언제나 마무리되는 이야기, 끝나지 않는 역사: Ever After

Abstract

In last century Britain, there were plenty of historically self-conscious novels that bore the unavoidable reciprocity between historical imagination and literary inventiveness, making history and literature intercommunicate. They asserted that both historiography and fiction as narratives were human constructs, and narrative artificiality in historiography led history to the fictional rather than to the factual. They believe the novel becomes not only passively imprinted upon history, but also one of the ways which [re]makes and [re]writes history. Two directions can be noticed about these novels. One is an aggressive challenge against or an active intervention in historiography, which subverts and replaces conventional history through using historiographic terms. The other finally retrieves the position of literature after insisting on history as story-telling, simultaneously fore-grounding literariness as much as historicity in it. Graham Swift’s Ever After excellently illustrates the process of the latter, showing that ever-ending stories make never-ending history. Swift considers the narrative history as story-telling, yet remembering his position as literary story-teller, and insidiously provokes historiography to self-reflect. He seems to retain his instinctive esteem for traditional history without radical/visible division of historiography and fiction, embracing common features of both as narrative story-telling. This paper explores Swift's return to literature after the deepest contemplation of history and historiography in Ever After.