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Forum Second Response of Carole Fabricant to Warren Montag In spite of Warren Montag's claim (ECF 10:1, 101), I have never denied the existence of a clear distinction between oppressor and oppressed in early eighteenthcentury Ireland. On the contrary, I have always insisted on this distinction, rejecting supposedly "sophisticated" contemporary critical methodologies that tend to result in its erasure. Nor can I imagine what would have led Montag to expect that I might pursue my argument "in the manner of contemporary revisionist historians" (p. 103), given my unequivocal criticisms of the basic assumptions of contemporary revisionism. For example, I explicitly reject its questioning of eighteenth-century Ireland's colonial status and its tendency to exploit ambiguities , both rhetorical and historical, as a means of obscuring clear power relationships; see my introduction to Swift's Landscape (1995, pp. xx-xxiv). Nor have I ever said anything to suggest "that the legitimacy of Protestant rule was virtually unquestionable (at least among Protestants) and that the opposition to the oppression of Catholics could only be expressed in the paradoxical form of the near total silence it takes in Swift's writings" (p. 102). In various places, I have had occasion to comment on a number of contemporary Irishmen besides Swift—George Berkeley, John Toland, Robert Molesworth, etc.—who in their different ways offered critical perspectives on the contemporary political or religious situation. Moreover—belying Montag's baseless claim that I "assert[ed] that Irish Roman Catholics could not speak for themselves and needed Swift to speak ... for them" (p. 104)—I've elsewhere examined at some length a number of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Roman Catholic historians (Geoffrey Keating, Hugh Reily, Sylvester O'Halloran, etc.) who, as I showed, were quite capable of "speaking for themselves" by using their writings to combat the dominant, often racist historical myths produced by English EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 3, April 1998 364 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:1 and Irish Protestant writers; see my essay, "Swift as Irish Historian," in Walking Naboth's Vineyard (1995). Clearly there existed a range of oppositional voices in Ireland at the time, and I believe that only by recovering all of them can we arrive at an accurate picture of the period—-and gain a fuller appreciation of Swift's unique and highly significant contribution (hardly dismissible as "near total silence"!) to this resistance. Contrary to Montag's claim that "I abandoned the terrain of historical fact altogether for the realm of theory" in my previous Forum response (p. 103), my comments were quite clearly aimed at demonstrating the reality of Swift's protonationalist and anti-colonialist stance, both through an elucidation of the grounds ofits theoretical possibility and through concrete historical and textual examples. I see no necessary contradiction between these two modes of argumentation, no need to "abandon" one in order to deal with the other. On the contrary, the two strike me as interconnected and complementary. If Montag wishes to place history and theory in two separate and mutually exclusive compartments, that is certainly his prerogative. There is a problem, however, when he appropriates "actual history" as his own private domain and relegates opposing views to an airy, "transcendental" realm of insubstantiality (pp. 104-5). All fundamentalisms are dangerous, whether they are based on the belief that one enjoys a direct pipeline to God or that one has a direct pipeline to "actual history," since such a belief automatically banishes one's adversaries either to a realm of pagan ignorance or to a land of pure fantasy. Not—I hasten to add, given earlier distortions of my position—that I think actual history does not exist; but most of us realize that our access to it is necessarily mediated, as well as shared with others who may come to different conclusions about its shape and meaning. And while these conclusions are not all equally valid (some, indeed, may be deeply flawed), most deserve to be treated as serious attempts to interpret the often complex and confusing body of facts out of which historical accounts are constructed. In the past I have had opportunities to argue my views about Swift with a number of worthy...

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