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The Specters of the Unspoken Past – Trauma in Graham Swift’s Wish You
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 The Specters of the Unspoken Past:
Trauma in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here

Petr Chalupský
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

Abstract
Graham Swift’s ninth novel, Wish You Were Here (2011), assumes a specific position
in the body of its author’s work. After Tomorrow (2007), in Wish You Were Here Swift
reverts to the tradition of his earlier works, which all revolve around his idiosyncratic
themes and motifs, such as personal and collective history, the relationship between the
past and the present, loss, recovery and confession, coming to terms with a troublesome
past and the role of memory in this process, the relationship between reality, history,
and fiction, the importance of telling stories, and the significance, but also inherent
fragility, of intimate human relationships. The central device that most often triggers
the exploration and contemplation of these thematic concerns is a traumatic experience
in the past which the protagonist gradually strives to disclose and, by transforming
it into a narrative, is able to cast some light on what may appear as unforeseen or
unreasonable acts. Focusing on the treatment of trauma and its symptoms in Wish You
Were Here, this article attempts to show how the novel both relates to Swift’s preceding
works and addresses this theme in a distinct manner.

Keywords
Graham Swift; Wish You Were Here; trauma; memory; English literature

Graham Swift (b. 1949) is one of the most distinctive British writers
of the strong post-World War II generation whose novels are known for
their essentially pessimistic and gloomy tone and atmosphere in which
despair, frustration, anxiety, sorrow, and hopelessness are the feelings their
protagonists experience and struggle to cope with. Therefore, in terms of
the human condition his fictional world, which is set in the present time
though always crucially affected by past acts and events, invokes what
Peter Widdowson calls a “postmodern wasteland.”1 But Swift can hardly
be considered a purely postmodernist writer as his novels combine various
playful and self-reflexive devices typical of postmodernism, especially the
mixing of genres, intertextuality, and metafiction, with narrative elements
of the realist tradition. This realist framework of a seamless and inevitable
history, however, is undermined and counterpointed by far less satisfactory
and more skeptical “his-stories,” the disparate, subjective, and therefore
always rather untrustworthy versions of what their creators believe, or wish
to believe, has happened but which, nevertheless, they strive to present as

1. Peter Widdowson, Graham Swift (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006), 108.

Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 7, nos. 1–2 (2016): 5–22. ISSN 1803-7720.
6 Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

coherent and faithful representations of reality. Swift’s favorite and recurrent

themes can also be traced in his contemporaries’ writings, namely: the
interconnectedness between personal and collective history; the relationship
between the past and the present; loss and recovery; guilt, confession, and the
(im)possibility of redemption; coming to terms with a troublesome past; the
role of memory in this process; the relationship between reality, history, and
fiction; the importance of telling stories, and the significance, but, at the same
time, the inherent fragility of familial and intimate human relationships.
But there are also certain idiosyncratic features of Swift’s novels that
distinguish them from those by his contemporaries. Prominent among these
is the first-person male narrative voice which dominates all his critically
regarded novels. This narrative voice is to a large extent a melancholic one, as
the narrator’s story abounds with good reasons for grieving, such as untimely
deaths, suicides, incest, abortions, insanity, fatal diseases, physical injuries,
and murders. As a result, these narrators are different types of mourners,
albeit ones who tend to incline to a pathological, incomplete form of mourning
where the lost object is not safely locked in the memory and intrudes into the
mourner’s real life.
Swift’s novels also emphasize the crucial bond between mourning and
telling stories—his narrators transform their lonely and isolated suffering
and bereavement into a shared act of storytelling. Their narratives are
at least in part confessional, longing for understanding, compassion, or
forgiveness, and calling for cooperative listeners and interpreters. However,
in reality this desire is an illusion as the reader gradually learns that some
of the most substantial parts of these stories will be told aloud only as long
as there is no real audience to hear them. This fact is driven by the need
to confess one’s faults and subject oneself to impartial judgement, while,
simultaneously, aiming, in Bożena Kucała’s words, “to comfort oneself by
constructing an acceptable version of one’s past”2 over which strict control
can be retained. Therefore, the nature and validity of their confession is called
into question since deception and self-deception inevitably come into play as
the narrators are telling their stories primarily for themselves. The charm
of Swift’s works, then, rests in his readers’ participation in his quest for the
naked truth, in the gradual disclosure of what Adrian Poole characterizes as
a “buried story, the re-membering of its mutilated and dispersed fragments,
until an apparently whole little body of knowledge has been composed.”3 It
is the alluring perspective of the detached onlooker of the narrator’s self-
torturing exposure that attracts Swift’s readers and rewards them for their
patience with his slow and reluctant laying bare.

2. Bożena Kucała, “Unspoken Dialogues and Non-listening Listeners in Graham Swift’s

Fiction,” Brno Studies in English 41, no. 1 (2015): 127.
3. Adrian Poole, “Graham Swift and the Mourning After,” in An Introduction to Contemporary
Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, ed. Rod Mengham (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1999), 164.
 Petr Chalupský 7

Wish You Were Here (2011) assumes a specific position in the body of its
author’s work. After the “excursive” novel Tomorrow (2007), in Wish You Were
Here Swift reverts thematically to the tradition of his earlier works. Despite
the symptomatic focus on the interconnectedness of personal and collective
history, which here spans not only the past but also the present, especially
the War on Terror, but also, as Kucała notes, the “contemporary process of
the general, rapid decline of rural life”4 in Britain, the central device that
triggers the exploration and contemplation of these thematic concerns is
an individual’s bygone traumatic experience which the narration gradually
struggles to reveal. By doing so, it casts some light on what may appear as
unforeseen or unreasonable acts performed by its protagonist. Focusing on
the treatment and role of trauma in Wish You Were Here, this article tries to
show, on the one hand, how the novel relates to Swift’s earlier works, and, on
the other, how it manages to address this theme in a new, distinct manner.

Trauma and Fiction, or Trauma Fiction

As Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega state in the introduction to their
edited volume Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction, since
the 1980s there has been a revival of interest in ethical issues in literature
as a reaction “against the skepticism and relativism propounded by some
extreme postmodernist thinkers and certain uses of deconstruction.”5 The
1980 inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder, with its diverse symptoms,
in the medical diagnostic canon6 has been an increasingly popular thematic
concern of many writers, giving rise to a separate genre of “trauma fiction.”
The ordinary response to an atrocious experience is to displace it from one’s
consciousness. “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to
utter aloud. . . . The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and
the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological
trauma.”7 Trauma is thus a wound to the mind inflicted by living through an
immensely disagreeable, shocking, or catastrophic event which is experienced
so suddenly and unexpectedly that it proves too overwhelming and intense
to be fully known and grasped when it happens. This event is not evinced as
traumatic—the traumatic memory is somehow preserved in the past—until it
returns later, as a delayed response, in the form of recurring and uncontrolled
intrusive phenomena such as flashbacks, nightmares, and hallucinations.
The unbearable immediacy of such experience forces the traumatized person

4. Bożena Kucała, “The Demise of Rural Life in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here,” American
and British Studies Annual 5 (2012): 50.
5. Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, introduction to Ethics and Trauma in
Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2011), 7.
6. See Ganteau and Onega, introduction, 12.
7. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse
to Political Terror, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 1.
8 Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

to relive it, which necessarily entails a disruption of linear temporality as

the past event is perceived, though still incomprehensible, as if it were
occurring in the present. In Letissier’s words, trauma “is not locatable as
a single, healable event”8 in an individual’s past, but, on the contrary, as
Caruth claims, stems from “the missing of this experience,” from “not being
experienced in time.”9 The traumatized person is trapped in a perpetual,
devastating switching between the agonizing nature of the original event
and the unbearable consequences of its survival. The belatedness of the re-
experiencing of the original event thus makes trauma not only a psychological
but also a sociocultural phenomenon.
Given the character of trauma, comprehending the traumatic experience
proves absolutely vital for the restoration of the survivor’s mental well-being.
A crucial role in this effort is played by language, or, more precisely, as Nagy
notes, by the ability to acquire language to verbalize this experience,10 which,
above all, requires careful and lengthy incorporation and a chronological
arrangement of the fragmentary contents of the intrusive psychic phenomena
into a valid account of the onerous past. To tell one’s personal story means to
come to know it, and, as Hartman observes, “a failure of language, resulting in
silence or mutism” means that “no working through, no catharsis, is possible”11
for the traumatized. As Dori Laub aptly wrote, “[t]he longer the story remains
untold the more distorted it becomes in the survivor’s conception of it.”12 The
narrative aspect and potential of trauma that make it attractive and inspiring
for writers were already noted by the founding fathers of trauma diagnosis
and psychoanalytic therapy: Carl Gustav Jung observes that every patient
“has a secret story no one knows of” and that “therapy only really begins after
the investigation of that wholly personal story.”13 As Cathy Caruth points
out, Sigmund Freud “turns to literature to describe traumatic experience”
because, like psychoanalysis, it is “interested in the complex relation between
knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and
not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic
theory of traumatic experience precisely meet.”14 Therefore, it is only a step
from trauma to its literary representation, whose importance rests in its

8. Georges Letissier, “‘The Eternal Loop of Self-Torture’: Ethics and Trauma in Ian McEwan’s
Atonement,” in Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Susana Onega and
Jean-Michel Ganteau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 211.
9. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996), 62. Italics in the original.
10. See Ladislav Nagy, In memoriam: Dějiny a paměť v současné britské próze (Prague: Academia,
2015), 191.
11. Geoffrey Hartman, “Trauma within the Limits of Literature,” European Journal of English
Studies 7, no. 3 (2003): 258.
12. Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Trauma: Explorations
in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 64.
13. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard Winston and
Clara Winston (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 117.
14. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3.
 Petr Chalupský 9

capacity to depict minutely, or even anatomize, the process of retelling the

traumatic experience and suppressed personal history and, by doing so,
respond to the question of what it takes to survive it.
According to Ganteau and Onega, trauma fiction, which often has a
testimonial character, tries to cope with the indescribability of a traumatic
experience—which shatters the very essence of one’s identity, destabilizes one’s
notion of oneself, and undermines accepted certainties—and creatively capture
the paradox according to which trauma and testimony are known/expressed
in the very impossibility of knowing/expressing themselves totally.15 Anne
Whitehead points out that this necessitates the employment of specific literary
techniques and strategies that reflect the workings of a wounded psyche as
“the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its
forms and symptoms”16 and Laurie Vickroy adds in this context that trauma
fiction exposes its readers to “a variety of voices, subject positionings, and
symbolizing that highlight the chaotic and disorienting aspects as well as
representational possibilities or approximations,” but also to “visual images and
affective states”17 rather than the rational. David Malcolm then sums it up when
he claims that such works share certain characteristic features that accompany
the protagonist’s struggle to verbalize the burdensome experience, such as the
temporal and narrative cyclicality of repetitive acts and thoughts and mixing
up the present and the past, as well as the real and the imagined or dreamt,
and so “[b]reaches in linear narrative and multiple points of view emphasize
the textual nature of the account and the partiality of the narrator’s version
of things.”18 As the protagonist is compelled to return again and again into
the past, the narration gradually loses any direct course towards a satisfactory,
progressive resolution and, instead, tends to regress to pathological inactivity
and obsession with non-being. This corresponds with Caruth’s opinion that
“traumatic disorder is indeed the apparent struggle to die,”19 which also involves
instances of what Vickroy calls “subjective death,” such as the loss of a beloved
person, emotional paralysis, a damaged identity, and self-perception.20
However, as trauma theory invites an interdisciplinary approach, ranging
from psychology, psychiatry, and sociology to philosophy, art, and cultural
criticism, the value of trauma fiction does not only lie, in Gerd Bayer’s
words, in raising traumatic events “from their repressed unspeakability,”21

15. See Ganteau and Onega, introduction, 19.

16. Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 3.
17. Laurie Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2002), 27, 29.
18. David Malcolm, Understanding Graham Swift (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
2003), 16–17.
19. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 63.
20. Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, 223.
21. Gerd Bayer, “World War II Fiction and the Ethics of Trauma,” in Ethics and Trauma in
Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2011), 157.
10 Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

bringing to light previously taboo topics, giving readers the chance to face
their own fears and worries through following other people’s tragic stories,
and by appealing to their empathy helping them to “discover their own
sympathetic imaginings of humanity in extremis.”22 What is equally or
even more important is its ethical dimension: by presenting readers with
unresolved dilemmas from the past, trauma fiction forces them to assume
a personal stance and confront their own moral values.

Trauma in Graham Swift’s Novels

One of the constituent aspects of trauma fiction is the attempt to narratively
bridge the unsurmountable otherness of the other, to make readers empathize
with the ultimately unshareable experience of another person. This complies
perfectly with what Swift identifies as the fundamental, yet also the most
difficult task of literature, that is, “to enable us to enter, imaginatively,
experiences other than our own.”23 It is precisely in this exercising of empathy
and compassion through an exploration of others’ mental states, processes,
and perceptions of reality that he sees the moral function of his writing.
Nowhere else is this task more challenging than in presenting characters
in extreme life situations, exposed to exceptionally intense and unsettling
psychic and moral pressures and demands.
Traumatic experiences of various kinds are at the core of Swift’s novels,
which is why they are, according to their author, simultaneously “domestic
and undomestic, rooted and uprooted.”24 The stories in the novels revolve
around the theme and motif of the protagonist’s devastating loss and his/her
consequent bereavement. This loss can be either abrupt, for example the
death or disappearance of a person one is close to, or gradual, such as
insanity, emotional estrangement, doubts, or uncertainty about faith and
identity. The reader meets the narrator in a paradoxical situation—trying
to account for the acute crisis in which he/she finds him/herself, while,
simultaneously, disguising and concealing its roots. As Stef Craps notices,
the narration is thus overwhelmed by the “insidious hold exerted over the
present by a traumatic past.”25 That is why, regardless of all the means used
to keep the trauma at bay, traumatized people’s narrations eventually betray
them and allow the uncomfortable memories to break through the layers of
(self-)deception and come to the surface.
The plotline in Waterland (1983) is triggered by a number of traumatic
moments that have a crucial impact on the lives of the narrator, Tom Crick,

22. Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, 2.

23. Graham Swift, “Throwing Off Our Inhibitions,” Times, March 5, 1988: 20. Also quoted in
Stef Craps, Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation
(Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 148.
24. “Paperback Q&A: Graham Swift on Wish You Were Here,” Guardian, March 20, 2012,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/20/paperback-q-and-a-graham-swift.
25. Craps, Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift, 2.
 Petr Chalupský 11

and his wife Mary. Apart from young Tom’s conscience-tormenting knowledge
that his mentally deficient half-brother is a murderer, the most significant
of these is the nightmarish experience of the barbarous abortion Mary
undergoes as an adolescent girl at the hands of the local self-proclaimed witch,
which leaves Mary infertile. The adult Tom then has to face up the traumatic
causal consequences of the abortion when his wife, deprived and aggrieved
by her childlessness, loses her mind as a result of a delirious, quasi-religious
impulse and abducts a baby from a local supermarket.
Against the background of the estrangement and laborious reconciliation
of Harry Beech and his daughter Sophie, the story of Out of This World (1988)
gradually reveals how the main characters and narrators are both affected by
certain past events. As an aerial photojournalist, Harry has exposed himself
to countless traumatizing warzone experiences. Additionally, Harry’s wife
and Sophie’s mother dies tragically in an airplane crash when Sophie is only
five years old. Another pivotal event of the novel is the assassination of Harry’s
father in an IRA terrorist attack in 1972, which is all the more devastating for
Sophie not only because she is almost an eyewitness of the accident, but also
because, as a result of Harry’s frequent absences, she has become emotionally
attached to her grandfather as the only true parental authority in the family.
In this light, it is symptomatic that her narrative monologue is addressed to
a psychoanalyst.
Bill Unwin, the narrator of Ever After (1992), recounts all the painful
moments he has experienced during his life. The first is the suicide of his father
when Bill was only nine years old, accompanied later by the information that
he was not his biological father. Bill is telling his story soon after his own
unsuccessful suicide attempt, which he performs after he loses the three most
important people in his life—his mother, his stepfather, and, most importantly,
his beloved wife, a popular actress who kills herself to escape a slow death from
lung cancer. Being childless, Bill feels forlorn and is overwhelmed by mourning
what he perceives as an irreplaceable loss.
Last Orders (1996) does not revolve around coming to terms with the dark
past of one particular person. Instead, it shows how a number of characters
have had to deal with some unpleasant, frustrating, and in the long term
potentially traumatizing occurrences, such as the loss of parents, having a
mentally disabled child, and the abrupt demise of a loved one. In The Light
of the Day (2003), George Webb is a disgraced former policeman who was
dismissed from the force and soon afterwards abandoned by his wife, and thus
he feels aggrieved and frustrated rather than traumatized. The fact that he
seeks redemption in his love for a convicted murderer whose case he worked
on as a private detective makes the story only more intricate.
In his next novel, Tomorrow, Swift digresses from some of the most
characteristic features of his narratives: the narrator is Paula, a woman who
in fact has nothing to mourn for as she is successful, well-off, and leads a
contented family life. The book can be classified as an example of the “novel
of recollections,” in which the narrator is trying to recollect the past, in the
12 Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

process of which some suppressed or displaced memories are disclosed which

show that the narrator’s own image and presentation are considerably tainted
by self-deception and delusion. The novel’s story takes only a few hours
as Paula is lying awake in her bed beside her sleeping husband, thinking
about how tomorrow they are going to tell their sixteen-year-old twins that
they were conceived through artificial insemination. However, unlike more
critically regarded representatives of this genre, John Banville’s The Sea
(2005), Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007), and Julian Barnes’s The Sense
of an Ending (2011), Tomorrow fails to achieve its goal for three major reasons:
the predictability of the fateful secret the twins are to be exposed to; the
certainty with which the narrator presents her recollections as the only
truthful version; and the lack of some hidden past guilt or trauma. It is
especially this absence of the narrator’s haunting past that does not allow
the novel to address its readers as powerfully as Swift’s earlier works.26

The Voices of the Dead and the Silences of the Living: Wish You Were
Here
From this perspective, Wish You Were Here can be seen as Swift’s return
to where he feels most comfortable, as it is his most profound and explicit
attempt so far to explore trauma and its symptoms. It focuses prevailingly
on the characters’ familial histories, even though they are set against the
real historical background of the 1990s and early 2000s, in particular the
impacts of BSE and foot-and-mouth disease, as well as the War on Terror.
It also goes back into the characters’ past in order to reveal and elaborate
on some hidden, secret, and distracting moments and events that have been
disturbing their psyches ever since. However, unlike the previous novels, Wish
You Were Here never abandons this exploration of trauma but gets stuck
inside its intrusive circularity and irrationality until the book’s very ending.
Written, uncharacteristically, in the third person, the narrative allows Swift
to present an in-depth depiction of the traumatized mind without giving the
affected persons much opportunity to gain some control over it and distance
from it by articulating their stories.
Jack Luxton, the protagonist of the novel, is a former Devon farmer who,
following precautions against BSE in the form of incinerating cattle, sells his
farm and, together with his wife Ellie, runs a prosperous seaside caravan park
on the Isle of Wight for over twelve years, taking an all-inclusive holiday in
the Caribbean every winter. However, although his life during these years
appears to be based on a series of logical and well-considered acts and
decisions, the reader soon learns that “Jack can sometimes lose his own

26. For a more detailed elaboration on the defining features of the novel of recollections see my
article “The ‘Novel of Recollections’—Narration as a Means of Coming to Terms with the
Past,” International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 5, no. 2 (2016):
90–96.
 Petr Chalupský 13

logic,”27 and “[l]ots of his decisions were really [Ellie’s]. Maybe most” (WYWH,
77–78). This passivity and inability to make up his mind and act on his own
are the main reasons why Jack often finds himself following a course he does
not mind much, yet actually did not wish for. To understand the true roots of
his latent mental uneasiness the narration has to go back to the crucial losses
Jack experienced within the six years prior to his selling of Jebb Farm—those
of his mother, his younger brother Tom, and his father—which left him alone
on a large farm on the verge of bankruptcy. Under these circumstances, the
always active Ellie persuades him to leave the past behind and start a new
life elsewhere and from scratch.
However, this step is too abrupt and thoroughgoing to give Jack enough
time to cope with how dramatically his life changed over the previous six
years. First, his mother, Vera Luxton, the constituting and stabilizing element
of the family’s emotional and social life, dies of ovarian cancer. Then, on his
eighteenth birthday, Tom flees from the farm at night and joins the army
in order to get away from the authority of his despotic father once and for
all. Eventually, the father cannot take the situation any longer—his cattle
exterminated, his wife dead, himself disgraced before the whole town by his
son’s craven running away from home—and on the night after Remembrance
Day in November 1994, he commits suicide with a shotgun in the Jebb fields,
where Jack finds him a few minutes later.
Although all these losses are painful for Jack, only the last one has all the
defining properties of a traumatic experience, as none of the others was so
sudden and unexpected or visually shocking, and he could, to some extent,
prepare for them mentally: he knew for some time that his mother was dying,
and he knew for some time that Tom was going to leave the farm for the
army. His father’s suicide, on the other hand, seems to have caught him off
guard, which is also reflected in his behavior when he finds the corpse, which
bears striking features of the irrational behavior of a shocked person, such
as checking the almost headless body for a heartbeat. However, the sight
of his dead father’s body does not haunt Jack’s memory. What recurs in his
imagination is the day before, when he and his father went through the family
rituals to honor Remembrance Day, and he is always wondering if his father
would have still been alive had Jack said and done something that in actuality
he did not find the strength to do. When Jack does recollect the suicide scene,
he chiefly recalls his dominant feeling of uncontrollable anger towards his
father, in part blaming him for having been the cause of Tom’s flight, in part
enraged by what he perceives as the failure of a cowardly captain who has
deserted his ship in distress.
What appears to be Jack’s most trauma-generating experience is his
younger brother’s leaving for the army. Although he is proud of himself for
acting like a proper older brother who calmly hears out Tom’s plans and

27. Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here (London: Picador, 2011), 25. Hereafter cited in text as
WYWH.
14 Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

refrains from any judgmental remarks or other affective reactions, in reality

he is seized by anxiety and sorrow far greater than he would ever be willing
to admit, since with Tom going away he is losing much more than a younger
brother. Eight years younger than Jack, Tom was an unplanned child whose
unexpected arrival in the family turned out to be a double blessing for Jack
as he not only took away his burden of being an only child, but also gave
him a chance to prolong his own childhood when he was made responsible
for looking after his brother instead of helping his father with the farm work.
The brothers’ relationship is loving and agreeable—Tom the baby brother and
Jack his protector. As a result, Jack develops a very special feeling towards
Tom, seeing himself as more of a parent to him than a mere brother. His
most cherished childhood memories are of the holidays he spent with their
mother in a caravan park at Brigwell Bay when it “could seem that he and
Mum were a couple and this was their little home and, for this one week at
least, he might be Tom’s dad” (WYWH, 67). From this perspective, Tom’s pre-
announced departure from Jebb Farm may be seen as too hasty and painful
for Jack to come to terms with and therefore, as he knows he may not see his
brother again for years, he decides to delete him from his memory.
This explains the nature of Jack’s reaction to the letter he receives from the
Ministry of Defence announcing that his brother, Corporal Thomas Luxton,
whom he has not seen for almost thirteen years, has been killed “on active
duty” in Basra, Iraq, on November 4, 2006 (WYWH, 78). All of a sudden, the
whole displaced, anxiety-causing event re-emerges in him with the force of a
shockwave, which is all the stronger as Jack realizes that by attending the
repatriation ceremony and arranging his brother’s funeral he will have to
take a tormenting journey back to the land of his past, both physically and
mentally, and confront his most disquieting and hidden fears and memories.
It is only then that the traumatic experience of the bygone losses, activated
through reading the message announcing Tom’s death, comes back to life
again with its devastating consequences.
In the character of Jack Luxton, Swift creates an emblematic portrayal
of a trauma-stricken person who suffers from a destabilized and shattered
personal identity, which, as Vickroy explains, results in a feeling of
“disconnection and isolation” and which, in effect, undermines or even
“destroys important beliefs: in one’s own safety or competence to act or
live in the world, one’s perception of the world as meaningful and orderly,
and one’s view of oneself as decent, strong and autonomous.”28 The letter
revives in Jack the memories of his brother’s and father’s disappearance
from his life and makes him relive the whole event, and yet, symptomatically
and in accordance with what Kaplan notes about traumatic experience, his
traumatized memory, for the sake of his present-day security of not re-
experiencing the fright, loops around the crucial moments by associating itself

28. Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, 23.

 Petr Chalupský 15

with what happened afterwards.29 The fact that these incidents happened too
quickly for Jack to fully know and comprehend them, and that he is actually
missing this experience which did not take place as properly as it should have
at the time, casts doubt not only on the nature of the past and the reliability
of his memory, but also on how he sees himself and his place in the world.
It is as if suddenly the whole of his existence for the past twelve years has
collapsed, all the certainties have been broken and questioned. As a result,
he perceives his life, including his marriage, as futile and meaningless and
he seriously contemplates suicide.
Reaching the point of now being the last of the Luxtons, the news of
Tom’s death revives in Jack the notion of his birthright to “rise to his
place and his task” (WYWH, 22), which is to continue the family farming
tradition kept up by generations of Luxtons for almost four centuries, and
with which he used to identify strongly. He assures himself that his current
self is false, and he strives to rediscover the “second person inside him”
(WYWH, 169), which floods his imagination with waves of nostalgia for the
countryside. However, the awareness of the desolating impossibility of re-
assuming this once abandoned self and the burden of the unresolved past
make Jack hopeless and provoke in him a desire for non-being, a powerful
drive towards death: he wishes to be reunited with his brother, be in his coffin,
to follow his dad’s and Tom’s example. That the idea of killing himself has been
unconsciously present in Jack’s mind is evident from the fact that although he
eventually got rid of all the things from Jebb Farm he retained the shotgun.
Another crucial outcome of Jack’s journey into the past is the revision
of his perception of Tom’s flight from home, this time completed with the
actual hostile feelings and emotions he managed to suppress at the time.
Dominant among them is anger at Tom’s decision to leave him alone with
their embittered father and farm in decline, a sentiment completely unlike
his earlier account of the event, but very similar to what he felt toward
his father after his suicide, calling Tom “the traitor, . . . the deserter, the
runaway. Running away from the war against cow disease and agricultural
ruin. And against his own embattled father” (WYWH, 178–79). That is why
Jack’s position is all the more complicated; not only does he mourn the loss of
a younger brother who was almost like a son to him, but he also has to find
the strength to admit his negative feelings towards Tom and forgive him.
However, the narration gradually reveals that Jack’s anger at his father
and brother is in reality a mere defense mechanism his psyche applies in
order to prevent him from redirecting it against its proper target—himself.
Jack’s memory, and in consequence the narrative, advances in a circular and
spiral manner, regressing to the past and then coming back to the present, as
a result of which it keeps returning to the traumatic events, each time adding
a new bit of previously unmentioned knowledge, allowing him to compose a

29. See E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 26.
16 Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

clearer picture of what actually happened and to develop his understanding of

it. What torments Jack’s mind is his sense of guilt for his brother’s and father’s
deaths in that he remained passive in the fatal late night-time moments when
only his active intervention could have stopped them from their decisions. At
first he recounts how he was lying awake, listening to the sounds his brother
was making while fleeing the farm for the army, unable to do anything else
but cry and whisper into his pillow. But not even this detailed recollection
helps him fend off the compulsion to return to the past, which implies that
a deeper, and more crucial, origin of his trauma must be revealed if he is to
overcome its symptoms, since, in Earnie Larsen’s words, “[t]he depth of the
damage becomes the depth of the spiritual blockage we experience in recovery.
Recovery must go as deep as the blockage the damage has caused.”30 And so
he eventually comes to admit that what he has up to that point believed to be
a dream was reality: he was not awoken by a shot, as he later tells the police,
but heard his father creep out of the house, and he even got up and went to the
window to watch him descend the slope with a gun in his hand, standing there
unable to move, “as if hypnotised” till “the sound of the shot . . . had woken
him, out of all dreams, into truth” (WYWH, 304). This realization thus shows
that the latter incident is far more likely to be at the core of Jack’s trauma
and that he has displaced Tom from his life as he would have reminded him
of his guilt for knowingly letting his father kill himself.
Wish You Were Here does not explore trauma only thematically, but also
through various narrative and stylistic means by which it renders its most
symptomatic manifestations. The first of them is the text’s variety of voices,
or narrative perspectives, from outside which allow the reader to compile a
more complex image of Jack’s personality and situation. The most frequent
of these is that of his wife Ellie. It is through her eyes that the reader learns
about the obscure deal Jack has made with her, namely that if they leave Jebb
he will not want to have children, which he views as a partial atonement for
his guilt at having terminated the family tradition, while in reality at least an
equally significant reason is that he does not want children because he has
already lost one with Tom’s departure. She also shows that she has fatally
misconceived and misinterpreted Tom’s role in her husband’s life: she hopes
for a long time that Jack may break the deal before she realizes that Tom is
the principal obstacle to her having children, yet when she witnesses Jack’s
reactions to the news of Tom’s death, she gradually comes to understand that
the true problem has just begun and will only grow bigger since Jack’s secret
past has caught up with them with frightening intensity, and that Tom “was
coming back to bloody haunt them” (WYWH, 117). Only then does she feel like
crying—not for Tom or Jack, but for herself and the futile sacrifice she has
made for her marriage. That Ellie tends to estimate her husband’s true state
of mind wrongly is also shown in the scene with Major Richards, the army

30. Earnie Larsen, Destination Joy: Moving beyond Fear, Loss, and Trauma in Recovery (Center
City, MN: Hazelden, 2003), 33.
 Petr Chalupský 17

officer in charge of bringing the news of Corporal Luxton’s death to his family.
His position is that of a complete outsider as he sees Jack for the first time in
his life, and yet, thanks to his rich experience of dealing with the bereaved he
can offer a valuable insight into the situation when, much sooner than Ellie,
he notices that deep inside Jack, behind his burly, serene, and almost dull
appearance, something “deep and contained” is going on “that might need its
outburst at some time” (WYWH, 98).
The second manifestation of trauma the novel evokes is the disruption of
linear temporality in favor of the cyclicality of repetitive acts and thoughts.
Although the narration at first tries to present a coherent, overall history of
the Luxton family, through touching upon the truly crucial traumatic moments
and experiences it tends to return to them incessantly, each time with a greater
clarity and precision of new details. Caught in a claustrophobic time loop, with
his memory stuck in the past, Jack re-lives these two events again and again
until they occupy almost all of his waking hours and are eventually perceived
as if they were happening in the present. Swift’s narrative aptly captures
the paradoxical nature of traumatic time when the traumatized person lives
through events of the past which, in effect, do not fill (and fulfill) his present
time but, on the contrary, empty it and deprive it of relevance.
The critical part of Jack’s process of rectifying the past is his need to
talk to Tom, to tell him everything he is not able to confess to anyone else,
including his wife. Such a strong compulsion makes the traumatized mind
imagine the deceased person as if he were still alive. Although Jack knows
that the fact that Tom is dead and cannot come back home is irreversible, for
his mind it is an unsatisfactory and unsustainable one. As a result, the real
and the imagined, daydreamt, or hallucinated become hard, if not impossible,
to distinguish, and the imaginary prevails over the rational and reasonable.
The narration of the novel is thus rich in various visual images Jack “sees”
in his mind; most crucially, the ghost of Tom he encounters repeatedly on his
journey and then back home. The last encounter, when Tom’s ghost “in his
full soldier’s kit” (WYWH, 346) appears to Jack at the front door of Lookout
Cottage, through which Ellie must enter if she is to get home, turns into
a tremendous wrestling scene during which he overpowers a phantom of
the past, and himself in consequence, and by doing so averts an impending
cataclysm. Challenging Jack to kill him first before he turns the shotgun on
Ellie and himself, the specter not only enables the shocked brother to see
“himself in a mirror” (WYWH, 350), thus compelling him to realize that he is in
reality battling with his own self, but also makes him feel a “small, impossible
explosion of joy” (WYWH, 351) that Tom has finally come back home to talk
to him and abandon his former suicidal plans. This brief “reconciliation” with
Tom/himself means that his ghost disappears and so does the most imminent
shadow of Jack’s traumatic past.31

31. At these moments, the haunted Lookout Cottage in fact assumes a cyclical spatiotemporal
arrangement similar to that which Tereza Topolovská describes in her analysis of the poetics
18 Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

In accordance with trauma theory, Swift’s novels dealing with this subject
matter demonstrate the utmost significance of language in the process
of healing the fateful wound, that is, of the survivor’s verbalization of
his/her experience and reconstructing it through putting its heterogeneous
recollected bits into a coherent and temporality-conscious narrative, and Wish
You Were Here is no exception to this rule. However, it does so differently as,
unlike all Swift’s first-person narrators who are telling their story to real or
made-up listeners, Jack is not given such an opportunity, or, more precisely,
he strenuously evades it. Subconsciously following the example of his father
and using the excuse of not being an adept speaker, he always keeps what
troubles him to himself.
The fact that the novel is written in the third person only underscores this
and reflects Jack’s taciturn and withdrawn personality. He is not given his
own voice, since, hidden behind the façade of his unreadable face, his true
feelings, thoughts, and moods remain unspoken. Therefore, rather than what
he actually says or has said the reader learns what he would or should have
said had he had the capacity and/or courage, such as inviting his father for
a pint on Remembrance Day, admitting to Ellie how much he misses Tom,
or responding kindly to her refusal to join him for Tom’s repatriation and
funeral. Although his inability or reluctance to say the proper words often
brings about problems and misfortune, he evasively convinces himself that
the right thing for him to do in most cases is “to shut up or say very little”
(WYWH, 155). His lack of apt words becomes striking when he is to produce a
compact text: he resorts to the “wish you were here” cliché on his postcard to
Ellie, he chooses a card with a ready-made commonplace greeting for Tom’s
eighteenth birthday, he toils over two short letters to Tom with the bad
news from the farm, and he is panic-stricken at the thought that he should
deliver a speech over his brother’s coffin. Unlike in Swift’s other novels, which,
as Tamás Bényei notes, always feature someone loquacious alongside the
catatonic figures of silence,32 no such “voiceful” person appears in Wish You
Were Here. That is why the story abounds in awkward silences, those resulting
from non-communication, but also with follow-up silences, that is, silences
after words which do more harm than good. Jack experiences awkward silence

of summer house fiction, specifically of two houses also experiencing the appearance of a
ghost: Howards End in the eponymous 1910 novel by E. M. Forster and Shruff End in Iris
Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978). Apart from the cyclical temporal patterning, Topolovská
observes that these houses “display an array of various contradictory dualities, they scare
and soothe, they inspire and exhaust, they shelter and expose, they attract and deter, they
welcome and reject, they tie and provide various forms of release.” Tereza Topolovská, “Days
of Peculiar Splendour: Howards End and The Sea, The Sea in the Context of the Poetics of
Summer House Fiction,” English Language and Literature Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 5. Because
of the common theme of the protagonist’s wrestling with the shadow of his past the affinity
between Murdoch’s work and Wish You Were Here is particularly noticeable.
32. See Tamás Bényei, “The Novels of Graham Swift: Family Photos,” in Contemporary British
Fiction, ed. Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham, and Philip Tew (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003),
52–53.
 Petr Chalupský 19

with the other male family members: the father, as taciturn and withdrawn
as Jack, is unable to translate his mind into words, and Tom, who, out of his
desire to start a brand new life and burn all his bridges behind him, does
not respond to Jack’s letters. A follow-up silence occurs between him and his
wife after the news of Tom’s death invades their seemingly smoothly-running
household.
Having gone through a similar life experience and knowing the character
of her husband, Ellie is at heart quite like Jack—she does not talk much, and
when she does her utterances are monological and rhetorical in nature, and
their primary purpose is to move Jack to make up his mind and encourage
him to look ahead instead of raking over the past. This strategy seems to
have been working well until the traumatic memory bursts out, placing them
into a new, extreme situation which requires a mutual verbal exchange they
are not capable of, and all they can say are hurtful words, stretching a tense
silence between them: it is all triggered by Jack’s hurling words at Ellie that
accuse her of his father’s death as another of his defensive moves intended to
shift the blame away from himself. The tension is then only made worse by
her tactless expression of relief that the news of Tom’s death at least came
in the off-season and his rash suggestion that they had better cancel their
holiday in St Lucia, as well as her harsh refusal to go with him “back into the
wretched past” (WYWH, 211). As a result, Jack never transforms his secret
past into a therapeutic story, a testimony he would share with Ellie, though,
unlike the protagonists of Swift’s earlier novels, he actually has a loving wife
at hand, and so his chances of successfully coming to terms with his traumatic
experience remain unclear.

Trauma Untold—Conclusion
Although Wish You Were Here fits thematically into the body of Graham
Swift’s works as it predominantly deals with the protagonist’s attempts to
cope with the uncomfortable, and therefore largely suppressed and distorted
memories of distressing and traumatizing experiences, it differs in terms of
the intensity and extent to which it addresses this issue, and also in the
formal devices it employs for its authentic rendering. All Swift’s protagonists
have experienced the painful loss of a person close to them in the past and
have suffered oppressive consequences ever since, especially in the form of
anxieties, frustrations, and other psychic disorders. However, in his earlier
works the reader finds them in the process of coming to terms with their past,
when the worst is already behind them and they are struggling, though not
always successfully, to regain control over their lives. Wish You Were Here is
different since it takes the reader deep inside the traumatized person’s world,
when the worst is actually happening, and keeps them there almost until its
very ending, without reaching any cathartic moment in the sense that the
protagonist not only fully reveals the traumatizing experience but also copes
with its painful truth. This allows the narration to explore and stylistically
evoke various traumatic symptoms, including the most severe hallucinatory
20 Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

states, such as seeing and talking to ghosts, thus offering a gripping, yet at
the same time inevitably dispiriting portrayal of the wounded psyche.
The crucial difference is that in Swift’s preceding novels the main focus is
placed on how the narrators/protagonists themselves are trying to grasp the
past and deal with it through telling it as a story, while Wish You Were Here
offers a case study of a trauma-stricken mind, where an unknown, third-person
narrator presents the story to the reader while Jack is trying to put together
the bits of disparate recollections, flashbacks, and phantasms, and by doing so
to arrive at a coherent and sensible account and interpretation of the events
in question. Although in the end he comes to know the roots of his trauma and
thanks to this manages to defy his death drive, the actual healing process will
not start unless the traumatic events that have been experienced are given the
form of a consistent narrative. In this regard, Wish You Were Here is rather
pessimistic as it does not offer much hope or consolation—the “happy” ending
of the story comes after a list of fundamental things Ellie will never know,
including Jack’s intention to kill himself (and her, too, should she stand in his
way) and the reasons why he eventually thought better of it. Although Jack has
eventually opted for life, he is not going to tell Ellie anything about what has
haunted his mind over the past few days and nearly ruined everything they have
ever cherished as lovers and partners. If the possibility of a redemptive coming
to terms with a traumatic past rests on the victim’s ability and willingness to
verbalize this experience, the novel’s ending is rather inconclusive, leaving the
reader in doubt as to the future prospects of the characters’ lives.

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