Ghost of a Chance: John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright and the Meaning of History

I am thy father's spirit
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
are burnt and purged away.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.109–16

'Remember me' (1.5.91); 'Do not forget' (3.4.102). In Shakespeare's classic play, Hamlet's murdered father rises from the dead to charge his son with the duty to remember, a burden which young Hamlet fails to bear with much strength or grace. Indeed, it is precisely this burden – the burden of history as a call for action in the present – that destroys Hamlet, and brings to ruin not only his attempt to honour the past, but his hopes for the future as well. History and regret are likewise the dominant themes of John Steffler's popular novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright, the eponymous hero of which is himself a ghost 'doomed,' like the senior Hamlet, to walk the earth for 'for a certain term.' But whereas theghost in Hamlet appears in order to command the living to remember, in The Afterlife of George Cartwright it is the ghost himself who is saddled with memory. What I am curious about is the nature of that remembering spirit's relationship to the world of the living and the idea of history that he embodies – or should I say dis-embodies? The eighteenth-century explorer, trader, and diarist George Cartwright who is the subject and principal narrator of Steffler's novel is, as the narrative repeatedly asserts, an actual historical figure. But as a ghost who bridges and therefore mediates between past and present, he is a figure of history as well – the formal manifestation (figure or trope) of a particular understanding of historical process.

And what is that understanding? If the ghost of Hamlet's father presides over a tragic narrative of violence and failed ambition, the ghost of George Cartwright would seem rather to rescue a true history of violence and failed ambition from tragedy through a confessional narrative of atonement and redemption. By living past his own death, Cartwright is given a second chance to learn from the mistakes he committed in life. The novel therefore operates as a sort of purgatorial quest for understanding and release. As a reward for coming to terms with the stubborn short-sightedness and avarice that fuelled his colonial project, Cartwright is granted a second death, a release from his 'post-life' existence where it is always 19 May 1819 and the wind is always 's.w. light.' (It is true that, as far as ghosts go, Cartwright is rather more haunted than haunting.) Thus is tragedy transformed into romance through the temporary suspension of death as an absolute limit to the historical life of George Cartwright.

And in this respect, the historicity of Cartwright's ghost – and the idea of history at the heart of Steffler's novel – is thrown into serious doubt because, as Terry Eagleton has argued, it is precisely an awareness of death as a 'particular form of finality and (literal) irrecuperability' ('History, Narrative, and Marxism,' 280) that gives history its meaning as an inescapably tragic process of frustrated desire and unrealized potential. For Eagleton, who develops this idea in a pair of essays published in the late 1980s,¹ the historical development and/or 'progress' of any society must be read from the perspective of the finite human life, from which view even the shortest delay of the beginning of utopia risks being too long. Inasmuch as such a beginning remains as yet unbegun (is, indeed, subject to endless deferral), history can be understood as the collective story of a particular disappointment: the global failure to bring about the end of history as such. Following Walter Benjamin, who argues in his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' that 'the past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption' (254), Eagleton locates the revolutionary potential of the past – what Benjamin called its...