Chapter taken from Daniel Lea, Graham Swift, (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2005), 1-15.

1. INTRODUCTION: LOST IN TRANSMISSION

If one heads east out of London following the A2 that

runs parallel to the Thames estuary, it is possible to

journey as far as Canterbury with only incidental

deviations from a straight line. A left turn onto the A28

at the seat of Anglicanism and another straight road

takes one to the seaside resort of Margate. Such an

uncomplicated cleaving of Kent illustrates the historical

legacy of invasion and pilgrimage that imbricates the

landscape within a tradition of social and political

change. The straight lines that took the faithful to

Canterbury and the Roman army to London symbolise a

purposeful directness that privileges the point of

arrival over the act of travel. For four men in a

borrowed Mercedes, the prospect of arrival in Margate

proves distressingly unpalatable seeing as journey’s end

demands the scattering into the sea of the ashes of one

known intimately to all of them. The principal

protagonists of Graham Swift’s 1996 Booker Prize-winning

novel, Last Orders, postpone the moment of closure by

abjuring the straight line of history, opting instead for

a Medway meander through Rochester, Chatham and

Canterbury before arriving at their destination in the

1

falling dusk. Their dilatory peregrination matches the

spiralling indirectness of their memories as each recalls

their private dealings with the deceased and summarises

their own lives in the face of this unsettling memento

mori. Suspending the moment of arrival represents an

unwillingness to relinquish a past of shared experience

and suggests a hankering for the stabilities of the known

that can mitigate the awful moment of loneliness that

comes with self-knowledge. On the end of Margate Pier as

each dips into the urn and throws Jack Dodds to the

winds, there is a creeping acknowledgement that only in

directly facing the realities of lives half-lived and

decisions wrongly made can they accept the commonality of

loss and achieve a genuine empathetic understanding of

each other.

None of the characters in Swift’s seven novels and

single collection of short stories do anything in

straight lines. The ambulatory progress to Margate

perfectly metaphorises the circumlocutory narratives of

self-revelation that characterise his style of elegiac

fiction and locates obliquity, displacement and nescience

as fundamental to the coping strategies of his

protagonists. Swift’s work enshrines a desire not to know

as a primitive urge, a deliberate turning away from the

alien and the uncanny as a defensive recourse thereby

distancing the unpleasant realities of life from the

daily task of living. And yet though his narratives are

filled with unreliable and disingenuous accounts that

2

seek to distract the reader’s attention from the tender

pressure points of psychic rupture, these feints are

invariably temporary diversions and the sites of trauma

are reached as inexorably as the destination of Last Orders’

mournful enterprise. The metaphor of the journey is

apposite for Swift’s writing, for although complicated

emplotment and narratorial reticence lead the reader away

from the focalising purpose of the narrative, journey’s

end always lays bare the pathology of distress by an

overt engagement with the instigating wound. The layers

of self-protective insulation that deflect cognisance are

crucial to the ultimate revelation however, for it is

only through the gradual shedding of inhibiting guilt and

sorrow that Swift can foreground the act of psychological

self-immurement.

Swift’s fiction can be relatively easily summarised:

it customarily involves monologic narration either by a

single figure or by a group whose voices compete with

each other; his narrators are principally men of late-

middle-age who reflect upon their lives as a series of

compromises, and who rue their failure to have been more

than they were; they are men that are commonly

ineffective in interpersonal relationships and exhibit

none of the stereotypical characteristics of manly being.

They are also frequently in conflict with other members

of their immediate families and struggle to negotiate

cross-generational relationships with parents and

children. Location is crucial to Swift’s work and tends

3

to focus around specific areas of south London, or other

communities where identification is closely connected to

a social interdependence. His over-riding theme is

history and the inadequate means we have of understanding

the past and our place in the historical process. But

such bland oversimplifications of the work of one of the

most consistently profound novelists of his generation

will assist only those looking to this volume for a

potted summation. Though his work focuses around

recurrent tropes and ideas, his meticulous attention to

the nuances and textures of his material resembles the

musical recitative that builds and extemporises on an

underlying theme, always exploring fresh cadences for a

new interpretational sensibility. This variation through

consistency has worked both for and against his

reputation, for whilst he has accrued significant

critical praise for the intellectual and technical

sophistication of his writing, the academic community

appears as yet unconvinced that his work is sufficiently

expansive in theme and tone to rank him alongside some of

his more celebrated contemporaries. Until relatively

recently his critical reputation, at least in terms of

academic attention through books and articles, could best

be described as modest. Despite building up a formidable

canon of work he was the subject (until 2003) of no

critical monograph in his native tongue, and, although

Waterland has been a focus of ongoing attention in

contemporary literature journals, his other fiction has

4

been seriously neglected.1 Unlike the more media-conscious

scions of literary celebrity, Swift’s furrow has been

ploughed largely away from the limelight and apart from

two flirtations with scandal he has largely remained on

the margins of public consciousness.2 To say as much

should not be to disregard his impact on British fiction

since the early-1980s but perhaps to suggest that his

critical reception and the quality of his body of work

are incommensurate, an imbalance that demands redress.

There are a number of reasons why this excentricity

may have come about. Certainly Swift’s rate of production

is an issue, keeping him from the public spotlight for

long periods.3 The seven-year gap between Last Orders and The

Light of Day is the longest to-date and whilst that should

not negatively prejudice academic readers (whose

productivity is hardly quick-fire), such pedestrianism 1 An interesting distinction to make is between Swift’s profile in the English and non-English-speaking world. Like his forebear John Fowles and his contemporaries Julian Barnes and Jim Crace, Swift has received far greater critical attention in mainland Europe (particularly in France) where his work is regarded as considerably more experimental (both formally and intellectually) than in the UK. Though the first English-language monograph (David Malcolm, Understanding Graham Swift, [Columbia SC: University of South Caroline Press, 2003]) wasn’t published until 2003 (and in the United States at that), it was preceded by Catherine Bernard, Graham Swift: La Parole Chronique: Nouveaux Échos de la Fiction Britannique, (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1991).2 In 1997 his novel Last Orders was accused by critic John Frow of plagiarising William Faulkner’s As I LayDying and in 2002 he chose to remove his back catalogue from his long-time publisher, Picador, and action it off, much to the opprobrium of the publishing establishment. The small-scale scandal of these incidents can be followed in Catherine Bennett, ‘Last Orders, Please: Same Again Sir?’, Guardian, 12 March 1997, 15; Chris Blackhurst, ‘A Swift Rewrite, Or A Tribute’, Independent, 9 March, 1997, 5 and Robert McCrum, ‘The Literary Lottery’, Observer (Review Section), 17 March 2002, 1-2.

5

perhaps leads to the occasional oversight. The subject-

matter of his fiction also possibly deflects attention:

his contemplations of the smallness of ordinary lives and

the ethical compromises each of us makes across time to

sustain ourselves and others is tonally distinct from the

pyrotechnic ostentation of some of his contemporaries. In

contrast to the formal subversiveness of Jeanette

Winterson, the self-conscious allusiveness of A. S. Byatt

and Ian McEwan or the ludic ironies of Martin Amis

(authors with whom he is customarily grouped), Swift’s

brand of intense attention to the detail of daily living

and his nostalgic yearning for lost certainties appears

old-fashioned and overly scrupulous. And yet surely the

root of his peripherality lies in the redundant

indiscriminacy of this comparison. Swift should not be

casually appropriated for a school of contemporary

British fiction that seems to have become indivisible

from an underdetermined postmodernism, for his work

speaks not only from different traditions but

consistently questions the parameters of contemporary

being from a broader historicizing position than

postmodernism’s ‘nowness’ will allow. The lazy

identification of any radicalised, transgressive or self-

conscious cultural production with a postmodern episteme

ironically attends the democratisation of the terms of

the postmodern debate across culture at large, but this

inclusive self-reflexivity actually does a disservice to

the ideational integrity of the debate by eliding

6

difference. How one can judge postmodernism from within

has, of course, always been a paradox that critics such

as Jürgen Habermas and Fredric Jameson have noted, but

its rapacious cultural egalitarianism threatens to render

postmodernism a fundamentally closed symbolic system,

endlessly recycling its own products in a self-affirming

modality.4

Swift’s writing does not comfortably fit into the

model of postmodern literary production that became

dominant during the 1980s and early-1990s, even though

much of his work reflects the interests in narrative

framing, unreliable storytelling and temporal

dislocations that are associated with what Linda Hutcheon

terms ‘historiographic metafiction’.5 True, Swift’s most

formally sophisticated works (Waterland and Ever After)

conform to a version of self-conscious interiority that

positions them alongside monuments of British

postmodernism writing such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s

Children (1981) and Byatt’s Possession (1990), and true, his

interest in history as a complex multivocal palimpsest

3 Though seven novels and a collection of short stories in twenty-five years may not seem unduly sluggish, Swift’s early productivity slightly skews the mathematics. Material for The Sweet Shop Owner, Shuttlecock and Learning to Swim was apparently collated in the period before the publication of the first novel and subsequently published on the back on The Sweet Shop Owner’s favourable reception. Swift comments on the rate of his production in John O’Mahony, ‘Triumph of the Common Man’, Guardian (Review section), 1 March 2003, 20-23.4 See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987) and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism, (London: Verso, 1991).5 See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, (New York and London: Routledge, 1988).

7

resonates with New Historicism’s attention on the

political act of telling, but Swift’s writing always

elicits a narrative surplus that is anterior to, as well

as being contained in the postmodern. Though Waterland is,

and has always been read as, an example par excellence of the

metahistorical tendency of postmodernism, it is, in

actuality, something of an anomaly within his oeuvre. The

fragmentation of the narratorial structure and the

acknowledgement that History can only be understood as

stories are key features of the novel and are recycled

elsewhere, but the intensity of the playful

subversiveness and the broad visionary scope are unusual

in Swift’s work. Though he manufactures intricate

emplotments in his other novels, none are as labyrinthine

as Waterland and it is this complexity that has led some

of his reviewers to see his subsequent fictions as pallid

and unambitious by comparison.6 But if critical opinion

has been disappointed by Swift’s ‘failure’ to develop on

the potential of Waterland, it is only because that

opinion seeks to categorise him within a certain literary

moment, one that his work as a whole not only does not

belong to, but at times openly abjures.

Rather than reading Swift through the focus of

increasingly dated theoretical paradigms, what this

volume will do is to explore the manner in which his

fiction has always gone beyond the limits of mechanistic 6 See for instance Harriet Gilbert, ‘The Lost Boys’, New Statesman, 11 March 1988, 36; Hermione Lee, ‘Shutter and Lens’, Observer, 13 March 1988, 43 and Lynne Truss, ‘Out of Focus’, Listener, 10 March 1988, 21 on Out of this World.

8

readings to examine the experience of living in the late-

twentieth century. Though his work is often ascribed to

the postmodern idiom, it more readily resembles a form of

self-conscious social realism shot through with serious

psychological investigation and more than a gesture

towards the Bildungsroman. Such clumsy categorisations do

not, however, comfortably sit over a body of writing

whose individual elements persistently foreground the

arbitrariness of semiotic definition and the elusive

qualities of any hermeneutic superstructure to life. From

his earliest novels Swift’s interest lies in the small

choices that individuals make over their lives and how

they are governed by the ideological apparatuses of

class, community, nation, profession and tradition within

which they are made. If these determinants represent a

macrostructure for the formation of a social identity,

then the microstructural imperatives of love, duty,

dependence and dedication are of equal importance and

point to one of the distinguishing features of Swift’s

writing: his conviction in the centrality of ethical

commitment to human actions. All his fiction involves

characters forced into positions where they have to make

ethical choices about the way in which they lead their

lives, choices which are rendered more difficult by the

network of debts and dependencies that tie them to their

place in the world. From Willy Chapman (The Sweet Shop

Owner) who struggles to accept his acquiescence in a

loveless marriage, to George Webb (The Light of Day) who

9

invests in an impossible love the potential for self-

redemption, Swiftian protagonists locate in their ethical

decisions the quality of their subjectivity. The people

they consider themselves to be emerge from moments of

decision and challenges to which they have occasionally

risen but more frequently failed to meet either because

of timidity, or a fear of rejection, or because the

expectation of disappointment was too overpowering. The

characteristic pessimism of Swift’s novels develops from

the retrospective regret that this want of agency

induces; a sense of lost opportunity that demands

expiation through the radical refashioning of

autobiography.

That Swift’s novels engage so directly with ethics

(and particularly so after Waterland) is unsurprising

given his debt to the nineteenth-century novel. Allusions

to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George

Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley amongst

others, abound, and are most clearly brought into focus

in Ever After’s discourse on the loss of faith after the

Darwinian revolution. The intersectioning of social and

private selves and the moral choices that mediate that

dichotomy make Swift an old-fashioned writer in one

sense, but one that is engaged on a very fundamental

level with the ways in which human beings live their

lives. His prevailing questions – how can we ever know

ourselves as singular, coherent beings; how do our public

and private worlds intersect; how do we go about living

10

in a way that is true to a sense of authentic selfhood –

have long been the stuff of philosophical and creative

thought and it is possibly this engagement with the

metaphysical (albeit channelled vividly through time and

space) intangibilities of living the ‘good’ life that

distinguishes him from some of the more politically vocal

of his contemporaries. Certainly the ethical turn of

criticism in the mid-1990s and its more recent interest

in issues of belief, have led to a much greater interest

in Swift’s work and to the publication of a number of

monographs, including this volume.7

His commitment to a literature of ethical debate has

been matched since the mid-1990s by a generation of

writers such as Andrew Miller and Rachel Seiffert who

locate the dilemmas of living well in the murkiness of

history, but who articulate those dilemmas through

contemporary epistemologies. Swift’s devotion to the

disinterring of past traumas through a forensic

excavation of the silences and secrets of private history

reveals a conviction that the experience of the present

as ideologically and ethically fragmented and

7 At the time of going to press David Malcolm’s study is about to be joined by Peter Widdowson’s Graham Swift (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2005) and this is due to be augmented in 2005 by Stef Craps, Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift, (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005) and Anastasia Logotheti, From History to Storytelling: Confession and Redemption in the Novels of Graham Swift, (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). For the ethical turn see Todd F. Davis, and Kenneth Womack (eds), Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture and Literary Theory, (Charlottesville VA & London: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997) and Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethicsand the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas, (London: Routledge, 1999).

11

discontinuous lies in the hidden reaches of the past.

Only in the archaeological peeling back of the temporal

incarnations of the self in society can the full import

of the traumatic past be realised, but that realisation

is always incomplete and unsatisfying. None of Swift’s

principal narrators find what they seek of themselves

lying buried undisturbed in the past, instead all they

encounter are the disarticulated shards of former selves

which, even when reassembled, fail to proffer a full

picture of their lives as continuous, logical and

coherent. That sense of lack, of being incomplete, or of

glimpsing the potential forever outside the grasp of the

self or of the means of expression, is a recurrent theme

of Swift’s fiction that will be highlighted throughout

this study. In most of the novels it is expressed through

an engagement with the historical process that juxtapose

the individual’s dislocating experience of the historical

moment with the form of grand narrative that constitutes

History and against which the unsatisfying experience of

the subject is always judged. In effect though, history

is merely an abstract site around which a more

fundamental dislocation is enacted: that between

subjective and objective realities.

One of the abiding characteristics of Swift’s novels

is that the characters are isolated in matrices of

subjectivity that are precariously inscribed and prone to

dissolution. Not only that, but they are alienated from

others through their inability to empathise with the

12

inner workings of another’s consciousness. The typical

Swiftian male protagonist is a loner (even if married),

disenchanted by his lot and profoundly dismayed by his

inability to understand the world around him. The

methodologies of knowledge that he applies to his life

are painfully insufficient to the task of furnishing a

coherent sense to existence and he is left facing the

precariousness of his subjectivity with a vertiginous

instability. The collision of the subjective with the

experience of the objective world (which includes other

subjects) always disables the solidity of the self for

Swift believes there to be an inherent disjunction which

keeps the objective forever outside the totalising

purview of the subject. That is not to say that the

objective world is intrinsically contradictory, malign or

aggressive but just that it is at a remove from the

individual’s experience of her or himself and cannot be

accessed with the available interpretational apparatuses.

This base-level distinction between subjective and

objective versions of reality is insurmountable and can

only be sutured by the cohering implementation of

arbitrary fictions of continuity.

The models of symbolic coherence through which the

fractured elements of subjectivity seek coalescence

reflect a totalising inclusiveness that offers an

antidotal panacea to the chaos of being. History, as a

monolithic testament to narrative continuity, is a

recurrent structure of restitution but others include:

13

the family, Englishness, community, love and, perhaps

most commonly, knowledge. These frameworks for psycho-

social meaning form complex pre-inscribed structures

against which Swift’s protagonists measure their sense of

belonging and test the resilience of their psychic

boundaries. There is however always a tension between the

expectations of fulfilment that they believe such models

should extend, and the frustration of incompletion that

they actually experience. Knowledge is a good example

here, for all Swift’s principal narrators seek (and

occasionally deny) knowledge as a salve to the

indeterminacies of their lives. Tom Crick in Waterland

urgently requires understanding of the concatenation of

traumas that has assailed him and seeks clarity of vision

in the ostensible fixity of the past, whilst characters

like Prentis (Shuttlecock), Bill Unwin (Ever After) and George

Webb (The Light of Day) could be described as professional

knowledge-seekers. Their jobs (archivist, academic and

detective respectively) demand the isolation,

verification and codification of knowledge yet each of

them is as frustrated as Crick by the elusiveness of the

object of their search. Total understanding is

consistently denied them and they are left floundering in

the inexactitude of their impressions, forever at a loss

and yet convinced that the closure of their

epistemological voids is feasible if the right questions

can only be asked.

14

The other institutions of symbolic coherence

function in the same distressingly imprecise manner,

never fully acquiescing to the orderly satisfaction of

the subject’s expectations but always remaining, at least

in part, tantalisingly outside rationalisation. This

vexing disequilibrium is exacerbated by the series of

roles into which these models interpellate the individual

and which mask, rather than resolve a sense of

incompletion or emptiness. All Swift’s character are

‘hailed’ into subject positions whether that be as

shopkeeper, photojournalist, detective, father, husband,

soldier or drinking companion, and each of them fulfils

their roles with a due sense of duty and responsibility.

Yet the process of inhabiting the part, of becoming a

performative subject, is never an easy one even though it

ostensibly offers a means to a form of self-

reconciliation. The role, pulled on like the garb of

public ownership, never fits Swift’s characters with a

bespoke comfort; there is always a discordance between

the consciousness of performance and the desire for an

authentic being beneath that veneer. This disparity

grates because it reveals an excess of subjective

sensibility that apparently cannot be contained by either

physical or metaphysical self-conceptualisations. The

self always stands outside the self in Swift’s novels,

resolutely resistant to a totalising logic that would

bring the subject completely within the order of the

symbolic. Because that surplus is impervious to semiotic

15

codification the experience of selfhood for Swift’s

protagonists is always characterised by inadequacy, self-

alienation and the fear of dissolution into an asymbolic

nullity that is so threatening precisely because it

renders the subject alien to her/himself. The silences

which dominate these novels therefore not only carry the

weight of the unsayable disappointments of the

character’s lives, but also reflect an exhausted

acknowledgement that at the core of the self is an

irreducible nothingness that is also an unexplainable

somethingness.

This contradictoriness is, for Swift, simply in the

way of things and is connected to a primary

misrecognition of the world as an orderly place and

ourselves within it as fixed and transcendent subjects.

The fictions we create to deaden the awareness of our

instability may convince us of an overarching meaningful

structure to life, but these novels reveal time and again

the flimsiness of those deferrals in the face of a

deracinating reality. That reality could equally be

termed a Reality for one of the interpretational

frameworks for this study is the Lacanian model of the

symbolic order which posits the Real as that which stands

outside the domination of the symbolic. For Lacan the

Real is the nebulous space of disorderly, uncontrollable

areferentiality into which the symbolic (in the form of

language construction and signification) makes cuts to

wrestle meaning from the meaningless.8 To grasp such a

16

concept necessitates the abandonment of the idea that

every facet of human perception is pre-inscribed by a

symbolic that fits snugly over everything that is known.

Instead the Lacanian Real demands that we see

signification as an imprecise approximation of reality

that can never wholly describe its totality. Thus a

surplus Reality always exists outside the ability of

language to contain and identify it. For this study the

Real becomes a productive means of articulating not just

the subjective excess that resists symbolisation but also

the discommoding collision between the individual and the

models of psycho-social integrity in which they invest.

The clearest example of this is the ‘Here and Now’ which

Swift names in Waterland but which is in operation from The

Sweet Shop Owner onwards. This refers to the shocking

experience of the self within history not as an abstract

concept or disciplinary discourse but as a vital and

immediate engagement with events. The intersection of

public history with the private realm creates a

dislocation which enforces the recognition of the self as

both intrinsic and irrelevant to the historical process.

In the confusion of that disorientation the Real

intercedes.

If the Real implies that at the heart of the

subjective experience is a hiatal space that can never

fully be articulated, then what the majority of Swift’s

narrators do is try desperately to fill the emptiness

8 See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, (London: Routledge, 2001).

17

with the presence of things and, in particular, with the

substantiality of narrative. His narratorial figures are

invariably at points in their lives where they are

seeking a form of individuation, a harmonisation between

what they have been and their residual sense of

incompleteness that they need to reconcile. Denying that

to be is to be inauthentic, they search for a ‘true’

inner authenticity that will rationalise their life

experiences into a continuous and developmental whole.

Faced with a collection of disconnected memories and

incoherent life-events, their only recourse is to a

radical narrative refashioning that can apply the order

of logic to the disparate jumble of their being. They set

about revisioning their lives through the focus of a

redemptive diegesis, an application of retroactive

conformity that endows them with a hindsight that can

therapeutically resurrect their ‘lost’ subjectivity.

Though this overt fictionalisation of the past is a

ubiquitous feature of Swift’s writing, it is only seen to

be a successful strategy in one instance: Prentis’

construction of himself as the ideal father in Shuttlecock.

In all the other narratives the act of self-inscription

runs up against the recondite immateriality of the Real

which jeopardises their self-appointed omniscience by

reiterating the provisionality of their fabrications. The

stories that they tell about themselves and, by

extension, that human beings construct to deflect the

dreadful knowledge of the unknown, are pitiful incisions

18

in the fabric of the asymbolic engendering an

unsatisfyingly ‘inauthentic’ subjectivity that only

pantomimically invokes the whole through its performative

credibility.

One might reasonably ask what inspires such a

singularly bleak summation of the human condition and why

Swift’s fictional Weltanschauung is dominated by motifs of

disconnection, discontinuity and discordance. An answer

that this study will suggest is that such fracturing is

symptomatic of modernity’s epistemic character. Swift’s

status as a postmodern writer (at least as it is commonly

understood) is debatable I would argue because he

interprets the conditions of the late-twentieth century

within a broader post-Romantic timeline and understands

modernity in a less territorial way than a

modernist/postmodernist dichotomy would avail. His

abiding diagnosis of British society in the second half

of the century is of a chronic melancholia that mourns

the lost stabilities of the past with a lachrymose

nostalgia. The sense of dislocation and alienation that

bedevils the subject springs from a systemic abandonment

of institutional authority and its replacement by an

ideological and ethical free-for-all that champions its

democratic relativism even as it disavows collective

responsibility. For Swift the loss of the centralising

doctrines of religion and patriarchy as efficient

symbolic cornerstones for social and psychological

mooring has resulted in a drift away from cohering

19

communalities and into a form of atomised solipsism that

ultimately destroys empathetic identification between

subjects. It is not just God and the father that are seen

as victims of modernity’s individualist bent; Swift’s

novels return time and again to the dismantling of local

communities by the imperatives of demographic change and

shifts in generational value systems and suggests that

without the exterior markers of social belonging the

centre cannot hold and things, and people, fall apart.

A very insistent metaphor for the mobilisation of

collective meaning-making is the Second World War that

features in some form in six of the seven novels (the

exception being The Light of Day which supplants it with the

Balkans war of the early-1990s). Swift is very tied to

the war as a focalising point for collective and

individual realisation - it is for instance in their

memories of combat that the men of Last Orders feel

themselves most real – and it is also a potent vehicle

for the introduction of the Here and Now, as we see in The

Sweet Shop Owner and Waterland where the war is a thoroughly

disorienting intrusion into normal life. The conflict

also functions however as a point of nostalgic

fetishization; a time when ideological ambiguity gave

way, at least in popular mythology, to consensual

fraternalism. In its aftermath the cohering narratives of

togetherness are seen as being replaced by divergent and

dissonant ideologies which inspire in Swift’s

retrospective protagonists a hankering after something

20

they are convinced has been lost. Swift is not dewy-eyed

enough to believe in the substantiality of an

historically enforced entente, but he does recognise the

significance of the myth as a socially symbolic

narrative. He does also acknowledge that being of the

generation that grew up after the war (he was born in

1949) he suffers from a romantic attachment that reveals

itself as a poignant sense of having been excluded from

involvement by the unhappy chance of his birth.9 This

experience of having missed a defining moment of human

praxis, of having a qualitatively different encounter

with history than one’s parents, is conducive to the

feelings of loss and incompletion that permeate Swift’s

post-1945 melancholic Britain. Having lived after history

is how A. S. Byatt chooses to see it, and in a novel like

Shuttlecock we see an acute jealousy of the active

masculinity of the war generation in Prentis’ anaemic

parodies of manly assertiveness.10

The Second World War, with its hyperbolic narrative

of social and ideological unanimity, thus seems

negatively to accentuate a post-war fall from grace, but

Swift employs the performative aspect of a national

togetherness to indicate its atypical status within

modernity’s individualising trajectory. The

demythologisation of such cultural monoliths as religion,

9 Swift has commented on the ‘physical evidence of war’ during his childhood, claiming that ‘the second world war … has been my great history lesson’ (O’Mahony [2003] 22).10 A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 26.

21

patriarchy, the community and the stable Cartesian ego

is, for Swift, less a product of twentieth-century

scepticism that of nineteenth-century rationalism, but

recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented crisis of

authority across social discourse. The stripping away of

the sustaining fictions of human practice lays bare the

gaps in the subject’s formation of themselves and the

groups they foster. Brought face to face with the Real of

the subjective void, individuals have little choice but

to reconstruct stories (in the full knowledge of their

constructedness) to defer the abjecting imperative of

solipsistic dissolution. The stories that Swift’s

characters tell themselves therefore replace the

narratives in which they no longer have faith, but this

arbitrary displacement is not a morally devoided act

because, as his later fictions shows, to sustain a

palpable credibility the new stories demand an ethical

commitment.

Though storytelling may emerge as a palliative act,

a poultice on the wound on the Real, its transformative

potential makes it a potent weapon in the process of

individuation and particularly in the generation of a

moral continuity across the panorama of a lifetime.

Because these narrators have attained at least a

respectable middle-age, they survey their lives with a

summative discretion seeking out the connective threads

that guarantee some subjective contiguity amongst the

disparateness of fragmented memories. Whether the

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compromises they have made were justified in the light of

their present loneliness is an unwelcome question that

assails their contemplations of opportunities not grasped

and lives not lived, but underlying their final analysis

is the nagging conviction that they have not ‘done right’

by others, an imbalance they tend to address not by

reparative action but by narrative self-exculpation. This

ethical ambivalence is present from the early work but it

becomes much more insistent after Waterland (a novel in

which the principal character tries to disguise his guilt

for past mistakes through a narrative of self-

justification). From Out of this World onwards the themes of

subjective instability, the contingency of memory and the

possibility of redemption through ethical commitment

become increasingly interconnected and reveal an

intriguing diversion in Swift’s thinking into the

transubstantive potential of a secularised faith system.

In the face of a nullifying encounter with the Real

and the broken empathetic relationship of subject to

object, a gesture towards symbolic unity becomes,

regardless of its fragility, a statement of agency and an

announcement of ethical presence. Such a significant

intervention in the symbolic order represents, in Out of

this World for instance, a transgression of the interspace

of isolation between individuals and posits a productive

potential for their self-alienation. If, as has been

suggested, subjective interconnection is fissured by

dissonant empathetic cadences, then one answer the novel

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suggests is to ‘become’ other people by temporarily

suspending an instinctual distrust of the Other and

reaching out to the possibility of change. Believing, if

only for a short period, in the realisability of

rapprochement is a recuperative act that elicits a

substantive ethical outcome for it anchors one individual

to another not in a bond of dependence but in a

liberating gesture of self-determination. The willingness

to believe in something, whatever that something may be,

becomes a key feature of the fiction after Waterland and

is increasingly connected to the desire for salvation

that Swift’s characters evince. Bill Unwin, the men of

Last Orders and George Webb all seek something they can

believe in with an unquestioning absolutism and all have

to face the traduction of their ideals by the pragmatic

relativism of the contemporary episteme. The loss of

centralising authority entails a concomitant loss of

ethical and ideological leadership and it is these

qualities that the men have to reinstate not as

authoritarian dogma, but as lived practice if they wish

to arrogate meaning to their lives. Faith is thus seen to

be less about the object of devotion and more about the

qualitative nature of that faith. Believing in believing

and the establishment of a working ethics offer forms of

redemptive transcendence to these characters and, though

they may be frequently undercut by Swift’s bleak

prognostication of the intransigence of human

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selfishness, they do offer a positive indication of an

uncynical optimism at the core of his writing.

Swift’s concern with modernity’s gradual abandonment

of doctrinaire narratives of authority and the impact of

that on the process of identity formation within and

without a framework of social reference reveals him as a

profound and expansive thinker on the nature of

contemporary being. Though his novels undoubtedly reflect

the aesthetic bearing of postmodernism and intervene in

intellectual debates about the literariness of history

and the contingency of grand narratives, he is a much

more interesting writer than the narrow definition of any

literary movement could encompass. Though the terms

‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ will be used in this volume to

describe aspects of his work, such distinctions are

imprecise sops to a contextual periodisation that, like

the Lacanian Real, never fully overlays the totality of

the material. If the Swiftian self is always in excess to

its own definitions then his writing contains a similarly

effulgent surplus that resists the critical symbolic.

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