Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (review)

Reviews Leo Damrosch. Fictions ofReality in the Age ofHume and Johnson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. ix + 262pp. US$39.50 (cloth); US$15.50 (paper). Leo Damrosch's new book seems, initially, to belong to the vanguard of new historicism and other forms of scholarship that have blurred the distinction between fictional and non-fictional writing. The mid-eighteenth century, argues Damrosch in the introduction , was a time of "epistemological crisis" when philosophers, moralists, and historians believed that physical reality was too fragmented and various to serve as a basis for coherent knowledge. People derived a sense of order and coherence solely from a "social consensus," a set of tacit conventions about truth, which Johnson, Hume, Boswell, Gibbon , and other authors of this period were attempting to create and affirm in their prose works. Damrosch's subject is the knotty interweaving of fiction and reality suggested by the title. The writers he examines were using nominally non-fictive forms to establish the fictions necessary to support their readers' understanding of reality. They wrote "fictions of reality." This thesis propounds an epistemological explanation for what, in Damrosch's view, are prominent characteristics of literature and society during the second half of the eighteenth century. The shared conservatism of such unlikely allies as Johnson and Hume results from their anxiety that only the established institutions, though based themselves on dubious claims of truth, could preserve society from the disintegration of all order and belief. Similarly, since the appropriate medium for creating consensus and defining trutfi is prose, not poetry, the latter half of the century witnessed an outpouring of some of the greatest essays, biographies, and histories in the English language, but relatively little important verse between Pope and Blake. Although Damrosch is less clear on the status of the novel in these developments, his suggestion is that only writing which defined itself as "real" could fulfil the necessary function of consensus-building. 7Hstram Shandy, which is hardly mentioned, presumably dramatizes the chaotic state of affairs that Sterne's contemporaries were attempting to avert. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 3, April 1991 260 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:3 Undoubtedly many readers will object that this argument achieves a certain vision of the later eighteenth century only by excluding a great deal of material as irrelevant to "the Age of Hume and Johnson." Can we really sweep aside a great mass of poems and novels as unrepresentative of a period typified by non-fictional prose and the desire for consensus? Perhaps with this objection in mind, Damrosch denies that he is claiming "an epistemic shift for the whole culture, along the lines of a theory like that of Michel Foucault" (p. 7). He goes on to say that he is interested only in exploring a number of especially significant individual texts, a claim that seems disingenuous given the title of the book and later references to a "decisive paradigm shift" (p. 179). These moments of wavering are indicative of a general ambiguity in the book's critical methodology: despite the initial appearance of new historicism or a radical new departure in eighteenth-century studies. Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson is ultimately a traditional and conservative book. Inside the frame of a provocative and intriguing historical thesis, Damrosch deploys a series of informed and skilful, but orthodox readings of canonical authors. Damrosch's discussion of Samuel Johnson is an obvious example of a missed opportunity for a new approach. Much work remains to be done on Johnson's rhetoric and understanding of audience, on his use of fictions and allegories, and on his interest in the contradictory demands of private and public life. These are themes that could be easily explored in the context of this book's general theme. Instead we hear once again about Johnson's neurosis, the dangerous prevalence of the imagination, and his secret belief in the demise of Christianity. Ironically, this portrait of Johnson is a "fiction of reality" first popularized by another of the book's main figures, James Boswell. But Damrosch does not test the validity of Boswell's famous portrait, and instead concentrates on Boswell's well-known...