(Re) Constituted Pasts: Postmodern Historicism in the Novels of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes

Abstract

British novelists Graham Swift and Julian Barnes share a fascination with troubled histories. At one point in Swift’s novel Waterland, a character asserts that ‘the only important thing about history … is that it’s got to the point where it’s probably about to end’.² Although within the book this particular character’s fear of nuclear annihilation is not realised, the concern displayed towards history at this moment of postmodernity may be considered emblematic of a more widespread anxiety with history as a subject within literary representations in the late twentieth century. In the conditions of today’s world, the place of history and its role in searching for meaning and facts seems uncertain to many. Compounding this, among those theorists who perceive an approaching ‘end of history’, opinions are even split as to whether this would be a negative thing: at least one theorist, Francis Fukuyama, doubts history’s relevance in the face of the ‘triumph’ of capitalism, (prematurely) welcoming an ‘end of history’ as a sign of class victory.³

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

Walter Benjamin¹