Factions' Fictions: Ideological Closure in Swift's Satire (review)

REVIEWS 85 Daniel Eilon. Factions' Fictions: Ideological Closure in Swift's Satire. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991. 212pp. US$33.50. ISBN 0-87413-391-2. "The central argument of this book is that Swift's work is consistently concerned with the tyrannical powers of the group ethic" (p. 15). When writers on Swift attempt to explain his work in terms of a single preoccupation, one is tempted not to read on, knowing how easy it is to demonstrate from Swift's work the reverse of virtually every individual proposition that is made about it. Not reading on would be a mistake, however, in the case of Daniel Eilon's book. For the open-textured, exploratory essay on Swift that follows his statement of intention quickly disperses any concern that his argument will be reductive. In arguing that Swift relentlessly satirized all manifestations of faction, exclusivity, private interest, private language, parochialism, and narrowness of opinion, Eilon seldom overlooks the paradoxical manner in which Swift inhabited his life and his art. Swift hated cabals and clubs—but he was a member of the Brothers Club (and, we might add, the Scriblerus Club, not to mention the Journal to Stella, which makes clear how much the young Swift enjoyed being part of a political in-group.) He loathed private languages, argots, trade-talk, obscurantist and mystificatory rhetoric—but he was constantly inventing such languages. Indeed, is there not a sense in which his irony precisely functions as a language closed to all those not perceptive or intelligent enough to second-guess its real intentions? He hated all manifestations of "party spirit" but, as Eilon argues very convincingly in an absorbing chapter on Swift's politics, he held Whig beliefs in the sovereignty of the people so fiercely that he would have to be termed "radical" rather than "moderate." This seeming contradiction is taken on board by Eilon's argument, and his conclusion is that there is usually a dialectical resolution in which, on a higher plane of complexity, Swift again appears consistent. More than to any deconstructive imperative, Eilon responds to the pressure behind even the most complex of Swift's satires, of a clear truth desperate for enunciation. Thus, "a Tory by temperament and a Whig by principle is persuasive as a final verdict on Swift" (p. 1 14); and "there is a fundamental difference between the private-spirited clubs that Swift attacked and the group of 'insiders' that his irony creates ... the clubs, cabals, sects, 'families' (in the Mafia sense), professions, and parties that Swift attacked are unions of interest and privilege: their closure defines them. Swift's irony, on the other hand, forms a meritocracy rather than an aristocracy" (p. 153). I am convinced more by the former resolution than the latter. Are the servants whose language and customs are satirized in Directions to Servants appropriately called a "union of interest and privilege"? In the opening chapter, on the basis of Swift's references to Babel and Nimrod, Eilon contends that he "saw the political and cultural nation of his own day as a second Generation of dispersion" (p. 160). Since Jonson and Pope made as much use of the Nimrod and Babel types as did Swift, perhaps the analogy tells us more about its suggestibility to the author than about what was in Swift's mind. Convincing though much of the exposition is, the reader occasionally wishes that Eilon would step back and comment. Swift satirizes "ideological closure," but without a degree of closure there could be no ideology. Again, the need to pair-bond, to form groups and associations, seems to be deeply rooted in human behaviour, and does not seem to be invariably sinister. It is difficult to imagine how Swift thought society could function without it, just as it is difficult to see what mechanism if not faction could drive the English political system at that time. At times the author offers hostages to fortune by claiming that a topic has not been satisfactorily explored, when an examination of the bibliography suggests that it has been explored further than Eilon knows. Christopher Fox's work on Locke and the Scriblerians, Richard Ashcraft's revisionist...