History As Narrative

Graham Swift (1949—) is an outstanding postmodernist writer in the opinions of critics worldwide. He belongs to the generation of highly talented novelists born around the mid-20th Century, who came to prominence in England in the 1970s and 1980s, and now in their maturity.As a spellbinding storyteller, Swift is both traditional and innovative, for he inherits the legacy of realism, and meanwhile, his handling of the realist legacy is a highly subversive and paradoxical one. Waterland is just a typical example of his idiosyncratic storytelling talent. Waterland was published in 1983 and became an immediate success. It established Swift as a novelist of authority and range, winning him many prizes and a Booker McConnell Prize nomination. Waterland is not only regarded as Swift's great art of storytelling, but also labeled as"historiographical metaphiction"(coined by Linda Hutcheon) with the author's overt discussion of the intrinsically paradoxical nature of history, the multiplicity of reality, but above all the human fiction-making impulse.This thesis, seeking theories of Linda Hutcheon's historiographic metafiction and the Nietzschean belief that life demands deception, analyzes the experimental narrative strategies and the nihilistic feature of reality in Graham Swift's Waterland. In doing so, the thesis argues that history is narrative, a human construct which meets man's need to keep reality under control.The body of this paper consists of tree chapters: the first chapter analyzes some postmodern writing strategies such as nonlinear narrative, the self-contradictory metaphors, the self-conscious constructions of grand narrative, in order to disclose the paradoxical directions of history(both progressive and regressive, circular). Thus, it deconstructs the teleology of Grand history. The second chapter examines the methods such as pastiche of genres, multiple perspectives and voices as well as chaotic tense, which thus dismantle the coherence and unity of grand history. Grand History is historians'interpretation of fractured historical records, a human construct. The first two chapters analyze the experimental narrative strategies in Graham Swift's Waterland, dissolving the totality and teleology of Grand History and testifying that history is no more than a narrative, a human construct. The third chapter focuses on the nihilistic feature of reality, arguing that history writing meets men's need to shelters themselves from nullity of reality. The ultimate truth is empty and meaningless; whereas, human beings crave for meanings and are intrinsically story-telling animals. Therefore men construct history and stories to confront the emptiness of reality.