Graham Swift

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Graham Swift Short Fiction Analysis

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Because of his largely experimental novels, which examine the relationship between history and fiction, Graham Swift is often cited as one of the most important British postmodernists. Although he published only a small number of short stories—the eleven included in his collection Learning to Swim, and Other Stories—both his importance in contemporary British fiction and the fact that the British short story is often ignored make them deserving of attention.

Whereas Swift deals with the large social and cultural issues of history in his novels, his short fiction focuses more sharply on the nature of story, which, in an interview, he argued is always a “magical, marvelous, mysterious, wonderful thing.” Because of Swift’s belief that telling stories is a therapeutic means of coming to terms with the past, his stories, in which characters must try to come to terms with their personal pasts, form the core of his novels, in which the personal past becomes cultural history.

“Learning to Swim”

The focus of “Learning to Swim” begins with Mrs. Singleton, lying on a beach in Cornwall, watching her husband try to teach their six-year-old son Paul how to swim; however, most of the story takes place in her memory as she recalls having thought about leaving her husband three times in the past primarily because of his lack of passion. The story then shifts to the two times Mr. Singleton has thought of leaving his wife—once when he considered jumping into the water and swimming away.

Indeed, swimming is a central metaphor in the story, for Mr. Singleton had been an excellent swimmer in school, winning titles and breaking records; in the Spartan purity of swimming he feels superior to others who will “go under” in life, unable to “cleave the water” as he did. Mr. Singleton dreams of swimming; even when he makes love to his wife, he feels her body gets in the way, and he wants to swim through her.

The undercurrent of marital conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Singleton comes to a head at the end of the story. Mrs. Singleton is indifferent to her husband and wants the kind of close relationship with her son typical of women who have rejected their husbands; she thinks that when he is grown he will become a sculptor and she will pose naked for him. At the same time, Mr. Singleton thinks that if Paul could swim he would be able to leave his wife. The story shifts finally to the boy, who fears that his mother will swallow him up and that he will not win the love of his father if he fails to swim; even though he is terrified of the water, he knows if he swims his mother will be forsaken. The story ends with Paul swimming away both from his father and his mother, finding himself in a strange new element that seems all his own.

“Hoffmeier’s Antelope”

The title refers to a rare, almost extinct, pygmy antelope discovered by a German zoologist named Hoffmeier. However, the focus of the story is the relationship of the narrator to his uncle, an animal keeper at a London zoo, after the uncle’s wife dies. The story centers on the fact that the two surviving antelopes are placed together in the zoo under the uncle’s care. The narrator, who teaches philosophy part-time in London, argues with his uncle that, if an unknown species exists, it is the same as if it did not exist at all; therefore, if something known to exist ceases to exist, it is the same as something that exists but is...

(This entire section contains 1434 words.)

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not known to exist. The idea that there may be animals existing in the wilds still unknown to humans is exciting to the protagonist; he notes that, even given the variety of known species, humans still like to dream up such mythical creatures as griffins, dragons, and unicorns.

The nature of reality is a central issue in the story; the narrator even begins to doubt the reality of Hoffmeier, for his actual life seems as elusive as that of the antelope he rescued from anonymity. The story comes to a climax when the male antelope dies and the uncle feels more closely bound to the surviving female, suffering from the illusion, common among children, that mere loving brings babies into the world and that she could conceive by the strong affection he has for her. When the antelope disappears from the zoo, the uncle disappears also.

“The Tunnel”

Typical of Barnes’s stories, “The Tunnel” begins broadly and narrows its focus near the end. The story centers on a young male narrator and his girlfriend Clancy during a spring and summer, when they live together in an old tenement after having run away from the girl’s parents. Underlying their idyllic, albeit shabby, retreat is the girl’s confidence that her seventy-three-year-old crippled uncle, who has a soft spot for her, will leave her everything when he dies.

A motif that runs throughout the story is the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, which fascinates the boy and causes the girl to buy him paints and brushes and urge him to paint the walls of their tenement apartment. Their romantic escape turns sour when, just as the boy felt he was transforming their little hole into a miniature Tahiti, they begin to become aware of the filth surrounding them. As they both get laboring jobs, the tenement area where they live begins to be demolished, and they start to see the paintings and the place as worthless, sentimental trash.

The crisis in their lives becomes more acute when the boy severely burns his hands in a kitchen accident and is confined to the apartment alone to think, particularly about the crippled uncle, with whom he now identifies; he begins to wonder if the uncle is a fiction Clancy invented. The title metaphor of the tunnel is evoked near the end of the story when below his window five boys begin to dig a tunnel out of a fenced-in playground into which they have climbed. He thinks that in their minds the boys have transformed the playground into a prison camp and are trying to escape from a place they had entered and could leave at their own free will. He wants them to succeed because he sees their situation as that of his own. The story ends when the boys break through and when Clancy arrives to say that her uncle has died and left her everything. What the couple will do with this windfall, however, is left unresolved.

“The Watch”

Because “The Watch” is based on a thematic premise, it is fabulistic rather than realistic. The premise is announced in the first sentence, with the narrator musing that nothing is more magical and sinister, yet more consoling and expressive of the constancy of fate than a clock. The narrator has descended from a family of clock makers who once had the primitive faith that clocks not only recorded time but also caused it, that without clocks the world would vanish into oblivion.

The central metaphor governing the story is a magical watch, invented in 1809 by the narrator’s great-grandfather, which not only could function perpetually without winding but also had a magnetic charge that infected its wearer with its longevity. Thus, his great-grandfather lived to be 133 years old and his grandfather lived to be 161. Although his father died young in the war, the narrator, Adam Krepski, is now the owner of the watch.

The final event in the story occurs one week before the time of the telling, when Krepski hears a female cry in the room below him and discovers a woman in childbirth. He recognizes that the cries come from a region ungoverned by time and thus are as poisonous to him as fresh air to a fish. When the baby is born close to death, he understands that time is not something that exists outside human beings but rather that all people are the distillation of all time; that each human being is the sum of all the time before him. He dangles the watch near the baby, and when the child grasps it, it is brought back to life and simultaneously the watch stops. The narrator stumbles out into the street and is struck by an internal blow, which he says topples family trees. The story ends with doctors bending over him to lift his wrist to check his pulse against their own ordinary watches, and he knows that his breaths are numbered.

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Graham Swift Long Fiction Analysis

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