No more drama

The article is a review of Here We Are, the latest novel by contemporary English novelist Graham Swift, published in the spring of 2020. The text is considered in the context of the author’s earlier work, which the often self-reflexive narrative references at a number of points. The author’s use of understatement and the motif of parenthood also receive the reviewer’s attention.

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes (b. 1946) is an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist who received considerable praise in 1984 with the publication of Flaubert’s Parrot, a book that, together with A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), defies categorization. Barnes belongs to a generation of British writers (including Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Graham Swift) who came to prominence in the 1980s at a time when suspicion toward the main tenets of realism, foundational grand narratives‚ and the figure of the stable and reliable narrator led many authors to disrupt and subvert conventional modes, favor historiographical metafiction and postmodernist skepticism‚ and experiment with narrative strategies. Thus, a number of scholars have examined Barnes’s work through the prism of postmodernism on the grounds of the metafictional dimension of some of his books, his transgression of realist strategies and reliance on various forms of intertextuality, and his mistrust of truth claims and fondness for fragmentation, polyphony‚ and generic hybridity. Several of his books (fictional and nonfictional) have been analyzed for the way in which they challenge the borders that separate existing genres, texts, arts‚ and languages and, thereby, oscillate among novel, essay, biography‚ and meditation. However‚ the restrictive label of postmodernism can apply to only part of Barnes’s production‚ as other novels published throughout his career are inscribed within a more conventional and realistic framework—in particular, such early books as Metroland (1980), Before She Met Me (1981), and Staring at the Sun (1986)—and his most recent production is marked by a less ironic and subversive mood and a more personal, subdued‚ and melancholy tone, for example in The Sense of an Ending (2011), which won the Man Booker Prize; The Noise of Time (2016); and The Only Story (2018). Barnes has also been praised for his art as an essayist and a short-story writer. Drawing from a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, scholars have examined such recurrent themes and concerns in Barnes’s work as memory, art, love, longing, death, or Englishness. They have also probed his self-reflexive questioning relating to the evasiveness of truth, the irretrievability of the past, the construction of national identity‚ and the relationship between fact and fiction.

Family history rewritten: How to narrate the life happening 'Tomorrow'

This paper is dedicated to exploring the narrative points and strategies in the novel Tomorrow, written by Graham Swift, a prominent English postmodern writer, with the main objective to draw attention to the nature of narration and narrators. The aim of the research is to give answers to the questions of choices made by the novelist when it comes to narrators, narration, narrative methods and techniques, and whether the narrators are (un)reliable, etc. The author of this paper tries to determine to which extent the 2nd person narration has become influential in postmodern literature - by being mysterious, ambiguous and unknown. We often do not know to whom a narrator is speaking, nor whose voice is being heard by readers. Contemporary narratological theories deny the existence of this clear, precise and uniformed narratological voice, whether it is an author, a narrator or a reader. These days, numerous avant-garde narratological strategies are being emphasized, most notably the "wandering" second person, used by the main character of the novel Tomorrow as well. The inseparable part of the research is also questioning the postmodern premises such as the final doubt considering the (re)presentation of a story, the truth and the past (both individual and collective) which influence the choices made while forming the narration in the novel. The narratological analysis has shown the nature of psychological, moral, as well as ethical competence of the narrator, Paula Hook - a successful woman of the 21st century - a professor, a mother, a wife, living an ideal life threatened by a profound family secret. She acts as a representative of the 21st century wandering narrator - she doubts, questions, rethinks - because the history, past and truth are being constantly questioned in contemporary societies and literature as well.

The Uses of Formulaic Language in Graham Swift’s England and Other Stories

This article argues that in his collection of short stories England and Other Stories (2014), as in most of his fiction, Graham Swift is preoccupied with the limits of language, with what remains unsaid or is poorly communicated. In this volume, the writer’s focus on private, domestic and ordinary lives corresponds to his representation of the language of everyday interaction as essentially non-creative and formulaic. Swift’s deliberately clichéd language reflects what, as contemporary studies of discourse reveal, is a standard mode of social interaction. For example, Roberta Corrigan et al. affirm that linguistic formulae should be considered as yet another manifestation of behavioural routines (xxiii-xxiv), while Alison Wray claims that the reliance on formulaic language “predominates in normal language processing” (Formulaic Language 101). A range of uses of formulaic language is analysed in selected stories from the collection. It is demonstrated that, typically, characters choose prefabricated language for the paradoxical purpose of establishing and maintaining a degree of contact with others while avoiding in-depth interaction.

Past and Present: Historical Views in Graham Swift's Waterland

The semi-autobiographical novel Waterland by twentieth-century British writer Graham Swift has been recognized as a popular work by British literary critics. Under the guidance of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the literary chronotope, this paper analyses both the various types of chronotope in the novel as well as the author's historical view between different times and spaces through the dialogue.

Apprehensive Alleviation

When might the source of sorrow be the expectation of alleviation itself? How could the very prospect of solace effectively morph into a jeopardizing moment from which one wants to flee or, in wishful desperation, to forestall? And in such situations, whether immediate or remote, what other resources of emotional rescue are at our disposal when consolation wears out its welcome? Chapter 5 takes up these questions with the help of writers who combine retrospection with expectant threat and anticipated mourning. After an introduction centred on the recent short stories of Graham Swift, it turns to an unequivocally bleak work that offers a stark forewarning of the perils of biotechnology: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). The chapter argues that this speculative novel about state-authorized cloning shows how, through its depiction of what some critics have deemed futile, institutionalized forms of care, Ishiguro provokes readers to reflect on their own parameters of sympathy and judgment—most notably, on our grounds for subjecting to critique what his characters utilize to console.