MARLENE GOLDMAN AND JOANNE SAUL

Talking with Ghosts: Haunting

in Canadian Cultural Production
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If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations,

generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor
presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice.
Derrida, xix

In Specters of Marx, Derrida insists that learning to live necessitates learning

to live with ghosts. But his injunction, tied to a politics of memory and a
conception of justice, seems, at least on the surface, vexed and difficult to
heed in a settler-nation such as Canada which, for many years, was
renowned for its supposed lack of ghosts. In 1833, Catharine Parr Traill
proclaimed: >As to ghosts or spirits they appear totally banished from
Canada. This is too matter-of-fact a country for such supernaturals to visit.=
Over a hundred years later, Canadian poet and critic Earle Birney echoed
her sentiments, stating that >it=s only by our lack of ghosts we=re haunted.=
Nonetheless, despite or perhaps because of Birney=s suggestion that
Canadians are haunted by a lack of spectres, contemporary Canadian
authors, artists, and filmmakers are obsessed with ghosts and haunting. A
host of writers and artists, including Margaret Atwood, Ann-Marie
MacDonald, Jane Urquhart, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, Daphne
Marlatt, Kerri Sakamoto, Joy Kogawa, Eden Robinson, Dionne Brand, David
Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Robert Houle, Karoo Ashevak, Jessie Oonark,
Colette Whiten, and Sandra Meigs, to name only a few, have taken pains to
map the intricacies of haunting. Recognizing that earlier views of Canada=s
supposed ghostlessness needed to be revisited and that, to borrow Len
Findlay=s words, >it is crucial to identify and discriminate among spectres of
Canada,= the editors of this special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly,
Marlene Goldman and Joanne Saul, invited scholars to reflect on the politics
and poetics of haunting in contemporary Canadian literature. To initiate the
discussion, we posed a series of questions:

$ How does living with ghosts entail a politics of memory, of inheritance,

and of mourning that continues to shape Canadian literature and visual
culture?
$ What is the impact of the Gothic on Canadian writing and art?
$ How do works by First Nations authors and artists interrogate Canada=s

university of toronto quarterly, volume 75, number 2, spring 2006

 supposed ghostlessness?
$ To what extent do ghosts signal anxieties associated with multiple
and/or diasporic identities?
$ What is the significance of haunting in women=s textual and artistic
productions?
$ As well, if ghosts signal the return of a secret, something repressed, then
what types of secrets (ranging from familial to national) are encrypted in
the texts under consideration?
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$ What is the impact of haunting on textual production; for instance, to

what extent is abjection (understood textually as an impulse towards
decomposition, disintegration, and the breaking-up of language) the
structuring principle of haunting?

Implicit in this range of questions was a desire on our part to unearth

what gets covered up or buried by contentions of Canada=s ghostlessness.
Or, put another way, what is at stake in such contentions? Although
separated by over a century, both Traill=s and Birney=s sense of Canada=s
lack of history are arguably based on the mentality of the colonial cringe. As
a new settler in Canada, Traill compares the vastness of the mother
country=s past and the richness of its treasures to Canada=s supposed
newness B a country whose >volume of history is yet a blank= (69). Birney
looks south for his comparison, with both a sense of dread of being
swallowed up by a much more >historied= and storied nation and with
seemingly more than a little envy. He contrasts the manual labour of
railway building in Canada to the intellectual and creative labour of a Walt
Whitman or an Emily Dickinson in the United States: >too busy bridging
loneliness to be alone we hacked in railway ties what Emily etched in bone=
(296). Rejecting such overt manifestations of the colonial cringe, in the
1970s Margaret Atwood attempted to fill in this supposed emptiness by
exhuming ghosts and providing evidence of a past, a history, and thus a
culture. >The digging up of ancestors, calling up of ghosts, exposure of
skeletons in the closet which are so evident in many cultural areas,= writes
Atwood, >have numerous motivations, but one of them surely is a search for
reassurance. We want to be sure that the ancestors, ghosts, and skeletons
really are there, that as a culture we are not as flat and lacking in resonance
as we were once led to believe= (>Canadian Monsters,= 100). Atwood=s list of
>ghosts= (including the wendigo, the Coyote, several magicians, and the
wabeno) supports her position that >there is more to Kanada than meets the
eye= (122). In her study The Haunted Wilderness Margot Northey similarly
suggests that the Canadian Gothic is >at the base of cultural revitalization=:
>those works studied which appear so death-ridden and frequently
disintegrative may indeed be considered catalysts of regeneration. With
good reason we may suppose that in culture, as in the natural world, death
and decay are compost for new growth= (110).

Seeking a new Canadian mythology that rejected previous dependence

on a set of alien or imposed myths, critics like Atwood and Northey

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 ghosts: haunting in canadian cultural production 647

attempted to >fill up= the emptiness and to replace what they perceived as
the socio-realistic take of much of modern Canadian fiction with a new
unifying thematic for Canadian literature, the Gothic. This unified and
unifying vision of Canadian culture sought to challenge the narrative of
Canada=s >pastlessness.= However, it did so without adequately coming to
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terms with Canada=s past (or present). For example, there is no mention of
First Nations= writing (or of First Nations peoples) in their version of
Canada=s past. In fact, Atwood=s take on Canadian monsters depended on
and was a response to seeing the land as empty, silent, seemingly
unpeopled, and yet, perhaps paradoxically, threatening. The range of
questions we posed in our call for papers reflects our attempt to tease out
the paradoxical nature of this complex threat and the implications of this
earlier colonial and postcolonial dread, to explore past histories, and to
examine the empowering and provocative uses of haunting in contempo-
rary Canadian cultural expressions.
The process of composing our call for papers prompted us to examine
more closely the terms as well as the scope of our inquiry. Just what did we
mean by >haunting=? People often speak of landscapes and works of art as
>hauntingly beautiful.= And people are frequently described as being
>haunted by memories.= Given the looseness with which the term >haunting=
has been and is currently applied, we needed to consider the prerequisites
we had in mind when thinking about the term >haunting= in relation to this
collection. Did ghosts actually need to appear in a given work? Was it
enough that a character or characters were haunted by certain memories?
Was haunting the same as memory? As history?
Ultimately, we determined that, however it was understood, haunting,
or some sense of the supernatural or the uncanny, needed to be foreground-
ed within the work under consideration, enabling critics to trace exactly
how the trope of haunting was being used in a particular work. The
appearance of ghosts, for example, might signal the deployment of a
specific aesthetic convention or generic context such as portraiture or the
Gothic or magic realism and, in turn, prompt an analysis of how that form
is itself haunted by knowledges, bodies, and histories previously excluded
by these Western, European aesthetic paradigms.
We were also conscious of the temporal scope of our call. Should the
focus be strictly limited to >contemporary= Canadian literature? If so, why
contemporary literature? And, more fundamentally, why Canadian? Why
the emphasis on national boundaries? In thinking about these questions, we
recognized that both the national and temporal scope were integral to our
inquiry. As critics of Canadian literature, we were intrigued by the
resurgence of interest in the trope of haunting in Canadian critical dis-
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 648 marlene goldman and joanne saul

course. 1 Moreover, we hoped that the papers in the collection would

consider the extent to which the return of the trope of haunting was
potentially bound up with Canada=s status as settler-invader society
historically engaged in the project of nation-building and currently
occupied with the challenges of post-nationalism (and the return of
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nationalism) and globalization. For our purposes, then, a critical engage-

ment with both the historical and the contemporary national contexts was
desirable.
Indeed, if, as Jonathan Kertzer argues, >the nation is inescapable and
continues to haunt us= (26), then the situation is even more complex in
Canada where the supposedly unified nation is haunted from within by
other nations. As Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs explain, an uncanny
experience may occur >when one=s home B one=s place B is rendered some-
how and in some sense unfamiliar; one has the experience, in other words
of being in place and Aout of place@ simultaneously. This happens precisely
at the moment when one is made aware that one has unfinished business
with the past, at the moment when the past returns as an Aelemental@ ...
force to haunt the present day= (181). According to Gelder and Jacobs: >An
aboriginal claim to land is quite literally a claim concerning unfinished
business, a claim which enables what should have been laid to rest to
overflow into the otherwise Ahomely@ realm of modernity= (181). In essence,
the >uncanny= can remind us that within settler nations, >a condition of
unsettled-ness folds into this often taken-for-granted mode of occupation=
(Gelder and Jacobs, 182). In Canada, the spectral presences of North
America=s Indigenous peoples and the Québécois repeatedly unsettle the
imaginary, unified vision of an Anglo-Canadian nation-state.
Compounding this haunting from within are the forces of globalism and
diasporic experience that ensure that the nation is also haunted and
fractured at the transnational level. Perhaps part of the explanation for the
>return= of the trope of haunting in contemporary literature and criticism is
the unprecedented movement and dislocation of people across the globe
associated with the development of global or transnational capitalism.
>Home= as a constant has become less of a given, and more and more people
are >unhomed= B often forced to exist in a kind of liminal space traditionally
associated with the ghost. The sense of >neither here nor there= experienced

1 A partial list of recent Canadian critical texts that have engaged the trop of haunting
include McFarlane, Kertzer, Gunew, Edwards, two special issues of Mosaic on >Haunting=
(ed McCance), Atwood=s Strange Things and Negotiating with the Dead, and Cynthia Sugars
and Gerry Turcotte=s forthcoming special issue of Ariel on >Canadian Literature and the
Postcolonial Gothic.=

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 ghosts: haunting in canadian cultural production 649

(albeit in profoundly different ways) by the traveller, immigrant, migrant,

and refugee can all be related to the in-between space of the ghost. This may
explain why various theories of postcolonialism and diaspora that take as
their starting point the movements of people, the dispossession of people,
and the clash of disparate cultures make use of the image of the ghost to
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capture the in-betweenness of the displaced.

A range of postcolonial theorists use the trope of haunting to symbolize
the traces of lost histories in their understandings of colonial relations. 2
Diaspora theorists have also found the trope enabling. The authors of Ghosts
and Shadows, for example, suggest that their examination of the African
diaspora, specifically, >how the past continues to affect the present in the
lives of diaspora populations,= is >a ghost story= (Matsuoka and Sorenson, 4).
For these critics, >Looking at ghosts and shadows helps us to understand
both ontic and epistemic aspects of diaspora experience. ... ghosts and
shadows are not merely the spectral recurrences that haunt individual
experiences; they often become the source of a structure of feelings, the
basis of the mythico-history that allows groups to analyze their collective
experience and identity. They are neither objective nor subjective= (5). In her
book Cultural Haunting, Elizabeth Brogan refers to the number of what she
calls >American ethnic= writers who make use of the symbol of the ghost in
an attempt to recover and make social use of a poorly documented, partially
erased cultural history. According to Brogan, these stories are centrally
concerned with the issues of communal memory, cultural transmission, and
group inheritance. In a country like Canada with a history of arrivals and
departures, the trope of haunting may be a particularly useful way to think
about the relationship between history and memory, about displacement,
about ancestors, and about inheritance.
Taken together, the ten essays in this collection initiate a conversation
with ghosts and, in the process, prompt an interrogation of the various
>media= in (or through) which these spectres appear. As Jodey Castricano
reminds us, however, >the task of learning how to talk with ghosts is
complex ... because Atalking with ghosts does not only mean being in
conversation with them. It also means to use them instrumentally and, in
turn whether one knows it or not, to be used by them.@= In Shakespeare=s
play Hamlet, the spectre of Hamlet=s murdered father cries out: >Remember
me=; >Do not forget= (1.5.91; 3.4.102). But this is only one example of a ghost
calling on the living, using the living to effect revenge. And, although

2 A wide range of postcolonial critics have made use of the vocabulary of haunting to evoke
the uncanny effects of colonial relations. Some of these include Gelder, Bhabha, The Location
of Culture, >The World and the Home,= and >Signs Taken for Wonders,= Chambers, Lopez,
Sharpe, and Cheah.

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 650 marlene goldman and joanne saul

common, revenge is by no means the only ghostly aim. As Avery Gordon

asserts, reckoning with haunting involves far more than revenge or
witnessing; it means coming to grips with one=s involvement in a buried or
forgotten history and the necessity of being led >somewhere, or elsewhere=
(205):
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When you see, in a photograph or in a hat or in a foot print, the hand of the state,
the other door, the water and what is down there, you have seen the ghostly
matter: the lost beloveds and the force that made them disposable. When you
have a profane illumination of these matters, when you know in a way you did
not know before, then you have been notified of your involvement. You are
already involved, implicated, in one way or another, and this is why, if you don=t
banish it, kill it, or reduce it to something you can already manage, when it
appears to you, the ghost will inaugurate the necessity of doing something about
it. (206)

It is this spirit of critical engagement that characterizes the papers in this

collection.
The first two essays, by Len Findlay and Sylvia Söderlind, respectively,
examine how the nation and national discourses remain haunted by the
spectres of other nations, specifically the unsettling ghosts of New France
and Turtle Island. Findlay=s essay analyses two media, Canadian visual and
literary discourse, to trace the genesis and transmission of a portrait painted
by the Quebec artist Antoine Sébastien Plamodon (1804B1895) entitled Le
dernier Huron. Initially, the painting was purchased by the first Earl of
Durham, author of The Durham Report, which promoted the assimilation of
the French and the union of the Two Canadas. But the painting was also the
inspiration for a poem by François-Xavier Garneau, an influential historian
who adamantly opposed Durham=s ideas. As Findlay argues, the creation
and dissemination of the image of the last Huron, a >living ghost Acaptured@
just as the camera is kicking in and he is dying out,= has a great deal to tell
us about >the haunting of the Canadas by the spectres of their first peoples
at every stage of colonial configuration and national sovereignty and how
such spectres both assuaged and aggravated settler fears while triggering
Indigenous resistance to the cultural completion of colonialism.=
Whereas Findlay discerns ghosts in Canadian portraiture and poetry,
Söderlind locates spectres through the medium of English-Canadian critical
writing. She argues that this discourse is doubly haunted: >on the one hand,
by the particular role played by Quebec in the country=s history and, on the
other B perhaps as a result B by its own inability to acknowledge its
indebtedness to Quebec for its self-definition as a nation.= Tracing the
history of what she refers to as the >Canada First= tendency in Canadian
literary criticism, Söderlind argues that what makes Canada unique as a
nation is neither its supposed >ghostlessness= nor its more recently
celebrated multicultural character. Instead, Canada=s uniqueness is based on

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 ghosts: haunting in canadian cultural production 651

what is paradoxically excised from English-Canadian critical discourse,

namely, that Quebec is >the alien within, on which Canadian self-definition
depends.= Moreover, because English-Canadian critics are so loath to
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 652 marlene goldman and joanne saul

acknowledge this dependence, the alien within becomes >ghosted=; it is

always there yet never quite present.
The two essays that follow, by Cynthia Sugars and Robert David Stacey,
broaden Findlay=s and Söderlind=s interrogation of the spectres that haunt
Canada=s nation-building project and how these spectres are currently
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deployed. Both Sugars=s and Stacey=s essays focus on a single text: John
Steffler=s novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright, based on the life (or
afterlife) of the eighteenth-century explorer, trader, and diarist of the same
name. In the novel, Cartwright appears as a ghost, doomed to wander the
earth, haunted by memories of his ruthless, imperialistic behaviour. As
Sugars observes, Steffler=s treatment of Cartwright=s ghost B a ghost more
haunted than haunting B raises important questions: >Is Steffler=s Cartwright
enacting a form of national penance, a literalized embodiment of white-
settler guilt? Are readers meant to see themselves in George Cartwright, or
to feel superior to him? And is a confession of sins enough, or at least all
that can be offered, in a fictional forum in the name of national atonement?=
She postulates that Steffler=s novel >allows contemporary readers to have it
both ways: they can adopt a postmodern scepticism about national origins
and ancestral ghosts, while at the same time entertaining the illusion of such
legitimating ancestors.= In his essay, Stacey takes issue with the structure of
the novel (and the trope of haunting more generally), which envisions the
rapacious Cartwright living past his own death and, in effect, being
rewarded with a second chance to learn from the mistakes he committed in
life. Drawing on Terry Eagleton=s view that it is precisely an awareness of
death as a >particular form of finality and (literal) irrecuperability= that gives
history its meaning, Stacey argues that Steffler=s treatment of Cartwright=s
ghost can be read as a denial of the sense of finality which is essential to any
socially responsible conception of the historical. In other words, Stacey
offers a trenchant Marxist critique of Derrida=s notion of >hauntolology,= an
approach that deconstructs the metaphysical desire for presence and origins
and ontological certainty.
An awareness of how the project of colonialism is doubly haunted by a
desire for legitimate ancestors B an authentic, indigenous ghost, if you will B
and by an awareness of settler-guilt likewise informs Warren Cariou=s and
Herb Wyile=s essays, which concern Canadian prairie fiction. Recalling Len
Findlay=s reading of Le dernier Huron, Cariou=s essay traces the obsession in
non-Native prairie literature with spectral Native figures who revenge
themselves on the settlers who stole their land. Contrasting this treatment of
ghosts with the very different role played by ghosts in ceremonies such as
the Ghost Dance and in works by Native North Americans of the plains,
Cariou helpfully discriminates among spectres. Moreover, as Cariou argues,
for Native writers, >the spirits may well not be frightening spectres; instead,
they may be figures of healing, ceremony, or xxxxxxxxx

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 ghosts: haunting in canadian cultural production 653

political action.= Wyile=s essay, which focuses on prairie author Margaret

Sweatman=s When Alice Lay Down with Peter, also examines how the spectres
of colonizers and colonized signal the settler-invader=s ambivalent
ownership of land previously occupied by the Cree and Métis peoples. Yet,
as Wyile observes, in Canadian literature the use of ghosts to pose
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postcolonial questions about territory and identity suggests >that the device
is becoming a cliché.= For Wyile, what makes Sweatman=s novel particularly
significant is the medium in which the spectres and postcolonial questions
are conveyed. He argues that Sweatman=s choice of the magic realist genre
has the potential to resist the rationalist and potentially imperializing
historicist suppositions of the traditional historical novel. Equally
important, in Sweatman=s novel the familiar postcolonial questions are
bound up with a critique of capitalism and considerations of class conflict
that, as Wyile observes, have been rendered ghostly presences in Canadian
literature and criticism.
The essays by D.M.R. Bentley and Amelia DeFalco take up a number of
the themes previously addressed, including the fears and desires of the
settler-invaders, but their essays focus explicitly on the uncanny threat
posed by women=s and mixed-race children=s bodies. According to Freud,
there is an inextricable connection between women and the uncanny. As he
explains: >It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is
something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place,
however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human begins, to
the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning=
(221). Bentley=s essay explicitly engages with Freud=s view of women as
signifiers of humanity=s primitive origins in his survey of the poetry of
Duncan Campbell Scott (1862B1947). As Bentley observes, Scott was an
extremely powerful political and aesthetic figure in Canada. For one, he was
deputy chief superintendent in the federal Department of Indian Affairs
from 1879 to his retirement in 1932. But he was also an influential poet
located between the writers of the Confederation group and those of the
modern movement in Canada. In his reading of Scott=s poetry about
haunting and haunted Native women, Bentley discerns Scott=s own
anxieties concerning women=s and Native people=s supposedly savage,
infantile behaviour and his fears of miscegenation. DeFalco=s reading of
Margaret Atwood=s Alias Grace reveals similar fears of women's bodies.
According to DeFalco, in Atwood=s novel, haunting signals Victorian
society=s conflicted and repressed response to the body. More precisely, the
corpse B coded as abjectly feminine B provides a horrifying reminder of the
fears and desires associated with the erasure of subjectivity. Although
DeFalco=s analysis of the desire to consume and, in turn, be consumed by
the female body is not explicitly tied to the Canadian national context, her
insights recall Sugars=s discussion of the settler-invader=s death instinct,
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 654 marlene goldman and joanne saul

which, in Steffler=s novel, also takes the form of primal fantasies of incor-
poration.
Whereas the majority of essays in the collection analyse spectral
encounters that highlight the uncanny status of Canada as a settler-invader
society, the final essays in the collection respond, in different ways, to
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Avery Gordon=s suggestion that an encounter with ghosts involves both a

willingness to reckon with one=s involvement in a buried or forgotten
history and to allow oneself to be led >somewhere, or elsewhere= (205). Jody
Mason=s essay examines how the work of Dionne Brand forges links among
memory, history, and haunting by returning to the image of the door, a
metaphor for all the portals through which African slaves passed as they
were taken from the west coast of Africa. By exploring the issue of
transnational haunting and investigating the uncanny nature of the Black
diaspora, Mason=s essay returns to the subject of racialized and gendered
bodies and, at the same time, widens the scope of the discussion about
haunting in Canadian writing by making the links to the Caribbean and
across the Middle Passage. In addition, Mason=s essay underscores the
potentially transformative aspect of haunting. As she argues, Brand
positions the poet (and critic) herself as a doorway: >She is both willing to
enter and be entered by experiences and processes, like haunting, that are
unknown to her and open to engaging in collective change, which will
necessitate going beyond the self.=
A willingness to go beyond the self or, put somewhat differently, >to
move toward what the dominant social order neglects, excludes, represses,
or simply fails to recognize= (Williams 125) also characterizes Jodey
Castricano=s essay on Eden Robinson=s novel Monkey Beach. Like Findlay,
Söderlind, and Wyile, Castricano interrogates the medium through which
the spectres appear, in this case, a >Gothic= novel by a Native author.
Recalling Warren Cariou=s suggestion that ghosts in Native literature may
have a different function, Castricano argues that the ghosts in Monkey Beach
signal the text=s resistance to what can be described as interpretive
colonialism by simultaneously inviting, resisting, and exceeding a Western
European Gothic explanatory model. As Derrida remarks:

[T]here has never been a scholar who really, and as a scholar, deals with ghosts.
A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts B nor in all that could be called
the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does
not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual
and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being ... in the
opposition between what is present and what is not, for example, in the form of
objectivity. Beyond this opposition, there is, for the scholar, only the hypothesis
of a school of thought, theatrical fiction, literature, and speculation. (11)

Yet, according to Castricano, in reading Monkey Beach, the critic must resist

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 ghosts: haunting in canadian cultural production 655

the urge to interpret the supernatural within the context of the Gothic, as a
sign of psychological confusion, an overactive imagination. Instead, readers
must come to grips with the possibility of a spirit world and examine the
consequences of Western culture=s drive to eradicate >superstition= or
>mysticism= in the name of psychology.
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To conclude, by offering models of how we might talk with ghosts, the

essays in this collection outline a politics and poetics of haunting that
demands an engagement with questions about the form and content of
national and transnational inheritance, of memory and forgetting, and of
justice. These essays demonstrate how haunting can be an empowering
literary and artistic trope that can evoke trauma, loss, rupture, recovery,
healing, and wisdom. And it is also, at its core, political. It provokes (and
insists upon) questions about ownership, entitlement, dispossession, and
voice. Although questions may be raised about the ghost=s agency or
political efficacy, many of the ghosts examined here are neither paralysing
nor stuck. Rather, they urge, they disrupt, they provoke. In fact, the
Canadian writer and critic Larissa Lai refers to the empowering aspect of
this trope as the >spectre of the hybrid= (20). The trope of haunting can be a
reminder that the space of the in-between is palpable; it represents a
neither-nor-ness that can break down the symmetry and duality of
self/other, inside/outside. It is a reminder that >in the productivity of
power, the boundaries of authority B its reality effects B are always besieged
by Athe other scene@ of fixations and phantoms= (Bhabha in Gagnon, 143).

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Literary Culture. Ed David Staines. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1977
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B Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Toronto: Anchor Canada 2003
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge 1994
B >Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a
Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.= >Race,= Writing and Difference. Ed Henry Louis
Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986
B >The World and the Home.= Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial
Perspectives. Ed Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis:
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