https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5873-9495
![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Graham Swift’s Ever After offers a literary treatment of the existential trauma that Darwinism has brought about in the nineteenth century. Further as part of the neo-Victorian sub-genre, Swift’s work intertwines this trauma with the anxieties characterising the twentieth century present of the novel. Swift charts two journeys which ultimately fail to culminate in a “happily ever after”, due to the impact of Darwinism in one case and the struggle against postmodern existential anxiety in the other. The novel juxtaposes the predicaments of two fictional characters and renders one’s apostasy in the past as a possible means for the protagonist’s attempt to cathartically release his pent-up feelings in the present. Our essay explores how the comparative equation between the two persons belonging to different eras in the novel corresponds to Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the “other” as a significant factor in the assertion of the “self”.
Acknowledgements
I dedicate the article to the memory of my Ph.D. supervisor and the co-author Dr. Ansu Louis who met an untimely end on January 31, 2023. This piece of work would not have been possible without his invaluable guidance and support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Swift, Ever After, 250.
2 Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon”, 73.
3 Peperzak, To the Other, 25.
4 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 6.
5 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, ix.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., x.
8 Ibid.
9 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 172.
10 Swift, EA, 49.
11 Lea, Graham Swift, 151.
12 Swift, EA, 75.
13 Ibid., 246.
14 Ibid.
15 Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 77.
16 Swift, EA, 247.
17 Ibid.
18 Swift, EA, 6.
19 Lea, “Feigning Reason”, 159.
20 Swift, EA, 173.
21 Swift, EA, 68. [emphasis added]
22 Ibid., 62–63.
23 Ibid., 6.
24 Fitzpatrick, “The Exhaustion of Literature”, 528.
25 Poole, “Graham Swift and the Mourning After”, 157.
26 Ferris, “Printing the Past”, 150.
27 Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, 132.
28 Ferris, “Printing the Past”, 155.
29 Ibid.
30 Nünning, “Crossing Borders and Blurring Genres”, 231–232.
31 Swift, EA, 32.
32 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 75.
33 Ibid.
34 Sage, Times Literary Supplement, 6.
35 Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, 131.
36 Swift, EA.
37 Virgil, The Aeneid, 15.
38 Swift, EA, 1.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 113.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 226.
43 Ibid., 2.
44 Ibid., 98.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 52.
47 Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 160.
48 Ibid., 159.
49 Bernard and Swift, Contemporary Literature, 224–225.
50 Levinas, Time and the Other, 83.
51 Swift, Waterland, 241.
52 Kaplan, Victoriana, 154.
53 Tillich, The Courage to Be, 39.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 35.
57 Ibid., 42.
58 Ibid., 42–43.
59 Swift, EA, 3.
60 Ibid., 128.
61 Ibid., 130.
62 Tillich, The Courage to Be, 47.
63 Ibid., 49.
64 Swift, EA, 44.
65 Ibid., 47.
66 Ibid., 45.
67 Ibid., 75.
68 Ibid., 176.
69 Ibid., 178–180.
70 Ibid., 48.
71 Tillich, The Courage to Be, 41.
72 Ibid., 52–53.
73 Swift, EA, 68.
74 Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 10.
75 Perpich, “Philosophy of the Other: Levinas”, 613.
76 Peperzak, To the Other, 64.
77 Swift, EA, 68.
78 Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, 156.
79 Tillich, The Courage to Be, 55.
80 Graham Swift with Kim Hill – 22 October 1997.
81 Swift, EA, 99.
82 Ibid., 227.
83 Ibid., 89.
84 Ibid., 98.
85 Ibid.
86 Tan, “No Saving Fictions of Masculinity”, 96.
87 Newman, “The trace of trauma”, 163.
88 Malcolm, Understanding Graham Swift, 151.
89 Swift, EA, 100.
90 Ibid., 104.
91 Ibid., 111.
92 Ibid., 109.
93 Ibid., 110.
94 Ibid., 133.
95 Ibid., 138.
96 Ibid., 146.
97 Ibid., 226.
98 Craps, Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift, 207.
99 Swift, EA, 98.
100 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 97.
101 Swift, EA, 142.
102 Ibid.
103 Levinas, On Escape, 52.
104 Ibid., 53.
105 Waugh, Metafiction, 19.
106 Swift, EA, 49.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., 120.
109 Ibid., 50.
110 Whitehead, Book Review, 738.
111 Pesso-Miquel, “Apes and Grandfathers”, 117.
112 Swift, EA, 159.