Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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clubbish both in British and U.S. academic institutions. Epistemological paradigms that afford a history of imperialism, such as those of Bhabha, Haraway, and Spivak, complicate models of Johnson scholarship and offer new readings in cultural representation and crucial ways to formulate the politics of national identity.
Foreign Bodies
The sheer breadth of Johnson’s literary engagement provides an example of the ways xenophobia informs a stabilizing signifying system that organizes and situates cultural and national identities. Johnson’s Preface provides a manifesto of codification: the maintenance of English as a master language is most clearly performed by a continual engagement with the peripheries of meaning. That is, the stability of a word’s meaning is accomplished through a constant concern with and policing of its outlying (or secondary) connotations. Other parts of Johnson’s corpus, works that for the most part remain outside the canon of his literary accomplishment, uncover similar concerns with the structures of xenophobia.
In describing Johnson’s work, for the Gentleman's Magazine during 1738–44, Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt observe that “one kind of a job … was the compilation of biographical essays.” They then list as examples of those found in the biographies the names Herman Boerhaave, Admiral Robert Blake, Sir Francis Drake, and John Philip Barretier. Following this notable catalogue, however, is the concession that
another feature was a department of illegal, semifictitious and thinly disguised reports on the proceedings of the Houses of Parliament…. Johnson produced, on very slender evidence, sometimes hardly more than the names of the speakers and their topics, a series of Debates which were translated all over the Continent as the veritable words of English statesmen. (5)
Brady and Wimsatt hastily point out that “at about the time when he fully realized the extent of this ‘propagation of falsehood,’ he dropped the job abruptly” (5).
At issue in this passage is Johnson’s practice and attitude toward historical writing. Brady and Wimsatt define Johnson’s authority by the cultural weight of his biographical essays as well as by the moral weight of his rigidly regulated conscience that refused with admirable alacrity to condone such “propagation of falsehood.” Yet the questionable status of historical “truth” in literary representation cannot be so quickly or easily dismissed, regardless of Johnson’s professed moral view. His writings in Gentleman's Magazine, legitimate or otherwise, illustrate how personal, historical, cultural, and ideological issues complicate representation. The eighteenth-century project of carving out a discursive space for a “refined” public sphere dominated by a bourgeois ethic seems particularly open to such complications of authorship.33 In the case of Johnson’s corpus, questions of identity, legitimacy and illegitimacy, raised by his “hack” work on Gentleman's Magazine, are reproduced not only in the Parliamentary debates, in which he “authors” the words of English statesmen, but also in his more canonical works. During this period, Johnson also wrote the poem London (1738) and the Life of Savage (1744), two texts strikingly concerned with problems of writing an identity.
Johnson’s “imitation” of Juvenal’s Third Satire, London, opens up the question of poetic voice and poetic authority. Imitating an established Roman poet in order to legitimize one’s own poetic endeavor defines much poetic work in the eighteenth century, despite the fact that this neoclassical practice poses problems regarding authorship. This poem’s two “voices”—Thales and a nearly silent “me”—register the two “authors” of the poem: Johnson and Juvenal.34 The Life of Savage concerns the credibility of Richard Savage’s romantic claim to be the “lost” son of the Countess of Macclesfield as much as it concerns legitimizing Johnson’s own identity as an English writer. The question of cultural and personal identity at issue in London and the Life of Savage is linked to the question of authority and authorship that Johnson assumes in his writing. The authorial issues so clearly determining the production of Johnson’s Dictionary and its Preface are foregrounded in these texts. It seems as if the Dictionary functions as a primer for lessons on eighteenth-century authorship, solidifying the anxieties about authorial identity insistent in his earlier work.35 Thales’s identification of “imported” politics invading an integrated English identity in London seems linked to Savage’s and Johnson’s project of articulating an identity that insures the virtues that Thales outlines as English.36 While ventriloquizing his own anxieties and beliefs about the identity and role of the professional writer in both texts, Johnson uses a Juvenalian rancor to rewrite unrecognized merit as the romance of rustic English virtue.
The prevailing ethos of eighteenth-century British imperialism further complicates these issues. Both in the case of Johnson’s biographies and in his work on the magazine, England’s dominant position in relation to the Continent is unqualified. His heroes are either English or strongly associated with the British Commonwealth; his Debates are a type of con-job, intentional or not, that speaks for England with political confidence. Johnson displays a conscience and character that prompts him to quit propagating falsehood. This virtue of a morally alert conscience, peculiar to being English according to Johnson, is the subject of both London and the Life of Savage. Johnson’s representation of nationalism is not merely a record of historical “fact” but is self-consciously produced out of dominant cultural ideologies.
The dominant cultural ideologies involve terms of national mythmaking that employ the racist and xenophobic strategy of creating and expelling foreign others. Gates describes this process as a Eurocentric habit of accounting for the Other’s “essence” in absolute terms, in terms that “fix culturally defined differences into transcendent ‘natural’ categories or essences,” so that they may be more easily displaced or expelled.37 Problematizing the neatness of such a paradigm is the question of integrity: that is, the “origin” of Eurocentric essences, given this logic of comprehending difference, has to return to the European “body” in part for its definition. Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of the structures of “society” usefully complicate Gates’s model:
“Society” is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing—and hence constituting—the whole field of differences. The irresoluble interiority/exteriority tension is the condition of any social practice: necessity only exists as a partial limitation of the field of contingency. It is in this terrain, where neither a total interiority nor a total exteriority is possible, that the social is constituted.38
Once again: “necessity only exists as a partial limitation of the field of contingency.” In the context of articulation, there is no possibility of a “totality” and therefore “difference” can only be partially returned to the European body for its representation. It is what remains external to the incorporation of identity that formulates disruption for Johnson, a description he reconfigures according to already established figures of difference that rely on ideologies of gender and sexuality for their constitution. The surplus of meaning attached to these ideologies in both London and the Life of Savage may be read through the metaphors of imperialism, xenophobia, and gynophobia. Through these metaphors, Johnson mediates the crisis of authority and legitimacy in eighteenth-century neoclassicism.
Languages of expulsion, imperialism, xenophobia, gynophobia, are produced through xenodochial invitation. The by-products of these languages—the “foreign” bodies—are rendered visible through an invitation to reside in the domestic domicile. Hence, the foreign fops who “invade” London’s hearth are brought there through cultural solicitation. This process produces, in turn, the necessity for introjecting a different order of meaning (Frenchifying English custom) which only results in the necessity to seek other (frequently less desirable) places of incorporation such as Cambria.
A bitter invective against urban corruption, Johnson’s London ostensibly offers the pastoral—that is, “Cambria”—as a “happier place,” one in which “once the harassed Briton found repose” (ll. 43–47), but perhaps now hesitates to find similar sanctuary. Johnson’s invocation of pastoral values maps out political positions in this poem. One can loosely line up issues of morality, the natural, Englishness, and the self with the pastoral, while the city embodies