SubStance

On August 6, 1763, the man who would become the greatest master of anecdotal form in English, James Boswell, and the object of his adulation and future biographical subject, Samuel Johnson, enter a church in Harwich. Boswell is about to take unwilling leave of his new friend, who is doing him the honor of seeing him off on his voyage to Holland. They approach the altar: “Johnson, whose piety was constant and fervent, sent me to my knees, saying, ‘Now that you are going to leave your native country, recommend yourself to the protection of your CREATOR and REDEEMER.’” Outside the church they talk “of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal.” Johnson is provoked by his companion’s assertion that “though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it.” “I shall never forget the alacrity,” Boswell avows, “with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus’” (Boswell I: 471). In this most iconic of Johnsoniana, the thing speaks for itself. Johnson’s constant faith in his creator is equaled and expressed by his faith in the reality of objects. The anecdote, by extension, expresses Boswell’s faith in Johnson; it is representative of the way in which, as I argued in Loving Dr. Johnson, “the force of the collision of man and object enacts the solidity of both, a solidity bolstered by the anecdote’s unique proximity to historical reality” (49).¹

But rather than interpret this oft-cited anecdote about the materiality of things anew, I choose to evoke it here as itself an object, the closest a narrative can get to a thing. Anecdotes function at the beginning of a variety of literary-critical, new-historical and just plain historical essays as stones critics kick to prove the reality and solidity of the historical matter they analyze. I’m struck in this context not by how the stone’s heft proves Johnson’s real-life vitality, but by how its materiality reminds us that the great author himself is—or was (and this ambiguity reminds us that Boswell’s version of the anecdote in the Life transpires in a revivifying present tense, while haunted by the inevitability of his subject’s death)—a weighty thing. The process by which matter is [End Page 31] brought to life here is symbiotic and janus-faced; this anecdote enlivens the subject of Boswell’s great Life and renders him potentially object-like, mute as the stone at the anecdote’s heart. Or, we might say, as we turn to our next anecdote, as expressive as an orange.

Golden apple of the Hesperides, cinematic mobster’s smile, the orange is translated via the portable genre of anecdote through time and space, from East to West, across historical eras and literary traditions, while resting at the heart of Wikipedia’s definition of “différance,” that elusive distinction definable neither as word nor concept:

A clear example of this effect occurred in England during the Renaissance period, when oranges first began to be imported from the Mediterranean. Yellow and red came to be differentiated from a new colour term—”orange.” What was the meaning of these words before 1600? What is their meaning afterwards? Such effects go on all the time in our use of language and frequently, in fact, this effect forms the very basis of language/meaning.²

Here the orange is the unique thing that paradoxically proves there is nothing outside the text. If we turn from textual matters to the orange itself (and this essay explores the impossibility of doing so definitively), things become even more complicated, for not all oranges are orange. As Pierre Laszlo informs us in a caption beneath a photo of green oranges at a Rio de Janeiro market, “Brazil is representative of the world-wide tropics, where oranges are not orange-colored, but greenish. The synonymy between the fruit and the color orange is thus seen to be an...