1 Institutionalizing Xenophobia:Johnson's Project

      How does language get institutionalized? Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language and his Preface to this project address some of the strategies involved in standardizing language. Embedded in Johnson’s Preface are ideas that reflect his understanding of language as a cultural barometer. Johnson’s invectives against the loose “license” of translators who destroy the integrity of language and his desires to preserve the purity of language by using pre-Restoration writers (the “pure sources of genuine diction”) as authoritative examples for his definitions together demonstrate an interest in keeping English (language) for the English. It is somewhat surprising, then, given the vehemence with which he treats these ideas, to remember that his first published novel was a translation of the seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuit, Father Jerome Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia.

      The apparent conflict between the ideas about language he represented in the Preface (1755) and the book he published in his early years (1733) is not especially problematic: given the enormous breadth of Johnson’s work, it would be surprising if his ideas about literature and language didn’t alter with time. More interesting, however, is the fact that when Johnson dwelled on the putative dangers of translation in the Preface he was referring particularly to translators of French, even though his early translation of Father Lobo was from the French and his later version of the “Oriental tale,” Rasselas, published only four years after the Dictionary, was heavily influenced by Voltaire’s Candide. It seems, then, that for Johnson, the French are crucially implicated in a strategy of othering: their place is somewhere between the “pure sources of genuine diction” that define Englishness and the “mingled jargon” that describes the language of Indian traders. That the genre of the “Oriental tale” was probably French in origin also suggests a metonymic connection of the French to more outlandish oriental exoticism.¹

      Johnson’s translation of Father Lobo and The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, both written under trying circumstances,² illustrate an eighteenth-century use of the “Orient” as an effective screen onto which to project English fantasies about the exotic. This use of the “Orient,” not altogether limited to the eighteenth century, may have been crucially negotiated by an infamous British francophobia. In the case of Rasselas (and those Rambler essays featuring Seged), exoticism—which had little to do with actual representations of Oriental countries—had an educational and moral edge. Although many of the French Oriental tales functioned as parables whose moral purposes were duly translated into English, for Johnson such narratives may also have been possible because, as Rasselas’s Pekuah says (a propos of the specters inhabiting the Pyramids), “our entrance is no violation of their privileges; we can take nothing from them, how can we offend them?”³ In other words, the function of the “Oriental tale” in England was, in part, to provide a different kind of backdrop (French/Oriental) onto which one could throw into sharp relief the moral lessons of English nationalism that would advocate cultural separation. After all, like the protagonist of Voltaire’s Candide who concluded “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” Rasselas and his company decide to return to Abyssinia rather than take up residence elsewhere. The other simultaneously circumvents the potential threat of national and cultural miscegenation and upholds the English ideology by keeping itself at bay. Also important to the eighteenth-century sensibility was the belief that tourism was “no violation”; that the fantasy about cultural purity (“we can take nothing from them, how can we offend them?”) was maintained on both ends, English and other; that the intermingling of cultural standpoints, at least in the context of travel, afforded few problems.

      But, clearly, there were problems with this form of exchange. Rather early in the novel, Rasselas asks:

      By what means … are the Europeans thus powerful? or why, since they can easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiatics and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither. (91)

      Imlac replies:

      They are more powerful, sir, than we … because they are wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance, as man governs other animals. But why their knowledge is more than ours, I know not what reason can be given, but the unsearchable will of the Supreme Being. (91)

      The reasonable question Rasselas poses is dismissed by Imlac’s irrational (to postcolonial readers) answer. This answer, however, is informed by the English (and European) belief that their epistemological stature is unassailable; the only kind of knowledge that can “predominate” is western. A character fashioned out of the English imagination, the “Oriental” Imlac crucially demonstrates the cultural fantasy that English imperialism was recognized by the “other” as natural.

      Anxieties about the invincibility of English epistemology, however, were more forcibly articulated in Johnson’s non-Orientalist writings than in the narratives that directly engaged the Orient. “Oriental tales” like Rasselas, the Rambler essays, or even his translation of Father Lobo provided his audience with an engaging if fictitious representation of the “Orient.” Such a representation, however, was clearly alien to anything English. Thus Imlac’s stories of his travels form more a catalogue of countries and travels than a detailed description, which in a culture that structured itself on taxonomies is hardly surprising. Readers could satisfactorily identify the lesson or story without necessarily thinking too deeply about their own relations to the different cultures being represented because what was reflected back to them was a picture of themselves. This is not to say that the representations of foreign places had no effect on English readers; rather, that they could dismiss cultural anomalies as foreign issues that had no relation to England.

      Johnson’s Preface to the Dictionary and other fictional works that explicitly address England and Englishness are different. These works do not treat their settings—London, Wales, Scotland—as mere backdrops; the settings act as politicized places that support the moral and political trajectory of the texts. The “lessons” or morals about language that Johnson represents in his Preface to the Dictionary are qualitatively different from those that he represents in his writings directly engaging the “Orient,” but in both cases the understanding of the power and authority of English epistemology is unquestioned. It is also clear, however, that the other—the French, the Orient—signifies the vulnerability of Englishness and their susceptibility to decay, to the corruption of the defining parameters of English cultural identity.

      For these reasons the following chapter on Johnson focuses on the Preface to the Dictionary, the poem London, and the cultural biography Life of Savage. These texts illustrate Johnson’s definition of English culture as one produced through xenophobia. Unlike the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary,