Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan

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СКАЧАТЬ political confidence. Johnson displays a conscience and character that prompts him to quit propagating falsehood. This virtue of a morally alert conscience, peculiar to being English according to Johnson, is the subject of both London and the Life of Savage. Johnson’s representation of nationalism is not merely a record of historical “fact” but is self-consciously produced out of dominant cultural ideologies.

      The dominant cultural ideologies involve terms of national mythmaking that employ the racist and xenophobic strategy of creating and expelling foreign others. Gates describes this process as a Eurocentric habit of accounting for the Other’s “essence” in absolute terms, in terms that “fix culturally defined differences into transcendent ‘natural’ categories or essences,” so that they may be more easily displaced or expelled.³⁷ Problematizing the neatness of such a paradigm is the question of integrity: that is, the “origin” of Eurocentric essences, given this logic of comprehending difference, has to return to the European “body” in part for its definition. Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of the structures of “society” usefully complicate Gates’s model:

      “Society” is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing—and hence constituting—the whole field of differences. The irresoluble interiority/exteriority tension is the condition of any social practice: necessity only exists as a partial limitation of the field of contingency. It is in this terrain, where neither a total interiority nor a total exteriority is possible, that the social is constituted.³⁸

      Once again: “necessity only exists as a partial limitation of the field of contingency.” In the context of articulation, there is no possibility of a “totality” and therefore “difference” can only be partially returned to the European body for its representation. It is what remains external to the incorporation of identity that formulates disruption for Johnson, a description he reconfigures according to already established figures of difference that rely on ideologies of gender and sexuality for their constitution. The surplus of meaning attached to these ideologies in both London and the Life of Savage may be read through the metaphors of imperialism, xenophobia, and gynophobia. Through these metaphors, Johnson mediates the crisis of authority and legitimacy in eighteenth-century neoclassicism.

      Languages of expulsion, imperialism, xenophobia, gynophobia, are produced through xenodochial invitation. The by-products of these languages—the “foreign” bodies—are rendered visible through an invitation to reside in the domestic domicile. Hence, the foreign fops who “invade” London’s hearth are brought there through cultural solicitation. This process produces, in turn, the necessity for introjecting a different order of meaning (Frenchifying English custom) which only results in the necessity to seek other (frequently less desirable) places of incorporation such as Cambria.

      A bitter invective against urban corruption, Johnson’s London ostensibly offers the pastoral—that is, “Cambria”—as a “happier place,” one in which “once the harassed Briton found repose” (ll. 43–47), but perhaps now hesitates to find similar sanctuary. Johnson’s invocation of pastoral values maps out political positions in this poem. One can loosely line up issues of morality, the natural, Englishness, and the self with the pastoral, while the city embodies moral and physical corruption, artifice, the foreign, and the other.³⁹ The distinctions implied between “Cambria,” “Great Britain,” and “England” reflect the changing boundaries of geographical and national identity. Despite the fact that it is regularly invaded by foreign bodies, London remains undeniably English while Cambria, nominally a part of the national hybrid “Great Britain,” is not English, even though it is relatively unadulterated by a francophilic culture. Hence, the articulation of an urban English society is absolutely contingent on the partial return of this “foreign” pastoral. Although the pastoral always functions as a way of positioning moral values, what complicates and perhaps even undermines the representation of those values in this poem is the division of the poetic and the authoritative voice: simple binarisms and symmetrical oppositions are not enough to account for the ambivalent representation of urban politics in this satire. Thales, the dominant voice, whom many have claimed to be the voice of Richard Savage,⁴⁰ argues for the pastoral life, not so much for its inherent virtues but for its difference from London—differences about which he is self-consciously ambivalent—while the first-person speaker remains allied with the city, even while ventriloquizing Thales’s position.

      Though grief and fondness in my breast rebel,

      When injured Thales bids the town farewell

      Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend,

      I praise the hermit, but regret the friend,

      Resolved at length, from vice and London far,

      To breathe in distant fields a purer air. (ll.1–6)

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