The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 417 Warren Montag. The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man. London and New York: Verso, 1995. viii + 174pp. US$17.95. ISBN 1-85984-900-8. This study sets out to demonstrate that Swift's identification as a "Church of England Man" determined the conditions of his existence as a thinker and writer: "it was Swift's position in what remained, precariously or not, an ideological state apparatus (at once an instrument and expression of inter- and intra-class struggles), the Anglican Church (specifically its colonial outpost, the Church of Ireland), that determined and made inescapable his participation in the struggles to make or remake the British state" (p. 4). The history of the Anglican Church is not simply an inert background for Swift's texts but an essential component of their structure and meaning, since this history "erupts within works like A Tale ofa Tub and Gulliver's Travels, disfiguring them, not only depriving them of their projected coherence ... but in its violence constituting them in their determinate disorder" (pp. 4-5). Warren Montag's study is rooted in a theoretical approach owing not a little to Louis Althusser and a great deal more to Pierre Macherey, whose spectral presence hovers over all aspects of the book's argument despite his being quoted briefly only once or twice in the text. Macherey's ideas are usefully invoked to help explain various assumptions governing the study, for example, that "it is not the task of the critic to repeat [the work's] discourse but to produce the theory of the conditions of [its] possibility" (p. 126)—as well as to explicate certain of the book's interrelated threads: for example, central but subtle shifts in the history of philosophy that "took place at the margins of the theoretical transformations of the seventeenth century" (p. 48). At the same time, there are instances where allusions to Macherey's theory shade into distracting jargon, or cry out for clearer, more detailed explanations of their meaning. Thus the assertion that "It remains the task of analysis to uncover not hidden meanings, intentions or influences in the work but rather the indelible traces of the despairing silence upon which it is built, the unstateable theses whose absence renders the work hollow and incomplete" (p. 51) is only partially illuminated by its context. Like many other statements throughout the book, it presupposes a familiarity with Macherey's A Theory ofLiterary Production that cannot be assumed, especially when the book seems to be intended at least partly as an introduction for students. The first chapter, a thumbnail sketch of English history from the Reformation to Swift's time, although to some degree warranted as an introduction to the conflicts and contradictions central to the subsequent discussions of Swift, has the effect of undercutting the point Montag elsewhere makes so forcefully: to wit, that history is not something "out there," external to the text, but is integral to its very being as a text. Yet, the opening chapter comes across as a rather flat-footed, sweepingly general survey of English history, presenting a series of "facts" (however interpretively reconstructed) that the reader cannot but encounter as an inert backdrop to Swift's writings. The organization of the book sets up precisely the old-fashioned division between background and text that its theoretical premise strives to negate. By far the strongest section of the book is its chapter on A Tale of a Tub, which perceptively analyses the work's dizzyingly destabilizing ironies, its perverse tendency to deny what it wants to say and say what it wants to deny, in the light of seventeenth-century religious crises surrounding the need to defend spiritual values in the face of burgeoning materialist philosophies. Provocatively challenging the reader to consider Spinoza as "Swift's other, an inverted image of all that he believed" (p. 59), whose materialism and anti-transcendentalism are in effect acknowledged by the very text produced to 418 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:3 attack them, and daring to present William Wotton as Swift's "most acute critic" (p. 84), Montag ably demonstrates the inextricable relationship between the 7à/e's contradictions...