Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan

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      But language proves recalcitrant, even if it is the medium through which the imperialist literary products of “learning and genius” are made possible. One of its major forms of resistance is the inherent impurity of the sign that resists being “fixed” in an originary etymological moment but, rather, shifts its meaning from moment to moment. As he admits, Johnson cannot hope to change or alter language, but merely attempt to direct its movement. Faced with this verbal impotence, however, Johnson maintains a thoroughly bourgeois sensibility: “we retard what we cannot repel,” he reasons, “we palliate what we cannot cure” (296). Thus he modifies his desire, his fantasy of circumscription, proscription, and authorial control, as “duty.” In keeping with his representation of a work ethic, Johnson claims that “every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe” (278). Language as representation is ideologically informed. In the Preface, it is a reflection or communication of a unified and integral cultural and national identity. Yet language is dependent on its constitutive contextual iterability that by definition is cut off from its referent, intended signification, and context of communication. Language as a means of representation, as “practical consciousness,” is as “impure” as the sign, and its reflection of an integral national identity is equally flawed, changing, and contextually iterable.

      Faced with this malleability, Johnson constructs an empirical model of a national language and identity that depends on the fiction that an individual can redirect the course of words and meaning. This model is one that he has uncovered while applying himself to the “perusal of our writers … noting whatever might be of use to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase accumulated in time the materials of a dictionary,” whose progress he charts according to “such rules as experience and analogy suggested to me; experience, which practice and observation were continually increasing; and analogy, which, though in some words obscure, was evident in others” (278, italics mine). Language is determined by Johnson’s experience and observation: cultural identity is not discovered or revealed but proscribed and prescribed.

      Another problem with Johnson’s project of representing an integral culture through its language is the difference he establishes between oral and written language.²³ Containing language within the lexicographical project is made urgent by Johnson’s rearticulation of the possibility of a contextual rupture. The potential for rupture is always present and partially accounts for what is disruptive about language and problematic about lexicography. Johnson’s warning against babbling foreign dialects is predicated on the notion that the representation of a unified national identity through language depends on controlling and limiting its contexts—oral and written. This sort of control is as necessary as it is interminable. For Johnson, language’s mobility and motility, its tendency toward capriciousness and willfulness, confirms the necessity of an authority to control its energy within the confines of the Dictionary.

      Perhaps most striking in this conflicted account of Englishness is that Johnson assigns a feminine role to language. The fitfulness, waywardness, capriciousness, and willfulness that, according to him, constitute the various problems that vex a lexicographer’s task, are now bound up with ideologies of gender, and language acts even more like a flighty woman. Gender intersects with and informs Johnson’s project of cultural representation. He writes:

      I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote. (280, italics Johnson’s)

      This passage establishes the hierarchical priority of things over words and at the same time of sons over daughters. It is a telling instance of how gender categories overlap with the tenet that things precede words. The feminine is directly associated with a mutable language prone to decay; masculine “things” and “ideas,” in contrast, of which language is “only the instrument,” conform to the stability and uniformity that Johnson would recommend. Equally crucial is that the representation of the masculine as permanent and material is only established by way of the faulty, corrupted “instrument.” The availability of masculine “things,” that is, is guaranteed only by employing, or trafficking in, the feminine body of language. The mobility, the femininity of language makes possible a solid, unmoving, permanent masculinity within English culture.

      The relationship of feminine to masculine in this passage is produced by the same wishful anxiety that characterizes Johnson’s more forceful moment of sociological scapegoating, here involving Mediterranean and Indian “trafficking”:

      Commerce, however necessary, however lucrative, as it depraves the manners, corrupts the language; they that have frequent intercourse with strangers, to whom they endeavor to accommodate themselves, must in time learn a mingled dialect, like the jargon that serves the traffickers on the Mediterranean and Indian coasts. This will not always be confined to the exchange, the warehouse, or the port, but will be communicated by degrees to other ranks of the people, and at last incorporated with the current speech. (294)

      Here the necessary evil of commercial traffic functions as the screen onto which Johnson can project his anxieties about recontaining language within a lexicographical frame. The slippery, suspect position he has previously allotted the feminine now becomes pointedly othered; Johnson aligns “strangers” with corruption, and particularly strangers from exoticized ports of exchange like the “Mediterranean” and “Indian” coasts. The “mingled” mongrel dialect such traffickers speak, produced out of such questionable spaces as “the exchange, the warehouse, or the port,” may penetrate British bourgeois propriety and be “incorporated with the current speech,” thus infecting the proper language and hindering the lexicographer’s search for linguistic “purity.”

      Johnson’s conflicting representations of primary features of capitalism—his promotion of a bourgeois work ethic on the one hand and his fear of commerce on the other—suggests internal inconsistency in capitalist logic. Capitalist enterprise is at odds with the bourgeois impulse to protect national borders. That such a territorial impulse is opposed by an equally powerful desire to invite commerce in the foreign reveals the xenodochy on which xenophobia rests. For Johnson, lexicographical drudgery—a product of the bourgeois work ethic—is useful because it polices the borders of nation, here marked by language; commerce, “however necessary, however lucrative” to the power and efficacy of a national whole, is highly suspect because it “corrupts the language.”

      Although Johnson warns against the dangers of commerce, he is not particularly concerned with the actual disappearance of English words, or even with the emergence of a “dialect of France.” It is the “mingled dialect” or mixed “jargon” emerging from those Mediterranean and Indian traffickers that worries him. This worry reveals Johnson’s political imperative to construct not only an inviolable English language but also an inviolable English (bourgeois) society.²⁴ Johnson’s anxiety about the possibility of linguistic infection seems to be class based as well as xenophobic; he fears that dialects from the Indian and Mediterranean coasts (and not France) will be “communicated by degrees to other ranks of people, and be at last incorporated within current speech.” His anxiety—connected to the categories of class (“ranks”), race, gender, sexuality (“communicated”)—readily shifts its focus from one to the next. These anxious shifts indicate that Johnson sees identity in terms of difference.

      Foreignness is analogous to femininity in the way in which Johnson constructs an ideal of Englishness by debasement and rejection. Both the foreign and the feminine are cast out of Johnson’s representation of permanence, as masculine “things” and “ideas” eventually evolve into “pure,” timeless English diction. In the Preface, Johnson sustains his belief in a pure origin by turning and orienting English toward СКАЧАТЬ