Baskadia

As a follow-up to reading Graham Swift's 1996 novel Last Orders, I recently read Swift's 1983 novel Waterland. The two novels are markedly different in style and substance, but I found them equally excellent.

Waterland is set in the flat, featureless, silt-filled, water-logged, eel-haunted area of reclaimed land in eastern England known as the Fens. The narrator is a middle-aged high school history teacher who is facing forced retirement because the school wants to get rid of him and get rid of history. The narration consists of the teacher talking to his students -- sometimes in person, sometimes in his mind -- about the study of history and about the history of the Fens, his ancestors, his family, and himself. In addition to serving as the setting, the Fens serve as a metaphor for our unceasing struggle to reclaim ourselves to consciousness and to prevent ourselves from sinking into the sea of oblivion and nothingness. Paradoxically it is the Fens that, with their monotony and their nothingness, constitute the most vividly drawn character in the novel.

The overarching question asked by the narrator is why do some people have such a need to study history and to tell, and be told, stories. (A corollary question, which has always mystified me, is why do some people have no urge to study history.):

"Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens. How many of the events of history have occurred, ask yourselves, for this or for that reason, but for no other reason, fundamentally, than the desire to make things happen? I present to you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama. History, and its near relative, Histrionics. ... But it doesn't stop there. Because each one of th[e] numberless non-participants was doubtless concerned with raising in the flatness of his own unsung existence his own personal stage, his own props and scenery -- for there are very few of us who can be, for any length of time, merely realistic. So there's no escaping it: even if we miss the grand repertoire of history, we yet imitate it in miniature and endorse, in miniature, its longing for pretense, for feature, for purpose, for content."

A related question is how can we know anything about history:

'[H]istory is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge. ... I taught you that by forever attempting to explain we may come, not to an Explanation, but to a knowledge of the limits of our power to explain."

That question was always echoing in my head when I was studying history in college and contemplating a career as an historian. How can we understand history when we know so little of what actually happened in the past, and when those in the past knew so little of what was happening in their present? That's one of the several reasons I didn't become an historian. And the rest is history!!

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