Reconciling the Conflict between Story and Reality: Graham Swift's Waterland

置身於時問長河之中，不知道這一切是如何開始，又將如何結束，人類對於說故事和聽故事總有著極大的興趣或渴望，因為藉由一個又一個的故事，生命似乎能被賦與某種起承轉合的秩序與因果關係。然而，現實世界裡存在著太多的意外和偶然性，和故事裡頭井然有序、合乎邏輯的世界往往是不一致的，很多事件常常就只是發生了，唯有在事後回顧時，才能多少找出因果關係，甚至於以故事形式把它敘述出來。由此可知，故事的形式和現實生活的本質並不完全相同，甚至是彼此衝突的。許多現代與後現代小說家已經注意到這個相異點，因此他們開始致力於小說形式的革新，期望能寫出真正足以反映現實本質的作品。本文將探討晚近的後現代小說佳作－葛瑞漢•史威夫特之《水之鄉》，分析作者如何藉由主角對說故事的強烈渴望，呈現出人類對現實世界的極度不安，並且運用獨特的敘事技巧，巧妙地跨越故事與現實間的鴻溝，不但滿足了人們對聽故事的渴望，也將現實生活的本質忠實地呈現出來。

關鍵字

說故事；現實；後現代；敘事技巧

並列摘要

Rushing into ”the middest,” in ”a world which is riot our own,” our sense of crisis produces in us an overwhelming itch for telling or hearing stories in order to make sense of the world. The problem, however, is that things in life usually ”just happen,” without displaying the same kind of causal coherence and sequence with beginnings, middles and ends as our stories possess. It seems that our inherited ways of storytelling discord with the essence of reality, and that all we can do is to create our preferred versions of life and impose it on a formless chaos. Such dissonance between the form of story and the nature of reality has made many modernist and postmodernist novelist-storytellers question and move further away from conventional narrative sequences. This paper aims to explore how Graham Swift's Waterland deals with human anxieties about the endless tension between the form of story and the shapelessness of reality. Proceeding in a fragmented, discontinuous, and cyclical narrative pattern, the novel not only forces us to confront the ways in which we make sense of our lives and organize our knowledge of reality, but also offers us a prime example of how a new paradigmatic form of storytelling, or of fiction-making, can reconcile the conflict between story and reality.