Key Quotations (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes
Key Quotations
Introduction to quotations in Waterland
Graham Swift employs quotations throughout Waterland as tools for exploring the novel's central concerns with history, narrative and human fragility. Tom Crick's classroom teaching becomes a space where traditional historical certainty is challenged through storytelling. Each significant quotation reveals Swift's postmodern approach to time, memory and the construction of meaning in a world marked by doubt and cyclical patterns.
Understanding Swift's use of quotations is essential for analyzing how the novel challenges traditional approaches to history and narrative. Pay attention to how Tom Crick uses these quotations both in his teaching and as a framework for understanding his own life story.
History and the power of storytelling
'Children, it's all in the telling'
This metafictional statement serves as Tom's core philosophy throughout the novel. It suggests that history cannot be separated from the act of narration - meaning emerges through how stories are told rather than through objective facts alone. Tom uses this principle to challenge Headmaster Lewis, who demands straightforward historical facts.
Key significance:
- Subverts traditional history teaching methods
- Positions storytelling as essential for understanding the past
- Links to the Fens secrets, particularly Dick's paternity, which require imaginative reconstruction rather than simple factual recounting
- Reflects postmodern skepticism about absolute truth
Using this quotation in analysis:
When analyzing narrative technique, you might write: "Swift's metafictional statement 'it's all in the telling' directly challenges the objectivity of historical accounts. Through Tom's emphasis on narrative construction, Swift suggests that history is always already mediated through the storyteller's perspective, undermining Lewis's demand for 'facts' and establishing the novel's postmodern credentials."
'I taught you that there is never any end to that question, because... history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge'
Tom acknowledges the fundamental limitation of historical understanding. Both historical actors and those studying them lack complete information, creating endless uncertainty. This epistemological aporia (state of doubt) justifies Tom's digressive narrative style and the novel's refusal to provide simple answers.
Key significance:
- Explains Tom's wandering classroom digressions
- Connects to Freddie's death remaining forever ambiguous
- Reflects postmodern concerns with incomplete knowledge
- Validates personal storytelling as equally valid to official history
This quotation is crucial for understanding the novel's refusal to provide clear answers about key events like Freddie's death. The emphasis on "incomplete knowledge" operating at two levels - both for historical actors and historians - creates a fundamental uncertainty that permeates the entire narrative structure.
The Fens landscape and existential reality
The Fenland setting is not merely backdrop but functions as a philosophical framework for understanding reality and human existence.
'That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson'
This biological metaphor draws a parallel between human composition and temporal experience. Just as bodies are mostly water, human consciousness is predominantly shaped by memory and history rather than immediate experience. The watery nature mirrors the Fenland landscape and its floods.
Key significance:
- Connects physical landscape to human identity
- Challenges Price's apocalyptic focus on living only in the present moment
- The 99% water content symbolizes the eels' elusive essence described elsewhere in the novel
- Suggests identity is constructed through past narratives
'To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality'
Tom portrays the Fenland as stripped of romantic illusion. The landscape's horizontal emptiness becomes a metaphor for existential reality - bare, unadorned and sometimes oppressive. This geographical determinism shapes the characters' worldviews.
Key significance:
- Rejects pastoral romanticism in favour of stark realism
- Links geographical space to philosophical outlook
- The windmills' struggle against floods represents futile human resistance against natural forces
- Creates gothic undertones through emptiness rather than traditional gothic features
'Reality's not strange, not unexpected. Reality doesn't reside in the sudden hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness'
Tom privileges everyday monotony over dramatic spectacle. True reality consists of quotidian routine and emptiness rather than extraordinary events like Freddie's corpse discovery or Mary's mental breakdown. This challenges conventional narrative expectations.
Key significance:
- Reflects the Fens' oppressive monotony
- Privileges quotidian trauma (daily suffering) over spectacular events
- Connects to Mary's sterility as an emblem of vacancy
- Subverts traditional dramatic narrative structure
The repeated emphasis on "flatness," "vacancy," and "emptiness" in these quotations establishes a consistent philosophical vision. Swift uses the Fens landscape as a correlative objective for existential reality - the physical geography mirrors the characters' psychological and philosophical states.
Historical cycles and violence
'History said, don't hope / on this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme'
Tom adapts Seamus Heaney's poetry in his teaching. The tidal imagery connects to Fenland flooding whilst expressing cautious hope for revolutionary change. The allusion to the French Revolution and Jubilee parallels adds historical resonance about moments when justice might prevail.
Key significance:
- Affirms possibility of progress despite cyclical patterns
- Tidal recurrence reflects the novel's structural repetitions
- Ironizes revolutionary idealism through the Atkinson family's ultimate decline
- Uses eschatology (end-times thinking) against historical pessimism
'Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath...? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing?'
Tom questions whether humanity learns from violent historical patterns. This reflects his disillusionment with Enlightenment progress narratives and suggests humanity remains trapped in repetitive cycles of destruction.
Key significance:
- Connects to the Atkinsons' generational degeneration
- Challenges optimistic views of historical progress
- Links to Dick's violence and the novel's tragic events
- Suggests historical knowledge may not prevent future violence
These two quotations work in tension with each other. While the Heaney adaptation offers cautious optimism about "hope and history" rhyming, Tom's question about humanity learning nothing from bloodbaths suggests a darker, more cyclical view. This tension between hope and despair is central to the novel's philosophy of history.
Human vigilance and responsibility
'Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers – pity lighthouse-keepers – pity all the keepers of this world... caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon...'
Henry Crick's occupation as lock-keeper becomes a metaphor for human vigilance and moral responsibility. The liminal position of keepers - mediating between safety and danger, order and chaos - represents humanity's precarious situation in maintaining civilization.
Key significance:
- Embodies Sisyphean vigilance (endless, repetitive effort)
- Represents the waterland's precarious order requiring constant maintenance
- Links to Tom's role as keeper of stories and historical memory
- Suggests moral responsibility despite futility
The "keepers" metaphor extends beyond Henry to encompass Tom's own role as a teacher and storyteller. Just as lock-keepers must maintain constant vigilance to prevent flooding, Tom must continuously "keep" and retell stories to maintain meaning and order in the face of chaos and forgetting.
The question 'Why?' and narrative
'And what does this question Why imply? It implies (...) dissatisfaction, disquiet... History begins only at the point where things go wrong'
Tom identifies questioning as fundamental to historical inquiry. The question 'Why?' emerges from rupture and trauma, suggesting narrative itself is born from crisis. This connects to the Atkinson fire and Dick's suicide as catalysts for Tom's storytelling.
Key significance:
- Links narrative to trauma and rupture
- References Hayden White's narrative theory
- Explains the novel's focus on tragedy
- Shows 'Why?' as spawning futile chains of regret
- Demonstrates Tom's pedagogical insight
Connecting to narrative theory:
This quotation directly engages with narratology (the study of narrative structure). Tom's assertion that "history begins only at the point where things go wrong" echoes Hayden White's argument that narratives emerge from disorder and require emplotment. In your essays, you can connect Swift's philosophical reflections to formal narrative theory, showing how the novel both enacts and theorizes its own narrative principles.
Defending history and narrative
'But hold on, Lewis. Cutting back History? Cutting History? If you're going to sack me, then sack me, don't dismiss what I stand for'
Tom's defiant response to threatened curriculum changes becomes a defense of narrative's moral necessity. His resistance to the Thatcherite syllabub purge symbolizes the humanities' value against utilitarian educational reforms.
Key significance:
- Represents Tom's moral stand and character development
- Reflects 1980s educational policy changes under Thatcherism
- Affirms storytelling's essential human importance
- Shows Tom moving from passive to active resistance
- Connects personal crisis to broader cultural concerns
This moment marks a crucial turning point in Tom's character arc. His passionate defense of history as a discipline mirrors his defense of his own narrative - both personal and historical stories matter not for their practical utility but for their existential and moral significance. The novel thus becomes a defense of the humanities themselves.
Key Thematic Connections Across Quotations:
- Narrative subjectivity: Tom's emphasis on "telling" and "incomplete knowledge" establishes that all historical accounts are mediated and partial
- Landscape as philosophy: The Fens' flatness and emptiness become metaphors for existential reality and the human condition
- Cycles vs. progress: The tension between cyclical repetition and moments when "hope and history rhyme" reflects the novel's ambivalent philosophy of history
- Vigilance and responsibility: The "keepers" metaphor suggests that maintaining meaning requires constant, often futile effort
- Trauma and narrative: Questioning and storytelling emerge from rupture, linking the novel's form to its thematic concerns
Exam tips
Embedding quotations effectively:
- Integrate quotations smoothly into your analytical sentences rather than dropping them in isolation
- Always explain how the quotation supports your argument, not just what it says
- Link quotations to multiple themes where possible to demonstrate sophisticated understanding
- Consider the dramatic context - who speaks, when, and why
- Analyze Swift's linguistic choices and literary techniques (metaphor, imagery, syntax)
- Use technical vocabulary (metafiction, postmodern, epistemological) accurately to demonstrate critical sophistication
Making connections:
- Link quotations about history to metafictional techniques and narrative structure
- Connect landscape descriptions to character psychology and philosophical outlook
- Relate cyclical imagery to the novel's narrative structure and temporal organization
- Consider how quotations challenge or support traditional narratives of progress and meaning
- Explore tensions between hope and despair, progress and repetition throughout your analysis
Remember!
- Tom's phrase 'it's all in the telling' establishes narrative subjectivity as central to understanding history, challenging objective historical certainty
- The Fens landscape functions as a metaphor for existential emptiness and quotidian reality, shaping characters' philosophical outlooks
- Quotations exploring cyclical violence question whether humanity learns from historical patterns or remains trapped in repetition
- Tom's acknowledgment of incomplete knowledge reflects postmodern epistemological uncertainty about accessing absolute truth
- The novel uses quotations to affirm narrative's moral necessity whilst acknowledging the impossibility of complete understanding
- When using quotations in essays, always contextualize them within your argument and analyze Swift's literary techniques, not just the content