1‘Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water’1. Shakespeare’s words provide a rich body of material for posing the Canadian problem of cultural dispossession, as depicted in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, the fifth and last book in the Manawaka2 series, whose water symbolism, imbued with a spectral quality, arises from the human inability to renounce all illusions of identity. Exactly like the African worship of water spirits, and India’s water-oriented cosmogony, the Canadian artistic preoccupation with water myths reveals an aesthetics of hauntology that ‘suggests a spectrally deferred non-origin within grounding metaphysical terms such as history and identity’3.

2The Diviners not only develops its own detailed blueprint of personal hauntings, but is also a broad philosophical meditation on the entire spectral process associated with the Canadian sensation of cultural unease. As part of this overview, Laurence devotes close attention to the question of Victorian hauntology, diplaying considerable ambivalence towards it. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues—the prospect of losing our self and being taken by another, unfamiliar self, the literary phantoms which haunt the Canadian imagination, etc.—which they raise.

3But my central purpose will be to re-read the spectral condition of water, a philosophical phantasm that concerns the reconciliation of literary knowledge with cultural phenomena. On the base of Bachelard’s essay on water and imagination, I will reflect on the importance of liquid images which represent the inner world of Canadian dreams, the socio-cultural spectres that return in a sort of a ghostly act of disfiguration, making the invisible visible. Through water, I suggest, Laurence attempts to convey in her works the powerful force of displacement, the disfiguring of the present, as the trace of non-identity within identity, with important consequences for the phantasmatic Canadian condition, in which representation is fragmented.

4Haunted by genocide and enslavement, Laurence’s phantom-like characters wandering without direction in search of their birthright, experience divination events by Manitoba’s Red River, aptly defined ‘the river of now and then’4. This Horacian river of time—which recalls both T.S. Eliot’s lines, ‘The river is within us, the sea is all about us’5, and Jorge Luis Borges’s assertion, ‘Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river’6—enacts a spectral process in terms of remembrance and obsession. Morag, Royland, Pique, and Jules who practice hydromancy in one form or another, confront what Laurence called ‘The ghosts of those who had never been and yet would always be’ (200).

5Canadian reality as depicted by Laurence seems to be haunted by the spectre of Colonialism which appears when Morag watches ‘the river flowing both ways’ (3) and listens to ‘the hoarse prehistoric voices of the bullfrogs’ (88); when Royland, the old man of the river, finds he can divine wells; when Pique, Morag’s half-blood daughter sings the words ‘I found those ghosts were near’ (360); and when the Métis Jules Tonnerre, the embodiment of the Indian shaman, sings aloud about the death of his kinship in the snow. ‘Canada’s divine writer’, as the Canadian Broadcasting Centre put it, transforms the world into a spectre of the truth, the spirit of native people, that ‘serves as a metaphor for the alienated and repressed parts of the individual’7. If it is true that the phenomenal form of the world itself is spectral, it is equally true that the phenomenological ego (Morag, Royland, Pique, Jules and so forth) is a spectre in all its manifestations. Such a fluidity of consciousness, highlighting one or another of the phantasmatic aspects of Canada, is well exemplified by Morag’s troubled personality, split between ancestral ghosts8 and literary phantoms.

6Laurence’s meta-fictional writer, the author of Spear of Innocence, Presences, Jonah9, Prospero’s Child, and Shadow of Eden, is above all a river-watcher who was emblematically born under the water sign of Cancer10. Morbidly fascinated by the ‘apparently impossible contradiction’ (3) epitomised by the bi-directional flow in the Red River, Morag commits the pathetic fallacy with water that brings inscrutable signs and unbearable omens. Like the anonymous protagonist of Surfacing (1972), who plunges11 into the depths of one of the fathomless lakes of northern Quebec, in search for her beloved father, Laurence’s haunted character is so attracted to water that she risks her life. This mysterious connection is particularly evident in the chapter entitled ‘Rites of Passages’ where Morag seems to be affected by what Bachelard would call the Swinburne complex12, i.e. the desire for the physical struggle against the elements, and the ambivalence of pleasure and pain deriving from swimming in a ‘river-monster, probably prehistoric, which has been hibernating down there in the mud for ten million years and has just wakened. Or Grendel, as in Beowulf, and [Morag] without courage or a sword’ (292). Despite the uncanny nature of this scene, whose climax is reached a few pages later when Morag invokes God’s help (‘Save me o God, for the waters are come in unto my soul’, 337), a supernatural power nevertheless emerges that is associated with creative writing—that second sight which permits to see the unimaginable, the unspeakable, and the forbidden. More similar to a ‘Venus Rising from the Waves’ (127), a ‘summoning ghost’ (331) whose magic tricks derive from the ancient power of the river, this ‘Lady Oracle’13 offers a prophetic vision of the past, discovering the future in the past. Exactly like Atwood’s Joan Foster who is, according to Coral Ann Howells, ‘prophetess, oracle and alleged communicator with the dead’14, Laurence’s Morag fictionalises the immersions in the waters of life and death. For both writers the river’s surface is endowed with mirror properties used to prove the existence of ‘another world’ (77). Instead of a specular reflection of the surrounding reality, Joan and Morag confront with supernatural dimensions beyond the viewable and knowable forces of nature as in the metanarrative description of a woman drowning in the River Papple, the threshold between the human life and the spiritual existence: ‘in the mirror... there was water, she was gazing up at herself from beneath the surface of the river. She was afraid of death. All she wanted was happiness with the man she loved’15.

7Apart from the Rapunzel syndrome16 associated with Morag’s entrapment in the Toronto tower, a claustrophobic and depersonalising state under the control of her literate British husband, the haunted condition of Canadian women artists can better be summarised by the Miranda complex. As Gunilla Florby has pointed out, Morag/Miranda not only plays the role of ‘the eternal child-wife who is not allowed to grow up and attain independence’17, but also ‘protests against the imperialist discourse of the English professor, the guardian of the canon’ (Florby 1997: 222). What needs emphasis here is Morag/Miranda’s melancholic attitude toward water, that carries on its ripples and waves inner demons of mysterious origin. In Laurence, ‘ [t]he melancholic ghost bears the burden of that invisibility’18, sign of a racial melancholia continually confronted by injustice, abuse and neglect:

MIRANDA. ‘If by your art, my dearest father, you have/Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them./The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch, / But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek, /Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered/With those that I saw suffer! ’19

The night river was dark and shining, and the moon traced a wavering path across it. Morag sat cross-legged on the dock, listening to the hoarse prehistoric voices of the bullfrogs. Somewhere far off, thunder. Incredibly, unreasonably, a lightening of the heart (88).

8If it is true, as Freud theorised, that the mind is like an iceberg that floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water, then Miranda/Morag’s unconscious remains submerged and unseen, except for its sufferance and despair, a rite of passage for reawakening the awareness that ‘islands exists only in the head’ (292). But this melancholic water where myths and fantasies lie, where reflections and reality can meet and unite, does not exhaust the spectrality of Morag’s world. While drifting along the river, she becomes aware of her own lack of Canadian literary ghosts, compensated by a multitude of colonial spirits that invites her on an interior journey, and thus to creation. Gaelic folk songs, Shakespeare’s tragedies, and Wordsworth’s poems are only some of the many canonical English texts that are persistently surfacing in the Canadian mind. Morag’s obsession with British artistry, and with all its fictional representations of water, is characterised by an involuntary repetition of ghostly presences. This is particularly true in the sections devoted to John Donne’s aquatic spirituality20, the incitement to forgetfulness (drowning) or purification (washing), to Robert Browning’s mesmerising waters as explorative elements of psychology21, and to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s22 ecclesiological waters of baptism. Water, this vast unity, this singular ghost, generates an incalculable multiplicity that hallucinates the reader.

9And in its further development, the spectral water remains in large measure one of the primary distinguishing features of Laurence’s novels, whose actual historical meanings are fully disclosed only within the totality of a meta-literary discourse that reverberates with a language of magic and violence: with the mystery of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Like a ghost text, Coleridge’s ballad of ancient times reappears in The Stone Angel and The Fire Dwellers to haunt the characters’ mind in the form of personal guilt and disquieting figures. In the poetic image of water all supernatural activity is completely exhausted by the interplay between a faulty humanity (‘ancient mariners totte[r] around in search of lifeblood, a gallon of Calona Royal Red’23) and the hostility of the forces that govern the universe (‘I can’t drink seawater.... Water water everywhere nor any drop to drink. That’s my predicament. What albatross did I slay, for mercy’s sake?’24).

10What is involved in The Diviners is a very physical phantom projection into the destinies of human discourses: the fundamental seeking for hidden truths through divining for hidden waters, a practice employed by Royland who searches for water with a divining rod, a Y-shaped piece of willow and who knows the future of every person by inspiration or intuition. But the very essence of the old man of the river lies in the Charon complex25 coined by Bachelard to convey the dual valence of water, substance of both death and life.

No boats today. Yes, one. Royland was out, fishing, for muskie. Seventy-four years old this year, Royland. Eyesight terrible, but he was too stubborn to wear glasses. A marvel that he could go on working. Of course, his work did not depend upon eyesight. Some other kind of sight. A water diviner. Morag always felt she was about to learn something of great significance from him, something which would explain everything. But things remained mysterious, his work, her own, the generations, the river (4).

11The Red River, like the river Styx, serves as a crossroads where the world of the living meets the world of the dead, and Royland the ferryman of lost souls cherishes a mystery, the secret of men’s misfortunes and the nearing of the afterlife. While floating in these spectral waters Morag reveals: ‘Even if surrounded by a multitude with banners, Royland, I would still talk to ghosts’ (139), as if to assert that the Canadian age of pain will never cease. Together with the haunting image of the boat full of souls, whose pivotal importance is also attested in The Stone Angel26, A Jest of God27, and The Fire-Dwellers28, there appears the image of drowning into ‘another world’ (77), into that ‘giant dark green tranquillity’ (4) from which no return is possible. In contrast with Dante’s Charon29, largely based on Virgil30, Laurence’s version of the spectral ferryman appears to be more humanised. Royland sympathises with Morag’s fear of losing her self and being taken by another unfamiliar self. His compassionate nature is also evident from a partial similarity with Jehovah. Like the God of the Old Testament he is bearded and ancient looking, but his plaid wool bush jacket and heavy denims make him seem an ordinary Canadian outdoorsman: ‘Royland came to the door, looking old as Jehovah. Wearing his plaid wool bush jacket and heavy denims—a wonder he didn’t melt. Greybeard loon.’ (21)

12The novel’s heroine and her haunted discourse can be understood in all their uniqueness only against the background of the Métis culture, whose representative ghostly figures, Pique and Jules, are evaluated as displaced and fragmented individuals. Morag’s problematic daughter, suffering from the Ophelia complex31, by her own admission, leads a life ‘at full flood’, as reported by The Time, and her extravagant fondness for fog reveals a border-like personality ‘feeding on [emotional] crises’ (294) according to a distorted logic of pleasure (‘because they are exciting’, 294): ‘Now please do not get all uptight, Ma. I can look after myself. Am going west. Alone, at least for now. If Gord phones, tell him I’ve drowned and gone floating down the river, crowned with algae and dead minnows, like Ophelia’ (3).

13Opposed to the little prairie world, there is a great but hidden world, where the empirical is replaced by the supernatural, where water, in Bachelard’s definition, is ‘la patrie des nymphes vivantes et aussi la patrie des nymphes mortes. [L’eau] est la vraie matière de la mort bien féminine’ (Bachelard 1991: 111). Of just such a sort is Pique’s world, more decisively significant than any other socio-cultural reality imbued with historical references tothe Canadian pain and despair. Her wandering ‘lonely as a cloud’ (51) toward the West just as far as Manitoba, in search of her ancestors, not to mention the emphasis laid on her ‘long black hair spread on the [mental] hospital pillow’ (81), reveals a phenomenology of the ghost which occurs when Pique/Ophelia merges her own voice with her father’s voice in a singing tune:

There’s a mountain holds my name, close to the sky/... And I hear the voices that in me would never die //... I left behind my fear/When I found those ghosts were near/Leadin’ me back to that home I never knowed. //... When I think how I was born/I can’t help but being torn/But the valley and the mountain hold my name (381-2).

14Against this sense of immanent threat, displacement and obscurantism, Jules Tonnerre, fascinated with alcohol as a liquid fire, source of inspiration and physical death (possible symptoms of The Hoffmann Complex32), restores the ancient truth about the dispossession of the Métis rendered by a music that ‘comes to an approximation of rippling water’33: ‘They say the dead don’t always die;/They say the truth outlives the lie—/ The night wind calls their voices there, /The Métis men, like Jules Tonnere’ (375). Like Exodus Crow34, the Indian representative described in Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993), Jules has survived the many attempts made to annihilate him. Both Jules and Exodus, who suffer from the condition of being ‘walkers on surfaces, floaters on water, standers on mountains’ (Urquhart 1995: 181), are haunted by their kinship ghosts. These Indian spirits, that in Surfacing appear ‘on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten’ (Atwood 1998: 146), play a crucial role in Jules’s self-consciousness offering him additional encouragement to live his life against all odds. Unfortunately Jules dies before he is able to demonstrate his true value. The last scene which shows Jules drunk in the darkness of his room provokes a sense of the spectral aroused by the pain and misery of the Indians in the post-colonial era:

[Morag and Jules] drank some more rye, not speaking much. Jules’ voice seemed to have run out and he spat more frequently into the basin beside the bed. He was getting fairly drunk now, and his pain was lessened by the pills and the rye. The pain in his throat, anyway. The night was wearing on....
Then Jules turned to her and put his arms around her, and she put her arms around him. The brief sound in the darkness was the sound of a man crying the knowledge of his death (365).

15The extraordinary relevance of spectrality in Laurence, its projection of mythic paradigms is explained predominantly by its link with archetypic elements of individual psychology—helpful complexes to identify the origin of Canadian imagination springing from the spirit and power of water that in all its forms flows through the human mind, body and soul. To a certain extent, Laurence’s Manawaka novels, especially The Diviners, facilitate ‘the apparition of the inapparent’35, that is to say the materialisation of post-colonial ghosts which acquire the immanence and transcendence of water.