- 1 Swift himself commented on this aspect: ‘Unusually for me, [Wish You Were Here] is written in the t (...)
1Published thirty years apart, Graham Swift’s second novel, Shuttlecock, and his ninth, Wish You Were Here, differ greatly in terms of narrative techniques,1 settings and storylines. However, they are both to a great extent concerned with the way History and family stories are told and transmitted, and more particularly with the fabrication and manipulation involved in the telling and retelling of the glorious myths Swift mentioned in an interview in 1993 (Porée 10), passed on within families and wider society. For Swift and the writers of the immediate post-war generation, who grew up with ‘all the physical evidence of war’ around them (Swift 2009, 213), the novelist has a duty to remember and pass on the stories to the next generations but also to debunk these glorious myths when they are untrue. As François Gallix puts it,
Cette génération d’écrivains nés après la guerre estime en effet avoir un devoir de mémoire afin de conserver les traces d’un passé qu’elle n’a pas vécu, mais dont elle est imprégnée et qu’elle tient à assumer à la fois dans ses aspects positifs et négatifs. C’est ainsi que Swift se souvient des récits de gloire militaire quelques [sic] peu enjolivés et mythiques qu’il entendait dans son enfance et dont l’authenticité méritait parfois d’être mise en doute. (Gallix 69)
2If transmission is indeed constitutive of the writing of history itself, in Swift’s novels this very transmission is often inaccurate, embellished or even deceitful and therefore received history as well as family stories are often problematic. In a first part, using in particular French historian Pierre Nora’s distinction between history and memory, I will study how in Wish You Were Here the third-person omniscient narrator is able to reveal historical truths that, deliberately or not, remain inaccessible to the characters. In a second part I will analyse how in Shuttlecock, a double first-person narrative, doubt is cast on the veracity of the narrator’s father’s embedded war memoirs—also called Shuttlecock—and how through mise-en-abyme this suspicion is reflected as well onto the main frame narrative.
3For the narrators of most of Swift’s novels, one of the main myths to debunk is that of war heroism. It is the case in Out of This World (1988) for example. Robert Beech, the narrator’s father, a weapons manufacturer who was killed in an IRA terrorist attack, is widely regarded by his family and acquaintances as a true hero. He had been awarded the Victoria Cross (the highest military distinction) at the end of World War I for picking up an unexploded grenade and throwing it away from his wounded and unconscious commanding officer, losing one arm in the process. His son Harry, a photojournalist who has covered all the major conflicts from World War II onward and rebelled against his father, is haunted by the heroic image created around his father and starts questioning this heroic act: was it really ‘an act of unquestionable heroism, meriting nothing less than a Victoria Cross’ (Swift 1988, 195)? Or was it ‘an act of unqualified stupidity’ (195)? Was his father following ‘the highest principles of valour’ he had been taught at Sandhurst (197) or was he a desperate man trying to commit suicide after hearing that his beloved wife had died while giving birth to their son? No definite answer is provided, but doubt is cast by the narrator on the real nature of his father’s heroism and the way the founding family story has been transmitted to the next generations, and how it has affected Harry’s relationship with his own daughter.
4Another problematic medal is at the core of the story of George and Fred Luxton, the two great-uncles of Jack Luxton, the main protagonist in Wish You Were Here. Both were killed on the same day in World War I during the battle of the Somme and their heroic status is unequivocally accepted by the inhabitants of Marleston, who gather around the war memorial every Remembrance Sunday to commemorate those soldiers from the village killed in action: ‘it was the general, unspoken view’ that ‘they were both heroes who’d volunteered and died for their country’ (Swift 2012, 11). One brother, George, had been awarded the DCM (Distinguished Conduct Medal) which, the reader is told, is ‘only one medal down . . . from a VC [Victoria Cross]’ (11) for ‘captur[ing] single-handedly an enemy machine-gun and hold[ing] it under impossible odds . . . until he was cut down by crossfire’ (11) and the letters DCM are duly engraved after his name on the memorial cross. Along with the war memorial, the DCM has become for the Luxtons, and the inhabitants of Marleston, two lieux de mémoire, defined by French historian Pierre Nora as ‘any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which, by dint of human will or the work of time, has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’ (Nora 1996, xvii). The narrator comments that ‘George Luxton and his DCM were in fact the reason why—even long after another world war—many residents of Marleston village and its vicinity turned up in November with their poppies’ (Swift 2012, 11). Several generations later his heroic celebrity status still rubs off onto the Luxtons: ‘George Luxton . . . was the village hero and no one . . . could deny that he was the Luxtons’ claim to fame’ (12). When they are children, the story of their two ancestors is transmitted to Jack and his brother Tom by their mother, Vera, as ‘a rite of passage’ (12). She ‘had given Jack the plain—proud, illustrious—facts, a man’s story coming from a woman’s lips’ (12), but had also added an ‘extra, imaginary bit’ (13): if the brothers ‘had made it home after the war, one with a medal and one not, . . . George, who had the medal, would have pulled it from his pocket and would have broken it in two . . . and given his brother half the medal’ (12-13). Even as a child, Jack of course had realised that ‘you couldn’t break a medal in two’ (13) and that his mother’s fabricated tale had a moral purpose: indeed, ‘even the profoundly condensed, and arguably non-narrative, lieux de mémoire are generally entwined with and accompanied by stories, which circulate in social contexts and endow those sites with their changing meanings’ (Erll 147). Susana Onega remarks that this ‘embroidered version of the tale of bravery of the Luxton great uncles . . . enhanced family cohesion and harmony’ (Onega 178) and has become an intrinsic part of who they are, even though it is obviously fanciful. As Slawomir Konkol notes, Vera thus ‘narrativizes the founding horrors of the family’s war history’ (Konkol 112) and her ‘narrative installs Jack in the history from which he is trying to break free by offering him a place among “the generations going back and forwards’” (22) and introducing him to ‘his future and his responsibilities. Or, to put it in another way, his name’ (113). Jack’s adamant decision not to have children of his own once he has left his farm is going to cut short the long uninterrupted line of Luxtons (going back to 1614 [Swift 2012, 29]) and put a stop to the transmission of the family stories.
5What Jack, his mother, his father, his brother and the inhabitants of Marleston never realise is that the whole story of the great-uncles—the ‘proud, illustrious facts’ as well as ‘the imaginary bit’—is in part a fabrication. The narrator tells the reader the story of what ‘really’ happened:
- 2 Swift’s choice of the Battle of the Somme as the backdrop for the deaths of the two fictional Luxto (...)
Once, most of a century ago, . . . along the valley of the River Somme,2 two Luxton brothers had died on the same July day. In the process, though he would never know it, one of them was to earn a medal for conspicuous gallantry, while the other was merely ripped apart by bullets. Their commanding officer, Captain Hayes, who had witnessed the act of valour himself, had been eager, that night, to write the matter up, with his recommendation, in the hope that something good—if that was a fair way of putting it—might come of the day’s unspeakabilities. But though he knew he had two Luxtons under his command, George and Fred, he had never known precisely which was which. In their full kit and helmets they looked like identical twins. They all looked, he sometimes thought, like identical twins.
But the two Luxton boys were now equally dead anyway. So he had opted for George (it was the more patriotic name), intending to corroborate the matter the next morning, if he had the chance, before his dispatch was sent. . . . But he never did have the chance, since by seven a.m. . . . , not long after blowing his whistle yet again, and only obeying a futile order that elsewhere along the line had already been cancelled, Captain Hayes too was dead.
So it was George, not Fred, who got a DCM . . . and neither brother would ever dispute it.
No then-surviving or subsequent member of the Luxton family ever had cause to challenge what was set down in the citation and carved in stone. (10–11; original emphasis)
- 3 ‘Parce qu’elle est affective et magique, la mémoire ne s’accommode que des détails qui la conforten (...)
- 4 Following McLoughlin, I use ‘reporter’ here in the general sense of anyone who, ‘by some means, inf (...)
- 5 As early as 1955, Paul Ricoeur wrote at length in Histoire et verité on what he saw as the antinomy (...)
6This could be a very relevant illustration of Pierre Nora’s point about the opposition between memory and history: people’s memory and memories of past events are unreliable, based on a very partial knowledge of the actual facts and grounded in a sometimes quaint or sentimental family folklore, whereas history is a critical discourse based on intellectual analysis.3 As Nora concludes, ‘[l]a mémoire installe le souvenir dans le sacré, l’histoire l’en débusque’ (Nora 1984, xix). However in Wish You Were Here history has failed its mission. Captain Hayes was unable to ‘corroborate the matter’ of which brother had accomplished the ‘act of valour’ deserving of a medal in his official military dispatch, and the veracity of the historical record of what happened on that day is thus put into question because it is determined by the prejudices and arbitrariness of the reporter4 (George Luxton’s first name is considered more patriotic than his brother Frederic’s by Captain Hayes, probably because it was the name of the ruling king and Saint George is England’s patron saint). It is in fact up to the omniscient narrator to debunk for the reader, who consequently knows more than the characters, the deceitful nature of the memories transmitted from generation to generation and reclaim the historical truth about the brothers’ deaths, even if by doing so he undermines and contradicts the family’s and the villagers’ received version of events (Roblin 2017, 119–120). In Wish You Were Here, within the fictional framework of course, the story told by the narrator is thus seen as more reliable than memory and history.5 It fulfils its function as a fictional narrative, since ‘literary texts offer possible interpretations of the past and develop a number of—partly affirmative, partly subversive—narrative potentials’ (Erll 156).
- 6 As Catherine Pesso-Miquel points out (100), the last lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et Decorum (...)
- 7 Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth,’ also written in 1917, 99-100. For an analysis of this poem (...)
7Fiction is also used to criticise the clichéd vision, which has often been presented of World War I as heroic (‘The Great War’) and to ‘destabiliz[e] and question . . . the insidious rhetoric of war’ (Pesso-Miquel 98). According to Catherine Pesso-Miquel, the ‘old Lie’ denounced by Wilfred Owen in ‘Dulce and Decorum est’, which she glosses as ‘the convenient glorification of dying for one’s country’, is challenged (Pesso-Miquel 100).6 Like Owen’s powerful poem, Wish You Were Here is one of these ‘literary works [which] clearly shape our ideas about past realities’ (Erll 165). Swift, like for example Alan Hollinghurst in The Stranger’s Child, also published in 2011, ‘propound[s] variations on the hero motif’ and in his novels, written ‘in the wake of the collapse of totalitarian regimes, heroism [is] indeed viewed suspiciously’ (Letissier 45), and like Hollinghurst’s, his novel ‘aims at exposing the production of heroism’ (Letissier 47).The macabre irony of the narrator—being merely ripped apart by enemy bullets does not in itself deserve a medal—and his damning description of Captain Hayes’ casual indifference to his men—he cannot tell them apart—are an indictment of the war. Moreover, the fact that the two brothers’ and their commanding officer’s deaths were totally useless, the result of ‘a futile order that elsewhere along the line had already been cancelled’ (10) highlights their monstrous absurdity. The two brothers, like countless others—‘these who die like cattle’, with only ‘the monstrous anger of the guns’ and ‘the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ for passing bells, as another great war poem by the same poet put it—7 were in fact the doomed and docile victims of inept commanders.
8Within the novel, fiction can also be used to expose the lies deliberately fabricated by the army in times of war. In an earlier interview, answering a question about censorship and the manipulation of images, in particular during the first Gulf War, Swift had already voiced his concern about ‘the way that the pictures are arranged in such a way that one view or another of what went on can be conveyed’ and the fact that ‘the camera does not just record reality but in a way it sets it up’ (Bernard and Menegaldo 15). In Wish You Were Here, it is thanks to the third-person omniscient narrator and to the shifting of the narrative centres of consciousness that the truth about Tom’s death in Iraq is revealed. When Major Richards, ‘the sensitive army officer appointed as a by-the-book regimental angel of death’ (Tonkin) dispatched to ‘express the battalion’s condolences and sympathies’ (88) to Jack on the death of his brother, killed by a roadside bomb ‘in the Basra region of operations, on 4th November 2006’ (Swift 2012, 78), comes to visit Jack, he states that ‘Corporal Luxton would have died instantly, on active, front-line duty’ (91). The question of how exactly Tom died comes up regularly throughout the novel (122, 273) but it is only when the narrative point of view switches to Tom himself in Chapter 23 that the reader realises retrospectively that Major Richards has in fact lied to Jack: trapped inside his burning armoured vehicle, Tom is not going to die instantly, but in fact he is going to be slowly burnt to death (208). The reasons why Major Richards does not tell Jack (and other next of kin of dead soldiers) the truth are ambivalent: on the one hand, he wants to spare Jack by not telling him the gruesome details of his brother’s painful death, but he also follows army directives that the public at large should not be made aware of the full horrors of that war—its ‘unspeakabilities’—to avoid any embarrassing questions about the reasons for the conflict. Once again, in the end, the reader knows more about the circumstances leading to Tom Luxton being killed than his brother Jack. In the stories of the deaths of Fred, George and Tom Luxton, the versions of events provided by the military are at best inaccurate and the role of the omniscient narrator is to speak up and highlight and correct these distortions.
- 8 To mark the distinction between Prentis’s father’s Shuttlecock and Swift’s identically titled novel (...)
9The situation is different in Shuttlecock, which is a first-person narrative with an embedded story, also in the first person and also titled Shuttlecock.8 The narrator of the former is called Prentis—no first name given—and describes himself as a ‘specialized clerk, an archivist’ who works in ‘a sub-department of the police’ (14) dealing with dead crimes. The latter, subtitled ‘The Story of a Secret Agent,’ published twelve years after the end of the war, is told by Prentis’s father, whose code-name it was during World War II when he was a liaison officer with the French Resistance. He is both the narrator and the main protagonist of this first-person spy story. Shuttlecock thus ‘incorporates the subgenre of the prison camp escape memoir’ (Stewart 9) and, as Anastasia Logotheti remarks, ‘the coexistence of separate narratives in Shuttlecock depends upon a collage of styles and genres: Prentis’s confessional diary is not only autobiographical fiction with an implied audience but it also imbeds excerpts from police files’—for instance, section 22 of the novel (Swift 1986, 113) is part of a police file on X, who was an operating British agent in France at the same time and in the same geographical area as Prentis senior—‘and chapters from Dad’s war memoir, which offer the narrative the faux authenticity of official record’ (22–23).
10After the war, Prentis senior became an engineer, a successful businessman and an accomplished golfer. However, he had a sudden and unexplained mental breakdown two years before which left him aphasic and he now lives in a mental hospital. He is a ‘silent shell’ (40), totally unable—or unwilling—to speak any more, much to his son’s distress and incomprehension. ‘Withdrawn from reality, Prentis senior is incapable of providing answers but he maintains power over his son, the representative of the post-World War II generation’ (Logotheti 22) who worships his heroic father and suffers from an inferiority complex. So the son looks for some kind of response to the questions he asks himself about his father’s past in the book Prentis senior wrote about his exploits during the war: for him indeed, ‘the book is Dad,’ he says, ‘It’s more Dad than that empty effigy I sit beside at the hospital’ (Swift 1986, 52; original emphasis), thus ‘[e]xplicitly invoking the ontological confusion between an autonomous self and a character in a narrative’ (McLeod 376), between the narrator protagonist of the memoirs and his now silent father.
- 9 For a detailed analysis of these gaps, see Stef Craps 62-63.
11At first Prentis thinks his father wrote Shuttlecock for him, to pass on to his teenage son the glorious stories of his heroic acts during the war. Prentis himself wants his own son Martin to read Shuttlecock. Martin however refuses: ‘Why haven’t you ever read Grandpa’s book? You wouldn’t find it difficult. He shook his head—as if sorry for me. I knew he would never read the book’ (Swift 1986, 85). In a fit of pre-teenage defiance, Martin even pretends he has thrown the book in the dustbin, unleashing his father’s fury (83). Martin’s refusal to accept what is supposed to be his inheritance, the story passed on from father to son and grandson, indicates how problematic this transmission can be for a new generation for whom ‘the Bionic Man and Kojak and Captain Kirk, and all the other made-up heroes’ on television are ‘better than [their] father’ (84) and grandfather, whom Martin considers as ‘Loony’ (85). However, ironically, Prentis progressively starts to share Martin’s instinctive suspicion of his grandfather’s story as he reads and rereads and makes notes on his father’s war memoirs and starts to take a critical look at Shuttlecock. He comes to realise that there are gaps, inconsistencies, silences and even contradictions within the memoirs,9 but also a notable difference in style between the final chapters and the main body of the memoirs. When, in the last pages, Prentis senior writes about his capture, his imprisonment and torture by the Gestapo and his escape, his style becomes ‘more imaginative, more literary, more speculative’, whereas the main body of the memoirs, with its ‘brisk, adventure-book flow of the narrative’ (107) ‘is a perfect pastiche, on Swift’s part, of the suspense novel’ (Winnberg 103) and uses ‘the “repertoire” of spy-thrillers by Ian Fleming or Ken Follet [sic]’ (Kaczvinsky 5).
- 10 Irving Goh’s theory of the reject, as opposed to the subject, is seen by many contemporary critics (...)
12Two contradictory explanations of this stylistic discrepancy between the two parts of the memoirs are provided, one by Prentis himself and the other by his boss Quinn, a contemporary of his father. Whereas for the former, somewhat naively, ‘the last pages are too convincing not to be real’, for the latter, ‘in writing [them] he is torn between the desire to construct this saving lie and an instinct not to falsify himself completely’ (Swift 1986, 186, 188). The answers to the crucial questions: did Prentis’s father break down under torture, make a deal with the Germans and betray other agents who were subsequently shot? and did he then decide to write his memoirs to cover up his betrayal, ‘as a means of rebutting once and for all the possibility of exposure, of presenting the hero-image in such a complete and thorough way that no one will dare to challenge it’ (187)? may be found in a secret file that Quinn has removed from the archives and hands over to Prentis. In a surprising narrative twist, Prentis eventually decides he does not want to know the answers: ‘I knew I wanted to be uncertain, I wanted to be in the dark’ (199). Prentis and Quinn then burn Prentis’s father’s confidential file in Quinn’s garden incinerator without reading it, thus deliberately destroying the historical evidence they are supposed to be safeguarding. Watching the file burn, Prentis experiences a feeling of being liberated from his father’s oppressive influence. As a critic puts it: ‘Shuttlecock is one of those rare novels in which willed ignorance brings the feelings of freedom and release so frequently associated with the epiphany of the open ending’ (Higdon 94). For his son, Prentis senior has become more of a reject,10 ‘frail, fallible, incomplete’ (Onega and Ganteau 11) than a heroic subject. We are indeed at the end of Shuttlecock ‘[miles] away from the humanist conception of the hero or heroine as invincible and autonomous’ (Onega and Ganteau 12) that Prentis senior had tried to accredit in his memoirs. The son’s final rejection of his father is acted when he eventually decides to forego his weekly visit to him (215).
13Was Prentis’s father’s book a fabrication to make him appear a hero to his son, grandsons and the general public? The fact that Shuttlecock is a first-person narrative implies that the reader is also left in the dark, with no omniscient narrator to reveal the final truth about what had been in the file and had ‘really’ happened, unlike in Wish You Were Here. As Victoria Stewart remarks, basically, ‘[r]eading provokes, and is provoked by, a desire to know’ and ‘throughout its history, the novel has served to assuage a readerly wish for revelation’ (Stewart 9). In Shuttlecock, the narrative strategy of frustrating the reader’s deeply entrenched desire for disclosure thus goes against the traditional grain. It makes Shuttlecock part of what Linda Hutcheon termed historiographic metafiction, foregrounding the unreliability of the historical record and narrators who are not ‘confident of [their] ability to know the past with any certainty’ (Hutcheon 122). In Shuttlecock Swift takes ‘postmodern doubts about the reliability of both memory and documentary evidence as a given’ (Stewart 14) and refuses to provide the reader with ready-made answers.
14There are however a few pointers within the story which lead the reader to make up her/his own mind about Prentis senior’s story. Even though the narrator himself writes in a direct address to the reader:
[a]nd if the way I am talking suggests that, behind all my reticence, I really do believe that Dad did all those things that X accused him of, and that, indeed is the reason for my reticence, then let me assure you that that question, too, hangs like a finely poised balance. (Swift 1986, 213)
15The indirect evidence seems to point to Prentis senior having broken down under torture and having lied at the end of his memoirs. Like the Luxtons’ DCM and the Marleston war memorial, Shuttlecock is a fake lieu de mémoire but also an intentionally fabricated one, in both senses of the word: to fabricate, after all, means both ‘to put together by art and labour’ and ‘to devise falsely’ (Chambers English Dictionary). Moreover, there are parallels between Quinn’s and Prentis’s father’s stories. While they are burning the files, Quinn tells Prentis how he, too, could have been ‘charged for cowardice and dereliction of duty’ (192). During the Normandy landings, as a young officer, he had run away when his platoon had been shot at by the Germans. He adds:
believe me I didn’t perform any of my much-rehearsed functions as a leader. I obeyed my instinct. I ran like bloody hell—like everybody else. I ran for my life. That’s no joke. I would have killed any English soldier who got in my way, let alone a German. (191)
16While jumping over a hedge, he trampled over the face of a wounded man but didn’t stop to help him, even though he could tell ‘the poor fellow was still alive’ (193). Then, a few seconds later, ‘something knocked [him] into the air’ and he lost half a foot (192). Quinn cannot help thinking that his right foot was blown off as a kind of retaliatory punishment because ‘it was that foot that trod on that man’s face’ (192). If we apply the same logic of crime and fitting punishment to Prentis’s father, we could perhaps suggest that his aphasia, on top of a defence mechanism to avoid answering embarrassing questions, is also a kind of retribution for having spoken too much under torture and thus being responsible for the deaths of other agents.
17The deceitful embedded text can also be considered as a mise en abyme, ‘an enclosed narrative that reflects the framing device’ (Winnberg 106), and ‘[t]he sense of mise en abyme is enhanced by incompletion, and by the doubling of titles, and the triple narratives, derived from three acts of authorship on the part of father, son, and Swift himself outside the novelistic frame’ (Tew 11). Brian McHale argues that a ‘true mise-en-abyme is determined by three criteria: first, it is a nested or embedded representation, occupying a narrative level inferior to that of the primary, diegetic world; secondly, this nested representation resembles . . . something at the level of the primary diegetic world; and thirdly this “something”—that it resembles must constitute some salient and continuous aspect of the primary world’ (McHale 124–125; original emphasis). Shuttlecock fits the bill perfectly and since it is most probably a fabrication, it logically follows that ‘the mise en abyme structure suggests that the questions which are raised inside the text about the truthfulness of Dad’s version of events should also be addressed to Prentis’s story’ (Craps 60), and that Prentis himself is an unreliable narrator. Anastasia Logotheti points out that
[a]s a narrator, Prentis is concerned with his trustworthiness, and he frequently adds phrases that emphasize his sincerity (‘to be honest,’ ‘to tell you the truth,’ etc.). He seeks to demonstrate he is not absolute in his judgments, turning his opinions into questions (e.g. ‘how was I to know…’) and adding qualifying phrases (‘I think’). At times, Prentis’s effort to guide the reader’s view is more explicit, in comments such as ‘you know what I mean’… When the narrator struggles to appear sincere, the effect is ironic (‘excuse me if I sound odd’…). (Logotheti 24)
18To paraphrase Queen Gertrude in Hamlet (III, 2, 211), ‘The writer doth protest too much, methinks’. Moreover, in the end Prentis himself casts doubt on the wisdom of interpretation and exegesis of both Shuttlecocks, seemingly arguing for a kind of naïve reading of the texts and calling on the reader to trust the written word:
How much of a book is in the words and how much is behind or in between the lines? Perhaps it is best not to probe too deeply into those invisible regions, but to accept on trust what is there on the page as the best showing the author could make. And the same is true perhaps of this book (for it has grown into a book) . . . Once you have read it, it may be better not to peer too hard beneath the surface of what it says—or (who knows if you may not be one of those happily left in peace of mind by my “work” at the department?) what it doesn’t say. (Swift 1986, 214; original emphasis)
19Would I be wrong to read in the last sentence a not-so-subtle warning to the curious reader or even a veiled threat of blackmail? As a critic puts it, ‘Shuttlecock . . . suggests storytelling is a means of creating “gaps” in history, of escaping truth, of controlling, manipulating, or destroying certain information that may implicate one in the present’ (Kaczvinsky 3). The very concept of historical truth to be transmitted to the next generations is thus totally put into question and instead a postmodern sense of uncertainty about the possibility of ever knowing the past is asserted.
- 11 For a detailed analysis of these inconsistencies, see Stef Craps 64-65.
20Like his father’s, Prentis’s narrative ‘is strewn with little (and not so little) hints and clues which create doubts about the narrator’s reliability . . . . It does become an issue, however, when Prentis casually admits to having told the reader lies and half-truths’ (Craps 64).11 Moreover, the mise en abyme structure implies that if the last pages of Shuttlecock are based on a lie, the same assumption should also apply to the last pages of Shuttlecock. Prentis describes an idyllic family outing in Camber Sands where, ‘[e]nacting the redemptive fantasy of restored harmony’ (Craps 68), he tries and convinces the reader that, after he has been promoted, he has embarked on a new and fulfilling way of life, both personally and professionally. The authenticity of this ending is put into question however by its cyclical structure: the last line—‘I remembered the magical words Mr Forster had spoken when I was a boy (Peter’s age): “a piece of nature”’—( Swift 1986, 220) refers back to the very beginning of the narrative, where Prentis vividly describes how as a child he tortured and was cruel to his pet hamster, leading the reader to wonder whether in the end ‘the Prentis who concludes the narrative may well still be the cruel manipulator we encounter in the earlier parts of the novel, his sense of vulnerability a fabrication’ (Winnberg 109).
- 12 Tim O’Brien’s ‘How to Tell a True War Story’, ‘a story which itself is knowingly misleading, kaleid (...)
21In Swift’s novels, the transmission of family stories and memories is often fallacious, and the way historical events are passed on, problematic. In Shuttlecock, it is up to the reader to make up her/his own mind about the historical reliability of the narrator’s father’s embedded war memoirs, but also, through the literary process of mise en abyme, of the novel itself. In Wish You Were Here, thanks to the omniscient narrator, the role of fiction is to rectify the faulty version of past events passed on from generation to generation and consolidated over time by a quasi-fetishist devotion to objects, monuments, places or traditions inherited from the past, such as medals, war memorials or the rituals of Remembrance Sundays. It is also to reveal the truth behind the official lies in times of war. Its subtitle could well be ‘the Novel as History’, to borrow part of the subtitle of Norman Mailer’s 1968 non-fiction novel The Armies of the Night. Stating that ‘the novel . . . is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend other visions better’ than history, which according to him tend to be blinded by ‘a forest of inaccuracy’ (Mailer 219), Mailer put forward this conception of fiction as being ‘more true’ than either journalism or received history. The same point was made by Tim O’Brien, himself a Vietnam veteran, who in ‘How To Tell a True War Story’12 also suggests that fiction might in fact be the best way to write a true war story because, as he puts it, ‘a thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth’ (O’Brien 79). This professed belief in the power of fiction to transmit history and stories and to uncover the truth is undoubtedly shared by Graham Swift in most of his novels.
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