Memory, History and Narrative

Two of the most commonly studied novels for AQA's Modern Times option — Graham Swift's Waterland (1983) and Michael Frayn's Spies (2002) — are centrally concerned with the relationship between memory, history, and narrative. Both novels ask: can we trust our memories? Can we trust the stories we tell about the past? And what happens when the boundaries between history and fiction dissolve?

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Historiographic Metafiction

Both Waterland and Spies belong to a literary mode that the critic Linda Hutcheon has called historiographic metafiction — fiction that is simultaneously about history and about the process of writing history. These novels do not simply tell stories set in the past; they interrogate how we construct, narrate, and understand the past.

Feature	Detail
Self-conscious narration	The narrator draws attention to the act of storytelling — acknowledging gaps, uncertainties, and the temptation to invent
Unreliable memory	Memory is shown to be selective, reconstructive, and shaped by present needs
History as narrative	History is not a collection of facts but a story told by someone, for a purpose, from a particular perspective
The past in the present	The past is never simply "over" — it erupts into the present, shapes it, and is reshaped by it

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Graham Swift: Waterland (1983)

Context

Swift wrote Waterland during the early Thatcher years — a period when the teaching of history was a contested political issue. The novel is partly a defence of history itself: a plea for the importance of understanding the past in a culture that increasingly valued only the present and the future.

Structure and Narrative

Tom Crick is a history teacher who, facing redundancy (his subject is being replaced by "General Studies"), tells his students the story of his own family and the Fens landscape in which they lived. The novel interweaves three timelines:

Timeline	Content
The present (early 1980s)	Tom's impending redundancy; his wife Mary's breakdown and her abduction of a baby from a supermarket
Tom's adolescence (1943)	The wartime events that shaped his life: the death of Freddie Parr, the discovery that Dick Crick is the product of incest, Mary's abortion and resulting infertility
Deep history (17th–20th century)	The history of the Atkinson and Crick families; the draining of the Fens; the relationship between land, water, and human endeavour

Key Themes

1. History and Storytelling

Tom Crick is obsessed with the question: "What is history?" His answer: "Asking why." History is not a catalogue of facts but an endless process of inquiry — of asking why things happened and what they mean.

Key Quote: "Children, only 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 storytelling animal."

The novel argues that storytelling is not an escape from reality but the fundamental human activity — the way we make sense of experience. But it also acknowledges the dangers: stories can distort, conceal, and deceive.

2. The Fens as Landscape and Metaphor

The Fens — flat, waterlogged, reclaimed from the sea by human engineering — are both a real landscape and a metaphor for the relationship between nature and civilisation, chaos and order:

Aspect	Significance
Reclamation	Humans drain the water, create dry land — but water always returns. History, like water, cannot be permanently controlled
Silt	The Fens accumulate layers of sediment — like layers of history, memory, and story
Flatness	The flat landscape offers no natural perspective — everything must be constructed, narrated, made sense of by human effort
Eels	The mysterious migration of eels — a natural process that defies human understanding — represents what lies beyond the reach of history and storytelling

3. Curiosity vs. Fear

Tom identifies two fundamental human responses to the world: curiosity (asking why — the drive that makes us human) and fear (the desire to stop asking, to retreat into certainty or ignorance). The novel suggests that history — the discipline of asking why — is the only antidote to fear.

4. Circularity and Progress

The novel questions the Enlightenment belief in progress. History, it suggests, is not a linear progression but a circular pattern of construction and destruction, reclamation and inundation. The Fens are drained and flooded, drained and flooded — and human history follows the same pattern.

Narrative Technique