He constructs himself, and in the course of doing so he recognizes that "Perhaps history is just story-telling": "History itself, the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the dispeller of fears of the dark." That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as … "How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? He's someone who teaches mistakes. Waterland (novel) - WikiMili, The Free Encyclopedia - WikiMili, The Free Encyclopedia As an adult woman, she kidnaps a baby. Mill, Ruskin, and Newman, like the Pip of Great Expectations or the heroine of Jane Eyre, all tell the stories of their lives after everything interesting as already happened to them and they have at last reached some safe haven. Tom Crick's vision of reality is sealed by that abortion, draining, flowing back, stopping. Supposing it's revolutions which divert and impede the course of our inborn curiosity. Tom's father finds and pulls Freddie's body from the sluice, not realising that his drowning is not accidental. This is what Tom Crick claims to understand of his own vision as he looks back beyond and around the conception and abortion of his only child, a primal scene reluctantly uncovered by the skittering narrative as a series of nightmarish snapshots. After a scene in which the headmaster of the school, Lewis Scott, discusses Tom's dismissal with Tom, the narrative returns to 1943 and the discovery of the drowned body. As Robespierre and Marat sought not a futurist utopia but a return to an idealized Rome, Crick's students demand his reinstatement when the headmaster acts out their spoken contempt for the subject of history; generations of Cricks devote themselves to reclamation of the land; the last Atkinson brewer seeks to reproduce the purity of his family's original ale; and Mary Metcalf tries in a Lewisham supermarket to regain the motherhood she had relinquished more than three decades before in a filthy Fenland cottage. The narrator then embarks on one of his many explorations of the nature of history, before flashing back to a time in 1942 when Tom and Mary, both fifteen years old, first begin to explore each other sexually. Both novels relate the dark results of an adolescent passion, and both are haunted by the presence of an abused older woman, as Sarah Atkinson echoes and completes Miss Havisham—as do the breweries and flames that associate with each. Asking questions is essential for the study of history, and it also happens to be, in Tom's view, one of the most fundamental human traits, related to innate curiosity. It is a vital force. Like Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and like Dickens's Great Expectations (which the British reviewers don't mention), Waterland meditates on human fate, responsibility, and historical narrative by pursuing a mystery; so the book, like these others, is in part a detective story. But it doesn't progress. Story-telling, and history, and books like Waterland are these people's prime defences against fear: "It's all a struggle to make things not seem meaningless. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. It doesn't go anywhere. Mary's protest, protecting Tom, the real father, that their friend Freddie Parr was the father, thus outraged not only Dick's manhood but his very reality. But there is a fire at the New Atkinson Brewery, and it burns to the ground. And she lands in what seems a perversely awkward posture, body still, legs apart, not seeming to cushion her fall but rather to resist it. At this point, Dick is so focused on what he is doing in the Here and Now that history, either his own or the world's, does not touch him. How does language shape meaning? Tom’s obsession with the past is based on the idea that one can see events and repercussions of one’s actions clearly in hindsight, whereas the present and future are mutable, unpredictable. In 1874 he becomes a member of Parliament for Gildsey. Waterland is a 1983 novel by Graham Swift, set in the Fenland of eastern England. Source: Cynthia Cameros, "Swift, Graham," in Contemporary Novelists, 7th ed., edited by Neil Schlager and Josh Lauer, St. James Press, 2001, pp. He's the mate of the Rosa II. . Nor does history reveal the meaning of the events it records and purports to explain. It was the Here and Now which by the banks of the Hockwell Lode with Mary Metcalf unlocked for me realms of candor and rapture. Tom speculates that the feeling that everything in life really amounts to nothing haunted Tom's father in the World War I battlefield at Ypres; it also haunted his grandfather, Earnest Atkinson, which was why Earnest started drinking. In true postmodernist fashion Tom Crick, who knew the identity of the murderer years before he began the story-telling that constitutes Waterland, creates a mystery (for us) where none exists. "As long as there's a story, it's all right," says Tom. The couple lives an uneventful, conventional life, although Mary, because of a botched abortion in 1943, cannot have children. Fen lands and waters represent the reality that won't fit into our stories (one can't call it nature or the natural because those terms refer to a reality that already has been placed in a story). Underlying the sometimes lurid story of murder, suicide, abortion, insanity, incest, and mental retardation are some central questions about the nature of history. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. Tom Crick's meditations lead him to define and redefine history, in ways that are sometimes contradictory but from which a pattern ultimately emerges. By doing so, he makes himself a part of the history he is teaching, relating his tales to local history and genealogy. Like Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the polyphonic Last Orders is narrated through the friends and family of a recently deceased man on the burial journey. Their challenge to the teacher, Tom Crick, culminates two other disasters. 197–211. Tom Crick possesses the journal of his grandfather (Sarah's great grandson), Ernest Atkinson, in whom the engine of progress finally strips its gears. Graham (Colin) Swift was born May 4, 1949, in London, England, the son of Allan Stanley and Sheila Irene (Bourne) Swift. At the beginning of the narrative, he describes his childhood. In the family saga of the Cricks and the Atkinsons there are plenty of alternative explanations bandied around regarding the interpretation of key events, just as there are always conflicting versions of history; no one can know with certainty the absolute, definitive truth of an event that lies in the past. 2, Fall 1990, pp. ", With that phrase the story of Tom Crick's aborted fatherhood is linked with the messianic madness, the driven Atkinson pride, that produced empire, fueled war, sired Dick Crick, the mysterious elder brother whose attempts at lu—lu—love were behind the whole tragedy. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. To be human we have to be curious, and curiosity produces story-telling. This study guide includes the following sections: Plot Summary, Chapter Summaries & Analysis, Characters, Objects/Places, Themes, Style, Quotes, and Topics for Discussion. "I would believe or not believe anything, swallow any old make-belief, in order to have Ruth back. Experiencing an erection for the first time, Dick dives from the bridge and wins the game, the splash and swim itself serving as his act of intercourse with the river, with Mary, with the fillable vessel of reality. Helen becomes a nurse and wants to marry a wounded soldier, Henry Crick (Tom's father). All the stories were once a feeling in the guts … But when the world is about to end there'll be no more reality, only stories. They also resented the Dutch workers Vermuyden employed. Peter S. Prescott, in Newsweek, is one of a number of reviewers who compare Swift to William Faulkner. Like Proust's Marcel, she finds that a simple sensation brings the past back flush upon the present, making a mockery of separation and sequence. He knows his place. Introduction Dick becomes jealous of Freddie Parr because Mary tells him that Freddie is the father of her baby. Tom has not done his standing any good by abandoning the regular history syllabus and telling his class stories of the fens instead. Behind the tragedy of Dick's mental retardation is the Atkinson lu—lu—love (poignant, neurotic, incestuous) which begot him—a love timed by the "great narrative of history" to coincide with the Great War in which the Victorian dream of progress, of the March of Mind, of the primacy of energy over matter and of event and deed over reality, circled back upon itself and blew itself up (to quote an American tale of incest and the Great War, Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night) "in a great gust of high explosive love.". Immobilized by the heroic figure of his father, Prentis in Shuttlecock is freed by the revelation that his father may have been a traitor to the English. Dick kills Freddie by hitting him on the head with a bottle and pushing him into the river. People have to find out, people have to know. Finally, the story returns to 1943. In 1945 Tom serves with the British Army on the Rhine, after the war has ended. For example, the process of land reclamation in the fens is a metaphor of the process of human history. Tom Crick, a history teacher in the Fenlands, is driven by a marital crisis and the provocation of one of his pupils, to forsake his teaching and relate the story of his family who have lived in the Fens since the 18th century. For the Here and Now has more than one face. She is the daughter of a brewer, Matthew Turnbull. The study of history is also an attempt at reclamation, based on the desire to "discover how you've become what you are. Like Tennyson and most other nineteenth-century autobiographers, Tom Crick tells his story as a means of explaining his conversion to a particular belief and way of life. The fens harbored abundant bird life and sea life, especially eels (as Waterland makes clear). "Stephen Wall of the London Review of Books also protested that the multiple perspectives in Ever After were not resolved: "Despite its manifestly humane intentions, the different areas of narrative interest in Ever After disperse, rather than concentrate attention. Tom has been married to Mary for as long as he has been teaching, but the couple have no children. The whimsical and malignant Freddie Parr, seeing Dick, bewildered, fail to claim his trophy, initiates another game: he seizes an eel from the river trap and thrusts it into Mary's "knickers." Harold is devastated by Mary's teenage abortion and keeps her in seclusion for three years, only reluctantly giving her permission to marry Tom in 1947. The narrator is Tom Crick who lived in the Fens in the 1930s and 1940s and is narrating the story from London in the 1970s. This is not unlike the view once expressed by the French philosopher and satirist Voltaire, who remarked in a letter that "History is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead" (quoted in Durant's The Story of Philosophy). In Waterland, Crick is clearly in sympathy with the postmodernist approach to history. He said,'I've never told you, have I?'". Swift's novel begins, for example, with an epigraph from Great Expectations, another work that opens in the fens, and it shares with Dickens's novel many elements other than their opening scenes of death and guilt. In that same year, he discovers that the drowned Freddie Parr was murdered by Dick. Freddie Parr is the son of Jack Parr and a friend of Tom Crick when they are teenagers. It is narrated by Tom Crick, a middle-aged history teacher. Unlike the great Victorian autobiographers, real and fictional, he does not relate the significant details about his life from the vantage point of relative tranquility or even complacency. If you're lucky—but it's impossible—you might get back to where you can begin again. The landscape is monotonous, "bare and empty," as Swift notes in Waterland, and observers often remark on the sense of isolation it produces. This whole novel, in other words, sets out to examine these ages—and their literary as well as religious and philosophical foundations—and finds them wanting. Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, 1988. During the long period of her insanity, local legends build up around her, including the idea that she has the gift to see and shape the future. If they haven't let the world get any worse." The obvious difference between the two works, of course, appears in the fact that, unlike "Tintern Abbey," Waterland bravely refuses to find solace in some Romantic revision of Milton's Fortunate Fall. Out of this draught of his heritage, together with the sexual play with Mary and the eel which he witnessed and then took part in, Dick constructs a myth, incestuous in its turn, Oedipal, of a mother who will "rise up, wriggling and jiggling, alive—alive—o, out of the river"; who may consummate his earliest desire if he dives with force into the river, refuses to relinquish that desire. When he goes to the river after Tom's guilty and desperate revelation of his incestuous origin he is, Tom speculates, partly feeling that counter-Atkinson despair at the botch, the emptiness he is. "So when Vince Pritchett, but forget the Pritchett, dropped into my lap, into our lap," says Amy, "I ought to have known it wouldn't help a bit, it wouldn't win him back. Tom believes it may be Dick who got Mary pregnant. The narrator is a mysteriously spooked London history teacher whose fenland, paternal forbears were rural lock keepers and tale spinners, and whose maternal forbears were Victorian builders and brewers on the rise, in league with progress. But to ignore this is folly, because, above all, what history teaches us is to avoid illusion and make believe, to lay aside dreams, moonshine, cure-alls, wonder-workings, pie-in-the sky—to be realistic. He and his brother George are extremely successful businessmen. It has characteristics associated with postmodern literature, such as a fragmented narrative style, where events are not told in chronological order. Returning to the history of the Atkinsons, Tom describes how Earnest Atkinson becomes a recluse, falls in love with his daughter Helen, and lives with her as husband and wife. Tom notices a bruise on the body, finds a telltale beer bottle in the rushes, and Tom's girlfriend Mary insists Freddie was killed by Dick, Tom's mentally retarded brother. The story line goes back to 1943, and Freddie's death is ruled an accident. There is one other way that history dies, and that is when people manage to live in what Crick calls the Here and Now, which he contrasts with living with an awareness of history. Everything's got to have an explanation … Explaining's a way of avoiding facts while you pretend to get near to them." Tom is excluded from this decision. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Distressed and confused by this information, he commits suicide by leaping from the dredger into the river. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. "You ask," the narrator tells his students, "as all history classes ask, as all history classes should ask, What is the point of history." Thinking over the possibility of writing a history of the world, Lively's heroine rejects sequence and linear history as inauthentic and false to her experience: The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? In failing to organize the multiple viewpoints, Swift violates the assumption that the author will provide a "hierarchical organization of details." Her lesson for autobiography is that "inside the head, everything happens at once." Londoners Ray Johnson, Lenny Tate, Vic Tucker, Vince Dodds, and Amy Dodds are bound to the recently deceased Jack Dodds through decades of love, friendship, and secrets. When the offspring turns out to be mentally retarded (Dick), the title his father bestowed on him appears absurd and ironic. But just for a moment I saw this look on his face of deadly concentration. In Tom's view of life, children will grow up to be just like their parents, and in that sense there can be no such thing as progress. But in the face of present reality—a job that is about to disappear, students who are convinced that history is about to end in nuclear holocaust, and a wife who has lost her sanity—he is less confident about history as explanation; perhaps it is only a matter of telling stories and hoping to find meaning through them. The second consists of events of the 1940s: Mary Metcalf's adolescent sexual experimentation with Tom, Crick and his "potato-head" half brother Dick (who in his demented father/grandfather's eyes is the "Saviour of the World"), Dick's murder of Freddie Parr, Mary's abortion, Tom's revelation of Dick's incestuous conception and Dick's consequent suicide by drowning, Tom's return from the war and his marriage to Mary. 2021 . The historian is, in a sense, a partner with the past in an act of co-creation, rather than an objective chronicler of something entirely separate from him- or herself. Instead, the reader is left alone to make meanings; a job she could have done without the reading of any of Swift's novels. These questionings of narrative within its narrative make Waterland a self-reflexive text. Which perpetually travels back to where it came from." As Tom makes us realize, natural history is a paradox and an oxymoron—that is, a jarring placement together of contraries—because it is history of the antihistorical which has no order or is cyclical (nonhistorical) without individuating markers. The virtue is not so much in uncovering the facts, which are going to be colored anyway by how the historian thinks and writes about them, but in continuing to ask the questions. He thinks if she is, she will have to devote something to him. Waterland begins with the narrator Tom Crick describing his childhood growing up in the low-lying fens area of eastern England. Waterland, in other words, to a large extent embodies the conventional Romantic pattern best known, perhaps, from "Tintern Abbey." That baby who, as everyone knows, was sent by God. Revolution." Dick secretly returns the bottle to a mysterious locked chest in the attic. In Shuttlecock, Prentis says: "'I don't know' … It seemed to me that this was an answer I would give, boldly, over and over again for the rest of my life." There is no chronology inside my head. The narrator of the work is Tom Crick. Throughout the novel he addresses as his readers a class of adolescents who have suddenly rebelled against "the grand narrative"—history. She loses her mind as a result of the attack but lives another fifty-four years to become something of a local legend. A turning round, a completing of a cycle. (And, one must note in passing, this fact might cast into doubt all story-telling, particularly that of this novel, since narrative always involves some kind of progress.) The narrator's brother, the mentally retarded "potato head," Dick Crick, killed Freddie Parr by getting him drunk on a bottle of his grandfather's famous Coronation Ale, then hitting him on the head and pushing him into the river. The novel has as protagonist a history teacher who is about to be fired because history (his stories) are no longer considered of sufficient cultural value. As a teenager, Mary is curious and sexually adventurous. And inside Mary who's sitting so inside herself, another little being is sitting there, too. His father's profession was that of lock-keeper. Arthur Henry Hallam's death in 1833 forced Tennyson to question his faith in nature, God, and poetry. Harry reciprocated by reaching out to his father: "We strolled to the end of the terrace. 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