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Approaches of White Regret: John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Carturright and Harold Horwood's White Eskimo
- University of Ottawa Press
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Approaches of White Regret: John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright and Harold Horwood's White Eskimo JOAN STRONG like me?" (268). With these words John Steffler's George Cartwright arrives finally at the question central to his maker's text and more broadly to postcolonial ruminations in our times. Steffler constructs a fictional Cartwright based on journals written by the eighteenth-century British explorer, and this assembled creature suffers the horror of his own resurrection as surely as any Frankensteinian production. Cartwright's selfawareness is made possible through the unflinching gaze of his travel companion, housekeeper, partner and lover, Mrs. Selby. From her extremely limited appearances in the original journals she springs in Steffler 's text fully formed to confront Cartwright's ambitions, functioning in the novel as the moral disciplinary assessor of Cartwright's achievements. Comparing Cartwright to the Inuit—her use of the term "Inuit" identifying her as representative of our age, unlike Cartwright who in the journals fumbles between the terms "Indian" and "Eskimo"—Selbycalls Cartwright "more of a savage . .. than any of them" (10). Selby's representation of Cartwright is one which our century, through Steffler, has created. She asserts our condemnation of imperialism and the terrors it rained on aboriginal peoples in this country, and she condemns Cartwright for his part in it. Her views are written lucidly and with conviction, and we are invariably in agreement with her. Yet, the complexities which arise from Steffler's use of Mrs. Selby reveal our own uncomfortable posturing in the face of Cartwright's guilt. Mrs. Selby's easy rebuke of Cartwright's enterprises distances him from us. In her view, and her view becomes ours, he is a monster whose actions we deplore and whose victims we pity. But in this view we recognize neither the difficulty of self-analysis within one's own cultural matrix, nor the difficulty of locating the colonizer-creature ho, if not God, is to blame for making monsters ,,W 114 within ourselves. Steffler's Cartwright leaves us easily outside such questions and in knowledgeable contempt outside the horror that Cartwright's needs and guilt are not always so easily distinguished but are born out, often invisibly, in our own survival. Harold Horwood's White Eskimo also chooses the vehicle of historical fiction to examine relationships between the white and the Inuit and, ultimately, to expose with regret the lust for power that fuels exploration and exploitation. Yet, the framed story-within-a-story strategy of Horwood 's work refuses to explicate race relations in museum-like text, where one century meets the casting of another. Instead, White Eskimo's narrative invites the reader to seek cultural difference in actual landscape unknown, language untried, and narrative possibilities untold. Here we may see an alignment of the text to the Inuit "idea of a story" which has nothing to do with "what we [Euro-narrators] mean by being objective" (27). This is most clearly revealed by Horwood with a narrator's narrator, Ed Hamilton, who tells us his version of the events of the life of Esau Gillingham . To do this, he must preface the tale with a warning of the uncertainties encoded in its telling through the Inuit teller from whom he first heard the tale: [The Inuit] idea of a story isn't at all the same thing as ours. They tell better stories, but have no idea of what we mean by being objective. The world of spirits and magic is always getting mixed up with ordinary affairs of life in their accounts.. . . They've grown up with the habit of distilling literal meaning out of a mass ofimagery, some of it highly fanciful, and making allowances for the polite conventions of exaggeration, understatement, and so forth. But it doesn't do for us, of course, with our literal minds, our habit of expecting narrative to mean exactly what it says. So to fill in this next part of Gillingham'sstory I have to giveyou my own versionof what I heard from Abel Shiwak. This isn't the wayhe told it though. (27) Here Horwood urges that his narrative must be understood as the Inuit understand it: as a vehicle conveying sensibility, rapport, possibility, and webs of culture rather than definition, authority, linear history, and exclusion. Horwood's work stands in marked contrast to Steffler's version of Cartwright's journals. Steffler establishes Cartwright as a ghost living concurrently in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and materializes...