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Waterland charts the history of an individual, or more accurately it charts the history of the individual through particular events and examines how they played a part in shaping who he was to become and the later events of his life. Though, Swift blurs the distinctions relating to the genre making it difficult to relate the novel to a particular genre. The post-modern tradition of blurring narratives and techniques and crossing the lines between genres is clearly present in Waterland.
Throughout the novel, we have to assume that all of what Crick says is true, that it is not embellished, that it has not been mistakenly forgotten with the passing of time. But the novel Waterland tries to not teach us the facts of the protagonists life but to teach us the purpose of history, at least to the novel's main characters. This is one of the key points to consider when studying the novel what it tries to teach the reader, for the novel tries to teach something to the reader. This can be manifestly seen in Waterland by the use of the pedagogical tone, and the recurrent use of the word'children' to start paragraphs and threads of thought.
The novel is very much a post-modern venture; the disjointed narrative of Waterland has its roots in post-modernism and its concerns with history are essentially post-modern. Although Swift appears to take cues from modernist texts and modernist writers, in particular from Ulysses and from not simply James Joyce but also Virginia Woolf. Stream-of-Consciousness writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf meant to smash the narrative and submerge fiction in lyricism. Swift is also overwhelmingly lyrical, but in a totally different manner. He returns to the pleasure of the well-told story and enjoys the narrative. The account of it is meant to baffle and instigate the reader to active rereading.
The narrative uses two major tricks. One of them is the already familiar alternating of past and present, memory and the birth of experience, the moment that flits by even while we read. The second trick is the use of "I" and "he" for points of reference in the narrative. The book becomes a game which hurls together broken chronology and the point of view, a disabused attempt at being new, yet giving the impression the author does not care. The truth is he does care a lot but the right manner is hard to find.
In Waterland, Swift has created a narrative fabric in which it was possible to insert what is almost an essay on the natural history of the eel, but the chapter on the eel has its relevance and purpose within the whole. The tendency in Waterland has been away from this sort of authorial mixing of styles towards a tone that's governed by its characters.
Swift does not feel at home with straight, sequential narrative. This partly because moving around in time, having interruptions and delays, is more exciting and has more dramatic potential, but also it is more truthful to the way our minds actually deal with time. Memory does not work in sequence, it can leap to and fro and there's no predicting what it might suddenly seize on. It does not have a chronological plan. Nor does life, otherwise the most recent events would always be the most important.
The amalgamation of genres mixes here with the Joycean monologue. Joyce's seminal novel Ulysses charts the epic narrative of one day in the life of a single man, there history has no beginning or end, but history makes the man. History essentially makes a man who he is by offering him a sense of identity and experiences to relate and learn from. In Waterland, Dick is the character who has no perception of past or present, he has no sense of history and consequently he is the most simple and one-sided character, until of course he discovers the importance of history. Waterland is more concerned with the history of events, with facts, and with the history of circumstance.
History in Waterland covers both the history of a family and of a particular place and more'official' and popular history, which Crick is employed to teach. By comparing the two in terms of events, the personal history is over-shadowed by the larger world history of wars and revolutions. So, dwelling on the idea of personal history in the novel could be an attempt to emphasize the insignificance of the individual in comparison to world events, or which is more likely to emphasize the importance of the individual. Because when we compare the two in terms of significance to the individual and not to society personal history has the opportunity to over-shadow the other more wide reaching discipline. One of the many points Swift tries to call attention to in Waterland is that history gets its importance through its shaping of the individual.
The importance of history in explaining and understanding change in human behaviour is no mere abstraction. History is indispensable to understanding why changes occur. History, then, provides the only extensive materials available to study the human condition. It also focuses attention on the complex processes of social change, including the factors that are causing change around us today. Here, at base, are the two related reasons many people become enthralled with the examination of the past and why our society requires and encourages the study of history as a major subject.
These two fundamental reasons for studying history underlie more specific and quite diverse uses of history in our own lives. History well told is beautiful. Many of the historians who most appeal to the general reading public know the importance of dramatic and skilful writing as well as of accuracy. Biography and military history appeal in part because of the tales they contain. History as art and entertainment serves a real purpose, on aesthetic grounds but also on the level of human understanding. Stories well done are stories that reveal how people and societies have actually functioned, and they prompt thoughts about the human experience in other times and places. The same aesthetic and humanistic goals inspire people to immerse themselves in efforts to reconstruct quite remote pasts, far removed from immediate, present-day utility. Exploring what historians sometimes call the pastness of the past the ways people in distant ages constructed their lives involves a sense of beauty and excitement, and ultimately another perspective on human life and society.
History, or story telling, is done to bring order to chaos. In the case of Crick to his own life, although now he can't change the past and the relationship with his wife is effectively over, he examines the key events in his life at the Fens and more recently in an attempt to understand why his wife did what she did. So Crick does not make an attempt to learn from past mistakes but more or less seems to just make an attempt to learn what the past mistakes were and how they shaped his life. Crick looks at his own personal history and that of those around him, during his life in the Fens, in order to determine how history has shaped him. Story telling is also used to comfort threat of nuclear war although this specific threat is only present in the novel's time, the theme of Crick using history to comfort his students indicates something more about the nature of history in the wider perspective.
Crick assesses his personal history in order to understand himself the Shakespearian ideal of literature we study Shakespeare in order to understand ourselves because of the depth and breadth of human experience and understanding present in his works. Though personal history presents only a shallow human understanding all that can be done with your won personal history is to reassess it. So looking at your own personal history is essentially cyclical, it involves only learning from your won past in order to understand your present circumstances. "But all the stories were once real." Crick says, as if to suggest that eventually history becomes myth as nobody can tell what really happened after innumerable retellings of the same stories.
It seems more important to Crick to discover, by means of writing, who he was, than to address posterity. The writer in search for himself. The novel as a constant question mark. The reader pushed between the lines. An insecure text, using memory as its fragile foundation. Memory-land can be reclaimed, but the hurricane of literature can break it any time, by a mere brush, the horrifying, "You are not the first." He has found a track and steers his whole being to follow it. Crick attempts to fit his own life into a wider perspective; however, by focusing so strongly on the consequences and repercussions of personal history and how it affects the individual and those around them a great importance is lent to personal histories, which at least attempts to overshadow world history. This could be said to relate to the'here and now' of existence/being over grand narratives of becoming.
The novel has no minor heroes, they are all minds in progress, brought to the front. the novel is a merry-go-round meant to shock the reader into remembrance of things past. Yet history is made present. It chooses informal narration and join hands with all readers. So, Waterland offers the confusion of characters who are nonetheless trying to steer some kind of sustainable and hopeful course through their confusion. That course is story-telling. Good story-telling can, without denying or misrepresenting the actual confusion of life, redeem it. Strange heroes undergo half-revealed experiences and all along they wonder whether life is worth living. A life that "was set out like a map." No excitement. No promise. No future. This is, indeed, Graham Swift's major feat his novels abolish the future.
The idea of history repeating itself is possibly human nature with reference to the fear of nuclear war Swift suggests that now humans have progressed to the point of progression to the point that the possibility of progress has been eliminated, which is fundamentally a post-modern concern. There is the suggestion that it is human nature to be interested in the past because of the effect it has on us. Because animals act instinctively they have no need for the past and have no concept of time passing. Although Dick originally acts purely on instinct he becomes more humanised as time passes with the advent of his ability to plan and scheme to murder Freddie Parr, and when he eventually comes to realise that the past is important he kills himself.
One of the main themes of the novel and one of the points Swift tries to communicate to us is the idea that history repeats itself. The French Revolution was a return to nature as Rousseau proposed. So in the classroom Crick teaches that history will repeat itself on a grand scale, via the French Revolution, Napoleon then Hitler invading Russia, and on countless other occasions. But when he begins to teach informally and teaches the class of his personal history and the history of the Fens he teaches that history can repeat itself in smaller circumstances from large events such as the French Revolution to the small uprising in the classroom. "The dead are dead aren't they? The past is done with, isn't it?" Crick asks these rhetorical questions not to receive an answer from his class but to make them think about the nature of history and the nature of progression, which is paradoxically his real job.
The book ends with Dick's flight, with everybody's flight, in fact. Mary leaves sanity, Tom Crick leaves his classes of history, we leave the text. This book of pinching, interruptions and delays may well be a progress in the art of novel writing, but it sure is not a bright place to linger in. Our imagination, held captive while the suspense lasted, steps out of both story and history, and bolts away. Finally, Waterland declares "My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land."
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