic conflict—of "dangerous theft." In the pages to come, both of these aspects will be examined.

This paper seeks to interrogate Johnson's critical outlook through the frame of an intertextual perspective.² More specifically, this essay focuses on two key concepts central to Johnson's literary and critical achievement: mentoring and intertextuality. It aims to realize three specific goals: 1) to establish Johnson's status as a major intertextual critic; 2) to delve more deeply than others have done into Johnson's use of mottos and translations from the periodical essays—especially investigating their utility as instruments of critical investigation and illumination;³ and 3) to inquire into the relationship between Johnson's intertextual practice and his lifelong preoccupation with mentoring.⁴ The essay thus endeavors to connect Johnson's critical practice with recent theoretical notions about interactive and transformative relations among texts, arguing that a consideration of Johnson as a critic who frequently utilizes an intertextual perspective significantly illuminates the nature of Johnson's critical project. The following section investigates intertextual relationships found among some of the mottos and quotations in the periodical essays; the concluding section unpacks some of the intertextual complexities inhabiting a key passage in Rambler 208 and the conclusion of the "Life of Addison."

II. Johnson's Intertextual Criticism in Rambler 143 and Adventurer 45

Within the model of intertextuality, each new work draws power and articulation from its predecessors, even as it contributes something new, as T. S. Eliot's classic statement observes:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone…. [W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.⁵

Some words associated with this perspective might be "community," "wholeness," and "imitation" (in its non-pejorative, pre-Romantic sense).

Considered in a different light, intertextuality inhabits a sinister terrain, one governed by divisive and felonious relationships. One locus classicus exemplifying this view is John Dryden's bluntly admiring critical account of his ancestor Ben Jonson's intertextual predations:

He was deeply conversant in the Ancients, both Greek and Latine, and he borrow'd boldly from them: there is scarce a Poet or Historian among the Roman Authours of those times whom he has not translated in Sejanus and Catiline. But he has done his Robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any Law. He invades Authours like a Monarch, and what would be theft in other Poets, is onely victory in him.⁶

A literary history constructed from this perspective would largely be a chronicle of theft, infringement, and exploitation; some words associated with this perspective might be "robbery," "plagiarism," "agon," and "competition."⁷

In Rambler 143 Samuel Johnson...