LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/14. GRAHAM SWIFT (1949)

● Desperadoes are more or less Faulknerian novelists, and this is more obvious with Graham Swift than many others. Details woven in a puzzle trigger a later revelation each, postponing the end of he book. Actually, like many Desperado novels, Swift’s books end unwillingly. Between words and incidents, Graham Swift fights the waters of silence, and reclaims every inch of a bewitched land of memories.

● Waterland (1983) is one of the best examples of the Desperado version of hybridization of genres: it mixes fiction, poetry, history, essay, diary, teaching. It is less of a deliberate plan of thoughts than Joyce’s Ulysses, and it advances stealthily among ever new environments.

● The plot itself is uncomplicated, but narration is baffling. A history teacher addresses his pupils, and we soon find out we could be the pupils, and history could easily be the plot. We read smoothly, though breathlessly, but the overall impression is one of frustration. Unlike Virginia Woolf, who meant to smash the plot, but only achieved novels which we easily rearrange along the chronology past-present-future, which she so hated, Graham Swift is free from temporal causality. His novel feeds on incidents (and lyricism), but these innumerable fragments of the narrative float independently from any temporal determination. We rearrange an emotional puzzle, not a temporal one. Virginia Woolf did not go as far as changing the foundation of her characters, and these characters forced us to rearrange their lives chronologically. Graham Swift achieves what she aimed at, yet had no idea how to get: he splits the hero into feelings. When we have done assembling this enigmatical being, under the pressure of the story, of the painful suspense our curiosity creates, we are exhausted, and only the author’s lyricism can soothe our unrest.

● Swift’s universe, like most Desperadoes’, is one of obscure guilt. This guilt is only guessed at, in contemporary comments on past mysteries. Ishiguro uses the same tactics, and Lessing, Gray, Ackroyd. This guilt is a good source of lyricism, which these authors need in order to infuse feeling into an otherwise dry novel.

● Most Desperadoes have a liking for one, even more, slightly crazy heroes. The minds that we join in their pages are confused, along the line opened by T.S. Eliot. Madness is an impossibility to accept the outside. The Desperadoes are all overwhelmed by a complicated reality (see Lessing, Ackroyd, Gray, Amis, Barnes). Their heroes are slowed down, in panic over incidents which nobody, not even the author, can control. Confusion replaces explanation.

● Waterland follows the stream of Tom Crick’s memories, but it could not be farther away from the stream of consciousness. We are not invited within the minds of the characters. Swift sketches their outside story, even that is done fitfully, and also breathtakingly. We are shocked into remembrance of things past. The author flatly replaces sentimentality with sentimental horror, which is very different from Woolf’s decision that the novel needs no love-interest. It is much more general and profound than the modernist mere revolt against realism. It is a new trend. The Desperado age is not against previous trends, as modernism was. The Desperadoes are outside trends, devices, fashions. They change the meaning of literature. They adapt literature to the mind of a reader surrounded by visual stimuli and in danger of forgetting how to read. They reinforce the reading experience at a time when the screen threatens to take over. No film made after a very good novel (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nice Work, The English Patient, 1984, The Remains of the Day, Lord of the Flies, The Collector, Sophie’s Choice – after the American William Styron) is as good, as rich, as maddening as the written text.

● Swift uses every conceivable way out of the story, leaving us alone with his characters and their private hell. Happiness is not of interest. Desperado heroes are only happy in their unhappiness, meaning that they enjoy life, although to the reader their life does not appear enjoyable in the least. Again, Swift and the other Desperadoes teach the reader a new view on life.

● Love is for the Desperadoes a vain, haunting, desperate wait (see Lessing, Ackroyd, Ishiguro, Swift, Gray, Orwell, Huxley, Amis, Lodge, Barnes, practically everyone). It leaks into parent-child, teacher-pupil, friend to friend, superior to subordinate relationships. There can only be surrogates for love. Love as an experience is denied. The couple is a topic non grata.

● The Desperado narrative is ostentatiously informal. The hero speaks naturally, the reader strives to follow. The main trick to make this monologue interesting is to run the movie backwards: the details are lined up from end to the very beginning, the truth is delayed, and finally merges with its future, which is the narrator’s old age, as a rule (sometimes his death, as in Lanark).

● The informal narrative is interrupted by poetic sentences, relying on metaphor, images, haiku-like thoughts. With many Desperadoes, some paragraphs are blank verse poems (see Ackroyd, Barnes, Ishiguro, Swift). Fiction resorts more and more to the poetic arsenal in order to get through to the reader. When the author wants to grab his readers’ sensibility, he writes a poematic thought, and this is the signal for the reader to use sympathy, to feel. This signal used to be the story of a love, of a couple, but the world has changed, and key experiences are no longer what they used to be. Death is a Godless state, the birth of a child is rather sad (see Lanark’s child, the children in Ishiguro, Lessing, Swift). The Desperado author lives in and writes about a grim universe, which tends to slip into dystopia, even when the aim of the book is not to view the future.

● In Waterland we read: ‘As long as there’s a story, it’s all right.’ Again and again, though baffled by the oddity of incidents and characters, the reader cannot escape the narrative, yet cannot decode it completely. Insufficient decoding, carefully arranged by the author, leads to a planned reconsideration, rethinking, rereading. The reader comes back to the same incidents again and again, with the same curiosity to find the key to the puzzle. Although the plot is known, the story is every bit as interesting the second time around. The author writes directly with the reader’s hand, uses the reader’s mind to continue the story, then return to it and find the hidden points of suspense, which can make sense only when put all together. Treat the reader as yourself, is the slogan Desperado authors carry in their march.

● Unlike most Desperadoes, Swift loves the sweetness of the picturesque. Beauty cannot exist unless in accidental islands, but they are even more piercing as they are rare. The lack of beauty explains why a novel like Waterland ends with all kinds of departures: Mary leaves sanity, Tom Crick leaves his classes of history, Dick goes away, and we leave the text, relieved that we can breathe out of the captivity Swift planned for us.

● Swift’s novels have something Jamesian about them, but he goes farther than the father of the stream of consciousness. He abuses half-statements, double meanings, incomplete thoughts. Confusion is often overdone. The plot refuses to lure us by revealing psychology. All in all, we seem to be keeping company with an insufficient Henry James. It takes a while for the reader to find his bearings in Swift’s stories, to realize what he should be looking forward to. Strange heroes undergo half-revealed experiences, and all along they wonder (we wonder, too) whether life is worth living. No excitement, no promise, no future. This is the Desperado feat: the novel (Swift’s included) abolishes the future. A book like The Sweet-Shop Owner takes us to the North Pole of love.

● Like most Desperadoes, Graham Swift tries his hand at many varieties of the novel. In some novels, nobody changes and the future is preordained. In others (see Shuttlecock) we get the very psychology of change under our own eyes. Themes are also played upon: emigration to America (Out of This World) and return of Americans to the Old World, psychoanalysis (Shuttlecock), death all over, parents estranged from children (The Sweet-Shop Owner), books within books (Shuttlecock), memory playing tricks on the hero, voices crossing swords, interruptions storming. Some novels, by Swift and Ackroyd mainly, look like a book of poems arranged to make up a narrative. Some books of poetry look like novels, on the other hand, when we look at the poets. So, it goes both ways. The author never wants to stop, and when he does, the reader is angry, and feels like shouting, with Eliot’s words: Why have you stopped thinking? THINK!

● Desperado novels are endless goodbyes. Ever After is such a book. Characters keep dying, coming back to life in person or in diaries, memories. Swift is concerned with history of all kinds (World Wars, natural history and prehistory, individual history). A hero-writer’s sentence exclaims: ‘The struggle for existence? Ha! The struggle for remembrance.’ A writer within a writer finds it more important to discover himself by means of writing, than to address posterity. The Desperado writer is constantly in search for himself. The novel is a constant question mark. The reader is pushed between the lines. Like the others, Swift writes an insecure text, using memory as its fragile foundation. We find Graham Swift, as we find the other Desperado authors, struggling ever after with the dragon called myself.