Abstract
For Tom Crick, the narrator of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), history’s referent does not exist. ‘Reality is that nothing happens’ (40). Yet histories, stories and ‘making things happen’ proliferate, circulate and entwine in fecund excess in the novel, indicative of a desire for history that persists, even flourishes, despite its absence. This desire ensures that, paradoxically, the very void of history generates its surfeit. History always exceeds the attempts to represent it, so both histories and desire for histories are produced and reproduced excessively. Faced with the excision of his discipline from the school’s curriculum, history-teacher Tom abandons lesson plans and embarks upon a narrative that, in its meandering course through a range of historical moments, including many from Tom’s own childhood, in an order (or anti-order) determined by his own effort of recall, subsumes history into memory.
What every world-builder, what every revolutionary wants a monopoly in: Reality. Reality made plain. Reality with no nonsense. Reality cut down to size. Reality minus a few heads — I present to you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama. History, and its near relative, Historionics …
(Graham Swift, Waterland)
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© 2010 Kate Mitchell
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Mitchell, K. (2010). A Fertile Excess: Waterland, Desire and the Historical Sublime. In: History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283121_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283121_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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