Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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under the guise of rewriting a national identity, comes about by trafficking in language he has cast as feminine or feminized. Johnson’s representation of a dominant, masculine, English authority relies on a foundation of language that is almost always in a state of decay. Because, as Johnson claims language is by its nature prone to change, and because language is unreliable as a fixed signifying system, the task of securing “pure” meaning becomes impossible.
According to Johnson, at the heart of language, and therefore at the heart of Englishness, is a series of unfixable others; Johnson’s responses articulate a xenophobic anxiety of contamination by those others. Johnson’s representation of language and culture depends a good deal on instituted difference. His construction of English national identity relies on the maneuver Edward Said discusses in Orientalism. With this maneuver “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”27 There are at least two levels of this othering occurring in the Preface; one can be read as a familiar francophobia, based on economic and imperial rivalry between France and England, and the other as a deeper, less specific, xenophobic scapegoating in which a feminized language operates as a representation of “decay” or contamination. Thus Johnson describes in London the importance of distinguishing “British lineaments” from an undifferentiated other.
The comparison he makes between his task and ones undertaken by the French and Italians pits the single British lexicographer against others, even if all are engaged in the same sort of drudgery usually ascribed to the “lower employments” of the masses. Johnson describes others involved in lexicographical projects as “the aggregated knowledge, and cooperating diligence of the Italian academicians” or the “embodied critics of France.” While these descriptions ascribe an intellectual weight to Continental academies, the final effect is to negate such value. The “soft obscurities of retirement” and “shelter of academic bowers” convey a peculiarly effeminate and hence in the Preface’s terms, a repellent quality to foreign critics. In contrast, the more surly, singular and rustic English effort Johnson associates with himself produces “honor to [his] country,” against the indiscrete “nations of the Continent,” to whom the “palm of philology” is not yielded without a “contest” (296). In distinguishing between English and foreign efforts, Johnson’s defense of national identity may be aligned with his attempts to distinguish himself from the hack writers of Grub Street. In both cases, he constructs a masculine, bourgeois English identity through the an act of othering, a process of elimination.
Once again: Johnson’s notion of distinction, of aligning individualism with intellectual esteem, develops from his portrayal in the Preface to the Dictionary of the singularity of English intellectualism and English culture. In turn, this singularity is informed by an imperialist ideology and cultivated by the colonizing gestures underwriting the political imperative of the Preface. Johnson’s attempt to control language derives from anxiety of contamination by the very thing he has colonized and duly incorporated into the cultural matrix, such as French “terms of domestic use.” Johnson assumes a proprietary tone when he discusses his etymological research. He describes the “obscure recesses” he would “enter” and “ransack,” finding the “treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labor” (291, my italics). Such tropes not only shape his representation of imperialist culture but also assign gender to these linguistic acquisitions. Like the treasures brought back from English colonies to adorn English women, the “treasures” he pillages from literature figure language as a display-case of Western patriarchal power. Johnson seems to be guilty of the commercial trafficking in metaphorical language he deplores.28
Translation and trafficking lead to new inventions of “dialect,” and in earlier descriptions Johnson links oral speech to moral depravity, vulgarity, and indolence. The problem with dialect is its “anomalous formulations,” which “once incorporated, can never afterward be dismissed or reformed” (278). The implicit suggestion is that spoken language or dialect, as it follows class alignments, is able to infect written language in the same way that a “mingled dialect” may infect the “other ranks.” Written language, figured as property that can be shaped according to Johnson’s notion of culture, occupies a curiously double position here as a marker of both the stability and the instability of national and cultural identity. As an inherently capricious and wayward commodity, written language must be prevented from complying “with the corruptions of oral utterance,” yet it also constitutes the “wells of English undefiled.”
In Johnson’s representation, the “natural” slips from one pole to the other without apparent contradiction because, as Laura Brown suggests, it represents “not the landscape of England at all but a naturalized fantasy about English culture.”29 The double position that Johnson’s texts ascribe to language reflects his own double position: as a lexicographer, doomed to the “lower” employments of life; and as an intellectual authority, an authority that is, ironically, produced out of lexicographical drudgery.
What Johnson incorporates and what he casts out in the preface to his project reflect the problems implicit in cultural representation. In his invective against translation, he marks out his political ambivalence toward the other. Johnson claims that “single words may enter by the thousands and the fabric of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once.” Individual words are more easily incorporated than whole works, whose retention of “native idiom” presents the possibility of native resistance to colonial “incorporation.”30 Johnson casts out the (distressing) oral by writing the Dictionary, and secures his authority by supplementing it with another’s: “when it happened that any author gave a definition, I have produced his authority as a supplement to my own” (289–90).
The “spots of barbarity” or “anomalous formulations” are incorporated but not disseminated within the fabric of language: their existence, therefore, is a reminder of the foreign invasion and domestic weakness. There are, however, other instances where barbaric phrases supply “real deficiencies, such are readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate easily with our native idioms” (289). Here Johnson’s discussion of etymology once again exposes his self-conscious desire for a pure origin. The fantastic image of Englishness is not unlike his created image of others; both sets of images are constructed from powerful cultural fantasies about identity. The suggestive imagery of recesses and forgotten mines—in which Johnson “pierces deep,” leaving his mark or “inquir[ing] the nature of every substance of which [he] inserted the name,” with the end that this “book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical”—not only indicates that his project reflects imperialist acquisitiveness. It also figures the other in terms of the foreign and the feminine, positioning Johnson as the voice of patriarchal authority. Language and the foreign are therefore able to replace each other as forms of property. The other is threatening because of its difference from Johnson’s representation of Englishness. The feminine is threatening because it is unreadable, and must, therefore, remain “untouched.” It thus stands in for language’s dirty spots that criticism cannot wash from a cultural fabric.
Robert DeMaria describes his book on Johnson as a rediscovery of the Dictionary’s capacity as a book. “After spending time reading a dictionary as a disguised encyclopedia,” he writes, “it is possible to describe its contents—to classify and name the “galaxy of pieces of world knowledge” that the book contains.”31 Books disclose stories, and both Johnson and DeMaria seem drawn to storytelling. By his own admission, DeMaria describes how he imitates Johnson’s research for the Dictionary, and he seems to have employed the same plot: the narrative of ideologically constructed privilege. Although DeMaria discusses Umberto Eco’s demystification of a “dictionary” as a record of definition, the alternative model that Eco offers and DeMaria accepts—the encyclopedia—is just as subject to ideological investigation. Haraway’s proposals for a feminist epistemology and Bhabha’s and Spivak’s postcolonial investigation of epistemological representation have clearly identified the ideological impetus of the encyclopedic project.
In sum, Johnson and his admirers write from within a self-contained fellowship of intellectuals