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1 Institutionalizing Xenophobia:Johnson's Project

How does language get institutionalized? Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language and his Preface to this project address some of the strategies involved in standardizing language. Embedded in Johnson’s Preface are ideas that reflect his understanding of language as a cultural barometer. Johnson’s invectives against the loose “license” of translators who destroy the integrity of language and his desires to preserve the purity of language by using pre-Restoration writers (the “pure sources of genuine diction”) as authoritative examples for his definitions together demonstrate an interest in keeping English (language) for the English. It is somewhat surprising, then, given the vehemence with which he treats these ideas, to remember that his first published novel was a translation of the seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuit, Father Jerome Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia.

The apparent conflict between the ideas about language he represented in the Preface (1755) and the book he published in his early years (1733) is not especially problematic: given the enormous breadth of Johnson’s work, it would be surprising if his ideas about literature and language didn’t alter with time. More interesting, however, is the fact that when Johnson dwelled on the putative dangers of translation in the Preface he was referring particularly to translators of French, even though his early translation of Father Lobo was from the French and his later version of the “Oriental tale,” Rasselas, published only four years after the Dictionary, was heavily influenced by Voltaire’s Candide. It seems, then, that for Johnson, the French are crucially implicated in a strategy of othering: their place is somewhere between the “pure sources of genuine diction” that define Englishness and the “mingled jargon” that describes the language of Indian traders. That the genre of the “Oriental tale” was probably French in origin also suggests a metonymic connection of the French to more outlandish oriental exoticism.¹

Johnson’s translation of Father Lobo and The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, both written under trying circumstances,² illustrate an eighteenth-century use of the “Orient” as an effective screen onto which to project English fantasies about the exotic. This use of the “Orient,” not altogether limited to the eighteenth century, may have been crucially negotiated by an infamous British francophobia. In the case of Rasselas (and those Rambler essays featuring Seged), exoticism—which had little to do with actual representations of Oriental countries—had an educational and moral edge. Although many of the French Oriental tales functioned as parables whose moral purposes were duly translated into English, for Johnson such narratives may also have been possible because, as Rasselas’s Pekuah says (a propos of the specters inhabiting the Pyramids), “our entrance is no violation of their privileges; we can take nothing from them, how can we offend them?”³ In other words, the function of the “Oriental tale” in England was, in part, to provide a different kind of backdrop (French/Oriental) onto which one could throw into sharp relief the moral lessons of English nationalism that would advocate cultural separation. After all, like the protagonist of Voltaire’s Candide who concluded “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” Rasselas and his company decide to return to Abyssinia rather than take up residence elsewhere. The other simultaneously circumvents the potential threat of national and cultural miscegenation and upholds the English ideology by keeping itself at bay. Also important to the eighteenth-century sensibility was the belief that tourism was “no violation”; that the fantasy about cultural purity (“we can take nothing from them, how can we offend them?”) was maintained on both ends, English and other; that the intermingling of cultural standpoints, at least in the context of travel, afforded few problems.

But, clearly, there were problems with this form of exchange. Rather early in the novel, Rasselas asks:

By what means … are the Europeans thus powerful? or why, since they can easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiatics and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither. (91)

Imlac replies:

They are more powerful, sir, than we … because they are wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance, as man governs other animals. But why their knowledge is more than ours, I know not what reason can be given, but the unsearchable will of the Supreme Being. (91)

The reasonable question Rasselas poses is dismissed by Imlac’s irrational (to postcolonial readers) answer. This answer, however, is informed by the English (and European) belief that their epistemological stature is unassailable; the only kind of knowledge that can “predominate” is western. A character fashioned out of the English imagination, the “Oriental” Imlac crucially demonstrates the cultural fantasy that English imperialism was recognized by the “other” as natural.

Anxieties about the invincibility of English epistemology, however, were more forcibly articulated in Johnson’s non-Orientalist writings than in the narratives that directly engaged the Orient. “Oriental tales” like Rasselas, the Rambler essays, or even his translation of Father Lobo provided his audience with an engaging if fictitious representation of the “Orient.” Such a representation, however, was clearly alien to anything English. Thus Imlac’s stories of his travels form more a catalogue of countries and travels than a detailed description, which in a culture that structured itself on taxonomies is hardly surprising. Readers could satisfactorily identify the lesson or story without necessarily thinking too deeply about their own relations to the different cultures being represented because what was reflected back to them was a picture of themselves. This is not to say that the representations of foreign places had no effect on English readers; rather, that they could dismiss cultural anomalies as foreign issues that had no relation to England.

Johnson’s Preface to the Dictionary and other fictional works that explicitly address England and Englishness are different. These works do not treat their settings—London, Wales, Scotland—as mere backdrops; the settings act as politicized places that support the moral and political trajectory of the texts. The “lessons” or morals about language that Johnson represents in his Preface to the Dictionary are qualitatively different from those that he represents in his writings directly engaging the “Orient,” but in both cases the understanding of the power and authority of English epistemology is unquestioned. It is also clear, however, that the other—the French, the Orient—signifies the vulnerability of Englishness and their susceptibility to decay, to the corruption of the defining parameters of English cultural identity.

For these reasons the following chapter on Johnson focuses on the Preface to the Dictionary, the poem London, and the cultural biography Life of Savage. These texts illustrate Johnson’s definition of English culture as one produced through xenophobia. Unlike the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary, or various other bibliographical tomes, there are no "authors” of this reference work; rather, dictionaries are produced by such institutions as the academy and the publishing house. There is no place for individual acclaim or defamation. Perhaps because of the lack of visible and individual flair, the institution assumes a comforting solidity, a weighty sense of reliability and legitimacy that has established itself in early modern European cultures.

The exception is Johnson. His name stands out as an authorial presence in lexicographical history. The construction of the Dictionary is attributed exclusively to him, and yet his authorial presence, canonized as it is, has the same sort of legitimacy as that of the anonymous institutions. The ideological practices and positions embedded in his work, I will argue, are ones that are informed by xenophobia and produce the determining language for the privatized authorial space later privileged by romantic writers. Likewise, London also profits from a popular eighteenth-century poetic form: the imitation. The question of individual authorship is tethered to a faithful rendering of a national and cultural belief in its own incomparability. That this incomparability is embattled on the one hand by malignant Frenchified presence, and, on the other, by a vacuous and insipid Welsh pastoral motif again suggests the peculiar vulnerability of an English cultural identity that exists in an uneasy balance between xenodochy and xenophobia.

The Life of Savage, thematically connected to London because of the historical association of Thales (the poem’s speaker) and Richard Savage, exemplifies a domestic conflict about the status of English authorship. Johnson uses no explicit "others” to engage a representation of the English writer; several figures, however, function as impediments to the progress of Richard Savage’s literary development. These obstructions are domestic rather than foreign in origin: the troubled maternal relations that Savage invents for Johnson’s delectation, and the ways in which Johnson deploys Savage’s stories (Savage is also held under scrutiny, albeit sympathetically) in order to render the plight of the English author heroic. Thus Johnson’s poignant biography, recording the hazards that the embattled Savage experiences (and thereby illustrating a very effective portrait of himself), demonstrates the ways in which English authorship is also contingent on gynophobia. Turning the domestic household into a troubled spot suggests that the internal national space needs to be continually and carefully policed by the rigors of a regulated masculine authorship.

“Lost” in Lexicography

“It is the fate,” writes Johnson, “of those who toil at the lower employments of life to be driven by the fear of evil than attracted by the prospect of good. … Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered not as the pupil but the slave of science … doomed only to … clear obstructions from the paths through which learning and genius press forward … without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress” (277). These somewhat mordant words open Johnson’s Preface to the Dictionary and betray a keen sense of the costs of undertaking this task. The Preface subtly addresses concerns about the status of the lexicon as a text, an institution, and a cultural index. In the opening passage of the Preface is not only the droll complaint of the lexicographical lackey but Johnson’s absolute certainty that such drudge-work is vital to the production of knowledge. The “dream of comprehensive and universally available knowledge” is linked to the vexed relation Johnson had to the academy. If he derided academic institutions, he was also in competition with them to make accessible the notion of an encyclopedic body of knowledge.⁴

The importance of academic cultures in eighteenth-century England has been admirably discussed by critics of intellectual history and cultural studies.⁵ For the purposes of my argument, I focus on Johnson’s unsettled relation to the academy to spotlight his other troubled and sometimes contradictory reactions to the conditions of epistemological production. Ironically, considering the prominence of the academic institution in British intellectual culture, rejecting the structure and support of academies marks, for Johnson, a moment of nationalist investment as well as one of individual liberty. For him the “soft obscurities of retirement or … the shelter of academic bowers” (297) that conventionally foster the kind of work he undertakes are linked with French and Italian institutions, at least insofar as Johnson is competing with European academies to produce national lexicons. Johnson’s nettled relationship with wealthy patrons of letters, from whom he suffered personal humiliation on several occasions, may inform his representation of the academy as a potentially effete space, one that thwarts individual authority and control. English conventions of patronage, dependent as they are on the claims of class, are practices which Johnson seems happy to find in decline. Certainly his Dictionary, produced “with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great,” attests to his censure of the academy and its patrons alike.⁶

Many critics read the simultaneous events of the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary on April 15, 1755, and the conferral of his honorary degree from Oxford—received in time to be included on the title page of the Dictionary—as a gesture that automatically elevated the hack writer from Grub Street to a position as one of England’s intellectual authorities.⁷ This reasoning, while conveniently encouraging and reinforcing notions of “virtue rewarded,” for the most part ignores the powerful ideologies informing the production of knowledge in encyclopedic and lexicographical institutions. I want to consider these ideological implications. More specifically, I want to look at the production of knowledge when the contexts of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality are highlighted rather than effaced.

Most intellectual histories, argues Murray Cohen in his introduction to Sensible Words, are forms of self-validation whose main concerns seem to revolve around making “history safe for our understanding.” These histories tend to obfuscate their beginnings and, according to Cohen, “start after important first steps have been forgotten or buried.”⁸ Cohen’s metaphoric descriptions about writing histories may be a useful place to begin to uncover the ways in which certain “fundamental” shifts of paradigms may themselves be entrenched in ideological networks. Cohen explains that, in avoiding “modern limitations of terminology and discipline,” he “did not expect to find confirmations of explanatory patterns that I had been taught.” He remarks “in approaching the past, I expected to meet comparative strangers, not domesticated pets.”⁹ The use of the terms “strangers” and “domesticated pets” resonates considerably when one takes into account the conditions that have produced such phenomena. Indeed, the notion of “domesticity,” invented and established by powerful cultural institutions, reifies and recontains “strangers” and “pets” in very specific places, and in different relations to power.

Another paradigm of epistemology may be necessary to uncover some of the problems with eighteenth-century lexicography. The anecdotal richness of Boswell’s Life of Johnson furnishes splendid, humorous moments in literary history while serving as a model for biographical representation, but it may also be read as a way in which “Johnson” is made “safe” for “our” understanding. In this respect, a feminist epistemology becomes crucial to uncovering some of the dominant fictions informing both Johnson’s lexicography and the body of work written about Johnson as lexicographer.

Donna Haraway has identified as a major area of feminist struggle “the canonization of language, politics, and historical narratives in publishing practices, including standard reference works.” Although she is describing a “‘keyword’ entry for a new Marxist dictionary” in which certain words are being rewritten because “women do not appear where they should,” such a practice reminds us that models for standardization have been in place in early modern British culture and that ideologies of imperialism, gender, and sexuality account for the predominance of anglophone lexicons (although directly competing with European academies that have produced their own lexicons). Haraway argues,

The gaps and rough edges, as well as the generic form of an encyclopedia entry, should all call attention to the political and conventional processes of standardization. Probably the smooth passages are the most revealing of all; they truly paper over a very contentious field. Perhaps only I need a concrete lesson in how problematic an entry on any “keyword” must be. But I suspect my sisters and other comrades also have at times tended to simply believe what they looked up in a reference work, instead of remembering that this form of writing is one more process for inhabiting possible worlds—tentatively, hopefully, polyvocally, and finitely.¹⁰

Robert DeMaria’s claim that Johnson employed an encyclopedic tradition of lexicography because of the “vast amount of illustrative quotation he included” functions as an example of the tautological reasoning Haraway identifies.¹¹ Keeping in mind Haraway’s questions and cautions about works of reference, how does our understanding of Johnson’s Dictionary shift, and how are our assumptions about the status of reference and definition destabilized? Johnson’s Preface serves to frame the various problems of representation embedded in his lexicographical task. In doing so, it locates Johnson’s political imperative to construct bourgeois British identity.

One of the compelling features about the opening of the Preface is the concern Johnson expresses not only for the thanklessness of the lexicographer’s task, but for the barbarous state of language itself. Language, it seems, behaves not unlike an unruly child or flighty woman of fashion. He writes:

while [language] was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, [it] has itself been hitherto neglected; suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion; and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation. (277)

Johnson positions himself as the slave rather than the pupil of science in a history of drudgery that attends the production of knowledge. This representation imbues his labor with a bourgeois ethic that preaches toil as virtue. Yet the word “slave” seems curiously excessive in the context of Johnson’s typically measured and moderate language. The use of the term calls into question the status of his definitional progress. “Time” and “fashion” form a “tyranny” to which Johnson is a “slave.” Such a “tyranny,” composed largely of the “corruptions of ignorance” and the “caprices of innovation,” needs a steadier hand to wrest control from “accident or affectation” and steer the course of knowledge back on a progressive track. “Notwithstanding this discouragement,” Johnson decides to assume the part of cultural arbiter and write “a dictionary of the English language” (277–79), placing himself, impossibly, as both slave and tyrant of scientific knowledge, or, perhaps more accurately for capitalist culture, as its owner.

His first tyrannical move as owner is to position language as something material: either as “rubbish” and “obstruction” or as “learning” and “genius.” This gesture emphasizes the visceral and substantive qualities of language, endowing it with value, especially in the hands of a wise venture capitalist. Johnson’s material view of language does more than act as a convenient metaphor: it uncovers a discourse of cultural materialism at work in his representation of language. It is important to consider Raymond Williams’s argument for “the indissoluble connections between material production, political and cultural institutions and activity, and consciousness” when thinking through the ways in which Johnson’s catalogue of language replicates a model of British bourgeois identity.¹² When we take into account the various academic institutions with which Johnson competes, and their place in determining material conditions of life, Johnson’s concept of selfhood, informed by an uneasy relation between Enlightenment models of the individual and an increasing attention to the status of nation, may be read as an ideological position, a necessary fiction of a mystified lived relation about the material conditions of his life at the time: impoverished, embittered, and alone.¹³

Johnson is fated, he suggests, to serve a thankless public with his lexicographical toil. He is “doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions” in the service of “learning and genius” that “press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress” (277). Yet “tongues,” he reminds us, “like governments have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language” (296). Such reminders prompt an awareness of certain kinds of authorial power: as despised, hopeless, or invisible as lexicographical labor may be, it documents the coherence of national culture as crucially as the “constitution,” an argument that would have had considerable force in eighteenth-century England.¹⁴ Johnson’s identification with such labor is troubled by his relation to academic cultures. Caught between two categories, neither a member of the intellectual elite nor a mere Grub Street hack writer, he is highly sensitive to the competing and at times conflicting desires to have his work remain unnoticed (“I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave”); to serve as the price for his service to the nation (“I have devoted this book, the labor of years, to the honor of my country”); and to append his name, by the very act of writing this Preface, “to the reputation of English literature,” remarking that the “chief glory of every people arises from its authors” (296–98). One way of accounting for such contending desires may be to see Johnson’s project as a challenge to the practice of patronage and as his competition with academies. Johnson’s own definition of aristocratic patronage, one that “supports with insolence and is paid with flattery,”¹⁵ suggests a necessity for establishing an identity in which issues of propriety override the corrupt system of patronized literary production.¹⁶ That is, Johnson eschews aristocratic aid for an implicitly bourgeois self-reliance and derides aristocratic indulgences while promoting independent temperance. Johnson’s representation of language can be read as a study of culture. It reconstructs for a British audience the need to moderate potential imperial prosperity with a stabilizing bourgeois ethic. The potential of literary wealth that language offers can only be realized by the rational restraining hand of a lexicographer schooled in the arts of moderation.

The Preface provides an outline for the problem of representing English, and by association England, to the British. Much like an appraiser of fine gems, Johnson takes up the lexicographical burden of establishing a “settled test of purity” for language: he studiously endeavors 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 (as opposed to British). There seems to be a certain cultural imperialism, to borrow Said’s phrase, at work in Johnson’s national representation: the boundaries that he “fixes” for a definitive language do not stray beyond the borders of England to Scotland or Wales.²²

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 the past. He rids English (and England) of the “improprieties” of innovation and ignorance that are, by implication, feminine. Such improprieties and infelicities of usage are intrinsic to language, 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 double position: as a lexicographer, doomed to the “lower” employments of life; and as an intellectual authority, an authority that is, ironically, produced out of lexicographical drudgery.

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.

The prevailing ethos of eighteenth-century British imperialism further complicates these issues. Both in the case of Johnson’s biographies and in his work on the magazine, England’s dominant position in relation to the Continent is unqualified. His heroes are either English or strongly associated with the British Commonwealth; his Debates are a type of con-job, intentional or not, that speaks for England with 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)