Organic Tensions: Putting the Tracings Back on the Map in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson

This article argues that James Boswell’s attempt to stabilize a biographical representation of Samuel Johnson in the Life of Johnson was frustrated by Johnson’s resistance to the project, which Boswell wrote into the Life. Using the theoretical approaches of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the article examines how Boswell uses the conventions of eighteenth-century letter writing, paratextual arrangement, and intrusive commentary to confine and fix Johnson’s life in the biography. The rhizomatic intensity of Johnson’s life cannot be fully contained, and it destabilizes its own biographical representation with laughter: Bowell’s representation of Johnson is depicted laughing at the biographer and the biographer’s project, ultimately undermining the biographical stability Boswell seeks to impose.