Enroute to Unroot the Root: An Archival Study in Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock

Abstract

Graham Swift is the twentieth century British novelist and a short-story writer. Shuttlecock (1981) is the second novel by Swift. The themes of the novel include regret, guilt, love, and identity. The plot relates both the personal and professional life of the protagonist named Prentis. He is an archivist by profession. The research paper emphasis a connection between Prentis’s personal and professional life, under the lends of ‘archival’ memory. The novel carries two archives, first, the book written by Prentis’s father entitled, ‘Shuttlecock: The Story of a Secret Agent’, and next the files related to the case C9 in Prentis’s office. The researcher elucidates that, the first archive acts a raising action where Prentis raises question regarding his father’s sudden uncharacteristic silence, and the second archive acts as a falling action where Prentis finds an answer for his father’s muteness. Meanwhile, these archives arouse tension in the minds of other characters too, because it deals with valiant and secretive traits of certain Home Office officials during the war. As these archives deals with war and war heroes it is greatly associated with the interest of public opinion. The function of any  archive is to preserve the sensitive information away from the masses, thus it has great affinity with the term ‘silence’. The archives in the novel plays a dual role, that is by both causing and solving problems. To authenticate the above arguments, and to argue the impact of an archive in the private lives of the characters’ in Shuttlecock,  the researcher chooses the theory titled, The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion by Elizabeth Noelle- Neumann.