'It Takes More Than Mortality to Make Somebody Dead': Spectres of History in Margaret Sweatman's When Alice Lay Down with Peter

‘It Takes More Than Mortality to Make Somebody Dead’:Spectres of History in Margaret Sweatman’s When Alice Lay Down with Peter Herb Wyile In their introduction to Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, Peter Buse and Andrew Stott note that, although attitudes towards spectrality and haunting have changed since the nineteenth century, they 'continue to enjoy a powerful currency in language and in thinking, even if they have been left behind by belief' (3). The continuing power of haunting as a trope can be seen, for instance, in magic realist texts, in which ghosts often play an important part in the genre's melding of a rational, empirical order and a supernatural and/or mythical order. A particularly important function of 'magical realist apparitions,' Lois Parkinson Zamora argues, is that they 'unsettle modernity's ... basis in progressive, linear history' and often serve to challenge colonial accounts of the past (498). For Zamora and Wendy Faris, magic realist texts provide an alternative to the dominance of Western rationalism, as they draw 'upon cultural systems that are no less "real" than those upon which traditional literary realism draws – often non-Western cultural systems that privilege mystery over empiricism, empathy over technology, tradition over innovation' (2). Magic realist texts, however, often also reflect the unease of that cultural negotiation, self-consciously displaying a wariness of the politics implicit in their own cultural hybridity. As Brenda Cooper argues (32–33), there is usually a substantial and ironic distance between typically urbane and cosmopolitan magic realist authors and the pre-modern cultures they portray in their texts, and their evocation of Indigenous cultural beliefs – along with the presence of the supernatural and mythological as elements of the magic realist's arsenal – raises some troubling questions about authenticity and appropriation. David Danow suggests the tensions inherent in the term 'magic realism' in observing that the genre involves 'the superimposition of one perceived reality upon another, as seemingly fantastic events that may nevertheless appear to the indigenous, heterogeneous peoples of the region as an indubitable norm are embedded within what outsiders perceive as distinct, exclusive, and the only "true" reality' (70). What is real and what is magic, in short, are culturally loaded terms, and consequently the history of magic realism as a critical rubric has been marked by recurring suspicion of its implicit Eurocentrism. [End Page 735] These questions certainly resonate within settler societies such as English Canada, where 'magic' – such as mythic or spiritual figures from Indigenous cultures, spectral visitations, atavistic appearances, and extraordinary natural phenomena – is being increasingly deployed within otherwise 'realistic' contexts. One consequence of the increasing use of magic realism by non-Aboriginal writers is that their evocation of Aboriginal cultural beliefs and practices runs the risk of replicating what Daniel Francis has diagnosed as 'the imaginary Indian,' a construct that is less a representation of actual Native peoples than a projection of the dominant culture's desires and anxieties about them (8). This is a particularly complex and charged concern when it comes to the writing of history. English-Canadian writers, like writers in postcolonial cultures around the world, have increasingly adopted magic realist strategies as a way of addressing Canada's heritage as a settler-invader culture and the historical treatment of Aboriginal people. While the genre provides a form of resistance to the rationalist and potentially imperializing historicist suppositions of the traditional historical novel, its dialogue between the irrational and the rational, between Indigenous and European cultures, between magic and realism, nonetheless runs the risk of reinscribing the 'otherness' of the former terms in these oppositions. In a context of an ongoing decolonization of prevailing attitudes towards Native peoples and the colonial past, then, it seems fair to consider whether English-Canadian writers' use of ghosts and other spectres may come back to haunt them. Winnipeg writer Margaret Sweatman's When Alice Lay Down with Peter (2001) makes for an interesting study in this regard. Sweatman's novel focuses on a pair of Scottish settlers and their descendants in the Canadian West and is preoccupied with the fraudulence of their presence, using ghosts to raise postcolonial questions about claims to the land. Reminiscent of Jane Urquhart's chronicling of Irish...

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