This article was downloaded by: [The University of British Columbia]

On: 11 December 2014, At: 13:23

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK

Green Letters: Studies in

Ecocriticism
Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgrl20

ECOCRITICISM AND THE

POSTMODERN NOVEL: THE
CASE OF WATERLAND
a
Karla Armbruster
a
English Department , Webster University , St. Louis
Published online: 22 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Karla Armbruster (2009) ECOCRITICISM AND THE POSTMODERN
NOVEL: THE CASE OF WATERLAND , Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 10:1,
19-38, DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2009.10589042

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2009.10589042

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,
or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views
expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and
are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the
Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with
primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,
and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
 indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the
Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,
sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014
 ARTICLES

EcocRITICISM AND THE PosTMODERN NovEL: THE CAsE OF

WATERLAND
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

KARLA ARMBRUSTER

"Who is my brother? What's he made from?"

----- Water/and

In many ways, Graham Swift's 1983 novel Water/and seems a perfect topic for
ecocritical analysis. His narrator, a history teacher named Tom Crick, begins the book
with a discussion of the landscape where he and his ancestors were raised: the Fens -
of East England. This "waterland" of the book's title is a vast wetland which has for
centuries been artificially controlled by a system of locks and channels. The ongoing
reclamation of this landscape through the dredging of silt out of its channels provides
the central analogy for the novel's (and Crick's) most explicit concern: the relationship
between history and reality. Just as the channels must be continually dredged for silt,
experience must be constantly shaped into meaningful narrative: as Crick tells us,
"We have to keep scooping, scooping up from the depths this remorseless stuff that
time leaves behind" (346). An entire chapter is give over to the natural history of the
eel, one of the Fens' predominant nonhuman species. And Crick's older brother Dick,
whom Crick characterizes as a mentally-challenged "potato-head;' is consistently
associated with the natural and the nonhuman, from his fish-like swimming abilities
to his silty smell (the result of his job working on a dredger) to what Crick identifies
as his lack of intellect and human curiosity.
Despite this temptingly rich ecocritical terrain, Water/and has achieved critical
attention chiefly as an example of the type of postmodern literature which Linda
Hutcheon has called "historiographic metafiction:' According to Hutcheon,
historiographic metafiction demonstrates a typical postmodern awareness of history
and fiction as human constructs, but also makes this awareness "the grounds for its
rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past" (5). In Water/and,
Crick is propelled towards this type of awareness by personal and professional crises
which can all be characterized as "the end of history": he is about to be dismissed
from his post as a high school history teacher - ostensibly because history is being
 Green Letters Volume 10

"eliminated" from the school curriculum. He is also continually challenged as to the

value of history by Price, a student who believes history is about to come to an end
due to the threat of nuclear holocaust. Finally, for Crick's wife Mary, history has also
come to an end, if we view history as a linear narrative of progress into the future.
She has had a nervous breakdown and kidnapped a baby, which she believes God has
promised her, from a local supermarket. For Mary, this act points back to the past,
when she and Crick were teenage lovers whose relationship resulted in pregnancy and
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

a botched abortion which left her unable to bear children and indirectly led to the
deaths of Crick's older half-brother, Dick, and another local boy, Freddie Parr.
In response to these crises, Crick begins to tell his students stories that transgress
the boundaries of traditional history. In particular, he narrates his personal and
family history in an attempt to make sense of his present situation, adding the natural
history of the Fen landscape and the role his ancestors played in transforming it. As
numerous critics have discussed, the novel eventually deconstructs the traditional
distinctions among all these types of narratives: traditional, public history, family
and personal history, natural history, and even the myths or fairy tales that infiltrate
Crick's stories and style. All our stories about the past, Crick despairingly admits at

-
one point, are created to eliminate our fear that the events of our lives and the past
are meaningless. While the "thin garment" of historical narrative is vulnerable to
the "knife blade" of what Crick terms the "Here and Now;' unmediated reality that
makes its presence known through violence, loss, and other traumatic experiences,
narrative can also help to make sense of such experiences. The novel suggests that,
without linear, constructed narratives, we would perceive reality as being so chaotic
and frightening that we would lose our ability to function, like the characters in the
novel who go mad or lose themselves in alcohol in response to trauma. It is because
of this that Crick reconciles himself to history and narrative, arguing that they're all
we have to explain the past and provide hope for the future. His own narrative, a self-
reflective hybrid that reworks the traditional narrative forms of the past, exemplifies
this process. 1
As he weaves his narrative, Crick returns almost obsessively to the comparison
between the shaping of chaotic reality into history through narrative and the
reclamation of land from water through locks, canals, and the ongoing dredging of
silt. Perhaps because of the prominence of this comparison, many critical treatments
of Water/and address the importance of the fenland setting, but they do so primarily
in order to discuss how it functions as metaphor rather than considering the land/
waterscape in its own right, as an ecocritical treatment might. Michael Gora is fairly
representative of this approach when he writes, "The Fens are the physical embodiment
of a history in which all progress is chimerical" (393). In fact, ecocritical approaches
to Water/and are almost nonexistent - a curious state of affairs, given the seeming
wealth of material for such an approach. In the pages that follow, I ask why ecocritics
have paid so little attention to this novel, arguing that this lack of attention is primarily
a symptom of a larger ecocritical resistance to postmodern and poststructuralist
 Karla Armbruster

thought. Following the lead of Dominic Head and Ronald McKinney, two rare critics
who have read Waterland from an ecocritical perspective, I make the case that the
postmodern character of this novel, far from being an impediment to an ecocritical
reading, is precisely the aspect that makes it most significant from an ecocritical point
of view.
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

Ecocriticism's Resistance to the Postmodern Novel

To some degree, the lack of ecocritical attention to Waterland may stem from the
fact that it is a novel at all. As numerous critics have noted, the object of ecocritical
study is most often literary nonfiction in the nature writing tradition (see Head and
Phillips). If ecocritics are interested in literature where nature is the explicit focus,
this orientation isn't hard to explain. As Rebecca Raglon and Marion Scholtmeijer
point out, "The genre of nature writing has tended to show nature eluding human
control by minimizing the human presence and focusing attention on the nonhuman
world" (254). Novels, by contrast, are almost inevitably focused on the actions and
development of human characters. However, as I will discuss, works where nature
or environmental concerns are subordinated to what are seen as more human issues
offer fertile territory for ecocriticism as well, and in fact there are number of good
ecocritical readings of various novels. 2 -

It seems likely that Waterland's lack of ecocritical appeal thus far has more to do
with its postmodern status than with its genre. Ecocriticism has a reputation for
being hostile to postmodern and poststructuralist viewpoints, a reputation that has
developed on many levels - listserv conversations and conference presentations as
well as published work- and is perhaps most thoroughly examined in Dana Phillips'
2003 book The Truth of Ecology. This hostility seems to be rooted, at least for some,
in the perception that postmodern and poststructuralist thought deny the existence
of a material reality outside of language. Literary critic and scientist Katherine
Hayles calls this denial "radical constructivism": the idea that "everything we think
we know, including 'nature; is a construction emerging from historically specific,
discursive, social, and cultural conditions" (47). Needless to say, this reduction of
reality to no more than "a world of words;' as writer Ed Abbey once disdainfully put it,
generates considerable outrage among the ecocritically-minded. However, one could
argue that this outrage is unnecessary, since we can accept the culturally constructed
character of our experience of the world without denying that nature exists. As Neil
Evernden asserts in The Social Creation ofNature, "Inevitably, what we know is largely
our own symbolic representations ... But of that which they purport to represent,
they tell a partial story at best" (130). In fact, my reading of most postmodern and
poststructuralist thinkers suggests that they would agree - including that arch-
deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida.
But, even a constructionist model that acknowledges the existence of material
reality holds disturbing implications for some ecocritics and other environmental
 Green Letters Volume 10

thinkers and writers. Gary Snyder argues that "[c]urrent use of social constructionist
terminology ... is based on the logic of European science and the "enlightenment;':
on the idea of "Nature as a realm of resources that has been handed over to humanity
for its own use;' which he views as "the ultimate commodification of nature" (8).
Critics from Glen Love to Dana Phillips have argued that postmodern thinkers fail to
acknowledge the ways that nature exceeds and resists human control and construction,
both material and discursive.
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

In addition, many constructionist approaches rule out the possibility of a reliable

way to know the nature outside of our social constructions, or at least they don't
concern themselves with it, and environmental thinkers fear the potential relativism
of such a perspective; Michael Soule, one of the editors of Reinventing Nature?, a
collection focusing on the debate around the social construction of nature, describes
this perspective as the position that "all are words (text, narrative); statements are
the only reality; nature itself is inscrutable. Therefore all social theories and isms are
equivalent, and 'life is a struggle for verbal authority"' (quoting Shepard, 148). The
central concern among the more activist environmental thinkers is that this seeming
relativism denies us any consistent grounds for ethical decision-making about human

-
relationships with nonhuman nature and that the constructionist model could even be
used to justify actions that are harmful to the environment; as deep ecologist George
Sessions puts it, the danger is the implication that "human can 'reinvent Nature' (and
'reinvent humans' for that matter) in any way that suits our immediate interests and
desires" (46).
Even among what we might call "pro-nature" postmodern theorists, there is a
tendency to valorize undecidability and open-ended discussion. Take for example
Catriona Sandilands' argument in The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the
Quest for Democracy about the importance of acknowledging the ways nature exceeds
our discursive constructions: "Nature always already defies its construction .... This
very Otherness is what keeps it going and what keeps democratic conversations from
authoritarian closure" (203). By remembering that our representations of nature are
always already misrepresentations, she explains, we can at least move in the direction
of doing justice to its Otherness. While this sense of the ways nature exceeds human
discourse is valuable and certainly has the potential to engender a sense of humility
about human knowledge, and the notion that natural entities should have a voice in
decision-making is a provocative one, a commitment to keeping the conversation
open risks leaving us suspended in conversation and perhaps even provides an excuse
to delay when action is necessary - as when global climate change skeptics kept
insisting on more studies because our knowledge of the problem and its causes was
not complete. As Terry Gifford points out, even when we are asking questions about
nature, we are using provisional assumptions about what it is and how it works in order
to communicate (a point that I don't think Sandilands would contest). But he goes
on to explain that "whether we like it or not we act upon the environment every day"
(32), using those very provisional notions. And faced with pressing environmental
 Karla Armbruster

problems and the responsibility of "considered action;' we sometimes simply have

to choose particular provisional notions of nature and work with them (though that
doesn't mean we can't keep thinking and questioning). 3
But if the ultimate end of ecocriticism is to help solve environmental problems,
perhaps the most important thing it can do is to confront and explore the very aspects
of postmodern literature and poststructuralist thought that most challenge it and
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

stretch its capacities. In recent years, critics such as Dana Phillips and Greg Garrard
have critiqued ecocriticism for its tendency to appeal to the reality of nature as a
source of authority and to prefer traditional nature writing that seems to offer "nature
on tap" over other forms of literature (Phillips 211 ). Even if we agree with Lawrence
Buell, who responded to Phillips' critique in The Future of Environmental Criticism,
that most nature and environmental writing aims for something more complex than
simple mimesis, a postmodern focus on the difficulty of knowing reality and the
many ways that culture influences our ideas and experiences of nature can challenge
ecocriticism to question some of its basic assumptions, including the idea that the
solutions to our environmental problems can be based on unchanging truths or
standards found in nature as well as the notion that literature can give us simple
access to such truths.
In Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard argues that ecocriticism currently gravitates -
toward a poetics of authenticity, which sees "the unmediated encounter with the real
world [as rescuing] the subject from the corrupt modern world of representation
and simulation" (168). As Garrard explains, this poetics of authenticity assumes that
there is a fixed, external standard we ought to try to meet in our interactions with the
environment, even though the science of ecology suggests that natural systems are far
more complex and mutable than we like to think. If, as postmodern thought suggests,
we can never have unmediated encounters or knowledge of nature, we are seriously
hampered in our quest to find this external standard. Instead, Garrard asserts, we
need a "poetics of responsibility" which employs a shifting, pragmatic sense of the
relationship between nature and culture to focus on human actions and their results.
In "Theorizing Ecocriticism;' Serpil Oppermann argues that the ecocritical fear
that social constructivism's focus on language might distract attention away from
solving environmental problems is misguided; instead, he emphasizes, it is precisely
ecocriticism's ability to examine the ways we discursively interpret and construct
nature that enables us to unravel "the deconstructive social and cultural matrices
that make environmental degradation possible" (115). Developing this ecocritical
capacity is one way that ecocriticism could move towards the poetics of responsibility
that Garrard calls for.
Oppermann suggests Water/and as a text ripe for such a postmodern ecocritical
analysis, and I agree. It is precisely Water/and's postmodern character that allows it
to suggest something valuable and interesting about human relationships with the
environment. In its extreme self-consciousness about the constructed nature of all
 Green Letters Volume 10

human narratives and concepts, it takes ecocriticism out of its comfort zone in several
productive ways. First, it complicates and challenges the nature/culture dualism that
structures so much environmental thought, ultimately suggesting that our ideas about
nature often tell us more about ourselves than anything else. In doing so, though, it
does not subsume nature into the realm of culture; instead, Water/and dwells quite
insistently on the ways that reality, including what we tend to think of as the natural
world, makes its presence known in our lives. Its focus, though, is on human stories,
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

human drama and trauma, rather than what Crick calls "natural historY:' and this
orientation challenges ecocriticism's orientation towards texts directly focused on
the nonhuman world and environmental issues. And with its insistence that all our
versions of reality are constructions, it forces us to turn elsewhere than the natural
world for answers to our questions about how to relate to the world around us: in other
words, how to think of and interact with our Others, whether human or nonhuman.
As Kate Soper argues in "Future Culture;' the key to solving ecological problems is
not for humans simply to adopt the right attitudes toward nature, and neither can we
turn to nature as a source of intrinsic value; instead, we need to come to terms with
the human condition. For her, that means seeing ourselves as part of nature but also
as different from the rest of nature in the sense that we have the ability to think about
our actions and take responsibility for the choices that we make.
- From an ecocritical perspective, Water/and takes a similar stance as Garrard
and Soper: it doesn't give us what are supposed to be solid, timeless answers about
what nature is or how we should behave towards it. Instead, it directs us back to
the human condition, questioning the "truth" of stories we use to make sense of the
world, potentially making us more aware of the powerful effects those stories can
have and on our responsibility for those effects. In 2008, with concerns about global
climate change growing by the day, the prospect of water rising to take over the land,
especially in areas near the coast like the Fen country, Water/and and its concerns
appear even more timely than they were twenty-four years ago, when the book was
published. 4 In the end, it exemplifies the model of nature-culture relationship which
Phillips advocates in The Truth of Ecology - one which views culture as "our means
of negotiating our differences from nature and from each other, and not an outright
impediment to our negotiations, about which we can do nothing at all" (224).

Questioning and Complicating the Nature/Culture Divide

While early ecocriticism often assumed the validity of a nature/culture divide, merely
arguing that dominant culture's valuation of culture over nature is misguided, more
recently, a number of thinkers have worked to question and complicate the nature/
culture binary itself. 5 Critics like Soper, Garrard, and Molly Wallace have variously
explained how "the modern notion of an external nature, opposite to culture, and
there for discovery, 'a source of insight and a promise of innocence; has become less
and less useful in the current ecological situation'' (Wallace, quoting Hayles 137).
 Karla Armbruster

However, a radical constructivist view that sees "nature as a lost object, incorporated
entirely int9 culture" (Wallace 146) is not helpful, either, since it ignores nature's
power and agency. As Wallace points out, the development of a theory (or theories)
that can somehow deconstruct the nature/culture binary without reducing one side
to the other is one of the most important challenges facing ecocriticism.
In its postmodern questioning of narrative constructions of reality, Water/and
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

takes on the instability and constructed character of the nature/culture dualism, thus
potentially contributing to the discussion that Wallace indicates ecocriticism needs
to have. Most strikingly, the novel's central analogy between constructing historical
narratives and creating and maintaining the Fen landscape seems to rest on a familiar
opposition between nature and culture, one in which Crick takes the side of culture,
but ultimately, the novel suggests that this opposition is an unstable one.
Like the histories that create meaning out of the nothingness of reality, Crick sees
the ancient draining of the swamps as creating something out of nothing. "For what
is water;' he asks, "which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour
of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?" (13). The water is drained out of the fens
through the rivers Ouse and Leem, which were embanked and fitted with sluices

-
and staunches to control the flow. However, just as chaotic reality resists the orderly
constructions of historical narrative with the knife-blade of the Here and Now, the
water of the fens resists human structure and control. From time to time, the rivers
flood or change their courses, suggesting to Crick that "this natural stuff is always
getting the better of the artificial stuff" (205). In fact, the novel features two major
floods: one in 1874 and one in 1947, which permanently destroys the Atkinson
lock that Crick's father tended. Another way nature defies human management is
through the build-up of silt in the river channels. For Crick, silt comes to symbolize
the tendency of reality to resist forward progress: the solution is to dredge the silt
as it accumulates, the process which Crick compares to the process of constructing
historical narratives: both impose order on the inexorable forces of chaos.
One could read Crick's acknowledgment of the rivers' tendencies to flood or
change course occasionally as a fairly conventional, even environmentalist statement
on the human desire to control and dominate nature - that our control of nature will
always be incomplete, that nature will resist and perhaps even triumph in the end.
But Crick himself is ambivalent. In narrating the story of the original reclamation
of the fenlands, he imagines the perspective ofhis paternal ancestors, "water people"
who lived in relative harmony with their swampy environment by spearing fish and
netting ducks. "Is it desirable, in the first place, that the land should be reclaimed?"
he asks, answering "Not to those who exist by water; not to those who have no need
of firm ground beneath their feet" (10). In the end, though, he does not condemn the
ongoing work of maintaining the drainage system: "it has to be done;' he concludes,
"Because [the silt] won't go away" (246); in fact, he offers the reclamation of land as
a model of a qualified type of progress, explaining that "It's progress if you can stop
 Green Letters Volume 10

the world slipping away;' which is a tacit declaration of his loyalty to or reliance on
that world - a world dependent on humanly created land and stories. Thus, Crick
acknowledges a need for the process of human control and construction of reality and
nature.
And his very definition of humanity rests upon the assumption of an opposition
between nature and culture. At one point, he tells his students, "Children, only
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory
nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the story-telling animal.
Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space,
but the comforting marker buoys and trail-signs of stories" (62-63). In this view,
human culture, characterized by storytelling, escapes or rises above nature and other
animals.
But Crick, and the novel as a whole, rarely leaves a position unquestioned, and
Waterland also deconstructs the nature/culture opposition upon which his sense of
human superiority rests. Silt, seemingly the ultimate force of nature which humans
must battle in the Fens, turns out to have a more complex relationship with human
culture, sometimes even supporting the human goal of creating land out of water; as

-
Crick points out, "it is simultaneously accretion and erosion; neither progress nor
decay.... Just as it raises the land, drives back the sea and allows peat to mature, so
it impedes the flow of rivers, restricts their outfall, renders the newly formed land
constantly liable to flooding and blocks the escape of flood water" (9). Pamela Cooper
has argued that the novel undermines the nature/culture binary in another way as
well, explaining that "The seemingly unmediated and vegetative literalness of nature,
like the facile logic of its metaphorical applications, is compromised by the effective
removal of the ground of the natural-the land-to the floating realms ofhyperreality
and simulation (379).
As George Landow points out, the novel is quite self-reflective about the various
constructions of the natural world which Crick tries out, examining and discarding
"the Neoclassical view of nature that takes it to be divine order, the Romantic one that
takes it to be essentially benign and accommodated to our needs, and the Victorian
one that takes it to be, however hostile or neutral, something we can shape to our
needs and use for the material of a tale of progress" (208). In the end, the complex and
sometimes contradictory concepts involved in Crick's almost obsessive comparisons
between the shaping of reality into stories and the reclamation of land from water
work to highlight the constructed character of our ideas about nature - like Crick,
we tend to use what works in a given situation or argument without undue regard
for consistency. And, self-reflective about this phenomenon as about everything
else, Crick recognizes the human tendency to project our own needs, desires, and
characteristics onto the natural world; when discussing the natural history of the eels
seemingly ever-present in his childhood experience of the Fens, he comments that
"man" has found "in the domain of the eel, in water, not only a means of transport and
 Karla Armbruster

power and a source of food (including eels), but a looking-glass for his curious and
reflective nature" (204).
In this way, Water/and confirms Garrard's argument that "every inflection of Earth
is our inflection, every standard our standard" ( 179). Unlike the postmodern position
most feared by ecocriticism, the novel does not reject the existence of a reality beyond
what we can perceive or express, as I will discuss in the next section. But it does
remind us that our ideas about nature and culture, including the practice of seeing
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

them as two separate realms, are constructions and that we will learn just as much
about ourselves from these looking glasses as we will about the rest of the world.

Learning about Nature and Reality

Despite - or perhaps because of - its postmodern skepticism about the accuracy
of the stories we tell about the world, Water/and is deeply invested in exploring the
relationship between narrative and reality - a relationship that is, of course, also
one of the fundamental concerns of ecocriticism. As Stef Craps points out, despite
Water/and's postmodern "critique of traditional history, [it] does not - as is often
thought to be the case-reflect the extreme relativism and radical skepticism in
relation to the referentiality of language and narrative that are commonly imputed
to post-modernist historiography" (70). While the novel insists on the possibility -
of experiencing and understanding something of the reality that eludes human
construction, it also emphasizes the difficulty and costs of doing so. In the end, it
suggests that we cannot escape reality, experienced primarily through trauma, and in
fact that we must bear witness to it if we are to escape the wounds we all bear from our
pasts and do justice to our relationships with others (including nonhuman others).
One commentary on the ability of humans to know reality is Crick's seeming
digression on the natural history of the eel. Specific, individual eels play an important
role in the novel, making regular appearances in Crick's stories of his youth, when
they often served as food for his family. They also play a role in the developing
relationship between Dick and Mary: it is when Freddie Parr puts an eel down Mary's
knickers that Dick and Mary first notice each other in a sexually charged way, and
Mary feigns a desire for an eel as a pretext for beginning what Crick characterizes as
Dick's "sentimental education" (though Mary and the young Crick are teenage lovers,
she convinces him that "poor Dick" deserves to learn about sex and love as well). In
addition, the eel bears the burden of phallic imagery in Crick's reminiscences, which
betray his anxiety about competing with Dick for Mary's affections when he makes
pointed comparisons between the large, muscular creatures and "the great truncheon
shape" within Dick's swimming trunks (190). It is in the process of telling the story
of the swimming competition among the boys, which Dick wins and which ends
with the eel in Mary's knickers, that Crick breaks away into a chapter titled "About
the Eel:' Here he gives a history of human knowledge about the animal's mysterious
life cycle, which has been marked by error and confusion going back at least to
 Green Letters Folume 10

Aristotle. Although its reproductive organs were finally definitively identified in the
19th century, the mystery of where, geographically, young eels are born remained,
to be solved (but only in part) by Johannes Schmidt, a Danish oceanographer and
ichthyologist, in the early 1920s.
On the surface, Waterland seems to be proposing this information, which
Crick identifies as "natural history;' to illustrate the difficulty of developing reliable
knowledge of nature, a parallel to Crick's difficulties in figuring out how reliably
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

other forms of history cleave to reality. Crick emphasizes the ways in which the eels
exist and reproduce outside the realm of human knowledge or control, pointing out
that "notwithstanding the universal ignorance as to their reproductive processes,
large numbers of young eels continued every spring to mass at the mouths of their
favoured rivers" (198). Even World War I, which interrupted Schmidt's search for
the eels' spawning ground, did not "interrupt the life cycle of the eel" (201), Crick
notes. Critics have read this account of the quest to understand the eel's life cycle
as a comment on one of Crick's preoccupations, "the limits of our power to explain"
( 108) -in this case, to understand and explain the workings of the material world of
nature. The implication, as Daniel Bormann puts it, is "that nature will always exceed

-
scientific inquirY:' On the surface, this sounds like a nice, ecocritically-amenable note
of humility about the bounds of human power and the need to respect the complexity
of nature. But the novel's use of this "natural history" is more complex than that. The
story Crick tells does mark the limits of the human power to understand and explain
the natural world. But it also chronicles the way humans gradually learned more and
more about the eel, through a process of conjecture, investigation, and trial and error.
It is a testament to the way human curiosity, when coupled with persistence, can result
in fairly reliable - though never definitive - knowledge about the world around us.
In many ways, it fits the model that Kathryn Hayles proposes to explain why we
can legitimately consider some descriptions of reality more valid than others while
still acknowledging all as equally constructed. She maintains that we can make
decisions about validity based on constraints: "By ruling out possibilities, constraints
tell us something about reality and not only about ourselves" (52). As an example, she
presents different approaches to explaining the existence of gravity:

For Newton, gravity resulted from the mutual attraction between masses; for
Einstein, from the curvature of space. One might imagine still other kinds of
explanations - for example, a Native American belief that objects fall to earth
because the spirit of Mother Earth calls out to kindred spirits in other bodies.
No matter how gravity is conceived, no viable model could predict that when
someone steps off a cliff on earth, she will remain spontaneously suspended
in midair. Although the constraints that lead to this result are interpreted
differently in different paradigms, they operate universally to eliminate certain
configurations from the realm of possible answers (52)
 Karla Armbruster

While constraints do not allow us to claim to know reality in a definitive way,

they do allow us to say, as Hayles puts it, "This is consistent with our interactions
with the flux [her term for unmediated reality]" (53) and they allow us to test various
representations of reality for consistency. Similarly, Water/and suggests that all our
narratives, including "natural history;' are human creations. However, the story of
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

the eel suggests that some of our narratives, particularly those that remain open to
revision, can gradually achieve some level of reliability, even when we accept that that
cannot provide unmediated access to truths about nature.
But the most sustained exploration of the relationship between narrative and
reality in Water/and occurs through Crick's striking description of reality as the "knife-
blade of the Here and Now;' a feeling in the guts in the face of traumatic experiences.
As Crick explains, in his youth he experiences "a sudden series of encounters with
the Here and Now": Mary's unwanted pregnancy with what the novel suggests is
probably his child; the discovery of Freddie Parr's body floating in the river after
Mary told Dick, who was also in love with her, that Freddie was the father; Mary's
abortion; Dick's own suicide after the young Crick reveals to him the "truth" that the
baby was his (Crick's) and the shameful secret that Dick is the product of incest. 6 In
this formulation, the Here and Now is the "emblematic figure of traumatic intrusion"
(Craps 24) and, at least temporarily, puts the lie to Tom's suspicions that history is a -
myth, a mere human construction, convincing him "that history was no invention but
indeed existed - and [he] had become a part of it" (62).
Never content with one answer or perspective, though, Crick also offers what seems
to be a contradictory definition of reality, one more appropriate for the flat landscape
of the fens: "Reality's not strange, not unexpected. . . . Reality is uneventfulness,
vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens" (40). In this model, nothingness
reigns, and the events of history are motivated by the human desire to make things
happen; history is "the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama" (40).
But, as Craps points out, this second definition of reality is not really opposed to the
first; from the perspective of trauma studies, they are two sides of the same coin.
Significantly, Crick links the knife blade of the Here and Now with "the feeling that all
is nothing" (Swift 270). Tom's father Henry, who fought in World War I and returned
home so traumatized that he was sent to recover in the veterans' convalescent home
where he met Tom's mother, says he remembers "nothing" of his wartime experience
(20). As Craps explains, "Remembering nothing, it turns out, is not a matter of simply
forgetting something that happened in the past and that one fully experienced at
the time, but rather of remembering the occasion of nothing happening: one's
obliviousness to events which one could not grasp or make sense of as they occurred"
(72). For many of the characters who encounter the Here and Now, the experience
remains buried, unspeakable, the source of melancholia and dysfunction. 7 As Craps
notes, Mary rejects storytelling for what she considers "realism" and never speaks of
the botched abortion that leaves her unable to bear children. But decades later, she
 Green Letters Volume 10

succumbs to "a fatal fantasy of plenitude and salvation;' believing that God has given
her the baby she kidnaps from the grocery story (Craps 92).
As Craps explains, in Waterland stories are presented as attempts to domesticate a
terrifying reality experienced as trauma. But stories which are too sure of themselves,
grand narratives like Mary's which purport to provide the complete and true version
of reality, merely cover over its traumatic nature, and Crick understands that such
stories are inadequate and dangerous. In contrast, the metafictional approach of the
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

novel, which allows him to question, deconstruct, juxtapose, and mingle all sorts of
narratives, enacts the difficulty of capturing traumatic reality through "temporal and
narrative breaks [that] indicate [the] failure of language" (Craps 83). In this way,
Crick's narration indicates that what has been witnessed cannot be made whole and
integrated into an authoritative telling (Craps 102).
Like the story of the slow, messy development of scientific understanding about
the life cycle of the eel, Crick's approach to traumatic reality prizes process over
completion, setting aside hope for a final mastery of the truth. Craps draws attention
to Crick's modest definition of progress as simply keeping the world from slipping
away - a provisional process that is always ongoing, never completed: "Progress as

-
conceived by the narrator militates against the organization of the future according to
an immutable plan, prescription or programme which leads us to ignore the reality
before us" (Craps 98). Central to this form of progress is curiosity, which keeps Crick
asking "why" and telling and retelling stories, never satisfied that he has the whole
answer. As Craps explains, this type of

questioning zeal, which continually pushes beyond the boundaries of the status
quo, is hailed as our greatest asset in the search for an ethical way of being in
the world. Always wary of definitive explanations and final solutions, it impels
us to avoid complacency and sensitizes us to an irreducible alterity in perpetual
danger of being repressed from our constructions of reality. ( 103)

Taking Responsibility for Brothers and Others

As I have mentioned, one of the most pressing concerns within ecocriticism about
postmodern thought is the challenge it seems to pose for finding grounds for ethical
decision-making about human relationships to the natural world. Given Waterland's
stance on reality - that it is quite difficult to disentangle knowledge about "nature"
from knowledge of human "culture" and that doing justice to our encounters with
reality requires curiosity, ongoing effort, and an acknowledgment of the limits of
language - my ultimate question is whether the novel provides any insight into this
question of ethical grounds.
As Garrard emphasizes, an approach to the environment which prioritizes taking
responsibility for our impact will "focus not on what humans are, how we can be
more natural, primal, or authentic, but on what we do" (72). Both Craps' analysis and
 Karla Armbruster

Sandilands' book, which also explores the traumatic nature of encounters with the
real, hold up the ideal of somehow acknowledging the impossibility of capturing the
real in language. Both argue for an open-ended approach to narrative and discourse
that never claims completion or authenticity. They frame this process of continuous
questioning and conversation as leaving room for alterity and the voice of the Other.
Leaving room for the perspective of the Other is surely the first step, or at least a
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

step, towards a poetics of responsibility. Water/and not only takes this step, as I will
explain, but goes one step further by demonstrating both the difficulty of remaining
open to the perspective of the other in the face of one's own traumatic past and the
importance of somehow shaking off the hold of that past in order to take responsibility
for the effect of one's actions - and stories - on the Other.
Within the world of Water/and, Crick's representation of his older brother, Dick,
provides a fascinating study of the construction of the "natural" Other and of the
issues of human responsibility that such a construction brings into play. Dick, it turns
out, is really Crick's half- brother, the son of both the boys' mother, Helen, and her
own father, Ernest Atkinson. Crick presents Dick as the living symbol of the end of
the Atkinson dynasty, a knot tying up "the thread that runs into the future" (228).
The Atkinsons have figured in the novel as the embodiment of progress and
civilization, "making history" ( 17) by draining the marshes and prospering in the -
business of beer brewing. With the family business in decline, Ernest unsuccessfully
runs for a seat in parliament, loses his wife to a severe asthmatic complaint, and then
loses the brewery altogether in a fire. In 1915, he becomes a recluse in despair at the
state of the world. Gradually becoming entranced with his daughter Helen's beauty
as she grows up, he decides that "only from out of this beauty will come a Savior of
the world" (220). (It is just this desire for miraculous, complete salvation that the
novel critiques as covering over the symptoms of encounters with a traumatic reality,
according to Craps.) Though Helen resists, apparently she gives in to her father's
wishes, conceiving Dick from their incestuous union shortly before she marries Henry
Crick (perhaps to appease her guilt at leaving her father for Henry, Crick suggests).
Both brothers grow up believing Henry is Dick's father - until Helen dies and leaves
Dick a letter from Ernest explaining their relationship, a letter that the young Crick
reads and then summarizes for the illiterate Dick.
During the same conversation, Crick claims fatherhood of the baby that Mary
aborted, a baby that he knows Dick wanted and believed to be his own. In one stroke,
Crick denies Dick the only father he has ever known and the baby he thought he
had fathered. The adult Crick, telling us this story, does not explicitly reveal his
motivations; Dick seems to ask him to read the letter, and the young Crick presents
the information about the baby as a correction of the lie he told earlier, when he
told Dick that the fetus was his own (Dick's) baby. But there is evidence that Crick
harbored some jealousy of his older brother when they were boys; already Mary's
lover, he is hurt and surprised at her sexual curiosity about Dick, and he is clearly
 Green Letters Volume 10

insecure about what he represents as Dick's fantastic phallic proportions. When their
mother is dying, Crick is also jealous that her last act is to ask for Dick and give him
the key to a chest left for him by his grandfather/father, Ernest Atkinson.
Whatever the young Crick's motivations are in telling Dick what he does, the results
are real and devastating, and their importance is highlighted by their position in the
last chapter of the book: Dick takes off on his motorcycle and then absconds with the
Rosa II, the dredger that he works on. In explaining what has happened, Crick tells
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

his father that Dick killed Freddie Parr, something he believes but that Dick never
directly admits. Henry Crick blurts this allegation out to the army officers who are
trying to help him and Tom catch up to Dick. With police sirens wailing and Henry
Crick calling out "Dick, it's all right! Dick. I'll be your father .. :' (356), Dick dives
into the river and never comes up - clearly a suicide, given his talents as a swimmer.
The traumatic nature of this even for Crick is signaled by both its positioning at the
very end of the narrative-the kernel of experience he has been circling around and
working back to throughout the rest of the book - and his self-confessed inability to
remember whether or not he shouted out "Dick- don't do it!" before Dick jumped
(356).

-
In many ways, Dick comes to represent otherness, particularly the otherness of
nature, in Waterland. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Crick most often
describes Dick in ways that relegate him to the category of the less-than-human- a
"botched conflation of vegetable and animal forms;' as Pamela Cooper puts it (381).
Due to his associations with water and skill at swimming, he is also often read by critics
as a throwback to the "water people" who populated the area before the Atkinsons and
Progress arrived on the scene. He repeats the past in other ways as well: our final
image of him diving into the water and disappearing echoes a rumor about one of his
ancestors, Sarah Atkinson, who was said to have dived "'like a very mermaid' beneath
the water never to surface again" (104). The lack of curiosity which Crick attributes
to Dick also affiliates him with the past, with the forces that "want to go back;' since
curiosity is what makes things happen and move into the future, in Crick's view.
Strikingly, the narrative is almost completely dominated by Crick's voice, and his
self-conscious questioning of the reliability of memory undermines our sense of the
accuracy of the few direct quotes he includes from Dick. Critics have argued that
Dick's relative silence links him to the forces of nature and reality outside human
constructions, and it is by keeping Dick quiet that Crick is able to represent Dick the
way that he does - as someone with "no mind of his own" who merely performs
life's basic functions in a mechanical routine, who possesses no curiosity (a quality
that Crick asserts distinguishes humans from animals) and exemplifies the natural
forces that want to go back rather than forward. By relegating Dick to the realm of
nature, Crick builds the foundation for his final, naturalized image of Dick diving
into the river: "an expert on diving might have judged that here indeed was a natural,
here indeed was a fish of a man .... He's on his way. Obeying instinct. Returning.
 Karla Armbruster

The Ouse flows to the sea... " (357). By equating Dick not only with his ancestor
Sarah Atkinson but with the eels who return to their birthplace in the sea as part of
a seemingly eternal cycle of reproduction, Crick neatly provides an alibi for his own
responsibility for the tragedy.
Margaret Champion makes the case that Dick's presence functions as a "mysterious,
irrational [force, representing what exists] outside the common bounds of knowledge
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

. . . and overwhelming the narration with the radical strangeness of the nonnarrated"
(41). In fact, it is the fractured and self-reflective nature of Crick's narrative that leaves
space for this radical strangeness to seep in: contradictions in his representation
of Dick open the possibility of other ways of seeing Dick, reminding us that Dick's
own voice and perspective are inevitably silenced and covered over by Crick's and
challenging Crick's naturalized representation of him. Crick himself experiences
moments of self-consciousness and doubt about his ability to know what Dick is
thinking or feeling, especially when he is relating his efforts to figure out whether or
not Dick killed Freddie Parr. And Crick's efforts to associate Dick with the natural
are constantly undermined by what we learn about his "way with machines;' a talent
that Crick describes as "less a skill than a sort of kinship" (37). When he leaves school
due to his inability to learn to read, he goes to work on the Rosa II and demonstrates
"a natural instinct for the principles of dredging" and even appears to enjoy the hard, -
dirty, strenuous work (347). While Crick's descriptions naturalize Dick's affinity for
and skill with machines, it is still striking that Dick's occupation is nothing less than
the control of nature, the process seen as the foundation of civilization and culture.
He smells not just of silt, but of motor oil, another way the novel challenges the
assumption of a neat nature/culture dualism (39).
Dick's behavior toward Mary also refuses to conform to Crick's dominant
representations of him. The look he gives Mary after Freddie puts the eel in her
knickers, Crick remembers, is "a long and searching look you wouldn't expect from
a potato-head;' a look indicating the curiosity that Crick asserts separates humans
from animals and elsewhere denies to his brother (207). And Dick's love for Mary
and desire for a baby belies Cricks' characterization of him as a knot tying up his
family's progress into the future or a force that wants to go back. He wants to extend
his lineage into the future, although he never understands how children are created,
thinking love alone is enough. Even Crick admits to sometimes wondering if his
characterizations of Dick are accurate, conceding (temporarily) that "Even a potato-
head must sometimes wonder and think" (243).
Crick attributes a great deal of what happened to Mary, Dick and himself in
their youth to curiosity: youthful curiosity about sex, his own curiosity to know the
contents of Dick's letter from his supposed grandfather, and so on. In the novel as a
whole, Crick holds out curiosity as a generally positive mode of interaction, claiming
that it's what "weds us to the world;' that it is a form of love. He presents it as a
complex and unpredictable force that shakes up the uneventfulness of existence, for
 Green Letters Volume 10

good or ill, and that spurs us to ask "Why?" and make sense of the events of our lives
through narrative. In his view, it is the only alternative to drunkenness or madness,
the only way to engage with the world rather than retreat from it, despite the terrible
consequences it can produce.
But the novel as a whole provides a further commentary on the responsibility
that comes with human curiosity. By describing Dick in his final moment as an eel,
Crick's narrative works to present the suicide as something natural, even triumphant
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

and fitting. But Dick literally jumps out of the narrative that Crick has created to
contain him, leaving a conspicuous absence in the novel's final paragraph, which veers
away from the naturalized image that Crick works to create by briefly describing the
hopeless attempt to find Dick and rescue him. We are left with the words of Dick's
boss from the dredger, "'Someone best explain;" and an image: "On the bank in the
thickening dusk, in the will-o' -the-wisp dusk, abandoned but vigilant, a motor-cycle"
(358). The words, coming at the end of this complex and overwhelming narrative,
emphasize the insufficiency of language to capture reality at the same time that they
insist on the human need to try. This motorcycle, a machine representing all the
aspects of Dick that did not conform to Crick's characterization of him as backwards,

-
animalistic, and primitive, also reminds us of the ways the Otherness of the world
will evade our constructions and of Dick's very real absence - the material result of
certain narratives, certain versions of reality. Thus, the novel suggests that our stories
have real physical and psychological consequences and that all stories are not equal.

Conclusion
In the end, what does Waterland offer ecocriticism? As Garrard points out, agreeing
with ecocritic Jonathan Bate, "poets are not the engineers of the world, and ... literature
cannot provide specific solutions" to environmental problems {176). Despite the
specter it provides of water taking over the land, this postmodern novel will not tell
us exactly how to respond to global climate change. In contrast with the dominant
ecocritical vision of postmodernism, it acknowledges the existence and power of
external reality - nature, if you will. However, it denies us the alibi of an external
standard for decision-making and behavior. Instead, it leaves us with a sense of the
provisional yet crucial nature of narratives - of their power to affect human behavior
and material circumstances and of the resulting need for us, as human beings, to take
responsibility for the stories we believe, tell, and participate in.
As I have discussed, one of the major roles that stories play in Waterland is to help
make sense of the world and "domesticate" a potentially traumatic reality. As Crick's
own storytelling process reveals, we can also use them to bear witness to the ways this
traumatic reality has wounded us; it is only through Crick's process of revisiting his
own traumas and constructing a fractured, nonlinear narrative that simultaneously
works towards grasping those traumas and doing justice to the ways they cannot be
captured in language (a process that Craps details convincingly in his book) that he
 Karla Armbruster

gradually becomes capable of moving his focus away from his own psychic wounds
and towards his responsibilities to others - Dick, Mary, even his dog, whom he kicks
viciously in the process of taking the kidnapped baby from Mary. This movement is
quite gradual; for example, when he relates the incident in which he kicks the dog, he
refers to himself in the third person (as he typically does when describing a traumatic
event, whether he is the victim of the trauma, the perpetrator, or both, as is often the
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

case). After this passage, he refers to the dog only one more time, but at this point
in the narrative he takes incrementally more responsibility for his actions. He still
describes himself in the third person but acknowledges the repercussions of his deed,
describing the way the dog "shrinks away from him ... a vet's wire brace only recently
removed from its lower jaw;' then squarely focusing on his relationship with the dog,
"An injured retriever, with which amicable relations have to be re-established slowly,
tentatively, never quite completely" (331). In a similar way, as Crick tells and retells
the stories of his deepest traumas from different angles, he slowly becomes able to
think about and acknowledge the effects of his own actions and choices on others.
In this way, Water/and demonstrates that we must confront what we tend to consider
our own human issues in order to be able to open ourselves to otherness, whatever
its form.
In addition to demonstrating the way a postmodern narrative can help
acknowledge and cope with the often traumatic nature of reality, Water/and also -
reminds us that stories are not a purely human province. While the novel repeatedly
frustrates any attempt to find truths about the natural world or solid grounds for
ethical decision-making, it holds out the process of creating narrative, a process
fueled by curiosity, as itself a potentially ethical relation to the world, provided it
is a process that simultaneously remains open-ended but that also moves in the
direction of taking responsibility for its results. But while we as humans may most
productively concentrate on the aspects of the stories that we construct, Water/and,
with its complicated vision of the nature/culture relationship, also reminds us that
we cannot neatly categorize the forces at work in constructing those narratives. As in
the novel's final image of the motorcycle overlooking the river, we are always left with
nature and culture. As environmental historian William Cronon puts it in "A Place
for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative" (an article that begins, not coincidentally,
with an epigraph from Water/and),

Nature is unlike most other historical subjects in lacking a clear voice of its
own .... Still, nature is hardly silent. No matter what people do, their actions
have real consequences in nature, just as natural events have real consequences
for people. In narrating those consequences, we inevitably interpret their
meaning according to human values - but the consequences themselves are
as much nature's choice as our own. To just that extent, nature coauthors our
stories. (1373)
 Green Letters Volume 10

Karla Armbruster is associate professor in the English Department at Webster

University in St. Louis, where she teaches American literature, professional writing, and
environmental studies. With Kathleen R. Wallace, she is the editor of Beyond Nature
Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (University Press of Virginia, 2001).
Her current project is a book manuscript tentatively entitled "Walking With Wildness:
Dogs and What They Can Teach Us about Living on an Endangered Earth."
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

NOTES

1 In Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation, Stef
Craps indicates that critical examination of Water/and as historiographic metafiction
has more recently given way to a body of criticism growing out of trauma studies.
2 See, for example, Richard Kerridge's "Ecological Hardy" and Faulkner and the
Ecology of the South (ed. Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie, Jackson: UP of Mississippi,
2005).
3 Not all ecocritics share these concerns; in fact, some have found aspects of

-
postmodern and poststructuralist thought compatible with ecocritical ends. For
example, Head points out that the "postmodernist deprivileging of the human
subject" can be seen as consistent with the ecocritical interest in the nonhuman (235).
Rebecca Raglon and Marion Scholtmeijer have argued that "the best writing about
nature builds into its narrative allusions to nature's resistance" to construction by
human language, and it seems that the more self-conscious and experimental form of
the postmodern novel could be particularly amenable to such allusions (252). In his
analysis of Water/and, McKinney credits postmodernism with highlighting the local
character of all knowledge as well as for breaking down the barriers between science
and the humanities, both developments potentially supportive of ecocritical aims.
4 Thanks to Richard Kerridge for this insight.
5 I have worked toward this end in several essays ("Buffalo Gals" and "Good Dog;'
for example), and Dana Phillips, Greg Garrard, and Serpil Oppermann all include a
critique of the reliance on a nature/ culture dualism in their discussions of ecocriticism.
Outside the field, one of the more prominent examples include Donna Haraway's
concepts of the cyborg, natureculture, and companion species, which all begin with
the ways those two categories are inextricably interrelated.
6 This brief listing of events attests to the way the novel carries traditional narrative
codes to an extreme, which Craps argues is one of its strategies for subverting the
realist project by pointing to the radical absence of meaning in realist narratives (78).
7 See Wheeler.
 Karla Armbruster

REFERENCES

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Bormann, Daniel Candel. "Transgression and Stability in Graham Swift's Water/and."
Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikenistik 48.4 (2000): 354-63.
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and the
Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Champion, Margret Gunnarsdottir. "Cracked Voices: Identification and Ideology in
Graham Swift's Water/and." Critique 45.1 (Fall2003): 34-43.
Cooper, Pamela. "Imperial Topographies: The Spaces of History in Water/and."
Modern Fiction Studies 42.2 (1996): 371-396.
Craps, Stef. Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to
Salvation. Sussex Academic Press: 2005.
Cronon, William. "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative:' Journal of
American History 78.4 (March 1992): 1347-1376

-
Evernden, Neil. The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Gorra, Michael. "Silt and Sluices:' The Nation. March 31, 1984,392-4.
Hayles, N. Katherine. "Searching for Common Ground:' Reinventing Nature?:
Responses to Postmodern Deconstructionism. Ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease.
Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995. 47-63.
Head, Dominic. "Ecocriticism and the Novel." The Green Studies Reader: From
Romanticism to Ecocriticism. Ed. Laurence Coupe. London: Routledge, 2000.
235-241.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. NY and
London: Routledge, 1998.
Kerridge, Richard. "Ecological HardY:' Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the
Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace.
Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001. 126-142.
Landow, George P. "History, His Story, and Stories in Graham Swift's Water/and."
Studies in the Literary Imagination 23 (1990): 197-211.
McKinney, Ronald H. "The Greening of Postmodernism: Graham Swift's Water/and."
New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 28.4 (Autumn 1997):
821-32.
Oppermann, Serpil. "Theorizing Ecocriticism:' ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment 13.2 (Summer 2006): 103-128.
Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. New
 Green Letters 'Volume 10

York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Raglon, Rebecca,and Marion Scholtmeijer. "Nature's Resistance to Narrative:' Beyond
Nature Writing: Exapnding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla Armbruster and
Kathleen R. Wallace. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001, 248-262.
Sandilands, Catriona. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for
Democracy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.
Soper, Kate. "Future Culture: Realism, Humanism, and the Politics of Nature." Radical
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:23 11 December 2014

Philosophy 102 (July/August 2000): 17-26.

Soule, Michael E. and Gary Lease, eds. Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern
Deconstructionism. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995.
Swift, Graham. Water/and. 1983. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Wallace, Molly. "'A Bizarre Ecology': The Nature of Denatured Nature:' ISLE:
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 7.2 (Summer 2000): 137-153.
Wheeler, Wendy. A New Modernity? Change in Science, Literature, and Politics.
London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999.