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Why is “history” such a central theme in the novel Waterland
they prompt thoughts about the human experience in other times and places. The same aesthetic and humanistic goals inspire people to immerse themselves in efforts to reconstruct quite remote pasts, far removed from immediate, present-day utility. Exploring what historians sometimes call the "pastness of the past"—the ways people in distant ages constructed their lives—involves a sense of beauty and excitement, and ultimately another perspective on human life and society.
History, or story telling, is done to bring order to chaos. In the case of Crick – to his own life, although now he can’t change the past and the relationship with his wife is effectively over, he examines the key events in his life at the Fens and more recently in an attempt to understand why his wife did what she did. So Crick does not make an attempt to learn from past mistakes but more or less seems to just make an attempt to learn what the past mistakes were and how they shaped his life. Crick looks at his own personal history and that of those around him, during his life in the Fens, in order to determine how history has shaped him. Story telling is also used to comfort – threat of nuclear war – although this specific threat is only present in the novel’s time, the theme of Crick using history to comfort his students indicates something more about the nature of history in the wider perspective.
Crick assesses his personal history in order to understand himself – the Shakespearian ideal of literature – we study Shakespeare in order to understand ourselves because of the depth and breadth of human experience and understanding present in his works. Though personal history presents only a shallow human understanding – all that can be done with your won personal history is to reassess it. So looking at your own personal history is essentially cyclical, it involves only learning from your won past in order to understand your present circumstances. “But all the stories were once real.” Crick says, as if to suggest that eventually history becomes myth as nobody can tell what really happened after innumerable retellings of the same stories.
It seems more important to Crick to discover, by means of writing, who he was, than to address posterity. The writer in search for himself. The novel as a constant question mark. The reader pushed between the lines. An insecure text, using memory as its fragile foundation. Memory-land can be reclaimed, but the hurricane of literature can break it any time, by a mere brush, the horrifying, “You are not the first.” He has found a track and steers his whole being to follow it. Crick attempts to fit his own life into a wider perspective; however, by focusing so strongly on the consequences and repercussions of personal history and how it affects the individual and those around them a great importance is lent to personal histories, which at least attempts to overshadow world history. This could be said to relate to [next page]