The Impossible Afterlife of George Cartwright: Settler Melancholy and Postcolonial Desire

Those who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from their ghost life and led [sic] to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation, while as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow life.

Loewald, 249

soon enough
we'll all be out there with them
in the cold

Steffler, 'Save Our Ghosts!,' 25

Ghosts, the legends tell us, are the spirits of those who met an untimely end. Sometimes they seek revenge, sometimes escape. In some versions, they haunt the spots where their crimes were committed. They are the undead, whose souls have not been allowed to rest. They are anxious figures in an alien landscape, trapped in places they do not wish to be. Ghosts, we might say, left behind them unfinished business. On the other hand, they offer reassurance to those of us afraid of the prospect of our extinction. If souls can be tormented, if they can exist here on earth, they attest to an afterlife, and hence affix some degree of significance to the contingency of mortal life. Ghosts, like good ancestors, affirm the continuity between our selves and the past. They put us in our rightful place. Ghosts give to the living texture, significance, legacy ... culture. Without them, we are the ghosts.

John Steffler's 1992 novel, The Afterlife of George Cartwright, is a book about inheritance, atonement, and haunting. The enormous popularity of the novel testifies to its success in tantalizing, perhaps even haunting, the Canadian imagination. Yet what is it, precisely, that constitutes the haunting effect of this work? Are readers – and implicitly non-Aboriginal readers – seeking an assuagement, like Cartwright himself, of the guilt of the colonial past? Is George Cartwright, ever scribbling and rescripting his Labrador experiences, comparable to contemporary cultural critics who strive to make sense of the legacy of colonialism? And if there is some kind of atonement being offered in the text, in what does it reside? I want to suggest that if Cartwright is a ghost in search of a haunt-able landscape, the novel not only gestures towards a ghost that is sufficiently haunting (reflecting back a kind of historical-cultural legitimacy), but also depicts and enacts an inconclusive process of mourning, a process which should, ideally, enable a working through to some kind of reassessment of the nation's colonial history.¹

Nations, like religions (and like ghosts), according to Benedict Anderson, concern themselves with transforming 'contingency into meaning,' with linking 'the dead and the yet unborn.' Such configurations are projected to 'loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future' (11–12). Settler-invader societies have a more difficult time imagining their national origins because of the unavailability of even the illusion of such timeless authority. In this emerges a contradiction, as Julian Thomas acknowledges in his analysis of Australian historical narratives: 'more history is demanded by an assertion of the lack of it,' but this lack itself becomes an obsession, resulting not in 'absence but its opposite: a pervasive fascination with history and a strong belief in its importance' (125). As Thomas further notes, settler-invader societies have 'not entirely disposed of [i.e., put to use] the past they ha[ve] inherited' (126).² If settler societies are condemned always to desire a long-reaching timeless past but never to achieve it, postcolonial theorists have critiqued the ways Canada's settler past has been celebrated as a defining moment in the Canadian national imaginary, particularly how the arrival of Europeans is taken as 'the originary moment for the Canadian nation state' (Grace et al, 9). 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. While revelling in 'the chimera of the "myth of origins"' (Ahmad, 70), the novel also destabilizes that quest, since the origins are themselves shown to be compromised. Steffler takes this problem as his theme: the impossible...