In which water is a literary device

Water. It connects us and it keeps us apart.

I've recently read several books in which water is a recurring theme. I didn't set out to read books about water, but after the first two, I realised how water, as a literary device, can come to symbolise so much about humans and how we live.

Elif Shafak's 2024 book, There Are Rivers in the Sky, is transcendent, but then, all of Shafak's work is transcendent. In this book, she uses water as the device to span time as well as space, moving from ancient Mesopotamia at the time the Epic of Gilgamesh was written, to 21st Century London, focusing on the rivers Tigris and Thames. The link is water. Shafak said in an interview that the connection between the two rivers and the span of time is a single raindrop.

Shafak also looks at the importance of people having access to their history, touching on the subject of the "ownership" of other cultures by the British Museum. All the threads of the story are finally united, almost impossibly, but then, that's what novelists do. They weave stories that suspend belief but also make it believable.

Water as barrier is explored by John Boyne in his short but powerful novel, Water. A woman arrives on an island off the coast of Ireland, having changed her name and her identity, to find herself in a small community suspicious of outsiders. As the story unfolds we learn what she's running from and how she can reconcile herself with her past. Boyne uses the physical element of water to cleanse the woman of her past and to use the isolation of the island its small community to make a fresh start.

In Tim Winton's Breath and Louise Erdrich's The Mighty Red, water is almost a silent character flowing through the lives of the characters and linking them. In the case of Breath, it's the enigmatic and unpredictable surf that constantly draws the characters to itself and ultimately forces them apart. In The Mighty Red it's the Red River of North Dakota lying like a sleeping dragon that must be confronted before it will release the hold it has on the characters of the story.  

What makes water such a powerful metaphor? The flood myths in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament both have a god sending a destructive flood to punish a transgressive human population. Catastrophic flood - either literal or metaphorical - sweeps everything away and allows for new beginnings.

Water is a feminine element and we see this in Shakespeare, where he uses water to denote vulnerability, change and transformation. In Hamlet, Ophelia drowns, overwhelmed by the events surrounding her. In The Tempest, a drowned corpse is described as being transformed into treasure. In Othello, the titular character compares his heart to water, suggesting that his emotions are no longer under control and that God is punishing him for his jealousy and vulnerability:

There where I have garnered up my heart, 
Where either I must live or bear no life; 
The fountain from the which my current runs 
Or else dries up—to be discarded thence, 
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads 
To knot and gender in.

Lack of water, too, can be a powerful literary image, with drought signifying barrenness, deprivation, disaster or, ultimately, the need to flee or die. One of the most famous examples is Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which depicts the fate of farmers forced off their land by the 1930s drought that turned much of the south-west of the USA into a dust bowl. While the drought itself was real enough, Steinbeck also used drought and the resultant fate of the Joad family to symbolise the wider social 'desert' of scarcity, poverty and hardship brought about by the Great Depression.

 Australian writers have been particularly fond of evoking drought as a metaphor for the resilience of both the Australian landscape and people. From Dorothea Mackellar's oft-quoted (to the point of tedium) "drought and flooding rain" line, through to Jane Harper's epic The Dry, series, the lack of water is a common but powerful element in Australian literature.

Water is fundamental to survival - ours and every other living thing on the planet. The fluid and constantly changing nature of water makes its use as a metaphor unsurprising, given its centrality to life itself.

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Novels where water is a central theme (a very brief selection):

• There are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak (Turkish-British)
• Water, John Boyne (Irish)
• Breath, Tim Winton (Australian)
• Playground, Richard Powers (American)
• A River Called Titash, Adwaita Mallabarman (Indian)
• The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich (American)
•  The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese (Ethiopian-American)
• The Life of Pi, Yann Martel (Canadian) 
• Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese)
  

 

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AfrikaansAlbanianAmharicArabicArmenianAzerbaijaniBasqueBelarusianBengaliBosnianBulgarianCatalanCebuanoChichewaChinese (Simplified)Chinese (Traditional)CorsicanCroatianCzechDanishDutchEnglishEsperantoEstonianFilipinoFinnishFrenchFrisianGalicianGeorgianGermanGreekGujaratiHaitian CreoleHausaHawaiianHebrewHindiHmongHungarianIcelandicIgboIndonesianIrishItalianJapaneseJavaneseKannadaKazakhKhmerKoreanKurdishKyrgyzLaoLatinLatvianLithuanianLuxembourgishMacedonianMalagasyMalayMalayalamMalteseMaoriMarathiMongolianMyanmar (Burmese)NepaliNorwegianPashtoPersianPolishPortuguesePunjabiRomanianRussianSamoanScots GaelicSerbianSesothoShonaSindhiSinhalaSlovakSlovenianSomaliSpanishSundaneseSwahiliSwedishTajikTamilTeluguThaiTurkishUkrainianUrduUzbekVietnameseWelshXhosaYiddishYorubaZulu

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