SOURCE: "Double Closures in Postmodern British Fiction: The Example of Graham Swift," in Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1991, pp. 88-95.

An American critic and educator, Higdon is the editor of Conradiana. In the following excerpt, he analyzes Swift's use of closure in Waterland and his other novels.

'One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with,' notes the protagonist of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1951) and, he continued, 'a good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.' In the years following this comment, the sense of closure in contemporary British fiction has become more and more problematical. The traditional terminology of closure—open, closed, multiple, reflexive—no longer seems appropriate to or adequate for the fictions of postmodernism. Indeed, we may well...