[In the following essay, Braverman examines the significance of architectural structures as well as interior and spiritual spaces in Rasselas.]

More than twenty years ago, Paul Fussell noted the prevalence of architectural imagery in the writing of the major Augustan humanists. Writers from Swift to Burke, he observed, had found in the "architectural image-system" a way of expressing "the role of forethought, arrangement, will, and order in the self-construction of the human imagination …" Fussell went on from there to suggest that

If we could learn to pay less attention to what eighteenth-century writers say they are doing and more to what they actually do, I think we should find that instead of being devoted to the Horatian formula ut pictura poesis, as they sometimes say they are, they really are much more profoundly committed to thepremise ut architectura poesis.¹

Given the prevalence of the "architectural image-system" in what Fussell termed the "rhetorical world" of the major Augustan writers, it is not surprising that architectural monuments find an important place in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. In this work, Johnson's best known narrative, prominent architectural spaces—the palace of Abyssinia, the Egyptian pyramids, and the catacombs—serve to objectify thematic complexities by providing a correlative to the travelers' moral progress as they seek to resolve the paradox inherent in their quest.²

Rasselas is a quest romance whose narrative object is the redeeming knowledge that human experience promises but fails to deliver.³ The narrative is itself generated by a fundamental hermeneutical activity as the various characters who travel through its fictive landscape are continually engaged in acts of interpretation. Most acts of interpretation are fruitless because the travelers, armed with the wrong questions until the final chapters, cannot properly "read" the true nature of their quest. In fact, enlightened insight is possible only at a few critical junctures where interpretation might permit the appropriation of redeeming knowledge and power. Those critical junctures—points at which the temporal and noumenal intersect—are situated within the architectural monuments through which the travelers pass; those monuments, the palace of Abyssinia, the Egyptian pyramids, and the catacombs, are, in fact, the only spaces in the narrative where the travelers can gain access to an interpretive code denied them elsewhere. However, only in the final architectural space, the catacombs—a place that confronts them with their own mortality—do the travelers pose questions and answer them in ways that suggest that they comprehend the contradictory nature of their quest. Their realization, however, comes with a price, because it calls for a kind of moral discipline that undermines the autonomy they so ardently desire. When Rasselas and his companions recant their lost illusions and decide to travel back to Abyssinia, their quest is appropriately concluded. But it cannot be resolved, even though the narrative architecture, a fundamental trope for the narrative itself, is demystified. In spite of their disillusionment, however, their progress through the architectural monuments permits them to comprehend the terms of their journey so that they may return to Abyssinia with a deeper understanding of human resignation and hope.

The story of Rasselas begins in a "spacious valley in the kingdom of Amhara, which is surrounded on every side by mountains."⁴ This place, called the "Happy Valley," is one where "All the diversities of the world were brought together, the blessings of nature were collected, and its evils extracted and excluded" (p. 74). Above the floor of the fertile valley which "supplied its inhabitants with the necessaries of life," stands a palace, a masterpiece of architectural intricacy:

The palace stood on an eminence raised about thirty paces above the surface of the lake. It was divided into many squares or courts, built with greater or less magnificence according to the rank of those for whom they were designed. The roofs were turned into arches of massy stone joined with cement that grew harder by time, and the building stood from century to century, deriding the solstitial rains and equinoctial hurricanes, without need of reparation, (p. 74)

The palace, designed to withstand the ravages of time, is a monument that symbolizes the immutability of the social order it houses; even the material that bonds the massive arches supporting the "roofs" grows "harder," meaning stabler, with time. However, this monument to stability contains within it—in surprising contrast to its implacable exterior—a suspiciously intricate plan whose purpose is described at length in the concluding paragraph of the first chapter.

This house, which was so large as to be fully known to none but some ancient officers who successively inherited the secrets of the place, was built as if suspicion herself had dictated the plan. To every room there was an open and secret passage, every square had a communication with the rest, either from the upper stories by private galleries, or by subterranean passages from the lower apartments. Many of the columns had unsuspected cavities, in which a long race of monarchs had reposited their treasures. They then closed up the opening with marble, which was never to be removed but in the utmost exigencies of the kingdom; and recorded their accumulations in a book which was itself concealed in a tower not entered but by the emperour, attended by the prince who stood next in succession. (pp. 74-75)

The palace, "built as if suspicion herself had dictated the plan," clearly contains more than the "treasures" accumulated within its secret cavities. In fact, the treasures themselves, concealed within the columns that support the structure, seem to possess a significance beyond the mere riches that they apparently represent. Their whereabouts, after all, are denied to all but the royal inhabitants of the Happy Valley, whose general population, already amply provided for by the emperor, does not, we presume, seem likely to take them. And it is just as unlikely—given the monumental construction of the palace and the equally impregnable mountains that surround the Happy Valley—that the emperor fears their expropriation by hostile invaders. It seems more likely, I think, that Johnson intends for us to see the treasures in a different sense, a sense that serves to establish a fundamental problem posed by the text, namely the respective legacies of the royal sons. First of all, the very fact that the "prince who stood next in succession" is not permitted to enter the tower and presumably read the contents of the "book of treasures" except when accompanied by the emperor his father, suggests that the tower is a space of initiation and the book a critical instrument of that process. But what sort of initiation? And what importance might the initiation of the heir hold for the narrative? The initiation process of which the book appears to be an integral part is the royal succession, the means by which the emperor elevates the heir apparent. However, if power will presumably fall to the next in line upon the death of the emperor, why does Johnson introduce the royal succession in a work that altogether avoids practical politics? He does so because, I think, he is principally concerned with the theme of education, and the revelation of the contents of the book form part of the special education intended specifically for the heir apparent but denied to younger sons like Rasselas. Given the special nature of the initiation, what secrets does the book contain? Surely not the royal accounts. In fact, whatever it contains, it is far less important what secrets it holds than what the process of initiation itself represents in the context of the narrative; and in that regard the book in the tower is, I will argue, a sign for something conferred and something denied. What is conferred, I think, is the knowledge and concomitant authority that paternal nomination carries. Such knowledge and authority are, furthermore, legitimate only through inheritance, and Rasselas, we know, is not the heir apparent, nor is he ever likely to succeed to power. Having only the remotest chance of being initiated into the secrets of the palace through the special dispensation of the emperor his father, he will consequently seek compensation ("happiness") in the "worldly" education of a younger son. And in so doing he will find himself caught in the moral tensions that the text generates over and over again, tensions. owing to the basic conflict between the available alternatives to the problem of succession.⁵

Johnson gives narrative form to the moral tensions generated by the presence of the book in the tower by posing questions of authority and succession in the form of two alternative readings of experience, one based on the principles of what I will call "secular" narrative, the other on those of what I will call "divine" narrative, which is introduced as the privileged point of view. These two fundamentally different versions of narrative (and interpretation) are based on contrary notions of time. Secular narrative is based on the logic of sequence related by discursive motions proceeding in the perpetual present, while divine narrative is based on the ritual logic of the eternal return. The distinction between secular and divine narrative is essentially one between chronos, time as it is ordinarily apprehended, and kairos, time comprehended under the aspect of eternity. In contrast to the tick-tock time that we experience from moment to moment, kairos generally signifies a divine moment, "an event in time significant because of the [divine] presence in it."⁶ Such events, which permit access to knowledge beyond the limits of ordinary temporal experience, are available only in specially sanctioned places. In Rasselas, such places (in which the temporal and eternal intersect) are associated with architectural monuments. However, the secrets of the first such monument, the royal palace, are denied to Rasselas, who thinks he can find the answers he seeks beyond the Happy Valley. But in so doing he falls prey to a way of interpreting experience (via secular narrative) that will not allow him to transcend the limitations inherent in his quest—until, that is, he descends into the catacombs in Chapter 48.

The quest upon which Rasselas will embark with his companions outside the Happy Valley takes place for the most part within the framework of secular narrative. But in the tale it is the framework of divine narrative that is introduced first, through the succession theme that is brought up in the second paragraph of the first chapter. It is there that we learn that Rasselas is not the immediate heir to the throne of Abyssinia, but "the fourth son of the mighty emperour, in whose dominions the Father of waters begins his course; whose bounty pours down streams of plenty, and scatters over half the world the harvests of Egypt" (p. 73). Like all the princes of Abyssinia, Rasselas must remain in the Happy Valley until the time of his accession:

According to the custom which has descended from age to age among the monarchs of the torrid zone, Rasselas was confined in a private palace, with the other sons and daughters of Abyssinian royalty, till the order of succession should call him to the throne, (p. 73)

Given his status as the "fourth son of the mighty emperour," the chances that Rasselas will become the heir apparent who will be initiated into the secrets of the tower and the book are quite slim. But if Rasselas will never get to read the book, why does Johnson mention it? Because, as I said above, what is denied to Rasselas, an inheritance, is as critical as what is available to him as a younger son, experience. The difference between the paths available to the emperor's sons takes form in the tale as the difference between the narrative possibilities that shape their respective legacies. This becomes clear in the construction of the narrative, in which the book, stored in a tower which is itself in a palace that stands unperturbed "from century to century … without need of reparation," represents the discourse that royal sons desire of their fathers. Not only do its contents reveal the riches of the palace of Abyssinia, but its possession confers mastery over the imperial palace, whose passages and corridors very much resemble the kind of narrative labyrinth that Rasselas will soon discover outside the Happy Valley. While learning how to decipher the labyrinth—the space of the palace by means of the book—is the goal and the responsibility of the royal heir, Rasselas, as a younger son, has little hope of being initiated into the knowledge that would permit him to decipher and possess the secrets of the palatial labyrinth. And as he seeks to gain through experience what is denied him by inheritance—by the "grace" of his father—Rasselas registers his dissatisfaction with his predicament by expressing his boredom with the pleasures of the Happy Valley.

The Happy Valley is a world of pastoral ease that is isolated in space by impenetrable mountains and in time by an absence of temporality beyond the natural rhythm of the seasons.⁷ In contrast to Milton's Eden, where Adam and Eve work contentedly as a sign of their obedience, Johnson's Happy Valley is a place where members of the court find peace in refined leisure. Made aware of the miserable world beyond the mountains by "the sages who instructed them," the "sons and daughters of Abyssinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose, attended by all that were skilful to delight, and gratified with whatever the senses can enjoy" (p. 75). Furthermore, on the occasion of the emperor's annual visit, "all delights and superfluities were added.… Every desire was immediately granted" (p. 74). Rasselas, however, grows cloyed with his diversions and discontented with his world. In contrast to what his teachers have told him, he believes that man must have desires in addition to, yet distinct from, those equated with the satisfaction of appetite: "Man surely has some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy" (p. 76). Imlac, however, reminds him that he is in "full possession of all that the emperour of Abyssinia can bestow" (p. 77). But what of the book in the tower?

The book in the tower—the symbol of the knowledge and power he wants but cannot have—underlies Rasselas's compulsion to undertake his quest. The book, which contains the secret of interpretation, the a priori code, holds the interpretive knowledge that Rasselas seeks but is denied.⁸ And it will be continually denied him unless he regulates his will and desire according to the prescript of a divine authority that operates according to a higher order of succession. He can do this, in narrative terms, when his quest for happiness is made to signify a quest for felicity; for as progress in space and time is not coextensive with spiritual progress, only through the substitution of eternal felicity for temporal happiness as the object of narrative desire can the secular discourse signify the sacred.⁹ To accomplish this end, Rasselas must, to borrow a Miltonic phrase, "stand and wait," that is, substitute spiritual for temporal progress.¹⁰ The opportunities to comprehend this axiom outside the Happy Valley occur within the architectural spaces of funerary monuments, the Egyptian pyramids and the monastic catacombs, spaces where the spiritual and temporal intersect. At these junctures, the opportunity to interpret, a kind of training, makes available the means to transcend the labyrinth of the narrative. Yet the outcome of the inquiry is in each case governed by the immediately preceding events. In the Happy Valley those events, which include Rasselas's plans to escape and Imlac's account of events beyond the Happy Valley, prepare Rasselas for his subsequent fall into fictive narrative itself.

In the Happy Valley, Rasselas cannot escape the desires emblematized by the labyrinthine corridors of the palace, whose secrets are denied him. In fact, he only exacerbates his predicament by acting out romantic fictions that permit him to transcend only through his imagination the filial limitations implied by the laws of succession. Giving in to his impetuosity, he figures himself as a romantic hero, and in that guise he even chases an imaginary "treacherous lover" who has robbed an equally illusory "orphan virgin": "So strongly was the image impressed upon his mind, that he started up in the maid's defence, and ran forward to seize the plunder with all the eagerness of real pursuit" (p. 79). When the spectre passes, Rasselas realizes his "useless impetuosity" in chasing it, for confronting his "fatal obstacle," the mountains surrounding the Happy Valley, he concludes: "How long is it that my hopes and wishes have flown beyond this boundary of my life, which yet I never have attempted to surmount!" (p. 79). But the mountains, the natural boundary surrounding the Happy Valley, do not represent his real obstacle. His true impediment is internal; it is his implacable desire to transcend the filial limitations inherent in the laws of succession. Rasselas's limitation, like Oedipus' club foot, is the defect that he cannot outdistance, and Johnson uses his complaint to illustrate an almost Augustinian attitude to fortune. As Walter Jackson Bate has written, Johnson believed quite firmly that misfortune was less the result of external circumstances than internal disposition:

Johnson traces the inevitable "doom of man" to inward and psychological causes … and the confused jostle he depicts in the outer world finds an analogy in the nature of man himself …"

If it is not external circumstances, namely the mountains that entangle Rasselas and lead him to undertake his quest, but an internal cause, his flight from the Happy Valley can only be an escape into bondage, a point that is later reenforced by the place where he seeks his first adventures, Egypt. In his ardor to escape the Happy Valley Rasselas therefore overlooks the truths that "lie open before him," and his "fall" into experience will carry him into the space and time of secular narrative. It is significant that narrative itself is the means of the fall, narrative that takes the form of the tempting story that Imlac tells. But Imlac is only the instrument of theodicy, because it is the word he bears—the narrative of the younger son that he presents—rather thanthe man himself that is the origin of Rasselas's desire to circumvent the filial limitations necessitated by the laws of succession and seek through experience what is denied him through inheritance.

Once Rasselas and his companions are outside the Happy Valley, the main action of the narrative, the search for the happy man, begirns. At first (Ch. 17), Rasselas searches for happiness among the Epicureans, but he rejects their frivolity for he thought it "unsuitable to a reasonable being to act without a plan, and to be sad or cheerful only by chance" (p. 102). Next, the stoic philosopher with whom he is impressed violates the principles of his philosophy when he mourns uncontrollably the death of his daughter. In their "Glimpse of the Pastoral Life," Rasselas and his companions are dismayed to learn that shepherds do not lament their lost loves but their lost labors, for "they considered themselves as condemned to labor for the luxury of the rich" (p. 104). Similarly, the life of the country gentleman who represents the prevalent Horatian ideal of the happy man is only apparently idyllic. Though a man of many possessions, he is a prisoner of his wealth, fearing expropriation by the tyrannical Bassa of Egypt. The travelers' hopeful expectations are also disappointed by the hermit, who admits to having been "impelled by resentment, rather than by devotion, into solitude" (p. 107). In every case the happy man Rasselas searches for is fundamentally flawed because he represents a secular topos; and a quest without a transcendent goal can only fail the test of experience. Despite these disappointments, Rasselas, "almost discouraged from further search," sets out on a new adventure, resisting the stasis of which Imlac accuses him: "You wander about a single city, which, however large and diversified, can now afford few novelties, and forget you are in a country, famous among the earliest monarchies for the power and wisdom of its inhabitants …" (p. 120). Rasselas's curiosity leads him and his companions to the pyramids, those monuments which, according to Imlac, contain the secrets of their era.

The pyramids are funerary monuments in which the temporal and noumenal intersect. "Raised before the time of human history," they were designed to permit their sacred inhabitants eternal life.¹² In the narrative architecture of Rasselas, however, the pyramids are emblematic of the pilgrims' own interpretive blindness. Although the travelers listen to a philosophical meditation on the nature of human desire while in the great pyramid, the visit, preceded as it is by the fruitless search for the happy man in Egypt, does not permit comprehension of their quest. In fact, the significance of the pyramids is understood only retrospectively, after the pilgrims descend into the labyrinthine spaces of the catacombs in Chapter 48. In the "discourse on the nature of the soul" in the catacombs (Chapter 48), Rasselas tells Imlac that "it is commonly supposed that the Egyptians believed the soul to live as long as the body continued undissolved, and therefore tried this method of eluding death" (p. 151). The pyramids are, at last, understood as monuments representing a version of redemption in which the physical condition of the body and the status of its possessor determine the nature and duration of the afterlife. But the travelers cannot recognize this notion at first (in Chapters 31 and 32), nor can they apply it to their own circumstances, namely their search for the happy man, because until they visit the catacombs, they remain ignorant of the nature of what they are searching for.

As the party are leaving the great pyramid, the Princess, Rasselas's sister, prepares "for her favourite a long narrative of dark labyrinths, and costly rooms, and of the different impressions which the varieties of the way had made upon her" (p. 124). But upon meeting those who stayed behind, they discover that the favourite, Pekuah, has been abducted. The subsequent chapters, which tell the story of the abduction and its happy conclusion, mark a change in the tale's focus because, as Emrys Jones points out, it shows the travelers "living fully in the world" for the first time: "they no longer … contemplate the spectacle of life [but] become fruitfully involved in [it]." '" The sequence leads to a turning point in their interpretive education, which comes in Chapters 40 through 46 in the episode of the astronomer.¹⁴ It is in this sequence that they prepare themselves for their final opportunity to comprehend their quest, which will culminate shortly after the discussion of their visit to the monastery of St. Anthony.

In Chapter 44, after his visit with the astronomer, Imlac delivers his famous discourse upon "the dangerous prevalence of the imagination." At the end of this lecture, an admonition both to Rasselas and to the readers of his quest, Imlac warns of the dangers when "fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of raptures or of anguish" (pp. 141-142). Thereafter, Rasselas and his companions vow to recant their temporal desires: the favourite will no longer act the part of queen of Abyssinia; the princess will no longer play shepherdess; and Rasselas will no longer seek the role of philosopher-king. However, only after they have cured the astronomer of his madness do the travelers demonstrate that they possess useful knowledge, because their action is self-curative. Suffering from the "disease" of narrative, theirs is truly an affliction of the imagination: just as the astronomer cannot control the weather, they cannot control their destiny, or choice of life. Before he is cured, the astronomer believes that he has appropriated divine authority, for having effectively removed God from the universe, he thinks that he can impart the knowledge of His control, the legacy of the providential will, to Imlac: "The care of appointing a successor has long disturbed me; the night andthe day have been spent in comparisons of all the characters which have come to my knowledge, and I have yet found none so worthy as thyself (p. 140). Believing his authority to be divine in nature, the astronomer—in a way that evokes the themes of succession and secret knowledge—presumes he can pass on his power to Imlac through the authority of his word. His condition is clearly an analogue of the travelers', for his belief in the control of the future, signalled by the conventional symbol of destiny, the heavens, reflects the desire of the wanderers in their quest for happiness. In relieving the astronomer of the fictions of his imagination, the pilgrims prepare to remove themselves from their own. This transformation occurs with the lessons of the monks of the monastery of St. Anthony, which is followed by the descent into the catacombs.

Critics have often noted the shift in subject and tone that comes over the narrative after the travelers discuss their visit to the monastery of St. Anthony. But none, I think, has sufficiently stressed just how in these chapters Johnson works within the conceptual and narrative context of Christian heroism.¹⁵ Christian heroism, in contrast to heroic virtue, usually takes the form of vigilance: it is a kind of heroic or "standing." To take one example, standing is the "action" that Christ commends to the angelic band before the conclusion of the war in heaven in Book VI of Paradise Lost:

Stand still in bright array ye Saints, here stand
Ye Angels arm'd, this day from Battle rest;
Faithful hath been your Warfare, and of God
Accepted, fearless in his righteous Cause,
And as ye have receiv'd, so have ye done Invincibly …
(VI. 801-806)

With Christ as their vanguard, the angelic band win an easy rout, but as the Son explains, they win merely by standing, that is, by the conviction of their faith. If heroic resolution is the essence of Christian heroism, its prelude is the humble submission that prepares one for temptation and conflict. Expressed in high heroic fashion in Milton's poem, this axiom is conveyed in a much more sober fashion by Johnson, who in a prayer that he wrote later in his life, espoused a quiet yet resolute heroism. Striving to submit himself to the will of the heavenly father, Johnson vowed to stand steadfastly in the "patient expectation" of his own spiritual illumination: "Let me rejoice in the light which Thou hast imparted, let me serve Thee with active zeal and humble confidence, and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the soul which Thou receivest shall be satisfied with Knowledge."¹⁶ Stressing the need to wait for the time when he might be satisfied with the knowledge and the certainty he desires, Johnson can be "active"only in his "zeal," that is, in his obedience. In Rasselas, likewise, a son must come to recognize his filial obligations: he must learn, that is, to stand and "wait with patient expectation" for the paternal word that holds the key to the mystery of the book in the tower. So do the monks of the monastery of St. Anthony stand and wait, as Imlac observes: "… their toils are cheerful, because they consider them as acts of piety, by which they are always advancing towards endless felicity" (p. 149). While they remain in their monastic enclosures they are advancing, because they possess the interpretive code Rasselas is denied: "Their devotion prepares them for another state, and reminds them of its approach, while it fits them for it" (p. 148). Imlac's earlier articulation of this paradox of progress in the Happy Valley becomes, retrospectively, a gloss on the pilgrims' progress heretofore: "Change of place is no natural cause of the increase of piety …" (pp. 91-92). Pilgrims of a sort like Rasselas and his companions, the monks, however, accept their filial obligations and resist the temptation of narrative. And they are able to transcend its labyrinthine elaborations because they know that felicity (spiritual succession) is made possible only through submission. Such is the paradox of progress, which can be achieved only when the secular narrative signifies the sacred—when one makes the proper choice of eternity.¹⁷ For once the a priori code is grasped, they labyrinth of narrative is demystified and appropriated.

In bringing the pilgrims to the order of St. Anthony, the oldest in Christendom, Johnson may simply have chosen a Christian analogue available in Egypt. Yet I think there is reason to suspect that he may have had in mind one of the most famous passages from St. Augustine's Confessions. In Book VIII, Augustine, tormented by his sinful nature, took refuge beneath a fig tree where he sought in vain for a way to escape his contemptible condition. Paralyzed by self-recrimination and "with bitter sorrow in his heart," Augustine "all at once heard the sing-song voice of a child in a nearby house." Again and again the child repeated the refrain "Take it and read, take it and read." Augustine, telling himself that "this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall," remembered the miraculous story he had recently heard concerning St. Anthony:

For I had heard the story of Antony, and I remembered how he had happened to go into a church while the Gospel was being read and had taken it as a counsel addressed to himself when he heard the words Go home and sell all that belongs to you. Give it to the poor, and so the treasure you have shall be in heaven; then come back and follow me.¹⁸

In the Confessions, it is Augustine's recognition of St. Anthony's miraculous experience that put him on the path to conversion and which provided him with a new way of interpreting.Augustine's text, "Spend no more thought on nature and nature's appetites" (Romans 13.13-14), certainly resonates in Johnson's text, and in Rasselas the travelers come to recognize the limited nature of their quest after their discussion of the monks of St. Anthony, a discussion that is followed by their descent into the catacombs. In this final monument of the narrative architecture of Rasselas, the party will come at last to understand the true nature of their quest, and they will be able to because their discussion is preceded by their recognition of the paradox of progress.

Upon entering the catacombs, the travelers rove "with wonder through the labyrinth of subterraneous passages where the bodies were laid in rows on either side" (p. 150). Their visit to this "labyrinth" recalls the descent by which the epic hero receives the legacy of the future that he will fulfill as the agent of the paternal will. Although a number of analogues of epic descent were available to Johnson, I think that he may very well have had in mind Aeneas's descent in Book VI of Virgil's poem.¹⁹ In that book, Aeneas, having captured the golden bough that permits him to cross the threshold of mortality, receives a prophetic vision of Rome from his father, Anchises. But before the revelation of empire, he receives a lesson that draws upon Lucretian cosmology and stoic religious dogma. Anchises tells his son about the elemental fire that links the soul to the divine spirit that imbues the universal mind, instructing Aeneas on the path by which all souls seek to return to the "fiery energy" that forged them:

First, then, the sky and lands and sheets of water,
The bright moon's globe, the Titan sun and stars,
Are fed within by Spirit, and a Mind
Infused through all the members of the world
Makes one great living body of the mass.
From Spirit come the races of man and beast,
The life of birds, odd creatures the deep sea
Contains beneath her sparkling surfaces,
And fiery energy from a heavenly source
Belongs to the generative seeds of these,
So far as they are not poisoned or clogged
By mortal bodies, their free essence dimmed
By earthiness and deathliness of flesh.²⁰

Anchises continues his lecture by explaining that the soul, after passing through successive incarnations, finally returns to its elemental point of rest in the eternal fire from which it was born. While most have to undergo numerous incarnations, some, like Anchises, are free:

We are sent
Through wide Elysium, where a few abide
In happy lands, till the long day, the round
Of Time fulfilled, has worn our stains away,
Leaving the soul's heaven-sent perception clear,
The fire from heaven pure.

In Virgil's text, Anchises's speech serves as a kind of prelude to the prophecies to follow, prophecies that link past, present, and future through the legacy of pious Aeneas. In Johnson's text, Rasselas and his companions do not receive such an inspiring vision. But in their symbolic descent into the underworld, they come to appreciate the paradoxical nature of transcendent knowledge in a fallen world. And in the lecture they receive from Imlac, who, like Anchises, discourses on the nature of the soul, they come to reflect upon their own condition from the prospect of eternity.

In their discussion in the catacombs, the travelers dispute the nature of the soul, at last fixing their quest upon its proper object. At first they cannot determine whether the soul is material or immortal. But as Imlac explains, it is both, despite the apparent contradiction of the example he provides: "It is no limitation of onmipotence … to suppose that one thing is not consistent with another, that the same proposition cannot be at once true and false, that the same number cannot be even and odd, that cogitation cannot be conferred on that which is created incapable of cogitation" (pp. 151-52). Imlac's explanation leads Rasselas to understand the intersection of the noumenal and the temporal in the internal architectural space of the soul, for as the travelers prepare to leave the catacombs, he at last hits upon a potential interpretive code when he remarks: "How gloomy would be these mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he shall never die" (p. 152). Soon after Rasselas's revelation, the travelers at last comprehend the nature of narrative and recognize the limitations of their understanding. Although they make ambitious plans for more useful lives than they have lead heretofore, they recognize that in constructing such plans they have once again been seduced by their irrepressible desires. As a result, they plan almost immediately to return to Abyssinia. But in so doing they show that they can decipher the labyrinth of narrative even though they cannot so easily discipline their desires. And when Rasselas and the pilgrims resolve to return to Abyssinia, it is in tacit recognition that the privileged discourse, symbolized by the book in the tower, is not the preserve of the privileged; on the contrary, anyone who learns how to interpret its contents may decipher the mystery of the labyrinth and appropriate the riches of the palaces of Abyssinia, and of etemity.²¹ However, judging from the conclusion in which nothing is concluded, it is clear that the knowledge and potential power the book represents are not at all easily obtained, their elusive possession being the subtler lesson of the monastic visit. For while Johnson depicts the monks of St. Anthony advancing towardsspiritual accession because they humbly submit to the rigors of the religious life, he implies at the same time that such rigor may not be possible beyond the monastic enclosure. But the life of discipline is both a desirable goal and a moral challenge, especially in light of the appetite for experience that characterizes both Johnson and his fictional characters. Johnson, of course, was continually troubled about his own moral discipline, and he may have wondered whether such obedience as he hoped to attain was possible beyond the monastic life. But in spite of his doubts, he nonetheless continued to rededicate himself to the quest for spiritual peace, hoping to transcend his inherent limitations through diligent labor, the same labor for which Rasselas, the "fourth son of the mighty emperour," must prepare himself as well:

To give the heart to God, and to give the whole heart, is very difficult; the last, the great effort of long labour, fervent prayer, and diligent meditation.—Many resolutions are made, and many relapses lamented, and many conflicts with our own desires, with the powers of this world, and the powers of darkness, must be sustained, before the will of man is made wholly obedient to the will of God.²²

Notes

¹ Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 189.

² Of the numerous critical studies of Rasselas, those that I have found most useful for my purposes are Earl R. Wasserman, "Johnson's Rasselas: Implicit Contexts," JEGP, 74 (1975), 1-25; Eric Rothstein, "Rasselas," in Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975), pp. 23-61; Emrys Jones, "The Artistic Form of Rasselas," Review of English Studies, 18 (1967), 387-401; Gwin Kolb, "The Structure of Rasselas," PMLA, 66 (1951), 698-717; and Carey McIntosh, The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson and the World of Fiction (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 163-212. Also, Bertrand Bronson's footnote to the description of the palace (in chapter one) in his edition of Rasselas initially aroused my interest in the narrative's architecture: "The description here seems 'planted' for future narrative development. Johnson never exploits it, however, having his mind on events of a different order." Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose (New York: Rinehart, 1952), p. 507. My disagreement with Bronson's footnote generates the central thesis of this essay.

³ Though "redeeming" has unmistakable theological overtones, I also want to stress its narrative sense, which emphasizes recovery and fulfillment. Recovery and fulfillment, denied to the travelers in narrative time, can only be glimpsed at privileged moments (such as the monastery of St. Anthony and the catacombs) when they approach without crossing the threshold that promises access to transcendent knowledge. Of the many critical works on the theory of romance, I have found Patricia Parker's Inescapable Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979) particularly helpful. Parker defines romance as a form which "simultaneously quests for and postpones a particular end, objective, or object" (p. 4). In her subsequent elaborations, Parker shows how romance, operating as a narrative strategy deferring the anticipated moment of revelation, dilates the threshold before the promised end, word, or name is disclosed. In a generalization pertinent to Rasselas as well, she remarks: "For poets for whom the recovery of identity of the attainment of an end is problematic, or impossible, the focus may be less on arrival or completion than on the strategy of delay" (p. 5). The historical background on Johnson's use of romance can be found in Martha P. Conant, The Oriental Tale in England (New York, 1908); and Geoffrey Tillotson, "Rasselas and the Persian Tales," Essays in Criticism and Research (Cambridge, 1942), pp. 111-16.

⁴ Samuel Johnson, Rasselas in Samuel Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1977), p. 73. Subsequent citations, given parenthetically in the text by page, are to this edition.

⁵ Johnson, I think, uses succession as a trope for the transmission of privileged knowledge. Rasselas therefore desires to circumvent his filial obligations by means of an alternative "succession" through experience. The ultimate failure of such alternative schemes (of a younger son) is foreshadowed in the attempted flight from the Happy Valley in chapter 6, a flight that ends in Icarian bathos. On Johnson's thinking on succession in general, see Adam Potkay, "Johnson and the Terms of Succession," SEL, 26 (1986), 497-509.

⁶ Edward W. Tayler, Milton's Poetry, Its Development in Time (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1979), p. 128. On the distinction, see also Henri-Charles Puech, Man and Time (New York, 1957), pp. 40-41.

⁷ On the debatable Edenic status of the Happy Valley, see Gwin J. Kolb, "The 'Paradise' in Abyssinia and the 'Happy Valley' in Rasselas," Modern Philology, 56 (1958), 10-16; and D. M. Lockhart, "'The Fourth Son of the Mighty Emperour': The Ethopian Background of Johnson's Rasselas," PMLA, 78 (1963), 516-28.

⁸ In The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: CornellUniv. Press, 1977), p. 129, Tzvetan Todorov explains the nature of the quest narrative: "The quest of the Grail is the quest of a code. To find the Grail is to learn how to decipher the divine language, which means … to appropriate the a priori aspects of the system." It is also worth noting that in Rasselas the knowledge that the book in the tower contains applies to a realm of experience outside the Happy Valley, because the emperor does not live there but only visits once a year.

⁹ John Freccero elaborates this connection between narrative and desire: "The theology of the Word binds together language and desire by ordering both to God, in Whom they are grounded. From a naturalistic stand-point, it is impossible to say whether human discourse is a reflection of the Word or whether the idea of God is simply a metaphoric application of linguistic theory." "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," Diacritics, 5 (1975), 35. In Rasselas, Johnson's "theology of the Word" emphasizes the difference between happiness and felicity. In the Dictionary, Johnson defines "happiness" as the "state in which desires are satisfied." He defined "felicity" as "blissfulness, blessedness," giving as an illustration lines from Spenser's Amoretti 78: "The joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin, / And grant that we, for whom thou did'st die / Being with thy dear blood clean wash'd from sin, / May live for ever in felicitie."

¹⁰ The phrase concludes sonnet 19: "God doth not need / Either man's work or his own gifts, who best / Bear his mild yoak, they serve him best, his State / Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed / And post O're land and ocean without rest; / They also serve who only stand and wait."

¹¹ W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977), p. 281. The influence of the church fathers on Johnson's thought was first remarked upon by Hawkins: "To speak of… his religion, it had a tincture of enthusiasm, arising from the fervour of his imagination, and the perusal of St. Augustine and others of the fathers, and the writings of Kempis and the ascetics" (pp. 162-63). Johnson's relation to the church fathers has been considered by Katherine C. Balderston in "Dr. Johnson and William Law," PMLA, 75 (1960), 382-94, who argues that Johnson may have gotten such ideas from William Law. Nevertheless, given the evidence of Johnson's library, it seems clear that he knew the church fathers first hand. On Johnson's relationship to Augustinian theology, see Donald Greene, "Johnson's Late Conversion: A Reconsideration," in Johnsonian Studies, ed. Magdi Wahba (Cairo, 1962), pp. 61-92.

¹² Eric Rothstein notes that contemporary sources "treat the pyramid … positively, with reference to immortality or eternity." (Systems of Order and Inquiry, p. 45). In The Pyramids of Egypt (Harmondsworth, 1977), I. E. S. Edwards notes that "the possession of the Pyramid" enables the king to "mount up to heaven at will and return to his tomb" (p. 288).

¹³ Emrys Jones, "The Artistic Form of Rasselas," p. 397.

¹⁴" The way in which these chapters fit into later temporal patterns whereby characters try to control past, present, and future is treated by Geoffrey Tillotson in "Time and Rasselas," in Bicentenary Essays on Rasselas, ed. Magdi Wahba (Cairo: S.O.P. Press, 1959), pp. 97-103. A recent account of these chapters is Leonard Orr, "The Structural and Thematic Importance of the Astronomer in Rasselas," Recovering Literature, 9 (1981), 15-21.

¹⁵ For an extended discussion of Christian heroism in Milton, see Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 180-207. Contrasting it to heroic achievement, Fish writes that Christian heroism is "the willingness to rest easily and happily on days when there are no battles" (p. 196). What underlies Christian heroism is a post-Reformation conceptualization of man's temporal experience that, according to Georges Poulet, is based on the belief of "God the redeemer" rather than "God-the-creator-and-preserver," and which empowers the hero by joining "the particular moment … to an eternal moment." Studies. in Human Time, trans. Elliot Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1956), p. 11.

¹⁶Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr., in The Yale Edition of the Works (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958), I, 384.

¹⁷ Saint Anthony of Egypt, who died ca. 355, was the founder of Christian monasticism. By fasting and other ascetic practices, St. Anthony repeatedly overcame the devil, who appeared to him in the form of various visual and auditory temptations. See Butler's Lives of the Saints, ed. Herbert Thurston and Donald Atwater (New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1956), I, 104-109.

¹⁸Confessions, ed. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 177.

¹⁹ Although the allegorization of the classical epic was of greater importance to the later middle ages and Renaissance, in the eighteenth century, observes Wasserman, "Homer's epics and especially Virgil's Aeneid were still read as allegorical journeys of the prince (such as Prince Rasselas)" (p. 16). Johnson frequently cited passages from Aeneid VI in his periodical essays. He was apparently keen on lines 126-29, the descent into the nether world, which he cites on five occasions: Rambler 16, 64, 155; Idler 27, and Adventurer 34. Here are the lines in Dryden's translation: "The gates of Hell are open night and day; / Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: / But, to return, and view the chearful skies; / In this, the task and mighty labour lies."

²⁰The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Random, 1985), p. 185. While the afterlife first appears "localized and final," writes R. G. Austin, "now [VI.724-51], astonishingly, all is changed and a new prospect opens. The underworld spirit-existence, in its various forms, is replaced by a cosmic system of the origin and progress of the soul in its connection with the body; after death it is gradually purged of the contaminations that have become ingrained during its bodily imprisonment, and with a lapse in time, depending on individual circumstance, it ascends in purity to the fiery element that gave it birth." Aeneis: Book VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 220.

²¹ There has always been disagreement concerning the ultimate destination of the pilgrims. See George Sherburn, "Rasselas Returns—To What?" Philological Quarterly, 38 (1959), 383-84; Wasserman, op. cit., 20-21; and Gwin Kolb, "Textual Cruxes in Rasselas," Johnsonian Studies, ed. Magdi Wahba (Cairo, 1962), pp. 257-66.I interpret the ending according to Johnson's own uncertainties about divine election. Reflecting the emotional urgency under which it was produced, Rasselas affirms Johnson's belief that the individual can only "stand and wait" for the intervening grace of the father.

²² Samuel Johnson, Sermons, ed. Jean Hagstrum and James Gray, in The Yale Edition of the Works (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), XIV, 143.