Chapter taken from Daniel Lea, Graham Swift, (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2005), 72-98

4. WATERLAND (1983)

Every Sunday, Tom Crick takes his golden retriever,

Paddy, for a walk in Greenwich Park. During their circuit

Crick is wont to pause at the top of Greenwich Hill and

survey the city beneath him:

On the top of Greenwich Hill … stands an Observatory, founded by Charles II to search the mysteries of the stars. By the Observatory,set in the asphalt, much bestridden and photographed by visiting sightseers, a metal plate marks the line of longitude 0. Near longitude 0, perched on a plinth, becloaked andtricorned, stands General Wolfe, in bronze, staring to the Thames. And beneath General Wolfe, imitating his vigilant pose, stands the history teacher, in coat and scarf, taking in for the umpteenth time the famous view. The Maritime Museum (relics of Cook and Nelson); the Naval College (painted ceiling depicting four English monarchs). History’s toy-cupboard.The pastime of past time. … The river: a steel serpent coiling through clutter – derelict wharves and warehouses, decaying docks … And, away, out of sight to the east, the former marshes where, in 1980, they are building a flood barrier. (W 128-29)

1

Having taken in not just the cityscape but the history of

England, Crick wends his way diligently throwing a stick

for Paddy to retrieve. Contained within this short scene

are the key thematic structures of Swift’s third and most

celebrated novel, Waterland. Tom Crick, a history teacher

on the point of being retired because of an embarrassing

scandal involving his wife, returns ritualistically to a

spot imbricated with generations of historical activity.

Unable to comprehend the devastating series of blows

inflicted on his personal and professional lives, he

seeks solace in perspective. Looking down on the

palimpsest of London’s pasts he attempts to mimic the

authority of the vista, hoping, through a fresh clarity

of vision, to discover his own serpentine path through

the clutter of his life. Failing to do so he departs to

ground level appeasing Paddy’s desire for attention. Like

his dog, who faithfully brings back the stick that he

throws, Crick is a retriever; a dogged seeker after

historical detail whose own private history has become

embroiled in speculation and scandal. No matter how far

he attempts to throw the memories that he strives to

ignore, he will always be forced to retrieve and account

for his past.

As its title suggests, Waterland is a novel founded

upon juxtaposition and paradox; its focus is the point of

crossover where one state of being (e.g. water) becomes

another (land). The resonances (both literal and

metaphorical) of this site of transition are of crucial

2

importance to the structures of meaning in the novel.

Swift is interested not only in the ways that entities

are defined by their presence, but also by their absence.

The point of merger as a symbolically significant

location as well as a defining extremity of two separate

states is vital to a novel that fetishizes the liminal.

At the point of crossover, the definability of any given

condition becomes blurred and problematized by

indefinability as it fuses with an alternative

incarnation. Waterland is fascinated by edges, cusps,

borderlines, barriers, beginnings and endings. Of these,

the most compellingly present in the narrative are

endings, indeed, Crick’s discourse is focused on three

specific moments of conclusion: the end of history (in

the shape of possible nuclear annihilation), the end of

History as a discipline (through the convenient

rationalisation of the subject by the headmaster), and

the end of Crick’s career. How the individuals involved

negotiate those endings and attempt to accommodate their

ramifications suggests that intrinsic to the

understanding of an ending is a concomitant contemplation

of the point of beginning.

For the novel’s main character, the recognition of

the end brings with it a need to understand how what has

ended began. Waterland thus becomes an inquiry into the

nature of inquiry and a history of history as Crick

attempts to piece together the disconnected fragments of

his, and his family’s history into a coherent narrative

3

which obeys the teleological and aetiological laws of

cause and effect. However, Crick’s search for beginnings

is fraught with problems of both epistemological and

ontological veracity. Do events have beginnings, is the

question with which he is repeatedly faced, and, if so,

how can they ever be discovered? In addition, if the

point of initiation proves so elusive, how confidently

can we assert the finality of ends? Waterland operates in

the interstices between palpable states of being, in the

penumbra of merger where definition and meaning begin to

waver and break down. Crick stands by Greenwich

Observatory surrounded by identifiable points of

historical activity, concrete indicators of sustained

human endeavour, but as he looks at the jumbled mass of

histories he sees neither starting-point nor conclusion.

The cityscape mirrors the incoherence of his own history

and it is the recognition of this insubstantiality that

leads him to isolate the arbitrarily positioned Greenwich

Meridian as the defining point of indisputable origin. He

seeks his own irrefutable starting-point from which he

can systematically plot his life-narrative. It is ironic,

but appropriate that the site or origin that he chooses

is one that circles the globe returning to the exact spot

from which it began. For Crick, beginnings are always

endings and vice versa.

That an ending always implies a beginning would

appear a self-evident statement, but for Tom Crick the

proximity between commencement and conclusion (and indeed

4

their co-dependency) encapsulates his own problematical

relationship with history. He privately, and occasionally

ostentatiously, leans towards a Marxist vision of history

as an endlessly repeating cycle of historical revolutions

rendered as tragedy and farce. For him, history is always

destined to repeat itself because the human condition

abhors inertia. ‘How many of the events of history have

occurred … for no other reason, fundamentally, than the

desire to make things happen?’ (W 40). So Crick proposes

history’s kinship with histrionics – the vacuum of time

will be filled with drama as an insecure response to the

face of inertia and nothingness. The seemingly random

musings on the intersecting histories of the Cricks and

the Atkinsons (his wife’s family) become a forceful

working model of this historiography. Crick’s sprawling

narrative periodically invokes the repetitious principle

and he is eager to remind his pupils of the traceable

patterns within his story; ‘who says history doesn’t go

in circles?’ (W 208). The intertwining stories that

circulate around Crick are specifically designed to

convey an impression of history as a constantly

revolving, but little evolving process. Ultimately, the

past as we understand it through history, is about

‘detours’ and ‘loops’ (W 135), any attempt to straighten

it out only brings us frustratingly back to where we

began.

Yet the irony of this circuitous discourse on

history is that it contains and nurtures its own

5

opposite. Crick’s desire to convince not only his pupils,

but also himself, of the lack of progression in human

affairs, masks an interpretive methodology that depends

precisely upon the principles of linear history.

Fundamental to his understanding, and subsequent

retelling of his own private history, is the nostalgic

assumption that not only are things not as good as they

used to be, but also that a whole familial history of

trauma is somehow being brought to bear on the crises of

the present. Crick is forced to account for his role in

the trying circumstances that assail him, and effectively

to acknowledge his own mistakes. His attempts therefore

to construct a narrative of cause and effect is at once

self-justifying and self-lacerating, but it ultimately

defers to a conception of history as essentially linear.

Crick is thus caught in a bind of historical

methodologies: he preaches the cyclicality of history and

practices the linear model of cause and effect. This

discrepancy reveals a great deal about Crick’s

psychological instability, but it also reflects the

novel’s abiding concern with resolution and with the

answering of one significant question.1

What Went Wrong?

The teaching of history, Crick asserts, is the teaching

of ‘mistakes’ (W 235). Where innovation and

entrepreneurship inform us how to achieve things, history

will always counter by telling us where we will go wrong.

6

Disappointment, Crick believes, is part of the human

condition and the invidious task of the historian is to

remind us of its inescapability. On one level Waterland is

a novel precisely about ‘what went wrong’, a question it

poses so relentlessly as to become obsessive. The

question functions at the level of the narrative but also

pervades the novel as a cultural artefact. Clearly

Waterland is an investigation into private grief – Crick

is desperately seeking answers to the question of where

his personal and professional lives went so disastrously

off the rails. How and why has he become excess to

educational requirements? Why has his discipline become

the victim of political and economic rationalisation?

Much more importantly, how and why has his wife, Mary,

suffered an emotional breakdown leading her to snatch a

child in a supermarket? At what point in the past did

things start to unravel, and how did he fail to notice

that turning-point? The self-examination and guilt that

1 Perhaps unsurprisingly a significant proportion of critical work onWaterland addresses the issues around its presentation of history and historiography and in particular focuses on the unresolved tensions between Crick’s contradictory methodologies. Some of the more enlightening studies are: Ernst van Alphen, ‘The Performativity of Histories: Graham Swift’s Waterland as a Theory of History’, in Mieke Bal, Inge E. Boer and Jonathan Culler (eds), The Point of Theory: Practices of Culture Analysis, (New York: Continuum, 1994), 202-10; Pamela Cooper, ‘Imperial Topographies: The Spaces of History in Waterland’, Modern Fiction Studies, 42:2 (1996), 371-96; David W. Price, History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis and the Past, (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999) and John Schad, ‘The End of The End of History: Graham Swift’s Waterland’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38:4 (1992), 911-25. Linda Hutcheon employs the novel as an exemplum in her definition of historiographic metaficiton (Hutcheon 1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism, (New York & London: Routledge, 1989); studies that remain seminal explorations of the postmodern engagement with history.

7

arise from these contemplations force him to attempt to

justify not only his private actions, but also his very

beliefs in the relationship between the individual and

the historical. The narrative of Fenland history, which

he connects intimately with his own family story, is a

painful working through of the insistent doubts about his

own culpability in the mistakes of the past. The most

sensitive areas of his narrative, the ones from which he

strives most strenuously to distance himself, are those

involving his relationship with Mary. His discomfort is

detectable in his retreat behind the mask of the

dispassionate storyteller – the section in which he

describes the inception of their relationship is prefaced

with ‘once upon a time there was a history teacher’s wife

called Mary’ (W 116), a deliberate entrenchment behind

generic barriers. Furthermore his detailing of her

botched abortion as a teenager is conducted through a

haze of alcohol enabling him to neutralise the emotional

impact of the memories by diversion.

The determination of what went wrong motivates the

private assessment of the influence of historical forces,

but Waterland also examines the intersections between

public and private history. The novel is as much

concerned with retrospective stocktaking on social and

cultural levels as it is with the individual’s struggle

to find a suitably self-justifying history. In and around

the traumatised narrative of Crick is an equally

traumatised narrative of cultural despair. The question

8

of what went wrong is as applicable to twentieth-century

social formation as it is to Crick’s private reflections.

Waterland, for all its scepticism about the hegemonic

nature of the grand narrative of History, nevertheless

contains a sense of nostalgic melancholy for a certainty

abandoned by postmodernism’s discursive relativism. It

may be too simplistic an assumption, but the

investigation of where and how things have gone wrong

implies that there exists an idealised norm from which

events have deviated. The mistakes that Crick has forged

a career studying and teaching, likewise presuppose a

more felicitous course of action that has been abjured.

Waterland’s melancholic quality derives from a sense of

loss which operates on both individual and public levels.

The loss that preoccupies Crick (and beyond him, Swift)

is bought into sharp focus by Price’s assertion that ‘the

only important thing about history … is that it’s got to

the point where it’s probably about to end’ (W 7). Swift

is not so naïve as to suppose that any age was markedly

superior to the present, yet Waterland nurtures a

conviction that the international pressure points of the

early 1980s promise a uniquely bleak vision of the

future.2

Motivating his students’ fears of the future is the

prospect of nuclear conflict and in the face of such a

catastrophe, Crick’s history of the French Revolution

seems to have little to offer by way of comfort, or

indeed example. If History is merely the narrative of

9

mistake and human error, then the crisis of the present

would seem to offer a vocal endorsement of that view. Yet

behind this fear is a desire to come to terms with the

concatenation of circumstances that threaten to bring

history to its vanishing-point. Waterland, whilst being a

novel that addresses history and historiography in the

broadest sense, is also a contextually specific novel

that demands to know how the world has come to the brink

in the early 1980s. Whilst it ranges across four

centuries, it is primarily the events of the twentieth

that dominate the narrative focus. Specifically it is the

consequences of two world wars that are repeatedly

brought to the foreground. Henry Crick’s (Tom’s father)

experiences in the trenches of Belgium (of which his

damaged knee is a potent symptom for an even more damaged

mind) dovetails with the setting of the primary action in

1943. The drone of Allied planes departing for bombing

raids on Germany punctuates Tom’s adolescent explorations

of the world; a continual reminder of the wider

historical context, the knife wound of, what becomes

known as the Here and Now. In opposition to a comfortable

complacency within a temporal hermeticism, the Here and

Now represents the explosive immediacy of the

contemporary moment which enforces on the protagonists a

recognition of their imminence to the historical without

furnishing them with a robust interpretive system with

which that proximity can be understood. The experience of

the Here and Now is a juddering dislocation as subjective

10

and objective narratives are brought into collision, and

though the full impact of the dissonant ontological

intersection stands, in its immediacy, outside the

symbolizable, it articulates the intrusion of public

history on the private realm of the individual. Reminders

of the fact that history on a macrocosmic level goes on

around and through us are never far in Waterland: Price’s

Holocaust Club refers us back to the apocalyptic

potential of the Here and Now and to the painful

recognition that progressive notions of history falter in

the face of twentieth-century events.

However it is not just the threat of nuclear

conflict that drives the novel’s entropic fantasies.

Whilst history, as far as his students understand it,

could be about to reach a violent conclusion, History, as

Crick knows it, is threatened by a more insidious

dissolution. The early retirement which is forced upon

him strikes Crick as a convenient opportunity for the

‘cutting back’ (W 5) of History. Lewis, the school’s

headmaster and a scientist by training, seizes the moment

of Mary Crick’s embarrassment to effect a politicised

rationalisation of the discipline. History, with its

2 Swift’s nostalgic melancholy is addressed specifically in relation to Waterland in Schad (1999) and more generally in Adrian Poole, ‘Graham Swift and the Mourning After’, in Rod Mengham (ed.), An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 150-167 and Wheeler (1999). Contextual studies of the politics of nostalgic loss that have been useful to this study are William Watkin, On Loss:Theories of Loss in Modern Literature, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain, (London: Verso, 1985).

11

focus on the mistakes of human praxis, has little appeal

for the pragmatic positivist in Lewis. Its value, as far

as the utilitarian Lewis is concerned, is in its

exemplary role: unless it can provide humankind with the

means to progress through the recollection of past

mistakes, then it is useless as a pedagogical tool and,

by inference, a vain self-indulgence. Education, a

working model of linearity, is inimical to the ambulatory

Crick, who, steeped in a notion of history as cyclical,

believes that our study of the past should serve only to

inform us how not to leave the world ‘worse’ (W 240).

Crick’s bruising engagement with the economics of

education reflects the interesting political context

within which this book was written.

Written in the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s

first administration, Waterland reflects the hardening of

attitudes towards History as a discipline. Lewis’

pragmatic insistence that History should provide exempla

displays a deeply reactionary conviction that academic

study should be above all useful.3 The threat of a

political utilitarianism pervades Waterland; threatening

because it interprets education purely as a means to an

end, and countenances storytelling only as a method of

instructional enlightenment. Crick recognises that

education can only ever be a process of intellectual

flux, of ebb and flow, of persistence meeting resistance.

Teaching the past as a textbook of dos and don’ts renders

history little more than a progressivist’s almanac, one

12

that ignores the myriad minute, everyday cyclicalities of

living. For Swift, as for Crick, the future of history is

not determined purely by the consequences of

international relations, but also by a continuing liberty

to tell stories for the sake of storytelling. Stories

enact the intersection between public and private actions

and constitute historical sensibility. As such, Swift

suggests that fabulation is a fundamental human need.4

The end of history is not necessarily the end of

History. With the novel’s problematising of originating

points goes an equivalent problematising of conclusions.

The endings that haunt the novel are as insubstantial as

the beginnings; if one cannot isolate a beginning how can

one confidently assert an ending? Faced with the ‘end’ of

history, Swift declares the continuation of History

because, he suggests, the micro-cycles of human affairs

will continue and will continue to be narrativized. The

instinct of humanity, he argues, is to survive and to

carry on regardless of external factors. Under those

circumstances storytelling will continue to be used to

determine not just what went wrong, but what happens

next.

Knowing who I was: Subjectivity at the Point of Origin

3 Helpful analysis of Conservative education policy of the early 1980s is provided in Peter Riddell, The Thatcher Era and its Legacy, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).4 Storytelling as productive reinscription is explored by Robert K. Irish (‘“Let Me Tell You”: About Desire and Narrativity in Graham Swift’s Waterland’, Modern Fiction Studies 44:4 [1998], 917-34) and David W. Price (1999) in particular.

13

Whilst Waterland articulates a powerful human desire for

resolution, to uncover the answers to the how’s and why’s

of history, it also proposes that the only way in which

to achieve that sense of an ending is by a paradoxical

retreat from teleology. To know who I am and what I will

be necessitates knowing, in Bill Unwin’s’ words ‘who I

was’ (EA 249). Armed with the knowledge of my self before

self, I can construct an explicatory narrative that

accounts for the disorienting crises of the Here and Now

by reference to an embodying tradition. Implicit in the

notion of recovering ‘who I was’ is the presence of an

‘authentic’ self, interred but accessible.5 This reasoning

suggests that the pre-conditions of the present are

contained in the past, an empiricist assumption that the

novel does much to problematise. Nevertheless Crick’s

genealogical recuperations are founded on the shaky

premise that the past contains the epistemological

structures for interpreting the present. His task, as he

sees it, is fundamentally archaeological – to unearth and

reconstruct; the desire for a recognisable end is

determined therefore by the identification of a palpable

beginning. This returns us to the vignette with which

this chapter opened: Crick bestriding the defining point

of geographical origin – longitude 0. Waterland is driven

5 This notion of an authentic self embedded beneath the performative veneer of a social self is an abiding transtextual feature of Swift’swriting. Its most considered treatments are found in Shuttlecock and Ever After but it is a ubiquitous trope from The Sweet Shop Owner to The Light of Day.

14

by the search for definable beginnings; points of origin

that shape the histories that they initiate.

The search for an authentic subjectivity which is

atemporal and immutable is fundamental to Crick’s project

of self-historicisation. Through interrogating the

stories of his family he hopes to excavate the ‘true’

substance of his self whose analysis will enable him to

cohere as a whole subject. Such a project is fraught with

contradictions and problems, not least of which is

Crick’s own scepticism about the viability of such a

search. Rationally, Crick can accept that what he seeks

is illusory: his historical inquiry will not yield the

totalising and redemptive framework for the past. His

avowed vision of history is that it is governed more by

instability than coherence and that attempts to organise

only lead to the creation of artificial, and implicitly

inauthentic models. Yet though he acknowledges the

fruitlessness of pursuing ‘who I was’, and even though it

countermands all that he has learned and teaches, he

cannot abandon the search for his private, singular 0.

The discipline of History has taught him that if any

point of origin exists, it is so imbricated within the

layers of competing historical narratives as to be

inaccessible, it has also taught him that the quest for

answers inevitably resolves itself only into further

interrogation. Nevertheless, like the ancestors he

describes as ‘amphibians’ (W 13) Crick is torn between a

15

desire to know and an awareness that any knowledge is

ultimately contingent and impalpable.

This paradoxical trait is common to many of Swift’s

characters. In Ever After Bill Unwin searches for definitive

causal factors behind his father’s suicide, discovering

in the process that the man he had always taken to be his

father was not biologically related to him. In Shuttlecock

Prentis’ quest is into the true nature of his father’s

wartime exploits, which, he discovers were probably

fabricated. In both these cases the principal protagonist

is motivated by a desire for completion, for an

unequivocal form of knowledge that would ultimately

explain their sense of loss and inauthenticity. What they

find not only fails to make them ‘whole’, but actually

threatens to negate what sense of selfhood they possess.

Unwin’s discovery that his true father was a train driver

precipitates a form of emotional detachment wherein the

boundaries of his own subjectivity become blurred.

Crick’s private archaeology is similarly an attempt to

circumvent the knowledge and pain of separation from a

‘real’ self by the reinscription of a genealogical

narrative, but the irony for the intelligent and self-

consciously articulate Crick is that he knows that any

authenticity he might ascribe to himself is ultimately

provisional.

Pamela Cooper has argued that the novel evidences a

desire to ‘flow backwards’, to recuperate through retreat

(Cooper 1996: 380).6 The retrogressive motif is present

16

throughout the narrative: from the swollen Fenland rivers

that, during flooding, occasionally flow back on

themselves, to the insubstantial land itself which

periodically resolves itself back into water. Indeed for

Cooper, the novel’s setting evidences a fundamental

engagement with the liminalities of history and

subjectivity. ‘The Fens proclaim a blurring together at

the very heart of separation; they locate the collapsing

of boundaries at the precise point of primeval splitting,

where difference and otherness emerge’ (Cooper 1996:

380). Swift’s Fenlands represent as a contested space

wherein constitution and dissolution are in continual

conflict. The landscape is always in a process of

transition ‘never reclaimed, only being reclaimed’ (W

10); that which appears to be substantial is slowly

deliquescing through the erosive process, whilst the

fluid insubstantialities of water are concomitantly

solidified by the process of accretion. The Fens are

never a stable site onto which humanity can project its

imperialistic dreams, nor are they an immutable canvas

upon which Crick can construct his family history with

any degree of reliability. Instead they are in a state of

perpetual flux caught at the very point of ‘primeval

splitting’.

Cooper’s description is a very useful location for

the critical debate of Waterland’s retrogressive

6 See also Fred Botting’s discussion of history and the navel in Waterland (Fred Botting, Sex Machines and Navels, [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999], 97-140).

17

metaphorisation. The novel foregrounds the cyclical

processes of splitting and reformation in relation to the

landscape, processes which are equally applicable to

conceptions of the historical and subjectivity. At the

heart of separation is an unresolved and unresolvable

blurring; that which seems to be solid and discrete is

always threatened by dissolution. The binary oppositions

of water and land, as established in the novel’s title,

are caught within a mutually negating tension that

threatens ultimately to propel both into non-meaning in

the search for a fixed referent. Clearly land cannot be

water in any common understanding of the symbolic order

just as water cannot be land, but what is implied in the

novel’s oxymoronic title is the centrifugal pull away

from fixed meaning into the realm of juxtaposition. The

elements may contradict each other, but are ultimately

interdependent – land cannot stand alone within any

significatory economy without its referential opposite

and vice versa. What Swift draws attention to in the

ambiguous title is partly the structures of semiotic

deferral at the core of the book, and partly the

processes of separation that are fundamental to the

novel’s constructions of memory and selfhood.

Of course that which is neither water nor land does

retain its own significance in the interstices of the

novel’s symbolic order. Silt is the blurring of water and

land, an intriguingly liminal substance which

incorporates both land and water and yet is wholly of

18

neither. It is produced by the erosive nibbling away of

land by the water channels, releasing particles that are

subsequently deposited further downstream. It is a

product, in other words, that both scours the river’s

path and simultaneously clogs the water’s flow. At once

constructive and destructive, silt becomes the novel’s

dominating metaphor for the inbetweenness of history and

of the self within history. It is particularly intriguing

because it is a substance that exists without a binary

opposite and thus obtains a conceptual logic as a free-

floating signifier. Silt is an extremely important

textual motif because whilst it seems to assume a third-

space outside binary definition, it mobilises the

processes of erosion and accretion that are fundamental

to the meaning-making properties of water and land. It is

integral, therefore, both to the novel’s symbolisation

and to the undermining of those same symbols.

Just as silt represents both the presence and the

absence of its constituent parts, so the individual in

Waterland is assailed by conflicting emotions of belonging

and separation. The processes of erosion and accretion

that render the Fenlandscape so impalpable are equally

applicable to identity formation within that landscape.

The desire to ‘flow backwards’ to a mythical point of

origin is discernible in the storytelling of Crick, who,

in trying to discover ‘who I was’ seeks to recuperate a

past ironically, through the retreat from subjectivity.

Recounting the history of his family engages Crick in a

19

half-willed, half-enforced process of working through

emotions about the past that have been long suppressed.

His narrative performs a double function: it provides a

context within which the self-lacerations of guilt about

his roles in Mary’s pregnancy, Freddie Parr’s murder and

Dick’s suicide can be articulated; it also enables him to

situate his own troubled history within a longer,

established pattern of familial trauma. This second

function is perhaps the more important for, in the search

to discover ‘who I was’ Crick retreats from the

particular focus on his own subjective coherence to a

generalised history of his family and the environment

that they inhabited. In other words, to delineate more

effectively the limits of his own subjectivity, Crick

projects his self onto a broader, and implicitly, less

emotionally combustible canvas. In effect the discovery

of who he was requires the retreat from subjectivity. The

histories of the Cricks and Atkinsons become the means by

which Crick metaphorically substantiates his selfhood and

provides the justification for the ethical

miscalculations of his youth. Yet whilst his family

narrative appears to be ostensibly therapeutic - a

cathartic expression of guilt at a series of disastrous

moral choices - it could equally be read as a catalogue

of evasions, misdirections and deferrals. Take for

instance Crick’s contradictory historiographical

methodology.

20

In his attempts to discover the historical timeline

of his present crises, Crick employs interpretive

criteria that he abjures publicly. Despite his

protestations that history is composed of complex and

endlessly repeating cycles that resist ‘straightening’,

he adopts strategies of telling that favour linear cause

and effect as a way of reconciling his own feelings of

guilt about the past. Albeit winding, the narrative of

the Crick/Atkinsons follows a chronological sequence and

displays a readiness to match cause to effect. Although

outwardly eschewing the connection between Mary’s

adolescent abortion which has rendered her infertile and

her snatching of an unattended baby, Crick clearly

acknowledges a long-standing sense of loss as a

motivating factor. Similarly, in his detailing of the

incestuous relationship of his mother and grandfather

Crick implies a direct correspondence between their

internalised passion and the rejection heaped on Ernest

Atkinson by the residents of Gildsey. Indeed far from

renouncing the ‘straight’ path of history in his own

narrative, he could be said to embrace the chronological

and teleological possibilities that the autobiographical

format extends.

Beyond Degree Zero: Defining Non-Subjectivity

Flowing backwards may not necessarily be a desire to

return to origins. In Waterland there is an associated

need to return to pre-origins: effectively to nothingness.

21

Accepting the limitations of subjectivity, and ever-

conscious of the artificiality of authenticity, Crick

toys with the idea of returning to a space beyond origin

where wholeness could be achieved through the radical

dissolution of self. This abjection of the solid

materiality of being is, in the terms of Lacanian

psychoanalysis, attributable to a sense of primary, or

narcissistic, loss, focalised around the mirror phase of

ego development.7 For Lacan the subject’s propulsion into

language develops from a self-recognition at an infantile

stage. Aware for the first time of her/himself as a

separate entity to the m/other, and suffering a sense of

loss at the diminishment of comfort, inclusion and

attention that separation entails, the child desires the

re-establishment of the somatic and psychic unity and

begins to articulate in order to enunciate its

incompletion and need for fulfilment. The paradoxical

side-effect of this counter-flow is that it initiates the

individual into subjectivity in the same moment that it

shows a rejection of that separateness. Only in the

fantasies of pre-subjective dissolution can the idea of

wholeness be sustained, a completion that ironically

negates being by fetishizing the idea of being of someone

else. In Waterland we see this urge to return to an

inorganic fluidity established from the novel’s opening

paragraph with Henry Crick’s homily to his sons to

7 See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Lacan (2001), 1-8.

22

remember that each person was ‘once a tiny baby sucking

his mother’s milk’ (W 1). This image of the suckling

child recurs at intervals throughout the novel, each time

reinforcing the closed circuit of the family and between

generations and emphasising the desire to return to the

maternal body and to a protected oblivion. This image of

the maternal body as site simultaneously of belonging and

separation is carried through the novel in the figure of

Mary Crick.

Mary is symbolically tied to the processes of

fertility, sexuality and childbirth, but also

intrinsically identified with menstrual blood-loss,

abortion and maternal separation. Crick describes the

adolescent Mary as beside herself with curiosity about

her sexual potential and that of those around her. She

is, we are led to believe, sexually active from an early

stage and happy to accommodate the interest of Tom, Dick

and Freddie during the same period. She is earthily

attracted to the mechanics of sex and on one level,

represents the symbiotic conjoining of the fertile land

and fields in which most of her experiments take place.

However, whilst her sexuality certainly indicates the

creative possibilities of nature, it also contains the

symbolic capacity for destruction. In other words, it

parallels the novel’s scouring/depositing dichotomy and

exemplifies the maxim that ‘nothing is given without

something being taken away’ (W 72). Whilst Mary is

‘equipped with a miniature model of reality’ she is also

23

‘an empty but fillable vessel’ (W 42). Throughout the

novel, her body is associated with vacancy, expulsion and

negation. It is no coincidence that where the male sex

organ is priapically identified by its presence – ‘thing’

– Mary’s vagina – her ‘hole’ – is defined only in terms

of absence. Furthermore, Mary’s body becomes identified

with the abject liminality between the solid and the

liquid. She is fascinated by her menstrual bleeding and

invites Tom to observe the cyclical return of her own

solidity to the fluid (W 51-52). This is obviously a

prefiguration of the horrific abortion scene, but it also

situates Mary at the borderline, an empathetic emissary

of the abject landscape.

This marginality is further reiterated by two

episodes: the scene where Freddie playfully introduces a

live eel into Mary’s underwear (W 180-93), and the

abortion scene (W 298-308). The teasing sex games that

lead up to the former incident are conducted within an

atmosphere of curiosity and jealousy. Mary’s attention is

primarily drawn to Dick, an individual, like herself,

positioned at the margins. Her fascination with his

outsized penis instils jealousy in Tom and Freddie, but

it also reductively objectifies him to the level of his

member. Freddie’s playful vengeance thereby becomes a

metonymic transference of Dick’s dick into the live eel.

He is the character most closely associated with the

amphibian qualities of the eel, so the brief moments

during which the animal thrashes about in Mary’s

24

underwear could be read as a vicarious sexual act

occurring between Mary and Dick. This notion is

reinforced by the succeeding overtones of birth – the eel

extricates itself from Mary’s clothes and slithers back

to the water. Poignantly, the eel is the only living

thing that Mary will give ‘birth’ to and this proto-

maternity is recalled in the abortion scene where the

expelled foetus is discarded in the river – to be

devoured, appropriately, by eels. The scene situates Mary

as mother-figure, but only in an abstract and

metaphorical way. Her giggles as the eel wriggles around

her genitals stimulate a form of sexual awakening in

herself and her observers, but it is a detached and

narcissistically subjective pleasure. The creature to

which she gives ‘birth’ is symbolically established at

the problematic nexus of land and water, reinforcing

Mary’s status at the boundary of the fluid and solid.

Just as she is somatically connected to the

borderlines of the solid and the fluid, so too is she

psychologically presented. Mary’s grasp on her notion of

self grows increasingly attenuated through adult life as

she retreats from responsibility in an attempt to achieve

a condition of blissful pre-subjectivity. Together the

trauma of her abortion and her consequent infertility

drive her away from any recognition of the real and into

her own private asylum – religion. Just as for the

Atkinsons, mechanical entrepreneurship had salved the

blows of Fenland reality (or as storytelling has

25

performed the same function for the Cricks), so for Mary,

religion offers a means of erecting a hermeneutic

framework through which she believes she can resolve, or

at least reconcile, her nightmares of loss. Her attempts

to escape the emptiness of reality through religion are

flawed, however, just as Crick’s stories (and the

Atkinson drainage pumps) are flawed by the insidious

reappearance of the Here and Now. In these circumstances

the Here and Now becomes interpretable as the Lacanian

Real: that part of the symbolic order that stands outside

and always in resistance to signification.8 For Lacan the

Real is the zone of the unsymbolizable, an amorphous

space that is cut into by the process of symbol formation

and language but which is always in excess of the means

of containing or understanding it.9 Swift’s Here and Now

(which reoccurs in different forms throughout his

writing) exemplifies the Real in its resistance to

interpretation and in its asymbolic insistence. It is the

incarnation of the historical that cannot be identified

as historical and it is the subjective core that always

exists outside our definitions of self. The narratives of

consolation that the novel’s protagonists adhere to prove

flimsily insubstantial in the face of Reality and yet the

symbolic cuts that they make into the continuum of the

Real reveal the over-riding need to wrestle sense, order 8 See Lacan (2001)9 Slavoj Žižek is one of Lacan’s most lucid interpreters and his introductions to the Real in The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London & New York: Verso, 1989) and Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 2nd edition, (New York & London: Routledge, 2001) are insightful, erudite and entertaining.

26

and restitution from the indifferent void of being. The

return of Mary’s repressed memories of physical and

psychic trauma lead to an attempt at forceful reclamation

of that which has been both literally and symbolically

lost. By stealing another’s child Mary seeks to repair

the circle of her self, in effect, to make herself whole

again. It is an effort to return to the pre-traumatic

moment when she believes she knew ‘who I was’. Unable to

accept that her self will never be whole in the sense she

craves, Mary seeks a more complete retrenchment to the

nothingness of pre-subjective Reality.

In one very important sense the retreat from

subjectivity is also a retreat from self-articulation.

Crick’s ongoing crisis is motivated in part by Mary’s

retreat into silence, a silence which is self-protecting,

but simultaneously self-negating. Unable to cope with the

conflicting memories and emotions of her life, Mary has

turned away not only from the hermeneutic systems that

have previously shaped her existence, but from expression

itself. On one level Mary’s silence indicates not a

refusal to fabulate, but her inability to do so. All the

major characters in Waterland discover ways to circumvent

the knowledge of reality’s emptiness, to construct

stories of consolation. Religion has been for Mary just

such a consolatory fiction, but in the aftermath of the

baby-snatch such fictions are revealed to be arbitrary

and artificial constructs. Consequently Mary has no

stories left to protect herself with and, like Prentis

27

Snr. in Shuttlecock, indicates her inability to cope by a

total retreat from language. This clearly has grave

implications for her already tenuous sense of self. If,

in psychoanalytical terms, the impulsion into language is

fundamental to the formation of a stable, independent and

social identity, discrete from that of the m/other, then

the withdrawal from language indicates a desire to return

to a condition of pre-subjective dependency. Mary

renounces the therapeutic effects of fabulation,

reverting instead to a pre-symbolic phase of development.

It is a phase, similar to that described by Julia

Kristeva as the semiotic, where the intrinsic

heterogeneity of linguistic mechanics gives way to the

homogenous irreferentiality of silence.10 Crick interprets

Mary’s silence as a pathological inability to

historicise:

First there is nothing; then there is happening. And after the happening, only the telling of it. But sometimes the happening won’t stop and let itself be turned into memory. So she’s still in the midst of events …which haven’t ceased. Which is why it’s impossible to get through. Which is why she can’t cross into the safe, sane realm of hindsight and answer the questions of the white-coated doctors: ‘Now tell us, Mrs Crick. You can tell us everything …’ (W 329)11

10 See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, (New York 7 Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1984).11 Mary’s entrapment within the ongoing trauma of events recalls Irene’s failure to accommodate her rape in The Sweet Shop Owner. Both are suspended in a tortuous linguistic fracture that cannot be reconciled because it cannot be narrativised.

28

Crick diagnoses his wife to be trapped within the Here

and Now (rather like Dick). Her unconscious mind is

unable to process the traumatic events, nor is her

consciousness able to accommodate them within a pattern

of living. It is only through the imposition of an

historically conscious narrative that the process of

incorporating those events as memory can begin. Until

that point, silence is not a recalcitrant’s resistance,

but an expression of a pre-subjective or asymbolic

blankness.

Interestingly, Mary’s silence inspires a great deal

of verbosity in those around her. Her husband, Lewis, the

school-children and the press are more than ready to

fabulate for and about her, adding weight to the argument

that humanity abhors vacuity. Because she has rescinded

her right to self-expression, others willingly oblige.

Crick’s narrative response to his wife’s retreat from

history is ever more ferociously to historicise her. He

fills the vacuum of her despair in the only way that he

knows, by constructing a rationale, a logic and above

all, a narrative. Only through this narrativising process

can he cope with the breakdown of his wife and his guilt

at his own culpability. Significantly, it is through the

abiding need for stories that Swift suggests human beings

ultimately resist the dissolution of the self.

The recognition of the unbearable pain of reality

threatens the autonomy of the self precisely because it

29

negates that selfhood. Those characters that live

‘outside’ history (i.e. Dick and ultimately Mary) are

unable to develop a suitably robust subjectivity to

combat the Here and Now. Their only answer is the retreat

back to their points of origin, their Realities (silence

in Mary’s case, the silty waters for the eel-like Dick).

Storytelling is a creative, constitutive act that shapes

nothingness into meaning and thereby resists the return

to silence that would be the ultimate goal of the search

for truth or origins. It resists it because it suggests

that truth is fundamentally constituted by the stories

themselves and by the need to tell them. Crick seeks an

answer to Mary’s silence just as Prentis searches for an

explanation to his father’s silence in Shuttlecock, or as

Amy seeks to understand June’s silence in Last Orders. For

each of them, the insupportable emptiness of the silence

must be filled because the nothingness of silence

threatens the somethingness of self. A retreat into non-

vocalisation is also a retreat into non-meaning, a space

of pre-subjective flux prior to the referent. Or, to put

it in less pejorative terms, it is the space of the

defining referent which encompasses all in a fluid

homogeneity. If this is the condition of wholeness craved

by Mary (and, to a lesser extent, by Crick) then Swift

suggests it is a form of self-annihilation that humankind

will always instinctively resist. At the root of human

praxis, he contends, is the search for epistemological

and narrative structure which shapes experience and,

30

whilst Waterland suggests that this search incurs the

recognition that all structures of knowledge are

fundamentally contingent and unstable, the imperative to

support those structures remains undiminished. Finding

stories to account for the gaps in other narratives is

ultimately a self-constituting act (as was evidenced in

Shuttlecock); Crick effectively ‘silts’ himself in language

as a protection against nothingness. The dissolution of

Mary’s self thus becomes the means by which Crick

attempts to solidify his own subjectivity. But, in trying

to sand-bag against the dissolution of his self, Crick

reveals the perilously fragile nature of his

subjectivity.

Flood Defences: Storytelling and the Limits of the

Symbolic

Waterland foregrounds the problematically elusive nature

of realist representation, but more generally it

articulates the crisis of referentiality as a signifying

practice. As Wendy Wheeler has suggested, the novel

operates consistently at the limits of the symbolic,

where the stable referent is continually threatened by

non-meaning (Wheeler 1999). Wheeler takes as her

illustration of this point the Cricks’ battle against the

ceaselessly returning waters of the Fens. The family

profession is fundamentally the maintenance of a

distinction between water and land. Through keeping the

sluices clear and the locks functioning effectively, the

31

Cricks are vital to the continuation of both a literal

and a symbolical difference. They are always in the

front-line fighting against nature’s retrogressive

instinct to return all to an homogenous condition.

Effectively, they are required to set and maintain the

limits of both land and water, and in so doing, they

become the symbolic guardians of the edge, over-seers of

the fluctuating boundaries of something and nothing.

Throughout Waterland, human endeavour is associated with

the wrestling of a solid something from an indifferent

nothingness – Vermuyden’s initial reclamation of the

Fenland is the generation, through human ingenuity, of

land from water – the solid from the fluid. In contrast,

‘natural history’ dictates a desire to flow backwards

into nothingness and oblivion. This makes the Cricks

crucial to the task of halting, or at least stemming, the

process of both literal and metaphorical dissolution.

Their uneasy control of the landscape prevents the

collapse of the symbolic order and the slide into non-

meaning.

Whilst the maintenance of an efficient machinery can

ensure the physical distinction between land and water,

the Cricks’ penchant for storytelling allows Swift to

explore the limits of distinction in a metaphorical

sense. The act of storytelling is both an active

expression of subjective will and a reiteration of the

boundaries of that subjectivity. Just as the drainage

pumps maintain an equilibrium between land and water in a

32

literal sense, so the storytelling act enables human

beings to establish a borderline between a fear of

nothingness and the comfort of being. Language formation

dictates the parameters of human experience but it also

reassures us that those experiences have meaning within

wider systems of order. The creation of complex

linguistic structures is analogous to the flood defences

of the Fens – the greater and broader the narrative act,

the more solid the flood defences become. Crick’s own

defences are beginning to weaken and are threatened with

total collapse. The strength of his flood barriers has

been dependent upon the stable meanings of the major

reference points of his life – his job, his passion for

his discipline, the love and support of his wife. All

these are threatened with collapse and all that Crick can

do to prevent his own retreat into indistinctness is

desperately to shore up the extremes of his self in the

only way that he knows – by telling ever more complex

stories.

The irony of Crick’s battle to reinforce the limits

of his subjectivity is that at the same time that he

fills sandbags to protect himself, he simultaneously, and

self-consciously, undermines his efforts. Again, Swift

reminds us that the natural instinct of the waterway is

to scour and deposit, to construct and destroy in the

same action. By telling his pupils about his childhood in

the Fens, Crick is on the one hand, ‘silting’ himself in

the stories of his family whilst on the other hand he is

33

directly addressing memories that are at the very least

unresolved. So whilst he deposits against the slide into

nothingness, he also scours and weakens his already

stretched psychological defences.

Crick is therefore trapped in the tension of

contradictory impulses between verbosity and silence,

between a desire to be and a need not to be. At the heart

of this tension are Crick’s feelings of guilt about his

involvement in the death of Dick and in Mary’s pregnancy.

It is the unresolved nature of these feelings that

motivates him to return to the events repeatedly in order

to explain to himself how and why they happened. He

attempts, through a coded confession of his culpability,

to fill the gaps they have produced in his own defences,

for after all, as he has always been taught, stories will

protect him from the pain of reality. However, because

the psychological wounds have not healed completely,

Crick’s attention to them only serves to open them

further. As this process of scouring and deposition

develops, the reader begins to suspect that Crick’s

confession actually masks a deeper, irreconcilable sense

of guilt.

This seems to revolve primarily around his

relationship with Dick. If the land is the ‘something’ to

the water’s ‘nothing’ in the novel’s symbolic hierarchy,

then Dick similarly functions as the absence to Tom’s

presence. Yet that absence in Dick is something to which

Tom is strongly attracted, as well as being repulsed.

34

Although his confession does not acknowledge it, jealousy

is the primary emotion that Crick feels towards his

brother, and the motivating impulse behind that jealousy

is Tom’s perception that Dick is immune to the processes

of history. Born as the mentally impaired child of an

incestuous relationship, Dick personifies the instinct to

flow backwards. The circumstances of his existence

renounce the evolutionary desire to move forwards and the

result is an individual who is trapped between the past

and the future. He is quintessentially hybrid, a ‘potato-

head’ (W 32) as Tom cruelly describes him, half human and

half vegetable. As such he is defined by his younger

brother as ‘irreclaimable’ (W 37). This is an intriguing

description because it suggests that Dick stands outside

the forces of flux that affect all the novel’s other

characters. Dick seems to represent a stable reference

point that is not threatened with dissolution and which

is, above all, self-referential. He is commonly

associated with the eel whose procreative cycle is

couched in myth, and does not experience the competitive

urge to fight against the unifying impact of water – in

fact as he shows on several occasions (most notably his

suicide) he is more at home in water than on land.

If Dick is irreclaimable, then what Tom strives to

do throughout their adolescence is to reclaim him for the

symbolic. Dick, like the eel, functions in the Here and

Now, his consciousness is lodged in the present and he

has no developed sense of either past or future. Tom’s

35

actions are deliberately calculated to reclaim Dick into

a suitably historical sense of self. He is jealous of

Dick precisely because he is not trapped within the

cycles of history and memory; he does not have to

experience the pain of reality nor suffer the unbearable

recognition of his nothingness. Instead Dick lives in the

present and functions mechanically like his motor-cycle.

Tom’s cruel jibe about his dead brother’s ‘potato-head’

reveals a deeply unpleasant jealousy of Dick’s

imperviousness to himself as an historical creature. The

revenge that he enacts is equally as cruel. He forcefully

reclaims Dick for reality and from Reality by ensuring

that he appreciates his own culpability in a chain of

cause and effect, that is, in a linear historical

narrative.

The process of reclamation has two principal focal

points: the Coronation Ale bottle that becomes the murder

weapon, and the disputed paternity of Mary’s baby. When

he recovers the ale bottle from the river it doesn’t take

long for Tom to piece together the train of circumstances

leading up to its reappearance. His actions following

this discovery are difficult to justify. Leaving the

bottle where he knows that Dick will find it can have

only one explanation – he wants Dick to know that he is

aware of the crime and consequently to initiate feelings

of guilt in Dick for his ill-judged actions. It is

difficult to excuse Crick for this action, or to account

for it other than as a desire to witness the paralysing

36

fear of discovery that Dick undergoes. In his narrative

to the children, Crick justifies his action as an

involuntary human curiosity; he wants definitive proof of

the link between empirical evidence and crime. His

dedication to history and to the pursuit of curiosity is

thus essentially imperialistic: not only does he want to

understand the forces at work on him and on history, but

he is also determined that everyone else will seek their

own answers and justify their own behaviour whether they

want to or not. The spirit of curiosity that he nurtures

in his pupils is not a neutral or benign force, but one

that destroys in the same moment that it uncovers.

The issue of parentage is another on which Crick

reveals himself to be especially callous. Not only does

he feel obliged to inform his father of the truth about

Dick’s conception (W 324), a truth that could happily

have remained buried, but he initiates Freddie’s murder

and Dick’s suicide by a bitter aside on the real father

of Mary’s child. By informing Dick that the child may

have been Freddie’s and, finally, that it was his own (an

assertion for which he has no proof) he seeks only one

end, the selfish establishment of facts. He further

distresses Dick by insisting on detailing the nature of

his incestuous origins (W 322) - a concept that he knows

Dick could not hope to understand. With this, the

dragging of Dick from the Here and Now and into an

understanding of historical cause and effect is complete.

Rather than accept the pain of his newly acquired

37

reality, Dick commits suicide, returning, eel-like, to

the silty waters of the Fens. It is a final renunciation

of history. Tom is left to make account for his own

responsibility for the deaths of Dick and Freddie and the

ruined life of his wife. Dedicated to uncovering his own

history and those of the people around him, he pays

little attention to the damage that he does.

Only with the breakdown of Mary and the consequently

weakened state of his own psychological defences does

Crick begin to contemplate the ethical implications of

his past actions. His school-masterly judgement may be

that the human being is the curious animal and it is that

curiosity that drives innovation and supports

civilisation, but his own history dramatically undermines

that dictum. Whether he acknowledges his guilt for his

misjudged decisions is debatable, Waterland is an

‘apology’, but it is more obviously a self-justification.

The stories that he tells about the past are

fundamentally intended to buttress his own fragile

subjectivity, but their telling reveals the extent to

which Crick’s stable self is dependent upon the

dissolution of those around him.

Life-Righting

Given the tenuous grasp that he has on his own selfhood,

the task of reconstructing an autobiographical record

could seem either foolishly ambitious, or therapeutically

productive. In attempting to envisage his life as a

38

whole, Crick seeks to mirror the authoritarian

indifference of History and enforce a control over

experiences which he openly acknowledges is impossible.

Autobiography, like History is ‘the attempt to give an

account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves

undertaken with incomplete knowledge’ (W 108). Despite

his awareness that any narrativization of the self can

therefore only be partial, he insists on emulating models

of narrative that promise totalising epistemologies. As

an autobiography, Waterland exhibits postmodernism’s deep

discomfort with the empiricism of hindsight and the

linear narrativization of selfhood. Crick understands

that any story of his life will be intrinsically flawed

by the psychological desire for insight and explanation,

impulses which place unacceptably teleological demands

upon the narrative. He knows, above all, that his-story,

like History, will be an artificial and arbitrary

conglomeration of experiences and emotions yoked together

to simulate coherence. Yet, although he is painfully

conscious of the limitations of his storytelling, he

nonetheless feels compelled to comply with the dictates

of the genre.

His life-writing project is doomed from the start,

but in the ways that he tries, and fails, to mimic a

detached position, the reader becomes further aware of

Crick’s contradictoriness. He can never hope to achieve

the coherence he craves, partly because he lacks full

knowledge of many of the events he describes, and partly

39

because he is still engaged in the working through of

complex emotions arising from those events. It should not

be forgotten that the novel situates Crick in medias res;

whilst the scandal of his wife’s actions have already

taken place, their full consequences have not been

resolved since Mary is still consigned to an asylum.

Crick’s narrative is thus in essence a form of talking

cure, designed to provide structure and shape for the

chaotic circumstances of the present. Interestingly

though, Crick’s engagement with the present involves a

characteristic deferral of knowledge about those

circumstances. In order to explain to himself and his

audience how the crisis has come about, he adopts an

autobiographical form that contradicts everything that he

holds true in academic life.

Autobiography presupposes teleology and distance. It

suggests by its very format that certain conclusions or

lessons can be taken from a life narrative, and that

those conclusions are fundamentally secure. Explicitly,

life-writing promotes a linear conception of history and

one’s position within a stages development of experience.

Not only are these generic indicators anathema to Crick’s

understanding of how human beings perceive their lives,

but they also imply a clarity of historical perspective

that he could not hope to emulate. Nevertheless, it is

not unreasonable to suggest that it is precisely those

indicators that Crick strives so ardently to instil in

his own narrative. George Landow compares Crick’s

40

autobiographical account with a classic Victorian model

of the genre and suggests that the latter emerges from

both an individual and a cultural sense of security.12

Life-writing descends, albeit tentatively, from the

notion that its subject has achieved a space of

quiescence from which a panoramic vision of the past can

be expressed. Waterland exemplifies the postmodernist

autobiography in that its subject is writing from a

position of neither security nor distance. To use a

metaphor that I have employed elsewhere, Crick cannot

tell us his story from the privileged perspective of the

Greenwich observatory, but is required to relate it from

the perspectiveless Fens. He has no idea what his life

has amounted to and only a dim appreciation of the

lessons his experiences should have taught him. In

another desperate attempt to make sense of the chaotic

jumble of his life and to generate a degree of detachment

as much for his audience as for himself, Crick

appropriates one of the traditional functions of

autobiography: the provision of an exemplary life.

To his adolescent audience Crick extols the virtues

of curiosity and implores them continually to question

why. He offers his own life as a working model of this

philosophy. Human development, he argues, is dependent on

curiosity and a refusal to accept that things are as they

are. Ingenuity inspires innovation and any technological

advancement is rooted in a desire to know more and to

12 George P. Landow, ‘History, His Story, and Stories in Graham Swift’s Waterland’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 23:2 (1990), 197-211.

41

understand more fully. Moreover, ‘curiosity begets love’

(W 206), which, Crick would have us believe, is the

ultimate consolatory fiction: a redemptive force which

counteracts the pain of nothingness. Crick, the eternal

pedagogue, feels obliged to draw from the example of his

own life - an instructive paradigm - but this ignores the

multitudinous contradictions that his own life offers.

Why does Crick teach the value of curiosity when it has

clearly damaged not only his life, but also those of the

people around him? The answer brings us back to Swift’s

pastiche of the autobiographical form. Autobiography

implies detachment and control, qualities which Crick is

desperately lacking. By adopting the generic parameters

of the form, he seeks to convince both his audience and

himself that his investigations have been informative,

instructive and, above all, conclusive. In fact, Waterland

exposes the disingenuousness of autobiography by

revealing its casual teleologies. Postmodernist

autobiography is shot through with an instability over

the nature of narrative control and Crick’s flawed

attempts to make himself illustrative of a modus vivendi

reveals only an empty authority masquerading as exemplum.

Despite his outward cynicism about the potential for

historical progression and human development, Crick

fundamentally remains a humanist and a romantic. In his

question to Lewis – ‘do you believe in children?’ (W 235)

– he exhibits an indissoluble residue of hope about the

future. The optimistic Crick believes that one generation

42

will always learn from the mistakes of its predecessor,

but the realist Crick counters by reminding us that his

job as History teacher is to show how illusory is that

faith. It is an engagement between hope and experience

and Crick is caught in that irresolvable, but perhaps

optimistically dialectical loop. If history is a

continuous process of erosion and accretion, a process as

constructive as it is destructive, where does that leave

us? In a state of perpetual crisis, or in a quiescent

stasis? I would suggest that Swift considers both states

to co-exist. History, as presented in Waterland, is the

continuous struggle between equally matched forces

pulling in opposite directions. On one side is what is

termed ‘natural history’, the endlessly repeating and

perpetually self-generating cycles of the natural

environment. Natural history tends towards the stability

of inertia; it is indifferent to human effort and demands

the return of the ‘unnatural’ to the natural state.

Erected against this force is ‘artificial history’ which

is defined by human endeavour and by the irrepressible

urge to mark the landscape with permanent and

indissoluble landmarks of human activity. Artificial

history encompasses the ingenuity of the Fen drainers who

literally make something from nothing. It also includes

the discipline of History, the carving of memorable

reference points from a chaotic mass of incident and

event. That these forces are in perpetual tension, a

43

metaphysical tug-of-war, is at the core of Waterland and,

Swift implies, neither can ultimately triumph.

Crick’s tragedy, but also his salvation, is that as

much as he recognises its futility, he will not

relinquish his belief in the value of human endeavour.

Experience may have taught him that human beings

continuously undermine those things they believe in most

ardently, but he also holds that at the precise moment of

deconstruction they are also reconstituting those beliefs

in new ways. In the shattered remains of post-war

Germany, Crick decides to become a History teacher

because:

I made the discovery that this thing called civilization, this thing we’ve been working at for three thousand years, so that now and then we get bored with it and even poke fun at it … is precious. An artifice – so easily knocked down – but precious. (W 239-40)13

Waterland attests to the indefatigable optimism of

humankind – even though the rational historical animal

knows that nothing will change and that the same

catastrophic mistakes will be made time and again, human

beings will simply carry on regardless. As the Cricks

have doggedly and patiently maintained the distinction

between land and water, so human beings will continue to 13 The brittle substance of civilization and its precarious symbolic status has developed through Swift’s writing since Waterland. In Ever After the thin veil of the civilized is always threatened by the intransigence of the Real, whilst in The Light of Day the refrain ‘what’scivilization for?’ simultaneously underlines and undermines the products of human endeavour.

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believe that civilization is worth something even when

this conviction is most profoundly tested. Effectively,

what this paradox reflects is the division between the

historical sensibility and the Here and Now. The

historical sense is a passive, retrospective melancholy

that always haunts us with the lessons of past mistakes.

It informs us of why human beings will never progress,

but also why they will never seriously regress. The Here

and Now, whilst being associated throughout the novel

with the smack of Reality, is also characterised by the

need to cope, to find a way to survive. The Here and Now

is the basic need to protect ourselves from the forces of

history that seek to negate human endeavour. The

realisation of the devastating consequences of historical

intransigence in the ruins of Germany is a painful

reminder for Crick of the Here and Now, but it is also

the spur that encourages his vocation and thereby

bolsters the civilization that seems most threatened.

It is this humanist impulse at the heart of Waterland

that A.S. Byatt deprecates in On Histories. According to

Byatt ‘there is an unthinking romantic core in the middle

of Swift’s fiction’ that prompts his writing to adopt the

side of ‘life’.14 I would argue that it is exactly this

residual romanticism that makes Swift such an interesting

writer. In contrast to Byatt who knowingly plays

postmodernism’s cynically self-referential games, Swift

is a problematical figure amongst postmodernist writers

14 A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000),70.

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largely because he questions the cynical or detached

irony of many of its proponents. Instead, he reminds us

that writing and reading are fundamentally ethical

pursuits that cannot stand outside history, aloof and

indifferent. In the face of nuclear war storytelling, and

its official relative History, do not become obsolete or

irrelevant, they become more important because they

demand to know not only ‘what went wrong?’ but also ‘what

comes next?’.

Waterland is a novel continually teetering on self-

contradiction; it functions at the boundaries of meaning

and is constantly threatened with the collapse into non-

meaning. Swift argues that although storytelling is an

arbitrary act of self-consolation, human beings are

nonetheless driven to construct ever more complex stories

and histories to distance reality. The construction

process is both meaningful and meaningless, but, Swift

suggests, to be caught in the unstable territory of

meaning’s limits is fundamentally to enact the human

condition. As Tom Crick stands beneath the Greenwich

Observatory at the ‘originating’ point of time, he

articulates the novel’s essential paradox: longitude 0 is

both an arbitrarily imposed standard and a defining point

of human activity. It is, in other words, something and

nothing.

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