ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the presence of grotesque discourses in James Boswell's Life of Johnson, and traces their transmission to and refashioning within Victorian representations of Johnson. Boswell presents us with a body absorbed in a Gargantuan act of consumption. This is a body which makes the secrets of its interior systems of circulation visible, even in polite company, with veins protruding from the forehead. In an act analogous to the archaeological recovery of Roman ornamental grotesques during the Renaissance, Bakhtin's aim in Rabelais and His World was to rescue Rabelais's 'canon' of grotesque body imagery from the layers of cultural re-inscription that had obscured the liberatory potential he claimed for it. Vast strength hampered by clumsiness and associated with grievous disease, deep and massive powers of feeling limited by narrow though acute perceptions, were characteristic both of soul and body. Leslie Stephen's Johnson offers a contrasting perspective within this grand narrative representation of the evolution of eighteenth-century thought.
