The Hauntings of Canada in Michael Crummey’s Sweetland

• Published in: London Journal of Canadian Studies
• Main Author: Polić, Vanja
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: UCL Press 2018
• Subjects: Canada; Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.006; https://scienceopen.com/document_file/ab0aee7d-dd42-4cdc-9662-5a19f6b455f9/ScienceOpen/Article6.pdf; https://scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.006

In Michael Crummey’s novel Sweetland (2014), which belongs to the genre of Canadian Gothic, ghosts function as warnings and reminders on a broader cultural and national level. The article analyzes different kinds of hauntings in the novel to show how they emphasize the notions of belonging to a local community and specific location, to alert to the disappearance of the traditional ways of life and the importance of cultural memory for the survival of a comprehensive and diversified Canadian identity. The hauntings include: ‘typical’ ghosts haunting individual characters; workings of capital and national consolidation, which are shown haunting the local community (serving as a synecdoche of the Newfoundland region); hauntings of disappeared local communities in the impersonal national construct of Canadian culture (cultural mosaic); hauntings which emphasize notions of belonging to and emplacement into Canada’s Atlantic region; the haunting of the unrecordable quality of lived experience in such a community; and the inevitability of the book to be a record of absence as well as warning of that absence. The article discusses and postulates hauntings as a strategy of resistance against historical amnesia, but also as testaments to belonging.