An essay, or Vogon poetry, I'm not sure...
Well, as you can see, this is the very anti-apex of my writing skills. When it's the last day, one in the morning, and a 1500 word essay on a book you haven't read is due... The results are disaterous. I give it here, so you may all mock it. Note, this is a formal university essay worth 20% of my mark. It's gonna be fun seeing what it will be.
Premise for the essay: The reader of the essay has already read the book, Waterland, by Graham Swift, they just want to see what you can do with the option, (4) Metaphors using water.
Waterland, is fraught with innuendos, euphemisms and metaphors. The most subtle, yet the most obvious is that of water. This is accomplished primarily by the sheer volume of metaphors and guises it takes. Why, there are more references to water than there are pages, so it is understandable if one or two escape the readers notice. However, after reading the novel, one can take a guess at what roles Graham Swift wished the reader to think of the water. A matron, a life giver and a bequeather of riches. Also as a thief, a taker of wealth and being. Above all else, it is clear than the author wanted to show us that, just like the main character, Tom Crick, the water is a historian, etching the story it is in onto the riverbanks, like so much slit. The only difference is that water is neutral, while Tom is a land person.
It is clear, that water, as a natural thing, has no wish to twist or turn events one way or another, content to follow a course set down by the cardinal rules and laws described by science. By this nature it is an ally and a foe to all people. Some try to tame it, forcing its path along narrow winding streams, and some force its life be spilled away, as a curse to be rid of. There is no advantage given by water, a purely neutral force, but there are some that can take advantage of its properties with more grace than others.
A history can not start without a beginning, and a beginning can not be known without a recorder. In this case, a beginning is life, of life from non-life, of the purest immaculate conception. Like “the species [that] reproduced itself by parthenogenetically”p198 the eel, the story starts. How it starts is now known of the later, but of the former, well, there are but guesses that it involves water. Now there is life, now what? What then? What is time, and then is change. Then is adaptation and evolution, mutation and extinction. After a wait, the humans are, well, they are just there. They spread, and they begin to colonize. As life before them, they adapt, and they try to suit their environment. This time there is a difference, this time life is using tools. Life now is changing what it is has hardly changed before, and never on such a massive scale. They are draining, and ploughing, and building, and creating, and taking, and hurting, and, and, and destroying! Water does not care, can not care. It keeps its downward vector, evaporates, and repeats.
A historian must have something to record, or something to say, otherwise they are not a historian in the first place. This story starts with two kinds of people, water people and land people. The water people “speared fish and netted ducks.”p8 The land people farmed and used the land. The water people could not take over the land people, but the land people could evict the water people. They did so, as it is in every adaptations nature to be fully utilized by its host species. Many historians saw this, and all that recorded it saw it as a good thing, as most historians are biased, as they are human. The historian water on the other hand holds no bias, and just is. It saw these acts, preserved the evidence under miles of sand and slit, and sifted onward.
The water people, having nowhere else to go, “threw in their lot with the”p12 land people. This caused the two distinct peoples to become one They, like all life, had to adapt, attempting to take the best of the other and add it to their own. They had to grow and to expand into new roles. As with all growings and expandings, there are pains, and there are mistakes. Conversely, there are also surprise benefits, but these are usually overshadowed by the bad.
The mistakes made with mixing of the water peoples and and land peoples were many. The most obvious of these is Dick Crick, the potato-head. A brute, an imbecile, an abomination. That which should not exist. Or at least say the land-historians. Hailed by his (grand)father as “the saviour of the world,” p 229, he is anything but, and his very birth marks then end of the world for his father. Dick is that of the land person turned water, and he shows this by being able to do such with the water that no other land person can do. Be it a swim where emerging from under the waters is a fancy done “merely out of whim and not out of necessity,”p190 or “hav[ing] a natural instinct for the principles of dredging” p347. Or be it the fact that his child, and his seed, are both released into the waters, almost as if to appease a being with a pagan sacrifice. The water does not care, the water just accepts, and takes, and treats it all the same.
Soon after the land people forced the change, the Atkinson empire was created. It started with a contract with a brewery, then a building of a river, then a building of a brewery to go with that very river. This culminated in the creation of the finest ale, the Atkinson beer. Now why was this beer the best? Well, that has to do not with the making of the beer itself, but from what that beer was derived. To understand this, one has to realize, that when consuming quantities of ale, people tend to get mellow, and they tend to look back upon their lives, their pasts and reminisce. They wish to remember the good old days. The beer is derived from barley. The barley grown for this beer is grown in the fens and the fens are the deposits, the recordings of the water through the times. Then to hydrate the beer, they use water, the truest historian of them all! To what finer level could the beer obtain? It is made from the past, to remember the past. A fine history “ 'Out of Water,' ” p86 indeed!
Like all empires, the Atkinsons also falls in time. Prophecized by a land person violently turned water person, to the tune of “ 'Smoke!', 'Fire!', 'Burning!', in infinite permutations, ” the Atkinson brewery goes up in smoke, never to be rebuilt. The fire could have been stopped, if not for the hydrated infusion of brewing and malt barley that imbued the populace. The Gildsey Fire Brigade, water people by occupation if not by birth, were no exception. Even if the fire could have been stopped, it would not have been prevented. This is because that beer, as being mostly water, and mostly memories, had the effect of, over time, changing the general populace to become more water like, more interested in the history and stories. As the brewery was a creation of the land people, it was forced to adapt to being more water like or die. A brewery is not life however, it is a tool, made for a task, and thusly, can not adapt, and must die. The irony is that while the land people build the brewery for the task of making fine ale, they did not understand that the brewery had its own purpose (Pullman, Dark Materials, The).
As the brewery dies, the conversion of land people to water is halted, and reversed. The Saviour is born to attempt to halt this process, and given the means to do so, with the twelve bottles of the special brew, perhaps for his twelve apostles, but he fails in his task. It is, in fact, Tom Crick who succeeds where his half brother failed. It is Tom who instils the sense of curiosity and wonderment back into the children, turning them back into water people. It is Tom who uses the Bloody Mary p258 to make Price want to know about the past, and he consumes his own drinks to tell him the story. It is, again, a cyclical repetition of the past, of a land person turning the other people into water people.
It is clear that Waterland is not merely a novel about a land constructed of water, but a novel with “The majority of critical attention [] focused on the concept of historiography”(Geissler, Waterland). It is a story about conflict of the water people who are their past, and the land people, who are their future. Graham Swift, when writing this historical novel, tried to make people understand that most people are either water or land people, that is, most people can not take the full grasp of a situation. They can only see where they are going or where they have been. The only historian that knows its own future and its own past is the water. To flow down, evaporate, and cycle, and cycle, and cycle.
Premise for the essay: The reader of the essay has already read the book, Waterland, by Graham Swift, they just want to see what you can do with the option, (4) Metaphors using water.
Waterland, is fraught with innuendos, euphemisms and metaphors. The most subtle, yet the most obvious is that of water. This is accomplished primarily by the sheer volume of metaphors and guises it takes. Why, there are more references to water than there are pages, so it is understandable if one or two escape the readers notice. However, after reading the novel, one can take a guess at what roles Graham Swift wished the reader to think of the water. A matron, a life giver and a bequeather of riches. Also as a thief, a taker of wealth and being. Above all else, it is clear than the author wanted to show us that, just like the main character, Tom Crick, the water is a historian, etching the story it is in onto the riverbanks, like so much slit. The only difference is that water is neutral, while Tom is a land person.
It is clear, that water, as a natural thing, has no wish to twist or turn events one way or another, content to follow a course set down by the cardinal rules and laws described by science. By this nature it is an ally and a foe to all people. Some try to tame it, forcing its path along narrow winding streams, and some force its life be spilled away, as a curse to be rid of. There is no advantage given by water, a purely neutral force, but there are some that can take advantage of its properties with more grace than others.
A history can not start without a beginning, and a beginning can not be known without a recorder. In this case, a beginning is life, of life from non-life, of the purest immaculate conception. Like “the species [that] reproduced itself by parthenogenetically”p198 the eel, the story starts. How it starts is now known of the later, but of the former, well, there are but guesses that it involves water. Now there is life, now what? What then? What is time, and then is change. Then is adaptation and evolution, mutation and extinction. After a wait, the humans are, well, they are just there. They spread, and they begin to colonize. As life before them, they adapt, and they try to suit their environment. This time there is a difference, this time life is using tools. Life now is changing what it is has hardly changed before, and never on such a massive scale. They are draining, and ploughing, and building, and creating, and taking, and hurting, and, and, and destroying! Water does not care, can not care. It keeps its downward vector, evaporates, and repeats.
A historian must have something to record, or something to say, otherwise they are not a historian in the first place. This story starts with two kinds of people, water people and land people. The water people “speared fish and netted ducks.”p8 The land people farmed and used the land. The water people could not take over the land people, but the land people could evict the water people. They did so, as it is in every adaptations nature to be fully utilized by its host species. Many historians saw this, and all that recorded it saw it as a good thing, as most historians are biased, as they are human. The historian water on the other hand holds no bias, and just is. It saw these acts, preserved the evidence under miles of sand and slit, and sifted onward.
The water people, having nowhere else to go, “threw in their lot with the”p12 land people. This caused the two distinct peoples to become one They, like all life, had to adapt, attempting to take the best of the other and add it to their own. They had to grow and to expand into new roles. As with all growings and expandings, there are pains, and there are mistakes. Conversely, there are also surprise benefits, but these are usually overshadowed by the bad.
The mistakes made with mixing of the water peoples and and land peoples were many. The most obvious of these is Dick Crick, the potato-head. A brute, an imbecile, an abomination. That which should not exist. Or at least say the land-historians. Hailed by his (grand)father as “the saviour of the world,” p 229, he is anything but, and his very birth marks then end of the world for his father. Dick is that of the land person turned water, and he shows this by being able to do such with the water that no other land person can do. Be it a swim where emerging from under the waters is a fancy done “merely out of whim and not out of necessity,”p190 or “hav[ing] a natural instinct for the principles of dredging” p347. Or be it the fact that his child, and his seed, are both released into the waters, almost as if to appease a being with a pagan sacrifice. The water does not care, the water just accepts, and takes, and treats it all the same.
Soon after the land people forced the change, the Atkinson empire was created. It started with a contract with a brewery, then a building of a river, then a building of a brewery to go with that very river. This culminated in the creation of the finest ale, the Atkinson beer. Now why was this beer the best? Well, that has to do not with the making of the beer itself, but from what that beer was derived. To understand this, one has to realize, that when consuming quantities of ale, people tend to get mellow, and they tend to look back upon their lives, their pasts and reminisce. They wish to remember the good old days. The beer is derived from barley. The barley grown for this beer is grown in the fens and the fens are the deposits, the recordings of the water through the times. Then to hydrate the beer, they use water, the truest historian of them all! To what finer level could the beer obtain? It is made from the past, to remember the past. A fine history “ 'Out of Water,' ” p86 indeed!
Like all empires, the Atkinsons also falls in time. Prophecized by a land person violently turned water person, to the tune of “ 'Smoke!', 'Fire!', 'Burning!', in infinite permutations, ” the Atkinson brewery goes up in smoke, never to be rebuilt. The fire could have been stopped, if not for the hydrated infusion of brewing and malt barley that imbued the populace. The Gildsey Fire Brigade, water people by occupation if not by birth, were no exception. Even if the fire could have been stopped, it would not have been prevented. This is because that beer, as being mostly water, and mostly memories, had the effect of, over time, changing the general populace to become more water like, more interested in the history and stories. As the brewery was a creation of the land people, it was forced to adapt to being more water like or die. A brewery is not life however, it is a tool, made for a task, and thusly, can not adapt, and must die. The irony is that while the land people build the brewery for the task of making fine ale, they did not understand that the brewery had its own purpose (Pullman, Dark Materials, The).
As the brewery dies, the conversion of land people to water is halted, and reversed. The Saviour is born to attempt to halt this process, and given the means to do so, with the twelve bottles of the special brew, perhaps for his twelve apostles, but he fails in his task. It is, in fact, Tom Crick who succeeds where his half brother failed. It is Tom who instils the sense of curiosity and wonderment back into the children, turning them back into water people. It is Tom who uses the Bloody Mary p258 to make Price want to know about the past, and he consumes his own drinks to tell him the story. It is, again, a cyclical repetition of the past, of a land person turning the other people into water people.
It is clear that Waterland is not merely a novel about a land constructed of water, but a novel with “The majority of critical attention [] focused on the concept of historiography”(Geissler, Waterland). It is a story about conflict of the water people who are their past, and the land people, who are their future. Graham Swift, when writing this historical novel, tried to make people understand that most people are either water or land people, that is, most people can not take the full grasp of a situation. They can only see where they are going or where they have been. The only historian that knows its own future and its own past is the water. To flow down, evaporate, and cycle, and cycle, and cycle.
