A Film Canon

Rasselas, Prince Of Abissinia explicates wisdom literature as an inherently negative genre, an attempt to curb the excesses of imagination, exhortation and ratiocination, by positioning itself somewhere between poetry, theology and natural philosophy; that is, as a fundamentally unsatisfying genre and, therefore, the most appropriate to evoke - if not systematise, let alone solve - the paradoxical nature of desire, and structural impossibility of its fulfillment. Structuring his rudimentary narrative around his protagonist's escape from a sheltered, "happy valley", in search of the dissatisfaction that will sharpen satisfaction, Johnson ensures that his exquisite descriptions and elaborations of places, people and customs are always curbed or attenuated just when they seem on the verge of the exotic revelations of travel literature. In the same way, the various allegories, examples and lessons encountered on the course of this journey tend to be short, elliptical and inconclusive, while his taste for aphoristic pronouncement is both interrogated ("the emptiness of rhetorical sound and the inefficacy of polished sentences") and only indulged when it is it's own object. The resultant sense of self-referentiality, or redundancy, reflects the financial necessity under which Johnson wrote, and suggests that the final, unusually pointed argument against materialism is more about the materiality of language than of substance; or, alternatively, that the pervasive association of solitude with trauma stems from the former's ability to gradually denaturalise language, as evinced in the episode where Rasselas and his companions encounter an astronomer who has retreated into an insane conversation with the clouds. The latter also gestures towards a trauma peculiar to the individuated, sympathetic immersion of the novel reader, pathologising the entire genre as an instance of the omniscient imagination that turns desire into its own object, and suggesting that Johnson's distinctively anti-imaginative statement should ultimately be read aloud, or in some other collective or ceremonial fashion; or, alternatively, that the childish world of pure wish-fulfillment from which Rasselas flees is that of the emergent novel itself.