UNIVERSITATEA VALAHIA TRGOVITE

Facultatea de tiine Umaniste Studii universitare de masterat Domeniu: Limba si literatura romana/Limba si literatura engleza -perspective teoretice si didactice(ZI) Anul II

LITERATURA ENGLEZA - TEME SI DISCURSURI WATERLAND GRAHAM SWIFT

Profesor, Dna. STANESCU ANGELA Propunator, STOICA I. LOREDANA AURELIA

WATERLAND GRAHAM SWIFT

British novelist Graham Swift's Waterland (London, 1983; New York, 1984) is a complex tale set in eastern England's low-lying fens region. It is narrated by Tom Crick, a middle-aged history teacher. Tom is facing a personal crisis, since he is about to be laid off from his job and his wife has been admitted to a mental hospital. He is a man who is keenly interested in ideas about the nature and purpose of history. Faced with a class of bored and rebellious students, he scraps the traditional history curriculum and tells them stories of the fens instead. These stories form the substance of the novel, which takes place mainly in two time frames: the present, and the year 1943, when Tom Crick is fifteen years old. The traumatic events of his adolescence reach forward in time to influence the present. The structure of the novel, which frequently moves back and forth in time, also suggests the fluidity of the interaction between past and present Tom's tale of the fens is sometimes lurid. It includes a family history going back to the eighteenth century and such lurid topics as murder, suicide, abortion, incest, and madness. These events are set against a background of some of the great events in history, such as World War I and World War II. The novel also includes digressions on such off-beat topics as the sex life of the eel, the history of land reclamation, the history of the River Ouse, and the nature of phlegm. At once a philosophical meditation on the meaning of history and a gothic family saga, Waterland is a tightly interwoven novel that entertains as it provokes.

Plot Summary
Waterland begins with the narrator Tom Crick describing his childhood growing up in the low-lying fens area of eastern England. His father is a lock-keeper, and they live in a cottage by the River Leem. One day in July 1943, the drowned body of a local boy, Freddie Parr, floats down the river. The story flashes forward to the present. Tom, having spent thirty-two years as a history teacher, is leaving his job because the school is eliminating the history department. The other reason he is leaving is because of a scandal involving his wife, who apparently has stolen a baby. No more details are given. Crick abandons the history syllabus he is supposed to teach, deciding to tell his class stories of the fens instead. He describes the history of the fens and the persistent efforts over the centuries to drain the land. He also describes his ancestors, going back to Jacob Crick, who operated a windmill in the fens in the eighteenth century. His mother's ancestors were the Atkinsons, originally farmers from Norfolk. 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. 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 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. They are careful to meet at times when

they will not be discovered either by Freddie or Dick. After the death of Freddie, it transpires that Mary is pregnant, and Tom is unsure whether the baby is his or Dick's. The narrative then returns to the distant past, as Tom relates the history of the Atkinson family and how they built their fortune through land-reclamation projects and a brewery business. One of the most significant events occurs in 1820, when Thomas Atkinson strikes his wife Sarah in a fit of unreasonable jealousy. She loses her mind as a result of the attack but lives another fifty-four years to become something of a local legend. The Atkinsons continue to prosper as the leading local family, the height of respectability and power. Arthur Atkinson is elected to Parliament in 1874, the same year that a great flood causes devastation throughout the area. The story line goes back to 1943, and Freddie's death is ruled an accident. Freddie's father, unable to deal with his grief, attempts suicide but fails, thanks to the intervention of his wife. Mary goes into seclusion at her father's house for three years. It appears she never had her baby. Tom joins the army in 1945 and is stationed in Europe. In 1947 he returns home and he and Mary marry. They move to London, where he becomes a history teacher. For several decades they live a comfortable middle-class life. As the story reaches the present, Tom notices that his wife is becoming secretive. She has also become very religious. Then she announces, at the age of fifty-two, that she is going to have a baby. God has told her so. Tom then launches another inquiry into the nature of history ("De la Rvolution"), discussing the French Revolution. He debates the issues with his class, which includes a boy named Price, who questions everything Tom says. After a digression about the attempts of man to divert the course of the River Ouse in the fens, the narrative returns briefly to the present, and then back again to describe the life of Tom's father, a World War I veteran who married the nurse who brought him back to health. In the present day, Tom attempts a debate with Lewis Scott over the usefulness of history as a subject of instruction. They cannot agree on an answer. Tom describes the life of his grandfather, Earnest Richard Atkinson, who perfected a special kind of ale and lived in seclusion after a failed bid to win a parliamentary seat. After another round of present-day disputation with Price, the narrative returns to 1911 and Atkinson's remarkable brew. In the celebrations for the coronation of George V, the whole town seems to become intoxicated. But there is a fire at the New Atkinson Brewery, and it burns to the ground. The narrative returns to 1940 and the exploratory sexual games played by Tom, Mary, and their friends, including Freddie. Dick wins an underwater swimming contest, and there is sexual tension between him and Mary. Freddie puts an eel in Mary's panties, which prompts Tom, as narrator, to devote a chapter to the riddle of the birth and sex life of an eel. In 1943, Tom puts the beer bottle he suspects was used by Dick to strike Freddie in Dick's room. He wants to see what Dick will do. Dick secretly returns the bottle to a mysterious locked chest in the attic. 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. Helen becomes a nurse and wants to marry a wounded soldier, Henry Crick (Tom's father). Earnest Atkinson wants a child by Helen, and she agrees to his request on the condition that she can raise the child as if it is Henry's. The child, Dick, turns out to be mentally retarded. Earnest leaves a letter for Dick, hidden in the chest in

the attic, to be opened on Dick's eighteenth birthday. The letter explains that Earnest is Dick's real father. After leaving the letter, Earnest shoots himself. Back in the present, Tom takes his argumentative pupil Price to a pub for a drink, where they discuss history and teaching.

Themes
The Nature of History Tom Crick is obsessed with exploring the meaning and value of history, but the view he presents is not a comforting one. He rejects the nave notion that we study history in order to learn from our mistakes and improve the present. He prefers instead a cyclical view of history that denies the idea of progress. Each step forward is followed by a step backward; there is no achievement without loss: "It [history] goes in two directions at once. It goes backwards as it goes forwards. It loops. It takes detours." Similarly, every benefit that has ever been granted to human society has been accompanied by a corresponding regression. The invention of the printing press, for example, led not only to the dissemination of knowledge, but also the dissemination of propaganda and strife. All in all, Tom does not know whether the conditions of human life are any better now than they were the year zero. History, in the view of Tom Crick, is an attempt to fight off the nothingness of existence, the essential meaninglessness of life. The idea of "nothing" continually recurs in the novel. 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. The whole of civilization that looks so solid and immutable is in fact only a veil held across the face of nothing, and it easily collapses. But it is no less essential for its insubstantiality. It is essential, as is all of history, because it imposes an intelligible story on bare existence. Whether the story is true or not is less important than the fact that it exists. It is a way of making the emptiness seem full. "As long as there's a story, it's all right," says Tom. It is a way of driving out fear, and this is why all humans have the instincts of storytellers, whether they are professional historians or spinners of fairy tales. Everything Tom says of the global history that forms the background of the novel (the French Revolution, the two world wars, the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War) is true also of personal life, at least in Tom's view. For example, he regards the day-to-day details of his marriage to Mary as mere "stage-props," behind which lies "the empty space of reality." 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 Tom does not abandon the study of history or the search for explanations. The reason he tells his class about the history of the fens is because he desperately needs to come to terms with his own present unhappiness. This has been prompted by the imminent loss of his job and his wife's insanity. In spite of his skepticism about traditional approaches to history, he knows he cannot understand his present situation except by delving into the past. In personal and in societal life, the past always fluidly interacts with the present. It is never buried, even when it appears to be; it lies in wait, ready to cast its pall over the present. This point is conveyed by Tom's 1943 discovery of the beer bottle in the river. His brother Dick threw the bottle away, but it did not vanish. It resurfaced, ready to tell its tale to anyone who would ask the relevant questions. The

river in this example symbolizes the stream of the past and perhaps also the personal unconscious mind. 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. However, the question "Why?" that reverberates throughout the novel can never be finally answered. 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. Tom confesses that his investigation into the history of the fens yielded only "more mysteries, more fantasticalities, more wonders and grounds for astonishment than I started with." He concludes, "history is a yarn." Be that as it may, history cannot be escaped. In the novel, the most dramatic moment that shows the past intersecting with the present comes almost immediately after the grim account of the abortion Mary had as a teenager. After a brief digression comes the sentence, "We take the baby to the car." For a brief moment the reader, having just read of the disposal of an aborted fetus, is unsure what is happening. Then it becomes clear that the narrative has returned to the present, to the baby who fiftytwo-year-old Mary has just snatched from a supermarket, not the baby who was aborted nearly forty years earlier. This incident in itself seems to explain the necessity of history, whether personal or societal, since there is no other way of understanding Mary's bizarre action except in terms of what happened to her as a teenager, since the botched abortion prevented her from ever having children of her own.

Analysis of Chapter Fourteen

The title of the chapter De la Revolution, French for revolution refers to the French Revolution which is linked to the age of enlightenment and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who considers the nature of man and his environment in the eighteenth century. He argues that it is not natural for humans to live in society. Rousseau considered a division between society, which he sees as negative, and human nature. He considers human nature fundamentally good but corrupted by society. He considered humans living in a natural environment, free from the trappings and rules of civilization as independent, self-sufficient and good, in his essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences written in 1750. The text refers to it as Rousseaus cry of back to nature (Swift 1983 p.137). All the major characters in the text are in some way corrupted by civilizations touch. For Rousseau society is artificial, like the land reclamation in the text, and social interdependence, which he considered destructive of humanity, is symbolized by Marys abortion. The power of the Atkinsons and Tom Cricks lack of it is symbolic of the inequalities of society first exposed by Rousseau. This is referenced in chapter fourteen when Crick is telling the reader in the form of a lesson, that So-called forward movements of civilization, whether moral or technological, have invariably brought with them an accompanying regression. Crick explains how printing presses led to propaganda, steam engines to ten year olds working sixteen hours a day in coal mines (Swift 1983 p.136) and airplanes to the destruction of European cities. He refers to the splitting of the atom: And as for the splitting of the atom (The text in this phrase is in its own paragraph, an encapsulation

of the grammatical and punctuation devices used throughout the text. This phrase shows the metafictional nature of the text, self-consciously narrating history as a series of stories; Linda Hutcheon calls it historiographic metafiction. And beginning a sentence is generally considered bad grammar, but it is a device used throughout the text. Deviations from accepted rules of textual structure are typical of postmodern metafiction questioning established norms. Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as: fictional writing that draws attention to itself as an artefact Metafiction self-consciously and regularly draws attention to itself as a book in order to examine the interface and dynamic between fiction and reality. This definition assists in understanding Chapter fourteen. It is written in the form of a lesson, addresses both readers and students in the class, it switches points of view and from addressing the reader to the scene in the class. This exploration of the narrative structure and consideration of the nature of the world outside the text as potentially fictional or misrepresented is typical of metafiction as defined, written in a postmodern style. It helps in understanding that issues are explored in the text by using the metaphor of the book as world (Waugh 1984 p.3) environment or grand narrative and then reshapes it in terms of contemporary thought in fields of philosophy, literature and language. It aids our understanding of the impication implied in postmodern metafiction like Waterland that says people have roles rather than self will and the consequences of others actions are a predominant feature of their lives (Rousseau refers to self will as self-sufficiency). This leads the reader to the logical conclusion that worlds and environments formed entirely from words are legitimate models for the examination of reality as a construct. This is what Waterland does in this chapter and is what Crick is teaching us, and does throughout the text as a whole, in terms of structure, content, style and grammatical devices - especially unexpected uses of grammar and punctuation which draw attention to the metafictional voice of the text. The metaficional lesson of this chapter and the text as a whole concens the negative impact of progress, supported by referring to the French Revolution, demonstrating the nature of history to distort the past, showing it to Modernists at least as a golden age: leading to a natural desire to revert to it. The title of the chapter refers to revolution, which also means circular and recursive, the lesson about history, Crick teaches his readers and pupils, is that a revolution involves going backwards in history to something better that exists, for post modern texts only in stories, no more reliable than the text that is speaking to the reader. The River Ouse is recursive potentially able to spread causing destruction unless contained by humans, like history and progress. The French Revolution is a symbol of attempts by society to retreat back into history and the destructive consequences of that. The theme of the text as a lesson continues in lessons, elsewhere in the text, about eels, land reclamation, the Ouse and silt. The message that the historical metaphor silt, inevitably returns to change the course of progress or the river, causing causes recursion or changes in direction, is constant throughout the text and present in this chapter. It describes history as an Impedimenta an ever-frustrating weight furthermore that it accumulates, because it gets always heavier (Swift 1983 p.136) this is also a description of silt; silt that potato-heads, like Dick, dredge up but becomes harder and harder to bring to the surface as it becomes ever larger and unmanageable, like history. Dick is the metaphorical hapless historian, dredging, the consequences become more violent and drastic the more dredging is done: Dick dies on the dredger. This is how Crick explains the periodic convulsions of history. He refers to it as Natural History that seeks to take humanity back to where we were a reference to

Rousseaus view that humans are happiest living naturally. Crick considers the French revolution in some detail. The chapter, up to this point is delivered in third person limited to the perception of Crick. When the text begins to be more specific and consider the French Revolution the narrative voice becomes first person, as Crick, and is addressing the reader, the narrative is extremely self conscious at this point and addressed directly to the reader as a pupil. These shifts reflect the river, perception and reality as chaotic. At the end of this passage is another long dash which then leads into a first person narrative that utilizes mainly dialogue between Crick, now teaching in the classroom, and Price. Price is questioning the relevance or use of history. This is a metafictional device used by the text to consider post modernist theories of history and the importance of grand narratives. The voice of the chapter and the text is male, history and its relevance is considered from a male perspective, it is implicit from this that history itself is a male construct. The main characters in the French revolution were male. The lone female voice in this chapter is that of Judy Dobson who is described as a perky answerer (she says the voice of the people is the voice of God(p.). A phrase used in the media to describe the opinions of the man on the street, quotes of which are usually edited. This girl in the book is portrayed then as an untrustworthy commentator, symbolic of the distain with which historical grand narratives consider female opinion and experience. Crick considers the meaning of the people by completely ignoring the girls opinion. Crick explains the pliable nature of history and its unreliability. The lesson directed at Price, emphasizes that history is for men. Crick says Pricethe more you try to dissect events, the more you lose hold of them the more they seem to have occurred largely in peoples imagination The theme, that history is male and both men and women suffered because of progress, is underlined by the fate of the female characters in the text: Mary losing a child, becoming infertile and then being committed, her mothers and grandmothers suffering. The text tells us that Dick is the product of a powerful, perverted and controlling man a symbol of the corrupting nature of society. Dicks father is a symbol of the futility of progress as he oversees the decline in his family fortunes and the beginning of the demise of the lock, control of the Fens, the Ouse and Silt, ultimately arriving at Tom Crick, the narrator. The major premise of Post Modern metafiction is skepticism at the representation of history in grand narratives. Enlightenment philosophers, like Rousseau, argued scientific thinking could examine all human activity and question everything religion and authority especially. Prior to The Age of Enlightenment it was forbidden to challenge dogmatic, usually religious, theories. The Age of Enlightenment advanced ideas that reason and logic are able to establish an objective understanding of the universe.

Postmodernist point of view

Modernist writers have a mournful view of history as fragmenting and mourn its passing and do not question the validity of history and progress. Modernist literature considers that there is an overall purpose to human existence and views history and the loss of old values as a critical. The text obliquely criticises this view: History is the record of decline. What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past. Price is mocking of the post modern approach to Crick taught in the lesson, he argues that to want a future does not equate to a yearning for paradise lost:Never said anything about paradise. But I want a future.Price completely

misunderstands Cricks critique of Modernism. Modernists utilize narratives with multiple narrators, for example William Faulkners As I Lay Dying, showing an event from multiple perspectives as subjective and fragmentary and so history as fragmented and presenting this as a loss. Post Modernism celebrates this fragmentation. Crick is an example of it when narration changes from first to third person. Linda Hutcheon explains that Post Modernism is not so much a concept as a problematic: a complex of heterogeneous but interrelated questions which will not be silenced by any spuriously unitary answer (Hutcheon 2002) Jean-Franois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, explains the grand narrative. Stories are the original historical narratives. History once consisted of them leanding credibility to facts recorded, establishing social norms of behavior to protect existing power structures. Grand Narratives refer to the Koran and Bible. In his view these books confer credibility to the opinions and rules expressed. Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives. (Lytotard, 1984) Post Modernism rejects the mourning of a lost past. Chapter fourteen demonstrates that progress is inevitably damaging:Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath, a holocaust, an Armageddon? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing? (Swift 1983 p.141)Post modernism accepts natural chaos and disorder as inevitable symbolized in the text by the bloodbath that is Marys abortion and in this chapter by referring to the Reign of Terror orchestrated by Robespierre. The idea that grand narratives can organize humanity socially is discredited in this text and reality. The collapse of communism in Russia and the secular nature of the United Kingdom are examples of rejection. Changes in China consequent to Maos death and the Polish shipyard strikes were the first signs of these changes that were contemporary to Waterland. The chapter concludes as the narrator, in first person poses a series of questions. Then says the French Revolution resulted in Napoleon, ironically referring to Rousseaus Golden Age. The circularity of history is once again explained by Crick who ends by running straight into the next chapter, like water, into the Ouse, a vast expanse of history that will swallow this story with all the others. This chapter highlights the mythological and potentially fictional nature of the past as a golden age; it questions the reliability of history, as recorded in grand narratives, in the post-modern tradition, utilising the device of metafictional narration. The chapter and text argues and demonstrates that preoccupation with the past can be damaging, and that one can never fully know what the past is because it is a collection of stories surrounding events, like the text. The end of the chapter leads straight into a chapter about the Ouse, emphasising the unending, but all consuming power of an unreliable history to shape the future. This failure to end the chapter occurs in the whole text as there is no final resolution to narrative