Spectres of Canada_ Image, Text, Aura, Nation

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university of toronto quarterly, volume 75, number 2,spring 2006

L . M . F I N D L A Y

Spectres of Canada:Image, Text, Aura, Nation

Catharine Parr Traill called her new home in Upper Canada a matter-of-fact-country where no ghosts, spirits, fairies, naiads, or Druids haunted the forestsand streams she now loved so much. History of the Book in Canada I, 341

Spectrality, which is the mutual haunting or constitutive interpenetration ofnation and state ... is also the irreducible possibility of the becoming-ideologicalof nationalism, where the nation becomes a mystification the state deploys in theservice of global capital. Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 346

My title pays tribute to one of Jacques Derridas most important andapposite works, and is one of many ways in which scholars across theworld will mark his passing and insist on the importance and vitality of hislegacy. My title also gestures towards the strategic spectrality of Marx towhich Derrida responded in one of his most dazzling textual unteasings,

Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the NewInternational (1994). And my title, like my second epigraph, begins to tie thepolitical radicalism of Marxian tradition and the frequently derided textualradicalism of deconstruction to the multi-mediated, cultural and linguisticnation that was and is Canada. The first two sections of this essay engagewith possibilities of nationhood in pre-Confederation Canada in order tosuggest how populous and durable are the spectres haunting that archive,and how those spectres can be used to complicate and challenge howcanonical Canadians (Day, 166) understand, produce, consume, or areconsumed by national culture today. The final two sections of the essayconnect aesthetics and politics at the levels of high-theory-as-hauntingexemplified by the Benjaminian aura and the spectral nationality whichPheng Cheah has developed from Derridas Specters and Benedict Ander-sons work on imagined entities like community and nation.

image

When Radical Jack Lambton, the first Earl of Durham, returned toEngland in 1839, among the souvenirs of his brief but tumultuous sojournin Canada was a portrait by the Quebec artist Antoine Sbastien Pla-mondon (18041895; illustration 1). This portrait was known as Le dernier

Huronas well as by the name of its subject, Zacharie Vincent (Telari-o-lin,


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1 See Reid, 1:624, 11718, 1634; 2:15, 308(plate), 364.


1. Antoine Plamondon. Zacharie Vincent. 1838

With permission of the owner and the National Gallery of Canada

18151886; Yves Lacasse in Bland, 42931). The painting is one of a hostof works of the imagination dealing with the allegedly vanishing Indigene(and the embattled Canadien), and has much to tell us about the hauntingof the Canadas by the spectres of their first peoples at every stage ofcolonial configuration and national sovereignty and how such spectresboth assuaged and aggravated settler fears while triggering Indigenousresistance to the cultural completion of colonialism.

The fact that Durham would purchase such a work is consistent with hislifelong interest in the arts, especially painting,1and with his and his wifesefforts to encourage artistic endeavour in Canada (see New, 3935). Thedepiction of a doomed lineage would appeal to him because of its romanticpathos, resonating no doubt with the experience of frequent illness anddeath among his intimates, including his first wife and several of hischildren, and the spectre of himself as the last Lambton (Reid, 1:320). It wasalso an award-winning, prominently exhibited work by a Paris-trained,French-Canadian artist, and, as such, evidence of the cultural promiserepresented by institutions like the Literary and Historical Society ofQuebec (which sponsored competitions in the arts and awarded Plamon-


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don his medal) and the growth of creative independence among Canadian-born artists whose future lay not with producing copies of portraits ofQueen Victoria or of famous religious paintings but with their own visionof their own country, its topography and its emergent bourgeoisie (Porter,16ff). And the world of images seemed less entangled in the linguisticpolitics of the time which Durhams Reportwould recommend resolving bygradually but robustly Anglifying all French culture (e.g., Durham,2:16ff).Durham himself was impressively bilingual, but that was an ability appro-priate to the facts of European history, part of the education of an Englisharistocrat and not, he thought, the basis for encouraging official bilingual-ism in Lower Canada.

In Plamondons painting the last Huron is facing eastwards, whence theEuropean settlers mostly came, with his back to the only too apt symbol ofthe sun setting in the west. Vincent is dressed traditionally, but not as fullyas he will be in his own self-portraits where, as in illustration 2, he and hisson Cyprian attest to the fact that, not only is Zacharie not the last of hisxxxxxxx

2.Zacharie Vincent. Self-portrait with his son Cyprien. c 1845Muse de la Province


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2 See Chauveau, who claims persuasively that mesure que lon approchait de lacatastrophe de 1837, la muse patriotique prenait un ton plus vigoureux et plus menaant.

3 Lacasse cites an article from Le Canadien of 30 April 1839 which makes the politicalallegory explicit. When he arrived in Quebec a month later, Durham may have beenapprised of how the portrait was being interpreted in some francophone circles. However,no evidence of this has been discovered to date, and Lacasse concludes that the worksappeal to Durham was probably not as a harbinger of what he would himself recom-mend, but rather as a portrait ethnographique particulirement bien russi dun

Amrindien ou, plus, du dernier des Hurons (430).


people, but Huron traditions will live on as well. Plamondon presents aproud and handsome man, mature enough at twenty-three to exemplify hisNative culture but not strong enough to guarantee it will endure. He bidsa stoic farewell to the forest from its darkening midst, a selva oscura whichclaims the lonely figure while the dying sun picks out features to be readfor collective Huron identity: his sash, sword, and folded arms pointing toa historic but futile resistance to European money and European militarypower. What Plamondon does not yet know is that the Hurons resistanceto assimilation or extinction will express itself in culture, including thehigh-cultural form of painting whose techniques the subject of the portraitpicks up while posing for its painter. Vincent educated himself outside the

formal training system as so many Aboriginal people did and do, and heis returning Plamondons gaze when his pose allows him to do so. Andwhat Durham may not know, what his British diplomats and connois-seurs eye cannot explain to him unaided, is the fuller political import ofthis painting as an allegory of Qubcois as well as Aboriginal apprehen-sion and resistance. The living ghost of the Hurons of Lorette symbolizesa fate that haunts French Canada as powerfully after the catastrophe of1837as had the expulsion of the Acadians in the 1750s and 1760s.2His gazeof defiant accusation cast heavenwards, his incarnation of liberty, is a direwarning to Papineaus recently defeatedfils de la libert that this is whatprobably awaits them too. The death of the real, pure Huron indicated by

the name Terali-o-lin (meaning unmixed or undivided) prompts Pla-mondons and other Qubcois reflections in the 1840s and 1850s onracialized purity rather than current and future mtissage, a theme that haslasted until today in occasional and increasingly problematic appeals topure laine. Plamondon, like a number of his Canadien contemporaries, hasa multiple view of the spectral Indigene as living ghost and potent omenof the intensifying challenges to be faced by an increasingly outnumberedfrancophone minority. Plamondon projects doomed dignity onto theIndigenous subject. But if the future is British, and assimilation of theFrench about to be urged as official policy and the antidote to Anglo-French radicalism, then the autochthones qualities of rootedness and prioroccupancy become signs of endangerment rather than security for thehabitans as well.3


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text

Plamondons painting went to Britain as the property of the Lord Durhamwhose Report would soon cause such consternation among FrenchCanadians. Durham as patron validated the work of a Quebec artist but thepaintings physical departure was followed by political events that madeits allegorical import haunt French discourse and cultural production. Asmonitory spectre of Huron and Qubcois decline the image triggeredelegiac references and pictorial imitations (summarized in Lacasse), and anekphrastic poem from a man who had visited the Paris studio of Plamon-dons teacher, Jean-Baptiste Paulin Gurin (Garneau, Voyage, 206), and who

was soon to become the most influential historian of Canada writing inFrench. Franois-Xavier Garneau, adamant opponent of the union of theTwo Canadas proposed by Durham and implemented shortly afterDurhams death in 1840(see the conclusion to GarneausHistoire), used theplatform of Le Canadiento publish a poem entitled Le dernier Huron thatopens thus:

Triomphe, destine! Enfin ton heure arrive,O peuple, tu ne sera plus.

Il nerrera bientt de toi sur cette riveQue des mnes inconnus.

En vain le soir du haut de la montagne Jappelle un nom, tout est silencieuxO guerriers, levez-vous, couvrez cette campagne,

Ombres de mes aeux!

Mais la voix du Huron se perdait dans lespaceEt ne rveillait plus dchos,

Quand, soudain, il entend comme une ombre qui passe Et sous lui frmir des os. Le sang indien sembrase en sa poitrine; Ce bruit qui passe a fait vibrer son cur.Perfide illusion! Au pied de la colline

Cest lacier du faucheur!

The poem inspired by Plamondons prize-winning canvas (and by thepolitically astute prose notice of it in Le Canadien of30April 1838) offers anextended gloss on a discreetly allegorical visual work. The politics of voiceand place unfold in sixteen stanzas almost wholly devoted to singing theinevitable extinction of the Hurons of Old Lorette before extending a slimhope for the restoration of an idealized version of pre-colonial conditions.

The opening stanza is an exterior and interior monologue or double

apostrophe, interpreting the glance directed heavenwards where Destiny


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may dwell in Plamondons painting. However, to tutoyer fate is not tobecome its peer or rival but only to admit to being its experienced victim.And the intimacy of address here is no substitute for the lost intimacy offamily, friends, community, people. There are two addressees: one, theonly too effective, negatively palpable abstraction, destiny; the other, apeople whose concrete existence has passed away, except for this speakerbound to a bleak, irreversible futurity. The allusion to manes in the fourthline may seem an intrusively Eurocentric use of the classical Romanhousehold gods, a betrayal of ignorance and cultural presumption on thepoets part, just as it had been in Adam Kidds long poem, The Huron Chief(1830), where Sir Alexander Mackenzies Voyages is cited in a note as

referring to the Manitou as a sort of household god (Kidd, 12; see alsoGarneausHistoire, 1:134). But this cultural dissonance is perhaps offset inpart by the closeness of manes to the more appropriate Manitou whichfor some eyes and ears may haunt the Eurocentric French of mnesinconnus. The knowledge of those who outlive and replace the Huron willbe challenged by ghosts they do not know but who continue to haunttraditional Huron territory. Or are these spirits the romantic projection ofChristian settlers aware that inscrutable others occupied this riverbankbefore they arrived to manage and develop it properly, and that thoseothers somehow live on? Or are these spirits deliberately hybridized sothey can walk in Canadien as well as Huron paths, confirming the fate of

the Indigene but also introducing quietly, as does the language in whichthe poem is written, a French version of the peuple apostrophized andfrancophone warriors who will number among the shades of [thespeakers] ancestors? The control exerted by poetic allegory is resisted bythe contradictions and overdeterminations of history, so that even heavilyconventionalized classical ghosts like the manes will remain at leastresidually mysterious and unpredictable, especially if invoked in theinterfaces of colonial encounter.

The second part of the opening stanza seems to become an interiormonologue reflecting on the fact that the Hurons calling of a name is metby naught but stillness, with the medial caesura in line 6enacting in littlethe greater cessation to come. Then there issues a war cry to the shades ofTelari-o-lins ancestors, a gesture of defiance in the midst of defeat. The ebband flow of fatalism here will be replayed throughout the whole poem soas to implicate the Canadien rebels, as the inaudible and invisible are bothuncoupled from life and rhetorically restored to it. There is, moreover, alingering pathos in a call to arms issued at sunset (see also GarneausHistoire, 1:126). Meanwhile, the stanza break does its caesural work beforethe second stanza marks a change in tenses from present to past, a changeof perspective from empathy to distance. We shift from vocal presence toacoustic and related loss (se perdait), from inhabited place to empty space,

as the settlers frequent fears of being lost are ironically reworked in the


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echoes of this Indigenes cry enacting the doom of the Huron. However, thesilence is suddenly broken by a sound as if of a passing shade, causingthis human remnant to shake in his bones. He becomes a superstitious,emphatically embodied subject, and a mistaken one at that, for what hasspooked him turns out to be a perfidious illusion, his mishearing of aninvisible reaper swinging his steel blade. Whether this reaper is human orspectral, a colonist or Death itself, the outcome remains grim as disease,war, and European settlement continue to reinforce each other.

The poem then reverts to the purported voice of the last Huron to givea defiantly contemptuous portrait of the settler/reaper as servile andmercenary, timid yet triumphant, profaning as he goes the graves of sage

and hero (stanza 3). The money and modernity figured forth here arecoded English. Where Adam Kidd had spoken more generally of Perfidy,that foulest stain Which to the whites its gifts impart (26), Garneau seemsintent on strengthening connections between perfidious illusion andNapoleons celebrated description of England as perfidious Albion. Ineffect, capital triumphant is replacing ancient (Indigenous and habitan)liberties with genocide and wage-slavery (the salaire impur of stanza 3).Scenes of deforestation and pollution in the name of improvement contrastwith a pre-encounter idyl. However, the longer the process of Cana-dien/Huron identification continues, the more the Indigene is decentredand dematerialized to accommodate a more narrowly targeted anti-English

animus. The tribus mercenaires of stanza 7have wreaked havoc yet seemalmost certain to impose their own sanitized, triumphalist version of thatpast on future understanding, so that the story of the losers will itself belost: Leurs noms, leurs yeux, leurs ftes, leur histoire / Sont avec eux en-fouis pour toujours, / Et je suis rest seul pour dire leur mmoire / Auxpeuples de nos jours! (stanza 13; emphasis added; see also Kidd, Preface).Here Garneau seems to be projecting a version of his own imminentvocation as patriote historian into the predicament of the last (Huron)Native informant, and is registering in writing the magnitude of the taskfacing this final exponent of a unique and irreplaceable oral tradition. Avenerable, collectively produced, perpetually unfolding history is reducedto a single-source, spoken memorial (to supplement Plamondonsdocumentary portrait).

However, the audience for this commemorative work is a major part ofthe problem:

Orgueilleux aujourdhui quils ont mon heritage,Ces peuples font rouler leurs chars

O jadis sassemblaient, sous le sacr feuillageLe conseil de nos vieillards.

Au sein du bruit leurs somptueux cortges

Avec fracas vont profaner ces lieux! (stanza 14)


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Here Garneau is tapping into current Canadien resentment at the loss oftheir farms to agricultural improvers from Britain (see Durhams Report,2:36ff) and making a thinly disguised reference to the elaborate andcontroversial display that marked Lord Durhams arrival in Quebec and hismovements throughout Lower and Upper Canada. Garneau writes in fullknowledge of the contents of Durhams Reportand connects its assimilativeagenda to the presumptuous, excessive staging of state authority whichDurham thought necessary to supplement the unprecedented, sweepingpowers accorded him by the British Parliament.

Garneau then takes refuge from the bitter memories of recent Canadienreversals in the idea that British hegemony too will someday pass, the

state-(anglo)nation nexus will weaken, and they will be hoist with theirown assimilationist petard: Des peuples inconnus comme un torrentimmense / Ravageront leurs coteaux (stanza 15; see alsoHistoire, 2.70911). Here the pathos of mnes inconnus resurfaces as retributive indeter-minacy, while once again tapping into contemporary flood discourseespecially prevalent in Lower Canada. British immigration had increaseddramatically in the 1830s, checked only by anxiety about the rebellion(Cameron et al, Introduction). And part of Durhams design was of courseto restore stability and resume the anglophone flood which would makethe Canadas in due course unilingual and united under responsiblegovernment modelled on the best practices of the mother country. But

when times vengeance occurs, what then? The poem concludes thus:

Qui sait? peut-tre alors renaitront sur ces rivesEt les indiens et leurs forts;

Et reprenant leurs corps, leurs ombres fugitivesCouvriront tous ces gurets;

Et se levant comme aprs un long rve, Ils reverront partout les memes lieux,Les sapins descendant jusquaux flots sur la grve,

En haut les mmes cieux.

Perhaps the fugitive shades will resume their bodies and their traditionalways in a resurgent earthly paradise (see alsoHistoire, 1:135). They remain-ed mnes inconnus through successive waves of conquest, and thatinscrutability contained the promise of resistance and eventual, plenaryreturn. The ghost as revenantmay participate in the return of the same(mmes ... mmes) both ecologically and culturally. But this is a bigperhaps. The fugitive rebels like Papineau (who came back from Francein 1845) and those exiled by Durham will return sooner than the forestsand the Huron. The ploughed fields (gurets) will expand while theforests retreat further from the banks of the St Lawrence. The sequence of

Canadian staples, shifting from fur, fish, and lumber to wheat, will leave


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Indigenes in limbo and Canadiens in subjection and disarray after theabolition of the seigneurial system in 1854.Garneau can find some vica-rious hope for his people only by suggesting that the real, unmixed Huronare already asleep, and may awake from a long dream on the Day ofJudgment for the English. But such a qualified and cautious hope ignoresthe fact that Canadiens were colonists too, their river lots extending fromMontreal to Quebec, and they were fully implicated in the displacementand decease of Indigenous peoples. The return of the Huron consortsproblematically, then, with the resurgence of the Canadiens. And this hopefor pristine restoration ignores also the possibility that another empirewould follow the British one, and that global capital would go far beyond

Victorian scrip and whiskey in its ability to inundate and ravageIndigenous peoples in the name of the allegedly postnational anddeterritorialized (see, e.g., Findlay, Print, 13940).

aura

Both the image and the text considered here have proven haunting andhaunted, with the ghosts and monitory spectres of the Aboriginal and theCanadien, tenacious exemplars of Turtle Island and New France, unsettlingan emergent Anglo-national imaginary as well as each other. Both imageand text, portrait and poem, have revealed themselves to be in important

respects socially determined and hence non-identical with the subject oftheir representations, despite their best efforts to reconcile the contradic-tions that constitute and are proliferated by capitalism and colonialism andto empathize fully with the Indigenous other. To trace the nature andimport of the imbrication of the aesthetic, both image and text, with thesocial, I will rely on Walter Benjamins notion of Aura as aesthetic spec-trality articulated in his great essay of 1936, The Work of Art in the Age ofMechanical Reproduction. Benjamin reads the aesthetic and the socialtogether in order the better to interrogate both as repositories (in fascistGermany) of an increasingly ominous authenticity (Echtheit) whereinstate and nation will achieve a new and ghost-free, total (and totalitarian)identity. He is also intent on uncoupling technological process fromnarratives of emancipation and progress, though not from considerationsof ethical and political accountability in a state haunted by memories andconsequences of catastrophic defeat and the punitive peace of 1919.Benjamin engages with the notion of the aura as essence, residue, andcasualty across the fifteen theses that make up the main body of hisessay. He first argues for the interfusion of the work of arts substantiveduration and its historical testimony, the two main components of allthat is transmissible from its beginning (223). Testimony requires, but isnot restricted to, the objects physical durability. Accordingly, changes in

the status of an objects physical presence in the here and now (das Hier


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und Jetzt) affect its ability to bear witness and may be felt or marked as aloss in the authority of the object. When the unique object is present toitself and to its viewer, its aura is in place; when that object is representedor displaced by multiple, mechanically produced copies, its aura withers(verkmmert). Here Benjamin employs a term denoting a process inkeeping with the earlier depreciat[ion] of and interfere[nce] with authen-ticity (entwerten ... berhrt), and the imminent shattering and liquida-tion (Erschtterung ... Liquidation) of that tradition which the authenticwork art effectively embodies (22324). The loss of authenticity throughmechanical reproduction can be subsumed or accommodated within theaura, which is diminished without entirely disappearing. However, it is

worth noting the provisionality of Benjamins language here. The processof subsumption is subjunctive (might) and supplemental (go on to say)before it is axiomatic: One might subsume the eliminated element in theterm aura and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanicalreproduction is the aura of the work of art. ... One might generalize bysaying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object fromthe domain of tradition (223). The auras capacity is not exhausted by thechallenge of its uncoupling from the traditions that have hitherto sustainedit, for it still allows for the world beyond the object and its specificallyaesthetic apprehension to be accessed via the notion of symptomaticprocess. The provisional tone of the naming or location of loss of aura

extends into the domain of tradition so memorably captured by Benjamin in the seventh of his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940; 258) as the co-production of civilization (Kultur) and barbarism (Barbarei),where once again legacy, memory, and continuity prove vulnerable to thereign of the copy.

For Benjamin, any plurality of copies allows for a work to be both lostto the sanctuary and reactivated in new sites of access greatly enhancedbecause widely dispersed. Elite losses and demotic gains are twin solventsof tradition linked to the ancient technological reproduction of coinage butalso to the most menacing aspects of the present and foreseeable future,the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind (223).Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary massmovements (223). The shrinking of the aesthetic aura, coupled with thespatio-temporal mobilization and massification of its copies, produces anew form of intimacy and new ways of seeing. Until recently, art historyhad remained within the domain of the aesthetic and formal analysis, butBenjamin feels himself historically enabled to connect shifts in perceptionto social causation via the decay [Verfall] of the aura (224).

In the next stage of his compacted and allusive argument, Benjamin usesthe aura in nature to capture more fully the aura of the work of art. Innature the aura is the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it

may be, and it is vulnerable to diminishment because of the capacity and


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impulse of a new social formation to annihilate all distance while replicat-ing all uniqueness, as the masses and their social engineers commit to asense of the universal equality of things (224). The desire to dominatenatures famous vistas and phenomena by swarming all over them in actsof ecstatic mass tourism finds a parallel in the desire to dominate acelebrated object by owning a copy of it or having easy access to one. Bothtendencies express a consumerism far more aggressive, far less reverential,than the contemplative activities of the unarmed [literally unprepared]eye (225). The enhanced cultural entitlement of the Volk combinespopulism and militarism in order to destroy [the objects] aura, and itculminates in futurisms and fascisms aestheticizing of war and politics

(24344). With the shift of arts basis from ritual to politics (226), frommagic to exhibitability, photography and film flourish while painting,including the portrait, is pitched into crisis. For Benjamin, that site ofultimate retrenchment: the human countenance (22728) allows auratic artto make a last stand of sorts, retaining some of its cult value even in theemulative, haunted portraiture of early photographs. But this does not lastlong. By the turn of the century, Atget has ensured that photographsbecome standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hiddenpolitical significance. ... free-floating contemplation is not appropriate tothem (228). The political code and the populist caption will come todominate visual culture en route to an entirely new structural formation

of the subject (238). The shrivelling [Einschrumpfen] of the aura makespossible the rise of the film personality, the phony spell of a commodity(233). By the 1930s, man is not so much reproducing as being reproduced(234). Benjamin may seem to be at his most prescient here, anticipating thecoming reign of simulation and commodification, but his remarks areequally pertinent to that past where, in Plamondons painting and Gar-neaus poem, the auratic human countenance of the Huron subjectexpresses authenticity but also imminent extinction, a distinctiveness soonto be swamped by waves of intruders bent on territorial and culturalappropriation.

The allegedly vanishing Indian is caught in the double headlights ofhuman and artistic reproduction in what Benjamin can help us to under-stand as an allegory of authenticity even more complicated and conflictedthan we have noted so far. The Indigenes uniqueness is a moment ofhistorical pathos and aesthetic authenticity, the living ghost captured inportrait painting just as the camera is kicking in and he is dying out. Hisaura stays intense while his aestheticization becomes a key component inCanada as fledgling aesthetic state and discreetly spectral nation. TheHuron remnant is figured as synecdoche for a doomed society and for aholism that will prove no match for modernitys divided and divisivelabour. Settlement and improvement will disperse much of natures aura

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(outside national parks), overcoming its distance and difference, while theIndigenes otherness is savoured most intensely at moments of its mostacute endangerment and supreme rarity, as colonized difference splits intomemory and dcor. But Benjamins understandable Eurocentrism, aproduct of European domination of technological innovation and politicalchange, leads to a disregard for the Indigene except in the guise of the manof the Stone Age (227) linked to magic, ritual, and the cult values thatpreceded the rise of aesthetic sense. Plamondons Eurocentrism takes theform of playing catch-up, trying to emulate Europe while Europe is aboutto move on to the age of photography. He exemplifies derivative traditionand secondary (Canadien) modernity, while capturing the subject whose

otherness he both insists upon and identifies with. Plamondon was in factalready at work on fourteen stations of the Cross for the Church of Notre-Dame in Montreal (Lacasse, 43132) when he decided to enter thecompetition sponsored by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec.And since the prize was for an original painting, he could not imitate theseventeeth-century French painter Jacques Stella and others, as he wasdoing with the aid of engravings in his series for Notre-Dame (Lacasse,432). In the sacred paintings the aura shrunk by imitation of a reproductionremained only as New World novelty and the conventionally auraticcountenance of Christ. But in Le dernier Huron, an ostensibly secular subjectin which (according to Benjamin, 22526, 24556) aesthetic aura should

replace cult value, the aura may begin with Vincents golden features butwill be readily reconstituted by patriotes as the afterglow of the workseffective disappearance. Durham may have acquired this art work for hisprivate collection, and in a sense saved it from its mechanical reproduction,but he and his progeny do not own its meanings, especially the public andpolitical ones.

The fact of protracted foreign ownership, including ownership of therights of reproduction, mechanical or otherwise, remains part of thepaintings very Canadian aura to this day. It was repatriated to Canada in1982 and has since then been generously loaned by its Ontario-basedowners for major exhibitions across the country, most recently for Art ofthis Land at the National Gallery in Ottawa (see Lahey). It has maintaineda temporal distance from Canadian viewers even after its physical returnfrom Britain, even as its original blend of identification and appropriationhas gathered fresh complications and given rise to fresh spectres. AndGarneaus poem has had an ongoing role in this process. For example, Ledernier Huron was reprinted at the time of his death in 1866in theJournalde linstruction publique along with the following revealing comment:

lpoque o M. Garneau publia ce petit pome, il y avait tout craindre pournotre race, et lon sent, sous les strophes mues du pote, comme une sombre

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arrire pense, comme une de ces allgories qui sont frquentes dans la posiedes livres sacrs. (qtd in Lacasse, 430)

The poems meanings were not fully approachable (Benjamin, 245) evenby the poet himself, who is reread here through the lens of Plamondon, theprolific painter of sacred subjects, as having almost stumbled belatedlyonto the relevance of the Huron crisis for Canadiens before recognizingthat relevance as a sombre stage in the unfolding of Gods providence.What Garneau had the Huron address as Destiny, and situate in relationto Native spirituality, is now moved back towards the really sacred, amove apparently facilitated by the fact that some of the worst fears

occasioned by Durham have proven at least for now unwarranted. (Thecurrent situation of the Huron is ignored.) This little poem is reclaimedfrom ekphrastic art for cult value, praised for adopting the means of thesacred to secure a comparable effect and thus resuturing bonds betweenRoman Catholicism and Canadien identity. Textuality acquires an aura ofsorts through allegory understood as the management of mystery in theinterests of faith.

In sum, and without pretending to have exhausted the implications ofthe works by Plamondon and Garneau or the Benjaminian aura, anemerging artist makes a sale; a colonial administrator makes off with atrophy; a people makes do with surrogates of a nationalist icon in pigment,

prose, and poetry; and the Huron model remakes himself as artist,following the Canadien model of resistance but not the prophecy regardinghis own and his peoples doom. We might align Durham with theobsolescent option of free-floating contemplation of the art work hepurchased and scarcely lived long enough to enjoy. Plamondon, incontrast, tries both to divest himself of colonial cultural anxiety and toexpress a topical, widely experienced version of that very anxiety. That siteof ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance intensifies Indigenousidentity for the colonists while more firmly subordinating it to eliminationand assimilation. Garneau, in the time-based medium of language, givesvoice to the absent witness of Plamondons painting, both annihilating thedistance between culture and nature for the Huron Et les indiens et leursforts and traversing the distance between culture (Huron) and culture(Canadien) for the sake of political admonition, only to come to rest in fainthopes that require the amplitude of historical writing to endow them witha legitimizing and mobilizing nationalist force. And Zacharie Vincent(Telari-o-lin), after doubling as ethnographic object and pictorial subject,uses that experience to turn the conflicted gaze of the dominant againstitself , most notably in a series of some ten self-portraits whose meaningcomes as much from the reproduction of the means of production (seeillustration 3) as from the subject represented, while self-representation

becomes part of the return to self-governance.


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3.Zacharie Vincent. Le dernier Huron. Album photographs.Collection Baby, Universit de Montral

nation

Running through Huron, Canadien, British, and German examples aboveis the intriguing but elusive idea of the nation as haunted by spectres ofboth purity and contagion, autonomy and extinction. Le Canadien in 1838claims that Plamondons painting depicts le dernier rejeton dune nationnoble et intrepide (qtd in Lacasse, 430; emphasis added). This designationfacilitates identification of Huron and Canadien nations in face of unenation plus puissante. Le fort chasse le faible; cest en deux mots toutelhistoire des fils dAdam (430; emphasis added). In the course of a fewsentences the idea of nation goes from positive to negative, while the ideaof hunting is expanded from a distinctively savage practice into animmutable global principle that covers predatory economic as well as

military action. Like state and nation, hunting and haunting regularly


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connect but may never fully coalesce. The Hurons bravery and nobility arenot enough to protect them from modernity. But if the principle of thestrong hunting down the weak prevails, then who is really the savage?Moreover, can the Huron be included among the sons of Adam with anymore certainty than worship of the manes can be attributed to them?Canada in the making emerges from this commentary as three foundingnations who will eventually become one state, but at no stage a statebeyond dispute and without remainder. Foundational difference does thedance of diffrance, never attaining, though in moments of purist exaspera-tion or constitutional fatigue some may yearn for, a final solution. And donot call this process feckless nationalism or post-nationalism but rather

spectral nationality.In his brilliant and difficult book entitled Spectral Nationality: Passages ofFreedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, Pheng Cheahinsists that political theorists of the nation need to have their thinkingchanged by the spectres of literary and cultural theory, and of the non-Euro-American nations of the world (in his case countries in southeastAsia). This welcome insistence, and the careful analysis that supports it,lead to a remarkably provocative conclusion: the most apposite metaphorfor freedom today is the haunted nation (12). And what this does, and willI hope continue to do as Canadianists wrestle in numbers and at morelength than I can reasonably claim here with Pheng Cheahs work, is to

make us identify and discriminate among spectres of Canada, so as tocontribute to Canada as a postcolonial nations-state worthy of the name.

The image, trope, and aura of the vanishing Indian, like Durhamsreference to French Canadas national vanity (2:58), is a good place to startconstructing a Canadian hauntology (Derridas brilliant coinage inSpecters to denote a logic of haunting more powerful than ontology as thephilosophy of being, but more comprehensive only because it insists onthe role of the incomprehensible [10]). But will such an undertaking yielda more robust political credo than Derridas in Specters: I believe in thepolitical virtue of the contretemps (88)? Will it yield something morerobust than Pheng Cheah offers: The responsible thing to do is not toindulge in armchair activism and self-righteous sermonizing about whatthe world ought to be, but to transform theorypassivelyby asking what itcan learn from events (381; emphasis added)? I think it should, and must.And that the answer lies in a Canadian return to (and of) Marxs strategicspectrality (see Findlay,Manifesto, 4346), while refusing that forgetting ofthe Indigene which marked such moments of high political promise as theissuing in French in Quebec City in 1847of the Anglo-French ManifestoAddressed to the People of Canada by the Constitutional Committee on Reformand Progress(translated in Findlay,Manifesto, 22145). What if the Anglo-French underclasses had aligned themselves with First Nations and Mtis

against colonial elites in the age of revolutions? The spectre of that soli-


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darity must awake from its long dream and be embodied in newcoalitions within the Canadian nations-state so that the neo-imperialhunters are effectively haunted (down). Durhams language bore the marksof its time (race, etc) as surely as Benjamins bore the wounds of Weimarvolatility (liquidation, etc) and the evil that succeeded it. The same willhold for us. But our words and actions ought not merely to be haunted bythe spectres of helplessness and complicity, but must themselves haunt thecounsels of new, more powerful, and arguably more damaging tribusmercenaries. Our archive, our living nations, and the seven generationsthat will succeed us deserve no less. There is at least the ghost of a chanceof change.

WORKS CITED

Bland, Mario, ed. La peinture au Qubec 18201850: Nouveaux regards, nouvellesperpectives. Qubec: Muse du Qubec-Les Publications du Qubec 1991

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminationen: ausgewhlte Schriften. Ed Siegfried Unsel. Frank-furt: Suhrkamp 1961

Illuminations. Ed and intro Hannah Arendt, trans Harry Zohn. London: Collins/Fontana 1973

Cameron, Wendy, Sheila Haines, and Mary McDougall Maude. English Immigrant

Voices: Labourers Letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s. Montreal and Kingston:McGill-Queens University Press 2000

Chauveau, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier. tude sur les commencements de la posie franaise auCanada et en particulier sur les posies de M. Franois-Xavier Garneau. Mmoires dela Socit Royale du Canada pour les annes 1882et 1883.Montreal: Dawson1883, 6584.

Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to PostcolonialLiteratures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press 2003

Day, Richard J.F. Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity. Toronto:University of Toronto Press 2000

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and theNew International. Trans Peggy Kamuf, intro Bernd Magnus and StephenCullenberg. New York: Routledge 1994

Durham, Lord. Report on the Affairs of British North America. Ed and intro C.P. Lucas.3vols. Oxford: Clarendon 1912

Findlay, L.M., ed, intro, and trans. The Communist Manifesto. Peterborough:Broadview 2004

Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page: Part 2.The Future of the Page. Ed Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor. Toronto:University of Toronto Press 2004, 12541

Garneau, Franois-Xavier. Le Dernier Huron. Textes choisies. Ed Arsne Lauzire.

Montreal: Fides 1965, 2731


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Histoire du Canada.6

th ed.2

vols. Paris: Flix Alcan1920

Voyage en Angleterre et en France dans les annes 1831, 1832 et 1833. Ed PaulWycznski. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1968

History of the Book in Canada. Vol 1. Beginnings to 1840.Ed Patricia Lockhart Fleming,Gilles Gallichan, and Yvan Lamonde. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004

Kidd, Adam. The Huron Chief. Ed D.M.R. Bentley with Charles R. Steele. London,Ont: Canadian Poetry Press 1987

Lacasse, Yves. Antoine Plamondon. Bland, 42932Lahey, Anita. Pride of Place: Aboriginal Art Transforms the National Galleries.

Vernissage: The Magazine of the National Gallery of Canada(Spring 2003),1013New, Chester W. Lord Durham: A Biography of John George Lambton First Earl of

Durham. Oxford: Clarendon 1929Porter, John R. Les perspectives du march de la peinture: entre les besoinsmatriels et le got de lart. Bland, 1135

Reid, Stuart J. Life and Letters of the First Earl Durham. 2vols. London: Longmans1906

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