Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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academy and the publishing house. There is no place for individual acclaim or defamation. Perhaps because of the lack of visible and individual flair, the institution assumes a comforting solidity, a weighty sense of reliability and legitimacy that has established itself in early modern European cultures.
The exception is Johnson. His name stands out as an authorial presence in lexicographical history. The construction of the Dictionary is attributed exclusively to him, and yet his authorial presence, canonized as it is, has the same sort of legitimacy as that of the anonymous institutions. The ideological practices and positions embedded in his work, I will argue, are ones that are informed by xenophobia and produce the determining language for the privatized authorial space later privileged by romantic writers. Likewise, London also profits from a popular eighteenth-century poetic form: the imitation. The question of individual authorship is tethered to a faithful rendering of a national and cultural belief in its own incomparability. That this incomparability is embattled on the one hand by malignant Frenchified presence, and, on the other, by a vacuous and insipid Welsh pastoral motif again suggests the peculiar vulnerability of an English cultural identity that exists in an uneasy balance between xenodochy and xenophobia.
The Life of Savage, thematically connected to London because of the historical association of Thales (the poem’s speaker) and Richard Savage, exemplifies a domestic conflict about the status of English authorship. Johnson uses no explicit "others” to engage a representation of the English writer; several figures, however, function as impediments to the progress of Richard Savage’s literary development. These obstructions are domestic rather than foreign in origin: the troubled maternal relations that Savage invents for Johnson’s delectation, and the ways in which Johnson deploys Savage’s stories (Savage is also held under scrutiny, albeit sympathetically) in order to render the plight of the English author heroic. Thus Johnson’s poignant biography, recording the hazards that the embattled Savage experiences (and thereby illustrating a very effective portrait of himself), demonstrates the ways in which English authorship is also contingent on gynophobia. Turning the domestic household into a troubled spot suggests that the internal national space needs to be continually and carefully policed by the rigors of a regulated masculine authorship.
“Lost” in Lexicography
“It is the fate,” writes Johnson, “of those who toil at the lower employments of life to be driven by the fear of evil than attracted by the prospect of good. … Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered not as the pupil but the slave of science … doomed only to … clear obstructions from the paths through which learning and genius press forward … without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress” (277). These somewhat mordant words open Johnson’s Preface to the Dictionary and betray a keen sense of the costs of undertaking this task. The Preface subtly addresses concerns about the status of the lexicon as a text, an institution, and a cultural index. In the opening passage of the Preface is not only the droll complaint of the lexicographical lackey but Johnson’s absolute certainty that such drudge-work is vital to the production of knowledge. The “dream of comprehensive and universally available knowledge” is linked to the vexed relation Johnson had to the academy. If he derided academic institutions, he was also in competition with them to make accessible the notion of an encyclopedic body of knowledge.4
The importance of academic cultures in eighteenth-century England has been admirably discussed by critics of intellectual history and cultural studies.5 For the purposes of my argument, I focus on Johnson’s unsettled relation to the academy to spotlight his other troubled and sometimes contradictory reactions to the conditions of epistemological production. Ironically, considering the prominence of the academic institution in British intellectual culture, rejecting the structure and support of academies marks, for Johnson, a moment of nationalist investment as well as one of individual liberty. For him the “soft obscurities of retirement or … the shelter of academic bowers” (297) that conventionally foster the kind of work he undertakes are linked with French and Italian institutions, at least insofar as Johnson is competing with European academies to produce national lexicons. Johnson’s nettled relationship with wealthy patrons of letters, from whom he suffered personal humiliation on several occasions, may inform his representation of the academy as a potentially effete space, one that thwarts individual authority and control. English conventions of patronage, dependent as they are on the claims of class, are practices which Johnson seems happy to find in decline. Certainly his Dictionary, produced “with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great,” attests to his censure of the academy and its patrons alike.6
Many critics read the simultaneous events of the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary on April 15, 1755, and the conferral of his honorary degree from Oxford—received in time to be included on the title page of the Dictionary—as a gesture that automatically elevated the hack writer from Grub Street to a position as one of England’s intellectual authorities.7 This reasoning, while conveniently encouraging and reinforcing notions of “virtue rewarded,” for the most part ignores the powerful ideologies informing the production of knowledge in encyclopedic and lexicographical institutions. I want to consider these ideological implications. More specifically, I want to look at the production of knowledge when the contexts of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality are highlighted rather than effaced.
Most intellectual histories, argues Murray Cohen in his introduction to Sensible Words, are forms of self-validation whose main concerns seem to revolve around making “history safe for our understanding.” These histories tend to obfuscate their beginnings and, according to Cohen, “start after important first steps have been forgotten or buried.”8 Cohen’s metaphoric descriptions about writing histories may be a useful place to begin to uncover the ways in which certain “fundamental” shifts of paradigms may themselves be entrenched in ideological networks. Cohen explains that, in avoiding “modern limitations of terminology and discipline,” he “did not expect to find confirmations of explanatory patterns that I had been taught.” He remarks “in approaching the past, I expected to meet comparative strangers, not domesticated pets.”9 The use of the terms “strangers” and “domesticated pets” resonates considerably when one takes into account the conditions that have produced such phenomena. Indeed, the notion of “domesticity,” invented and established by powerful cultural institutions, reifies and recontains “strangers” and “pets” in very specific places, and in different relations to power.
Another paradigm of epistemology may be necessary to uncover some of the problems with eighteenth-century lexicography. The anecdotal richness of Boswell’s Life of Johnson furnishes splendid, humorous moments in literary history while serving as a model for biographical representation, but it may also be read as a way in which “Johnson” is made “safe” for “our” understanding. In this respect, a feminist epistemology becomes crucial to uncovering some of the dominant fictions informing both Johnson’s lexicography and the body of work written about Johnson as lexicographer.
Donna Haraway has identified as a major area of feminist struggle “the canonization of language, politics, and historical narratives in publishing practices, including standard reference works.” Although she is describing a “‘keyword’ entry for a new Marxist dictionary” in which certain words are being rewritten because “women do not appear where they should,” such a practice reminds us that models for standardization have been in place in early modern British culture and that ideologies of imperialism, gender, and sexuality account for the predominance of anglophone lexicons (although directly competing with European academies that have produced their own lexicons). Haraway argues,
The gaps and rough edges, as well as the generic form of an encyclopedia entry, should all call attention to the political and conventional processes of standardization. Probably the smooth passages are the most revealing of all; they truly paper over a very contentious field. Perhaps only I need a concrete lesson in how problematic an entry on any “keyword” must be. But I suspect my sisters and other comrades also have at times tended to simply believe what they looked up in a reference work, instead of remembering that this form of writing is one more process for inhabiting possible worlds—tentatively,