History as Storytelling and Storytelling as History

History as Storytelling and Storytelling as History:The Environmental Materiality and Imagination in Waterland's Bio-Regional Eco-Poetics Arun Kumar Pokhrel (bio) history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but . . . as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and . . . our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious. —Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious Nature is Imagination itself. —William Blake, Letter to the Reverend Dr. John Trusler If . . . the spatial is thought of in the context of space-time and as formed out of social interrelations at all scales, then one view of a place is as a particular appreciation of those relations . . . Importantly, it includes relations which stretch beyond—the global as part of what constitutes the local, the outside as part of the inside . . . The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple. —Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender Graham Swift's masterpiece Waterland (1983), often described as a classic postmodernist text and more recently referred to as a "late twentieth-century regional novel," narrates the story of the marginal East Anglian Fens [End Page 76] through the complex weaving of natural, topographical, imperial, and familial stories (The Future 88). Thomas Crick, a school history teacher and the narrator-protagonist of the novel, starts telling his personal story rather than teaching history lessons to his students. After being challenged by his student, Price, about his teaching abilities, and by the school headmaster, Lewis Scott, about the future of his profession, Tom abandons a traditional method of teaching history and employs a storytelling method. Tom begins to retell his own past story, the story and history of his family and the regional Fens. His retrospective personal narratives—moving forward and backward, inward and outward both in terms of time and space—interweave the grand narratives of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, British imperialism, Thatcherite neo-conservatism, and capitalist modernity. Circular and recursive, his narratives align with a cyclical pattern of nature and natural history, clearly evinced by the narrative structuring of the novel around an iconic spatial metaphor of land reclamation. The metaphor of the fluid, swampy Fens landscape illustrates how it is shaped and reshaped endlessly, analogous to the ever-shifting narrative itself, and how the changes in the natural world directly influence the social life. As a creation of the contemporary global era, Waterland represents "a new wave in British fiction" and the expansion of the British canon that began with the postwar aesthetic and cultural waves of postmodernism ("An Interview with Graham Swift" 637). Swift's novel, Stef Craps aptly comments, "defies easy categorization" because "it seems too invested in the traditional concerns of the English novel . . . to warrant the label 'postmodern'. . . [and] yet too self-conscious and formally sophisticated to fit comfortably under the rubric of realism" (637). Through the coimbrication of human and natural history, social and environmental factors, the novel's multilayered narrative not only adroitly interweaves multiple stories with histories of a regional community, but also connects the personal with the regional, and the regional with the national and the global. The novel expresses a deeper sense of place and history, and places Britain's and the Fenlands' past history at the center of its bioregional environmental poetics, in which history is storytelling and storytelling is history.1 History is presented as a sequence of progression and regression, continuity and discontinuity, and retreat and repetition rather than the movement toward a telos. Any narrative, Fredric Jameson has reminded us, "begins with the [End Page 77] recognition that there is nothing that is not social and historical—indeed, that everything is 'in the last analysis' political" (The Political Unconscious 20). In Waterland, the Fens, a major physical setting, are a focal point of the narrative and provide the intertextual context for a counter-hegemonic ecopolitics with larger socio-cultural implications. The novel presents the story of the Fens as part of a marginal, decentered narrative thoroughly embedded in the local environmental concerns while also participating in the larger national and imperial story of Britain. Swift's conception of the bio

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  Aghogho L Imiti, Chukwuma Anyanwu•African Studies•2026

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