R's blog

The importance of storytelling as a technique of education is a massive preoccupation in the first 116 pages of Waterland, and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t continue throughout the rest of the novel. The narrator of the story constantly makes both subtle and overt references to oral storytelling techniques and traditional storytelling conventions. The classic bedtime phrase “Once upon a time” makes multiple appearances. The narrator refers to his audience constantly by the name “children”, bringing to mind Kipling’s “Best Beloved”. He also blatantly identifies what he is doing with the telling of tales, identifying what he has just related about the Atkinson history as a “fairy-tale” rather than “good dry textbook history” (86). But what is he saying about the nature of stories? It is interesting that though the narrator is a history teacher, and evidently cares very much about education, very little is said (at least through page 116) about his own formal education. It is known by the reader that he attended a prestigious school on scholarship, but not what he learned there. We know what color his uniform was, but very little about his classes. In fact, that he attended school at all seems to be important only because it helps to explain how he developed a relationship with his future wife, Mary. So what does the reader know about Crick’s education? All we are given are the stories that his own father and mother told him. The book even begins with one of these fairy-tale like story excerpts, when his father addresses him “as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world”, conjuring up shades of every story about a poor farmer’s son that the Brothers Grimm ever wrote down. By the second page of the novel, Crick’s father has already told another story, this one explaining the nature of stars. Every passage about the narrator’s life as a child is filled with the stories his father told him, where references to conventional schooling are conspicuously absent. But what does that mean? I would propose that it is partly identified in the second paragraph of the second page, when the narrator identifies some of his father’s stories as “warning stories; stories with a moral, or with no point at all”. Part of this explanation seems to be an error on the part of the narrator – it does not seem that any of his parents’ stories had “no point at all”, because even those which his mother “got from books” would at least “make me sleep at night.” But the vast majority of the stories he mentions are far from pointless, and seem to be doing that which fairy tales originally did, back when our culture was more of an oral than a written one. They are “warning stories; stories with a moral” or, if not that, stories like his father’s one about the stars, stories which explain something about the natural world. The preoccupation with storytelling in Waterland revolves, I believe, around the idea that stories teach far better than “good dry textbook history”. Perhaps the narrator (and by extension, the author?) feels that more fairy-tales ought to be told in today’s history classrooms.