Cynthia Sugars. Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention.

Kertzer, Jon

Cynthia Sugars. Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014. xii + 291 pp. $150.

Canada is a haunted house. Cynthia Sugars argues in Canadian Gothic that Gothic has been a congenial mode for English-Canadian authors because its vision is so uncongenial; that is, its grotesque forms express the anxious historiography of a settler culture that has never felt quite at home in the land it settled. With an eye for paradox, she calls Canada an unhomely home, whose "settled unsettlement" (166) has been evoked over the years in Gothic styles that treat literature as a kind of exorcism-a "spectre of self-invention" according to her subtitle. Canadian writers articulate a "national uncanny" (73), a sensibility seeking national authen ticity from a past that promises legitimacy, only to produce monsters and ghosts. Gothic forms are perversely congenial because they summon, but promptly confound, the polarities by which European settlers justified their conquest of America such as primitive-modern, supernatural-natural, wild-civilized, body-mind, female-male. Sugars teases out these conflations to show how they have provoked an anxious national narrative. Being anxious is a good thing, however, because according to Freud, who also haunts these pages, anxiety is humanity's defining neurosis: we are all wonderfully twisted beings. Because the Gothic is both wonderful and twisted, it is just what the doctor ordered.

Applying Freud's model of loss and reward, Sugars detects a "fort-da dynamic in Canadian literature" (6) by which the spectre of nationality is simultaneously invoked and rejected, sought only to vanish. This frustrating fate does not prevent her from designing an orderly history of Gothic manifestations, from first encounters with an inhospitable land to the latest multicultural confusions. As co-editor of Penguin's bulky Canadian Literature in English, she is well acquainted with the scope of Canadian letters and is admirable in studying the nineteenth century, when romance was a dominant mode. She focuses on fiction, somewhat less on poetry, and less still on drama. It is revealing, although what it reveals is not explored, that drama is especially important in modern Native writing. Each of the seven chapters defines a Gothic style in accordance with the cultural climate of a period defined by that style. Taken in sequence, they compose a Gothic tale of their own, as the spectral is in turn projected, rejected, respected, invited, domesticated, reinvigorated, and embraced-fort-da. The chapters investigate:

1. first contact with an alien wilderness inhabited by alien people

2. the felt absence of a national ghost in a colonial outpost: "a haunt ing by an absence of haunting" (15)

3. the fondness of early English writers to dress up Quebec in Gothic garb

4. defamiliarizing the uncanny through a "double negative effect" that makes it "un-uncanny" (109), that is, companionable

5. a postcolonial Gothic of atonement and restoration surfacing in the 1960s and 1970s

6. the "meta-haunting" (180) of Gothic ethnicity

7. indigenous Gothic

Each stage is illustrated by examining the unsettling ideological effects of suitable texts. Here, the breadth of Sugars's expertise is especially useful and her analysis is adept. The fact that Canadian Gothic is a volume in "Gothic Literary Studies," an international series published in Wales, may explain why readers are also given patient guidance and plot summaries.

As my list of themes shows, there is no literary motive that cannot be gothicized, that is, read as contemplating its own insufficiency, exclusion, or erasure. An air of frustration pervades Canadian literary history from pioneers like Susanna Moodie, haunted by the impoverished imagination of Upper Canada (60), to contemporary ethnic writers, rudely confined by the term "ethnic" to a spectral liminality, where they appear oxymoronically as familiar strangers (180) or an unseen visible minority. In sum, Canadian Gothic uses its ghostly repertoire to trace an anti-essentialist current in English-Canadian literature, ensuring that any imaginative effort to locate an origin of national destiny will only release another phantom. If read critically, even the most sincere, civil novel, such as Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes, will reveal a Gothic tinge, as indeed it does. But this, too, is a good thing, as if the peculiarities of Canadian history and geography have made us--as Robert Kroetsch once remarked mischievously--despite our earnest efforts to remain Victorian, always already postmodern.

Nevertheless, Sugars's disciplined literary genealogy cannot entirely avoid the temptation to capture a ghost or two. The works examined are chosen not only because they are suitably Gothic but because they offer the keenest insights into their historical period. They are Gothic in the right way at the right time, their literary merit bound up with their ideological value. In effect, they form a literary canon leading back to the originary moment in her own theory: the brutal injustice of colonial conquest. This occurred not at some legendary instant but, as the abuse in residential schools shows, as a repeated event. Its violence continues to haunt and invigorate English-Canadian literature by acting like a nagging conscience, demanding recognition and restitution, although literary restitution must take the form of another story. Sometimes Sugars discusses this demand as a Freudian return of the repressed applied culturally, sometimes as lingering guilt or just as a sense of unfinished business. I do not mean that her argument is too deterministic or moralistic. It is far more sophisticated than that, but a sense of fatality drawn from the Gothic tradition does infiltrate her own analysis. In a romantic view, of which the Gothic is an extreme example, literature serves as the voice of a nation; in Sugars's account, it sometimes sounds like a national nightmare provoked by a guilty historical conscience.

These issues are played out most visibly in the final study, "Indigenous Ghost-Dancing: At Home on Native Land," because here Sugars is obliged to be cautious. Gothic plots, settings, and characters were all imported from Europe and applied crudely to Native inhabitants, whether they were portrayed as savages or as nature's gentlemen, as superstitious pagans or as spiritually attuned to the land. To speak of indigenous Gothic, even with the best intention, is to risk casting it in a hostile idiom. Native writers do not need to summon the elusive ghost of national identity; they have other problems. Especially risky is the treatment of Native spirituality, which too often has been either "pathologized as psychically maladjusted" (218) or prescribed as romantic therapy for settler guilt (as in the film Dances with Wolves). Sugars is careful to avoid these dangers, guided by writers like Tomson Highway, Eden Robinson, and Thomas King, who dispel Gothic conventions through parody or expel them by invoking local spirits like Nanabush, Coyote, and Windigo. Guided by these skilful authors, Sugars follows the example of explorers like Samuel Hearne and David Thompson, who trusted Natives to lead them through the wilderness and to establish a bond with the land.

Jon Kertzer

University of Calgary