Postmodern Historiography in Graham Swift’s Waterland

The present article attempts to elucidate that Tom Crick, the narrator of Graham Swift’s Waterland, employs the techniques of postmodern historiography in his narrative. Postmodern historiography discredits the Grand Narrative of History and replaces it with histories. Hutcheon defines historiographic metafiction as a type of narrative which self-reflexively problematizes the correspondence between the real historical world and the referent. With a historical self-consciousness, Waterland paradoxically juxtaposes the necessity of stories and the awareness of their constructed nature. In this novel, the boundary between history and fiction is blurred. While it explicitly deals with the notion of history by offering several historical accounts, it paradoxically questions the authenticity of the accounts that are put forward. By not making distinction between history and fiction, the novel considers the existence of story necessary for the acquisition of an understanding of the world. The paradox lies in the fact that the novel admits that such understanding of the world is inevitably provisional.