Imperial Topographies: The Spaces of history in Waterland

Introduction: Redrawing the Lines What is deconstruction? The paradoxical logic of deconstruction Theology and deconstruction Deconstructing the name Methodology of research Summary of objectives PARTI Babel and the Paradox o f Singularity 1. The ‘Genesis’ of Language Appellation Tree o f knowledge Tower of Babel 2. Translating Babel The broad sense of translation Translation and original Derrida and the paradox of decadence and survival Translation as the survival of the original 3. The Singular Event of the Literary Work Signature: unreadable singularity Postcard: mere readability Biodegradables: survival 4Living on* Sacralisation Don Quixote and Pierre Menard's Signature PART II The Paradox o f Representation 4. Benjamin's Critique of Representation Theological discourse and representation Name as the pure language Benjamin’s coinage of'bourgeois’ and 'mystical’ views De Manian deconstructive criticism of Benjamin and representation Rabbinic readings of Benjamin and representation Derrida and the paradox o f representation in Benjamin 5. Derrida and Representation in Literary Language Saussure and the nature o f linguistic sign Benveniste and the nature of linguistic sign Derrida’s reading of Saussure Deconstruction and the sign Deconstruction and speech/writing Deconstruction and signification The process of signification in The Crying of Lot 49 PART III The Paradox o f Apophatic Discourse 6. Apophasis in Theological Discourse Benjamin’s notion of negation and nonexpression Paradox of negation in theological discourse The aporias of transcendence God as 'referent’ Transcendental experience The affirmative force of language in theological discourse 7. Derrida and Apophatic Discourse Derrida’s critique of negative theology Derridean paradoxes of negation The impossible’ Deconstruction and theology as 'promise ’ Negative theology as (a discourse on) 'language’ 8. Apophasis in Literary Discourse The Unnamable: The story of that impossible place named silence Aporias and paradoxes o f the Unnamable Self and language as counterparts The impossible space named silence Conclusion Conclusion: Limits of language Deconstruction, metaphysics and theological discourse Deconstruction of metaphysical language Deconstruction of language: Part I Deconstruction of language' Part II Deconstruction of language: Part III

Deconstructing the name : three theological paradoxes of language in literary discourse

Graham Swift’s Waterland has recently been discussed as an example of a postmodern text in which the narrative structure calls into question the notions of history, the past, storytelling, and their impact on the present. The complexity of the stories of the past and how they explain the narrator’s present is explicitly addressed in Tom Crick’s autobiographical narrative. Crick’s explicit construction of history mirrors Swift’s implicit construction of the novel: the stories Crick tells revolve and overlap—defying the traditional linear construction of stories employed to “keep reality under control” ( Janik 83). While simultaneously emphasizing the need to tell stories to shape our responses to history and consequently maintain reality, Swift also questions stories’ ability to represent the past. Crick’s “return” to “previous representations,” that is, the stories of his past, suggests the revolving, rather than linear, nature of storytelling. As such, Waterland is a parody of a Victorian autobiography, and an example of an historiographic metafiction that openly problemetizes the traditional construction of stories (Landow 204; Hutcheon 47). Swift’s narrative seemingly balances the necessity of telling stories to control reality against the inability of stories to

Mary Metcalf s Attempt at Reclamation: Maternal Representation in Graham Swift s Waterland

“Your history teacher wishes to give you the complete and final version,” the narrator of Graham Swift’s Waterland, Tom Crick, tells his high school students (7–8). Crick refers to his personal and family history, his account of which constitutes the novel. Crick’s avowed aim echoes auricular confession, which requires the complete recounting of a penitent’s sins before he or she receives absolution. Like a religious confessant, Crick seeks absolution for past sins: he feels guilty about the abortion of his would-be son, the death of his childhood friend Freddie Parr, and the suicide of his brother. Indeed, Crick reveals his guilt over these deaths to the police: “I confess my responsibility, jointly with my wife, for the death of three people” (314).1 However, because he speaks to his students, to the police, and (implicitly) to the reader rather than to a father confessor with the purpose and authority to offer him absolution, Crick’s secular self-examination and self-narration threaten to be endless. In a desperate and improvisational response to that problem, Crick universalizes his condition over the course of his narrative to assuage his feelings of guilt and bring his secular confession to a close. Crick’s narrative should be read in the context of—and as a response to the problems posed by—the secularization of confession. As I use the term here, “secularization” stands not for an inevitable decline of religious affiliation due to modernization (a once-prominent thesis that has undergone revision in sociology), but for an interminable histori-

"Eternal, Slithery Penance": Graham Swift's Waterland and the Secularization of Confession

Aside from being Graham Swift’s most famous piece of writing and probably one of the most praised British novels of the 1980s, Waterland is considered by many critics to be the embodiment of the postmodernist novel. Linda Hutcheon used it as an example to illustrate what she defined as “historical metafiction” and when one thinks of Waterland it is usually in connection with history and the role it plays in the life of ordinary people. It is interesting how, at first glance, the particular kind of history Graham Swift is addressing in this novel seems to escape both reader and critic. On further investigation, however, what does not escape is the underlying presence of Empire in the novel, which is the reason why this paper examines its versatile role in Tom Crick’s version of history.

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Faces of Empire in Graham Swift’s Waterland

of history ends more than once, or rather is always already ended. It first ends with the French Revolution which, as Tom Crick informs his pupils, in rejecting the past and tradition thereby rejected history itself. Tom, then, is already relating the end of history when, in a chapter entitled "About the End of History," he suddenly departs from the grand and objective narrative of the Revolution to narrate the small and subjective narratives of his own life. In short, the 1789 end of history does itself come to an end. Indeed, no sooner has Tom's own posthistorical narrative begun than it in turn is interrupted by the pupil Price who declares that '"the only important thing about history ... is that it's . . . probably about to end"'(6). As Tom himself remarks, Price has contrived to "disrupt disruption" (51), to end the end of the end of history. The significance of all this, needless to say, is that it brings into question the very idea of the end of history. And it is, of course, a confessedly ironic formulation; Baudrillard, for instance, even when using

John Schad

Papers

The End of the End of History: Graham Swift's Waterland