Understanding and deciphering the past in Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock

Abstract

Like the other influential events in world history, the two world wars of the twentieth century have deeply influenced the following generations and forced them to evaluate their existence and ask epistemological questions about fact and fiction, history and story, and truth and falsity in order to understand and situate themselves in a constructed present world. Shuttlecock, Graham Swift’s second novel, follows a senior police archivist who inherits a past from his veteran father and attempts to reach a natural flow of life by fully grasping the past. He thinks that he can dissolve the unnaturally constructed reality of the present by digging the past but scrutinizing the past does not provide the necessary answers to settle him down in harmony. In the end, he leaves his epistemological quest and seems to come to terms with the fragmented reality between the past and present. However, as Slavoj Žižek notes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, overseeing the modern alienation is a dangerous fantasy and it is impossible to return to a natural balance. This article aims to discuss the relationship between memory, trauma and modernity in order to come to terms with the impossibility of knowing the past.