Johnson and the Moderns

The final chapter explores how Eliot, Beckett and Borges were drawn to an author who appeared their polar opposite. All re-imagined Johnson, however, as an oddly modern figure. Eliot conscripted Johnson to his critical revolution, to help support his anti-Romantic animus and to underpin his attack on Milton’s poetry, which he, like Johnson, linked to the English Civil War, which, for both writers, represented a breach of the natural order of things. They shared a sense of the inadequacy of experience. Johnson’s elegiac tone may have seeped into Eliot’s verse. Beckett looked to a darker, stranger Johnson. In the 1930s, Beckett wrote an aborted play about Johnson and filled notebooks with examples of Johnson’s aberrant psychology and mathematical obsessions. These themes surfaced in Beckett’s later fiction and drama. Jorge Luis Borges found in Johnson a precursor who, in Rasselas, had produced an anti-realist, weightless fiction akin to his own post-modernist narratives. Borges’ fascination with the double enabled him to re-frame the relationship of Boswell and Johnson, a relationship recapitulated in Borges’ friendship with Adolfo Bioy Casares, who maintained a journal of Borges’s conversation modelled on Boswell’s approach.