Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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quotation he included” functions as an example of the tautological reasoning Haraway identifies.11 Keeping in mind Haraway’s questions and cautions about works of reference, how does our understanding of Johnson’s Dictionary shift, and how are our assumptions about the status of reference and definition destabilized? Johnson’s Preface serves to frame the various problems of representation embedded in his lexicographical task. In doing so, it locates Johnson’s political imperative to construct bourgeois British identity.
One of the compelling features about the opening of the Preface is the concern Johnson expresses not only for the thanklessness of the lexicographer’s task, but for the barbarous state of language itself. Language, it seems, behaves not unlike an unruly child or flighty woman of fashion. He writes:
while [language] was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, [it] has itself been hitherto neglected; suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion; and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation. (277)
Johnson positions himself as the slave rather than the pupil of science in a history of drudgery that attends the production of knowledge. This representation imbues his labor with a bourgeois ethic that preaches toil as virtue. Yet the word “slave” seems curiously excessive in the context of Johnson’s typically measured and moderate language. The use of the term calls into question the status of his definitional progress. “Time” and “fashion” form a “tyranny” to which Johnson is a “slave.” Such a “tyranny,” composed largely of the “corruptions of ignorance” and the “caprices of innovation,” needs a steadier hand to wrest control from “accident or affectation” and steer the course of knowledge back on a progressive track. “Notwithstanding this discouragement,” Johnson decides to assume the part of cultural arbiter and write “a dictionary of the English language” (277–79), placing himself, impossibly, as both slave and tyrant of scientific knowledge, or, perhaps more accurately for capitalist culture, as its owner.
His first tyrannical move as owner is to position language as something material: either as “rubbish” and “obstruction” or as “learning” and “genius.” This gesture emphasizes the visceral and substantive qualities of language, endowing it with value, especially in the hands of a wise venture capitalist. Johnson’s material view of language does more than act as a convenient metaphor: it uncovers a discourse of cultural materialism at work in his representation of language. It is important to consider Raymond Williams’s argument for “the indissoluble connections between material production, political and cultural institutions and activity, and consciousness” when thinking through the ways in which Johnson’s catalogue of language replicates a model of British bourgeois identity.12 When we take into account the various academic institutions with which Johnson competes, and their place in determining material conditions of life, Johnson’s concept of selfhood, informed by an uneasy relation between Enlightenment models of the individual and an increasing attention to the status of nation, may be read as an ideological position, a necessary fiction of a mystified lived relation about the material conditions of his life at the time: impoverished, embittered, and alone.13
Johnson is fated, he suggests, to serve a thankless public with his lexicographical toil. He is “doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions” in the service of “learning and genius” that “press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress” (277). Yet “tongues,” he reminds us, “like governments have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language” (296). Such reminders prompt an awareness of certain kinds of authorial power: as despised, hopeless, or invisible as lexicographical labor may be, it documents the coherence of national culture as crucially as the “constitution,” an argument that would have had considerable force in eighteenth-century England.14 Johnson’s identification with such labor is troubled by his relation to academic cultures. Caught between two categories, neither a member of the intellectual elite nor a mere Grub Street hack writer, he is highly sensitive to the competing and at times conflicting desires to have his work remain unnoticed (“I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave”); to serve as the price for his service to the nation (“I have devoted this book, the labor of years, to the honor of my country”); and to append his name, by the very act of writing this Preface, “to the reputation of English literature,” remarking that the “chief glory of every people arises from its authors” (296–98). One way of accounting for such contending desires may be to see Johnson’s project as a challenge to the practice of patronage and as his competition with academies. Johnson’s own definition of aristocratic patronage, one that “supports with insolence and is paid with flattery,”15 suggests a necessity for establishing an identity in which issues of propriety override the corrupt system of patronized literary production.16 That is, Johnson eschews aristocratic aid for an implicitly bourgeois self-reliance and derides aristocratic indulgences while promoting independent temperance. Johnson’s representation of language can be read as a study of culture. It reconstructs for a British audience the need to moderate potential imperial prosperity with a stabilizing bourgeois ethic. The potential of literary wealth that language offers can only be realized by the rational restraining hand of a lexicographer schooled in the arts of moderation.
The Preface provides an outline for the problem of representing English, and by association England, to the British. Much like an appraiser of fine gems, Johnson takes up the lexicographical burden of establishing a “settled test of purity” for language: he studiously endeavors to “collect examples and authorities from the writers before the Restoration, whose works [I] regard … as the pure sources of genuine diction” (289). With this explanation, Johnson places himself in the position of final literary authority. The contradictions in his writing—namely that “purity” of language incorporates not all English literature but only pre-Restoration works, specifically Elizabethan—illustrate not only his own uneasiness with the claim of a “pure” origin but also the ideological nature of his project.
Purity suggests the existence of its opposite: corruption. In his catalogue of the various forms of neglect the English language has suffered, Johnson names the “corruptions of ignorance.” These corruptions take the form of “irregularities” that, in the process of “adjusting the orthography, which has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous,” he has found “inherent in our tongue” (278). These “improprieties and absurdities,” he writes, are “the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe” (278). However, in many cases “Such defects are not errors of orthography, but spots of barbarity impressed so deep in the English language that criticism can never wash them away” (279). What I find compelling about this passage is that the issues of contamination inform Johnson’s lexicographical task. On the one hand, his position as a critic has the potential to wash clean contaminating error by locating and testing pure sources of “genuine diction.” On the other, the spots of barbarity indicate an otherness that, though domesticated—indeed, “inherent”—always represents a site of resistance to the contention of a seamless national language. Like the very construction of British national identity, the composition of language is impure and uneven. Indeed, it seems that there is something barbarous about language in its “natural” state; only when schooled by particular authors’ hands does language represent a pure source of “genuine diction.”17
One way to examine the way ideology operates in this context is to read “purity” in language in light of Derrida’s discussion of Condillac. In his essay “Signature Event Context,” Derrida writes:
The representational character of written communication—writing as a picture, reproduction, imitation of its content—will be the invariable trait of all the progress to come. The concept of representation is indissociable here from the concepts of communication and expression…. Representation regularly supplements presence. But this operation of supplementation … is not exhibited as a break in presence, but rather as a reparation and a continuous, homogeneous modification of presence in representation.18
Derrida’s