The Representation of Traumatic Past in Graham Swift's Waterland

Waterland, the novel published in 1983, establishes Swift's reputation in literary world. Critics who follow in the footsteps of Linda Hutcheon's earliest response to Waterland treat Swift's text as an example of what she calls "historiographic metafiction". However, Swift's emphasis on the differences between "artificial history" VS "natural history" and "history" VS "here and now" reveals his meditation on the problems of history as narrative, the narration of traumatic history in particular. In Waterland, Swift explores and exhorts the suitable ways of writing and documenting the traumatic past through rejecting the conventional forms of narrative, which with its teleological story is close to myth. Moreover, some features in narrative language can also be interpreted as symptom of traumatic dissociation on the part of the narrator.