Shock Tactics:

The Art of Linking and Transcending Victorian and Postmodern Traumas in Graham Swift’s Ever After

Abstract

It is the purpose of this paper to argue that trauma constitutes the bond between the Victorian and postmodern civilisations such as they are depicted in Swift’s Ever After (1992). By fictionalising the Darwinian, nuclear and ontological crises, Swift manages to capture the quintessence of both nineteenth- and late twentieth-century senses of loss, deprivation and doubt. Beyond the historicised treatment of trauma, what interests Swift in this novel is the ethical dimension of trauma, which he explores by reassessing the suffering of the minor actors of history. As a reader of the recent and distant past, Swift takes on the responsibility of historical testimony and embodies the ethics of witnessing. As a novelist juxtaposing, comparing and adjoining Matthew’s ethics of truth and Bill’s ethics of dissolution, he embodies the specifically postmodern version of an ethical plurality. What is also, and perhaps mainly, postmodern in Swift’s novel is the deconstruction of the concept of transcendence and its replacement by the concept of excendance, that is, the ethical urge to explore forms of otherness, as defined by Emmanuel Levinas. Swift illustrates this ethical drive by textualising the infinite otherness – and, of course, similarity – of our Victorian alter egos. As such his quest is typical of neo-Victorian fiction which can be considered as a form of literature of excendance.