The Aporia of Time in Graham Swift’s ＂Waterland＂

In its narrative form and in the philosophical issues raised by its narrator, Swift's ”Waterland” brings into question the distinctions between past and future, beginning and end, cause and effect on which the concept of linear, chronological time depends. It does so partly by pointing to the ”infinite regress” in which any quest for origins or first causes is inevitably involved and partly by demonstrating that human affairs also follow the same ”pattern of eddying repetition” as ”natural history,” that human beings are driven by the same ”insidious longing to revert” as eels or geese. In individual lives as well as the grand stage of historical events, the ”natural stuff” of which human beings are made is ”always getting the better of the artificial stuff”-of the purposive designs that we try to impose on experience to give it meaning and structure. What this means for Tom Crick's narrative is that ”the complete and final version” of his story can never be told, that the events he is trying to describe are always disrupting the linear, progressive frame that he tries to impose on them, pointing to another mode of time that somehow underlies or supercedes the linear, causal one. Because Tom is suspicious of our ”insidious longing to revert” and unwilling to transgress the limits of our time-bound phenomenal world, however, there must be a second Crick brother in the novel who is relatively uninscribed by the symbolic order, capable of ”going beyond or getting outside himself,” of returning to the undifferentiated generative matrix that is the source of all particular time-bound forms. Though he generally condemns ”regression” as a betrayal of civilization, Tom can describe his brother's return to this maternal matrix as a triumph because it demonstrates the limits inherent in any specific symbolic ”transcription” of reality, the inadequacy to experience of any totalizing religious or philosophical terminology. The water to which Dick returns is destructive of human distinction and order, but it is also a perpetual source of new beginnings, the site of everlasting renewal and regeneration.