Graham Swift
Graham Swift (*194?) wrote ? novels between 1978 and 1996: The Sweet Shop Owner, Shuttlecock, Waterland, Out of this World, Forever After, Last Orders. He has also published a collection of short stories (Learning to Swim, 1983).
Waterland
Genre: Historiographic metafiction
Narrative situation: first person /autodiegetic
Characters: Tom Crick, Mary Crick, Dick Crick, Freddie Parr, Price
Swift's topics and themes: explores difficult relationships between past and present, private and public histories. Waterland realises the full range of possibilities inherent in first-person retrospection. The narrator Tom Crick (53), is a history teacher made redundant at the school where he has taught for 32 years. One stressful event after another has assaulted him over the past few months. Tom has a specific audience (16 history students) and a specific reason for sharing his tale. Of these students, Price has repeatedly questioned the necessity of studying history. Tom has chosen to come to terms with guilt and responsibility he has evaded for so many years. At the same time he fully demonstrates the uses of and the ever-present needs for history, both personal and philosophical. Waterland consists of two intertwined stories (the events of 1943, the present; four levels according to one account - Bernard: intertwining of 4 time strata). Tom is a highly digressionary narrator, trying to convert his audience to his cyclical view of history.
(Source: N. N. - to follow soon)
History from above vs history from below: WW II plays a marginal role.
History vs story: history is by necessity non-objective, interpretation, value-laden, so why not go all the way to subjectivity/fiction/history from below? So postmodern writing reflects the belief that history is a construct. Thus it is only logical that, if historical events are the subject matter of these novels, history is replaced by (constructed) stories.
Recent political developments (the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Balkan Wars) support the view that history is cyclical, non-teleological (as ideologists like Marx suggested). In Waterland, this view is reflected by claiming that events like the French revolution and the Second World War did not ensure the World's progress as positivist historians insist. It follows that Waterland focuses on History from below, i.e. giving a detailed account of the exploits of the Atkinson and Crick families instead of discussing political history. It follows from this that the appropriate mediation of the subject matter is histrionics/storytelling (epigraphs!), which is what Tom does in the classroom. But this postmodern view of history is also reflected in the very structure of the novel. Tom, trying to convince his students that history is cyclical, contends that history corresponds to natural history.
Correspondingly, the 'history of the eel' is told in Ch. 26 (the book has 52 chapters, thus the eel-chapter could be regarded as the 'central' one), and the nature of the novel's detective story (hybridization!; chapter one begins with Freddie Parr's death, ch. 52 ends with Dick Crick's suicide) is cyclical as well. The novel's last word is even (motor-) 'cycle'. Fiction/explanation potential is needed to understand history; fiction ensures access to history (challenge & response instead of mimesis). Only combination of approaches ensures a new way of understanding/thinking.
Waterland is particularly representative of the formal innovations associated with historiographic metafiction. Problems of historiography are dealt with in an explicit manner; they are the crucial motivation of the story. It is a critique of teleological history. In particular it focuses on the philosophical problems of factual versus fictive representation. Critics have considered Waterland's manipulation of contemporary theories of history and historiography. How the novel engages with the challenges of representing the past will now be summarized.
As 'historiographic metafiction', Waterland taps into scholarly debate on the ontology of history and the cognitive status of both fiction and historiography in the late 20th century. History is dramatized as an obtrusive yet perversely immaterial 'body', available to us only through discourse. Such novels invoke a discursive tradition of always-already-told stories, strive for an already dubious historicized legitimacy by self-consciously foregrounding their own formal apparatus. "It is part of the postmodernist stand, observes Hutcheon, to confront the paradoxes of fictive/historical representation, the particular/the general, and the present/the past."
It also deliberately models itself on a canonical work of 19th century realism, Great Expectations. One of its epigraphs signals Dickens' novel as an intertext. Like The French Lieutenant's Woman, Waterland builds on the practice of historical imitation. Waterland both passes and fails to pass as a Victorian Bildungsroman. Through revisionism it seeks to open the past up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological.
(Source: N. N. - to follow soon)
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