RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Graham Swift's Waterland: The Pessimistic End of History, or the Optimistic Reclamation of (Hi)story/-ies
A1 Aguilar Osuna, Juan Jesús
AB Waterland is one of the best representatives of the postmodern ideaof history. It displays a concern for the end of history understood in traditionalterms, and presents an alternative based on a mixture of official,personal, and natural (hi)story/-ies and even fairy-tales. The making ofhistory and the construction of the self (exemplified by Tom Crick) areequated with the process of land reclamation in the East Anglian Fens,and, therefore, displayed as labours with only temporary validity. Thisloss of fixed mainstays that can support master-histories and solid selves—which would create illusions of static pasts— is understood as pessimisticby those who do not partake of the postmodern fundamentals.However, Swift’s message in Waterland is optimistic, for he understandsthis temporariness of man’s reconstructions of the/his past as liberating.He insists in the necessity of avoiding oppressive closures that make usprisoners of an overly rigid past. Thus, man’s reclamation of (hi)story/-ies and of the/his past are displayed as unfulfilled fulfilments which allowus to go on feeding on a liberating curiosity that helps us to makeconstant “improvisations upon reality”. In Waterland, only those characterswho abandon curiosity, Mary (Tom’s wife) and Dick (his brother),are flawed, for they have not learnt “a way of giving reality the slip”.
SN e-2530-8335
YR 1999
FD 1999
LK http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/30487
UL http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/30487
LA en
DS Repositorio institucional de la Universidad de La Laguna
RD 26-jun-2024