Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan

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      What Johnson incorporates and what he casts out in the preface to his project reflect the problems implicit in cultural representation. In his invective against translation, he marks out his political ambivalence toward the other. Johnson claims that “single words may enter by the thousands and the fabric of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once.” Individual words are more easily incorporated than whole works, whose retention of “native idiom” presents the possibility of native resistance to colonial “incorporation.”³⁰ Johnson casts out the (distressing) oral by writing the Dictionary, and secures his authority by supplementing it with another’s: “when it happened that any author gave a definition, I have produced his authority as a supplement to my own” (289–90).

      The “spots of barbarity” or “anomalous formulations” are incorporated but not disseminated within the fabric of language: their existence, therefore, is a reminder of the foreign invasion and domestic weakness. There are, however, other instances where barbaric phrases supply “real deficiencies, such are readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate easily with our native idioms” (289). Here Johnson’s discussion of etymology once again exposes his self-conscious desire for a pure origin. The fantastic image of Englishness is not unlike his created image of others; both sets of images are constructed from powerful cultural fantasies about identity. The suggestive imagery of recesses and forgotten mines—in which Johnson “pierces deep,” leaving his mark or “inquir[ing] the nature of every substance of which [he] inserted the name,” with the end that this “book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical”—not only indicates that his project reflects imperialist acquisitiveness. It also figures the other in terms of the foreign and the feminine, positioning Johnson as the voice of patriarchal authority. Language and the foreign are therefore able to replace each other as forms of property. The other is threatening because of its difference from Johnson’s representation of Englishness. The feminine is threatening because it is unreadable, and must, therefore, remain “untouched.” It thus stands in for language’s dirty spots that criticism cannot wash from a cultural fabric.

      Robert DeMaria describes his book on Johnson as a rediscovery of the Dictionary’s capacity as a book. “After spending time reading a dictionary as a disguised encyclopedia,” he writes, “it is possible to describe its contents—to classify and name the “galaxy of pieces of world knowledge” that the book contains.”³¹ Books disclose stories, and both Johnson and DeMaria seem drawn to storytelling. By his own admission, DeMaria describes how he imitates Johnson’s research for the Dictionary, and he seems to have employed the same plot: the narrative of ideologically constructed privilege. Although DeMaria discusses Umberto Eco’s demystification of a “dictionary” as a record of definition, the alternative model that Eco offers and DeMaria accepts—the encyclopedia—is just as subject to ideological investigation. Haraway’s proposals for a feminist epistemology and Bhabha’s and Spivak’s postcolonial investigation of epistemological representation have clearly identified the ideological impetus of the encyclopedic project.

      In sum, Johnson and his admirers write from within a self-contained fellowship of intellectuals that depends on promulgating ideologies of race, class, gender, and nationality to sustain itself.³² Within eighteenth-century scholarship, Johnson studies in particular have been especially clubbish both in British and U.S. academic institutions. Epistemological paradigms that afford a history of imperialism, such as those of Bhabha, Haraway, and Spivak, complicate models of Johnson scholarship and offer new readings in cultural representation and crucial ways to formulate the politics of national identity.

      Foreign Bodies

      The sheer breadth of Johnson’s literary engagement provides an example of the ways xenophobia informs a stabilizing signifying system that organizes and situates cultural and national identities. Johnson’s Preface provides a manifesto of codification: the maintenance of English as a master language is most clearly performed by a continual engagement with the peripheries of meaning. That is, the stability of a word’s meaning is accomplished through a constant concern with and policing of its outlying (or secondary) connotations. Other parts of Johnson’s corpus, works that for the most part remain outside the canon of his literary accomplishment, uncover similar concerns with the structures of xenophobia.

      In describing Johnson’s work, for the Gentleman's Magazine during 1738–44, Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt observe that “one kind of a job … was the compilation of biographical essays.” They then list as examples of those found in the biographies the names Herman Boerhaave, Admiral Robert Blake, Sir Francis Drake, and John Philip Barretier. Following this notable catalogue, however, is the concession that

      another feature was a department of illegal, semifictitious and thinly disguised reports on the proceedings of the Houses of Parliament…. Johnson produced, on very slender evidence, sometimes hardly more than the names of the speakers and their topics, a series of Debates which were translated all over the Continent as the veritable words of English statesmen. (5)

      Brady and Wimsatt hastily point out that “at about the time when he fully realized the extent of this ‘propagation of falsehood,’ he dropped the job abruptly” (5).

      At issue in this passage is Johnson’s practice and attitude toward historical writing. Brady and Wimsatt define Johnson’s authority by the cultural weight of his biographical essays as well as by the moral weight of his rigidly regulated conscience that refused with admirable alacrity to condone such “propagation of falsehood.” Yet the questionable status of historical “truth” in literary representation cannot be so quickly or easily dismissed, regardless of Johnson’s professed moral view. His writings in Gentleman's Magazine, legitimate or otherwise, illustrate how personal, historical, cultural, and ideological issues complicate representation. The eighteenth-century project of carving out a discursive space for a “refined” public sphere dominated by a bourgeois ethic seems particularly open to such complications of authorship.³³ In the case of Johnson’s corpus, questions of identity, legitimacy and illegitimacy, raised by his “hack” work on Gentleman's Magazine, are reproduced not only in the Parliamentary debates, in which he “authors” the words of English statesmen, but also in his more canonical works. During this period, Johnson also wrote the poem London (1738) and the Life of Savage (1744), two texts strikingly concerned with problems of writing an identity.

      Johnson’s “imitation” of Juvenal’s Third Satire, London, opens up the question of poetic voice and poetic authority. Imitating an established Roman poet in order to legitimize one’s own poetic endeavor defines much poetic work in the eighteenth century, despite the fact that this neoclassical practice poses problems regarding authorship. This poem’s two “voices”—Thales and a nearly silent “me”—register the two “authors” of the poem: Johnson and Juvenal.³⁴ The Life of Savage concerns the credibility of Richard Savage’s romantic claim to be the “lost” son of the Countess of Macclesfield as much as it concerns legitimizing Johnson’s own identity as an English writer. The question of cultural and personal identity at issue in London and the Life of Savage is linked to the question of authority and authorship that Johnson assumes in his writing. The authorial issues so clearly determining the production of Johnson’s Dictionary and its Preface are foregrounded in these texts. It seems as if the Dictionary functions as a primer for lessons on eighteenth-century authorship, solidifying the anxieties about authorial identity insistent in his earlier work.³⁵ Thales’s identification of “imported” politics invading an integrated English identity in London seems linked to Savage’s and Johnson’s project of articulating an identity that insures the virtues that Thales outlines as English.³⁶ While ventriloquizing his own anxieties and beliefs about the identity and role of the professional writer in both texts, Johnson uses a Juvenalian rancor to rewrite unrecognized merit as the romance of rustic English virtue.

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