Waterland

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This personal narrative is set in the context of a wider history, of the narrator's family, the Fens in general, and the eel. The telling shifts this way and that in time. The telling is fragmentary and nonlinear. This is a technique that usually does not appeal to me, but it works here!

Waterland is a 1983 novel by Graham Swift, set in the Fenland of eastern England. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Graham Swift kulağımıza yer yer güçlü çığlıklar haline bürünen çok özel bir hikaye fısıldıyor Su Diyarı kitabıyla. Tarihe geçmeden mekâna bir uğrayalım zira öğretmenimiz tarihçi olduğu kadar yetkin bir coğrafya bilgisine de sahip. Su diyarı namlı Fens, İngiltere’nin kuzey doğusunda insan emeği ile yaratılmış bir bölge, yüzlerce yıla yayılan bir süreç ve çaba sonucunda su diyarının göbeğine bir toprak diyarı inşa ediliyor. Anlatıcımız buranı yerlisi su diyarı insanları ile bölgeye toprağı taşıyan toprak insanlarının soyundan geliyor. Bu iki diyar iki farklı insan türünü de ortaya çıkarıyor. Su insanları doğaları ile barışık ve doğanın sunduğu nimetlerle –yılanbalıkları nereden geliyor- yaşarken toprak insanları sürekli bir gelişim, çatışma ve doğayı hizaya sokmanın tüm ard anlamları ve olumsuzluklarını bağrında taşıyorlar. Bu iki dünyanın çatışması metni ekolojist bir yoruma da açık kılıyor olsa da yazar bunu ve çatışmanın gerilimini büyük sözler sarf etmeden metnin son sahnesine kadar taşıyor ve nihayetinde topraktan gelen soy –dünyanın kurtarıcısı- karanlık sularda nihayete eriyor ya da kitaba sadık kalarak söylemek gerekirse doğanın tarihi büyük anlatının tarihine baskın geliyor.

Waterland - Key takeaways

It has a strong and veritable bearing on today, this history, the past, that incident; incidents. It shapes, shakes, cautions, humiliates, and intimidates – this history. Graham Swift's novels deal with the extraordinary in the ordinary. In their settings, language and characterisations Swift's novels are sparse and consciously drab. His protagonists are often ordinary men, middle-aged clerks or teachers or accountants. In their voices Swift ponders some of the bigger issues of life - death, birth, marriage and sex - as well as the everyday politics of relationships and friendships. His intricate narrative patterns raise questions about the relationship between personal histories and world events, between personal and public perceptions. He highlights the impossibility of creating a single objective reality, fictional or otherwise, and through fiction investigates the very nature of fiction.

Read the full text of John Burnside’s lecture ‘“Soliloquies of suffering and consolation”: Fiction as elegy and refusal’, published in the Journal of British Academy in December 2017.As critics and reviewers have pointed out there are similarities with Great Expectations and Absalom, Absalom: post-modern retellings which question narrative itself. Of course the material of the stories refuses to be shaped by them. There’s a great deal of water (this is the Fens!) and lots of water related motifs and symbols. It also fairly deftly jumps between the quaint and the macabre. This is an amalgam of lots of ideas which actually works rather well. And don’t forget the eels! Graham Swift has also released both short story and essay collections. His two short story collections are Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982) and England and Other Stories (2014). England was particularly noted by critics for its multicultural discussions of English identity. History and Memory: The novel reflects on the power of storytelling and memory in constructing personal and collective histories. Tom's reflections on his family's past and the history of the Fens demonstrate the role of storytelling in shaping our understanding of the world around us. The film was one of the first two co-productions by Fine Line Features, a subsidiary of New Line Cinema. [3]

Tom has reached a crisis aged 52. It looks as though he is about to be made redundant as his history post is being replaced by General Studies. His wife of thirty years has snatched a baby. He resorts to teaching history to his class by teaching them his own history: Hollinghurst, Alan, "Of Time and the River," in Times Literary Supplement, October 7, 1983, p. 1073. Tomorrow (2007) once again adopted a South London setting and an intense interior monologue to unravel a saga of family secrets at the moments before their imminent revelation. This time, the internal voice was that of 49-year old Paula, speaking as if to the teenage children asleep in the next room. With her husband asleep by her side, the novel relied on the tension of what the coming ‘tomorrow’ of the title would bring for the family. How would family secrets be revealed and how would the secrets be disclosed?

Preferences

There is an excitement, a sense of tension that builds in the novel. You want to know more and more and more. A sentence is started and then left hanging. You know exactly what was to be said but is then not said. This writing style is unusual; I have not run into it before. It’s good, very good. It draws your attention, keeps you alert and adds suspense. There is an underlying satirical tone that has you questioning what is implied. The prose is thought provoking. The students in Tom’s school have grown increasingly scientifically oriented, and the headmaster, Lewis Scott, himself a physicist, has little sympathy for Tom’s subject, a fact that he in no way masks. One of Tom’s students, Price, an intelligent sixteen-year-old whose father is a mechanic, presses Tom with questions about the relevance of learning about such historical events as the French Revolution. The youth’s skepticism causes Tom to change his teaching approach from one of presenting historical facts to one that involves his telling tales drawn from his own recollection. By doing so, he makes himself a part of the history he is teaching, relating his tales to local history and genealogy.

Tom is away fighting in World War II. Finally the two fathers agree to bring their children together again; unknown to them, Tom has already written to Mary. When he comes home, the two marry, and Tom begins his teaching career, while Mary takes a position in an old persons’ home. They live thus for more than thirty years; then Mary gives up her job and becomes actively involved in the church. Finally, she steals a baby because “God tells her to.” She explains the new arrival to Tom by saying that it is a gift from God. Obviously demented and obviously suffering from a pain that has been festering since her teenage abortion, Mary is arrested. Tom, as recounted above, is forced into an early retirement as a result of this disgrace. It's partly to do with how clever it is and the skilful way Swift uses the past to explain the present and create a feeling of inexorable flow towards the book's climactic events: incest in the 1910s, leading to a murder in the 1940s, to a kidnapping in the 1980s. Loss is very prevalent in Waterland. Many of the central characters lose very significant things throughout Swift's novel. The impact of loss is also shown. Büyük anlatı demişken; anlatıcımız Fransız devrimi uzmanı ancak bu ve diğer bütün büyük anlatılar haliyle bir dünya imkanı varken işe yarayan bilgiler ve kendi dünyasının çöküşü, öğrencilerinin dünyanın genel çöküşünü – rüyaya dair bölümü, nükleer felaket beklentili 80’ler- beklediği momentle çakışınca ve dahi tarih kesintiye uğramışken başka bir anlatını kapısı açılıyor. Tarihsel ilerlemenin bir adım ileri iki adım geri formunun benzeri bir biçimde anlatı, kişisel olanın sınırlarının tarihsel olanın sınırıyla bulanık bir halde ileri geri savruluşuna hikaye dinleyicisi olarak tanık okur olarak eşlik ediyoruz sayfalar boyunca. Anlatını merkezinde bir hikaye, üç ceset ve bir tarih var: 1943. Adorno az sonra şiirin sonunu ilan edecek, Hitler sonu ya zafer ya hüsran olacak adımlar atacak ama biz dünyanın sonuna kadar biraz daha hikaye dinleyeceğiz ama hiçbir hikaye bize sonuna kadar burada ne oluyor, ne olmuştu, ne oldunun cevabını vermeyecek. Tarihi biraz biliyorsak, bütün anlatıların öznel olduğunu da biliyoruzdur ve biraz Faulkner biliyorsak geçmişin asla geçmediğini, geçmişin geçmiş bile olmadığını biliyoruz.Abortion is illegal in Britain, and illegal abortions are performed by untrained people. Many women are seriously injured and about thirty die each year. Janik, Del Ivan, "History and the 'Here and Now': The Novels of Graham Swift," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 1989, pp. 74-88. Janik discusses the relationship between history and the present in Swift's first three novels. Mainly, however, it was the descriptions of the Fens: "a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing". A vast empty place inhabited by willow-the-wisps, potato-heads and a people filled with "phlegm", "mucus" and "slime" by the dank air. In his 2017 lecture to the British Academy, John Burnside discussed an important strand of British fiction over the last thirty years – exemplified by work by Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe and Michael Bracewell – in which the growth of ‘cultural totalitarianism’ has engendered a profound grief for the consequent loss of communal and ritual life, as well as for the land itself which has been ‘savagely degraded’ over the same period. In this extract, he talks about the 1983 novel Waterland by Graham Swift.