Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ however, and are not just contingent errors or accidents that can be excluded from the definition of language.

      Purity of origin, as represented in the Preface, lays the groundwork for Johnson’s representation of English cultural and national identity. Before Johnson can cast out foreign and feminine “improprieties,” however, he must identify and construct them. Johnson employs a strategy of othering—a process that creates the other in order to cast it out—by engaging in precisely the sort of traffic that he identifies as among the “lower employments of life” and associates with both the foreign and the feminine. That is, Johnson must use language itself with all its improprieties as the means by which a representation of his own position as well as Englishness is produced.

      One way of accounting for the others Johnson employs on behalf of constructing an inviolable and “pure” sense of Englishness is to use Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “self-consolidating” and “absolute” others. The feminine, previously aligned with those “spots of barbarism” that resist critical cleansing, function as the “self-consolidating” other: the presence of something identifiably not-English but yet able to combine with an English “self” (represented as the “genuine sources of pure diction” to which Johnson refers) and to present a unified front against the highly visible, “absolute other”: the foreign.²⁵ Johnson’s invective against the dangers of translation cohere with his cultural representation. Johnson complains that the

      great pest of speech is frequency of translation. No book was ever turned from one language into another without imparting something of its native idiom; this is the most mischievous and comprehensive innovation; single words may enter by thousands and the fabric of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once; it alters not the single stones of the building but the order of the columns. If an academy should be established for the cultivation of our style, which I, who can never wish to see dependence multiplied, hope the spirit of English liberty will hinder or destroy, let them, instead of compiling grammars and dictionaries, endeavor, with all their influence, to stop the license of translators, whose idleness and ignorance, if it be suffered to proceed, will reduce us to babble a dialect of France. (296)

      Part of this invective is informed by Johnson’s own investment as a rival lexicographer to those academies in France and Italy that were engaged in producing their own dictionaries. And certainly part of his rancor can be accounted for by the bitterness he felt toward English academic institutions, which had, in the powerfully empathetic words of Walter Jackson Bate, “for fifteen years … barred” him entrance for lack of a degree.²⁶ It is curious, however, that Johnson focuses on translation itself as a single cause for the problems he has with language (especially since he himself has profited from French translation in time of dire need). Like trafficking with Mediterranean and Indian cultures, translation functions as a kind of porous border, a membrane that, while marking out discrete languages and cultures, does not enforce these boundaries. These borders present the most difficult and antithetical problems for one whose task is to regulate and monitor the boundaries of meaning.

      Johnson’s representation of “ideas” and “things,” linked to cultural chauvinism under the guise of rewriting a national identity, comes about by trafficking in language he has cast as feminine or feminized. Johnson’s representation of a dominant, masculine, English authority relies on a foundation of language that is almost always in a state of decay. Because, as Johnson claims language is by its nature prone to change, and because language is unreliable as a fixed signifying system, the task of securing “pure” meaning becomes impossible.

      According to Johnson, at the heart of language, and therefore at the heart of Englishness, is a series of unfixable others; Johnson’s responses articulate a xenophobic anxiety of contamination by those others. Johnson’s representation of language and culture depends a good deal on instituted difference. His construction of English national identity relies on the maneuver Edward Said discusses in Orientalism. With this maneuver “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”²⁷ There are at least two levels of this othering occurring in the Preface; one can be read as a familiar francophobia, based on economic and imperial rivalry between France and England, and the other as a deeper, less specific, xenophobic scapegoating in which a feminized language operates as a representation of “decay” or contamination. Thus Johnson describes in London the importance of distinguishing “British lineaments” from an undifferentiated other.

      The comparison he makes between his task and ones undertaken by the French and Italians pits the single British lexicographer against others, even if all are engaged in the same sort of drudgery usually ascribed to the “lower employments” of the masses. Johnson describes others involved in lexicographical projects as “the aggregated knowledge, and cooperating diligence of the Italian academicians” or the “embodied critics of France.” While these descriptions ascribe an intellectual weight to Continental academies, the final effect is to negate such value. The “soft obscurities of retirement” and “shelter of academic bowers” convey a peculiarly effeminate and hence in the Preface’s terms, a repellent quality to foreign critics. In contrast, the more surly, singular and rustic English effort Johnson associates with himself produces “honor to [his] country,” against the indiscrete “nations of the Continent,” to whom the “palm of philology” is not yielded without a “contest” (296). In distinguishing between English and foreign efforts, Johnson’s defense of national identity may be aligned with his attempts to distinguish himself from the hack writers of Grub Street. In both cases, he constructs a masculine, bourgeois English identity through the an act of othering, a process of elimination.

      Once again: Johnson’s notion of distinction, of aligning individualism with intellectual esteem, develops from his portrayal in the Preface to the Dictionary of the singularity of English intellectualism and English culture. In turn, this singularity is informed by an imperialist ideology and cultivated by the colonizing gestures underwriting the political imperative of the Preface. Johnson’s attempt to control language derives from anxiety of contamination by the very thing he has colonized and duly incorporated into the cultural matrix, such as French “terms of domestic use.” Johnson assumes a proprietary tone when he discusses his etymological research. He describes the “obscure recesses” he would “enter” and “ransack,” finding the “treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labor” (291, my italics). Such tropes not only shape his representation of imperialist culture but also assign gender to these linguistic acquisitions. Like the treasures brought back from English colonies to adorn English women, the “treasures” he pillages from literature figure language as a display-case of Western patriarchal power. Johnson seems to be guilty of the commercial trafficking in metaphorical language he deplores.²⁸

      Translation and trafficking lead to new inventions of “dialect,” and in earlier descriptions Johnson links oral speech to moral depravity, vulgarity, and indolence. The problem with dialect is its “anomalous formulations,” which “once incorporated, can never afterward be dismissed or reformed” (278). The implicit suggestion is that spoken language or dialect, as it follows class alignments, is able to infect written language in the same way that a “mingled dialect” may infect the “other ranks.” Written language, figured as property that can be shaped according to Johnson’s notion of culture, occupies a curiously double position here as a marker of both the stability and the instability of national and cultural identity. As an inherently capricious and wayward commodity, written language must be prevented from complying “with the corruptions of oral utterance,” yet it also constitutes the “wells of English undefiled.”

      In Johnson’s representation, the “natural” slips from one pole to the other without apparent contradiction because, as Laura Brown suggests, it represents “not the landscape of England at all but a naturalized fantasy about English culture.”²⁹ The double position that Johnson’s texts ascribe to language reflects his own СКАЧАТЬ