Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 account of an ideology of representation is helpful for reading Johnson’s concern with representation. Language’s constitutive “impurity” is related to the function of the sign itself: in order for the sign to operate as a sign, it needs to be repeatable. The sign’s necessary iterability—the fact that the sign, standing for something else, is repeatable in a variety of contexts—makes the presence of an originary moment or meaning simultaneously necessary and impossible. The sign’s susceptibility to repetition, and consequent failure to coincide entirely with what it is supposed to represent in any instance, marks each instance of its occurrence. The “impurity” inherent in the sign is what defines it as a sign: iterability accounts for the authentic, the seamless “presence” of meaning, that is always preceded by the inauthentic.

      While Derrida’s account usefully complicates the ideological formation of language, marxist terms underscore its material construction. If language is “practical consciousness which is inseparable from all social material activity,” as Raymond Williams affirms, if it makes visible the material consequences of ways of thinking and acting in different worlds, then Johnson’s positioning of language and lexicographers is undeniably ideological.¹⁹ From a related critical stance, Haraway cautions against assumptions of objectivity in conventional processes of standardization. Her call to read the political worlds that reference works inhabit permits us to see the impulse to circumscribe as one that is ideologically fraught. The fiction of stabilizing language that the lexicographer performs is politically linked to establishing a place for the author within the literary and academic marketplace, a place not dependent on aristocratic patronage or the tyranny of academies and yet not bound by the equally oppressive bonds of hack writing. It would seem then that the resistant “spots of barbarity,” while masquerading under cover of a monolithic mother tongue, perform what can be called continual disruption.²⁰

      Johnson’s desire to shape language by recourse to its earlier manifestations (e.g., Elizabethan works) is informed by the (im)possibility of fixing an originary moment. While Elizabethan England may have represented to Johnson and other eighteenth-century readers a nostalgic moment of enviable national coherence, Johnson himself articulates the unsettling and destabilizing work which lexicography performs even in the act of circumscribing that ostensible coherence. Johnson writes that he has

      fixed Sidney’s work for the boundary beyond which I make few excursions. From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind for want of English words in which they might be expressed. (289)

      But he goes on to contend that

      When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language and preserve it from corruption and decay. (294)

      Johnson establishes the impossibility of his task to confine and secure linguistic meaning and usage to a specific historical period. Elizabethan writers stand for Johnson as a powerful cultural fantasy of national coherence. This is a putatively idyllic moment of absolute (although, unlike the French, inherently just) monarchy, global exploration, and military strength. An increase in consumerism in eighteenth-century society and succeeding dependence on commercial expansion, however, threatens the logic of this cultural fantasy.

      One way of analyzing the possible threats Johnson perceives to the integrity of language is to identify how language and labor come to be associated in ways other than intellectual. Johnson warns against the “folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives” (283). English works are used by Johnson as examples of “genuine diction” just as lexicographical drudgery paves the way for works of “genius,” or language is “employed” in the cultivation of literature. An English work ethic thus stands for a specifically English morality, positioned directly against the slothful uselessness of “foreigners.” Johnson’s xenophobic response to adopting foreign words that might “reduce us to babble a dialect of France,” together with his desire for a “pure” Englishness, construct the Dictionary as an undertaking of cultural representation. Johnson notes the etymological roots of words may be from Latin or French “since at the time when we had dominions in France, we had Latin service in our churches,” and “the French generally supplied us … [with] … terms of domestic use”; ironically, then, the British are “babbl[ing] a dialect of France” even if their appropriation of French words as a result of their “dominion” in France is an imperial one (296, italics mine).²¹ Johnson seems to be willing to entertain the possibility of a French supply of language (xenodochy) while rejecting the notion that such a source of valuable material could possibly affect or alter the original structure of English (xenophobia). Interestingly, the same sort of francophobic response Johnson has toward these “useless foreigners” complements his xenophobia toward Great Britain itself. The list of Elizabethan works Johnson deems pure enough to serve as references in his Dictionary not only fetishizes a particular literary period but the writers he names—Sidney, Hooker, Bacon, Spenser, and Shakespeare—are all English СКАЧАТЬ