'As if History Could Be Circumvented'

Undying Memories in Graham Swift's The Sweet Shop Owner

Abstract

Graham Swift's debut novel The Sweet Shop Owner recounts the final day in the life of an ageing shopkeeper whose wife has died and who is estranged from his daughter. It diagnoses the demise of a way of life based on the principles of predictability, immobility and economic circularity. This paper shows how the impasse in the narrative present is accounted for by the characters' failure seriously to engage with trauma. The mechanisms of denial to which they take recourse prove inimical to life, and yet remain in place right until the end of the novel. Tantalizing flashes of an alternative modus vivendi are offered through the rebellion of the protagonist's daughter against the oppressive regime imposed by her parents, but the suggestion that there is no possibility of achieving real change is at least equally prominent in the text. Envisaging the possibility of genuine renewal appears to be a deeply problematic undertaking. In exposing the ravages wreaked by a determined evasion of a catastrophic history, The Sweet Shop Owner inaugurates Swift's search for a way of coming to terms with trauma that would create the conditions for the invention of a more humane, just and less destructive future, a quest which is taken up and doggedly pursued in the author's later novels.