Gone up in Smoke: (Un)making the Landscape in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here

• Main Author: Pascale Tollance
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2018-12-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: displacement; landscape; land; landsman; trauma; Swift (Graham)
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/4837
• ISSN: 1168-4917; 2271-5444

This paper examines a particular trajectory in Swift’s work: from Waterland and its memorable landscape to Wish You Were Here, where we witness the unmaking of the landscape through the grey square of a window filling up with smoke. Based on Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay entitled ‘Paysage avec dépaysement’, the analysis takes as a starting point the philosopher’s insistence that we need to take into account the ‘land’ in landscape: what defines a ‘land’/what makes a ‘landscape’ involves a ‘tie’, a ‘relevance’ or a ‘resonance’ and at the same time implies some form of distance. If both novels explore a vital connection with the land, the former farmer (‘paysan’) cannot respond to traumatic displacement in the same way as the history teacher does. Waterland gives the magical land of the Fens ‘the force of a character’ in Swift’s own words; Wish You Were Here describes a land which, once it has been turned into a gigantic pyre, abandoned and sold, runs the risk of becoming a neutral expanse of space, devoid of all presence. If we follow Nancy, what has gone with the dissolution of the landscape is perhaps no less than a space for ‘the possibility of meaningtaking place’.