聽鬼魂說話：瑪格麗特‧史威特曼小說《當愛麗斯與彼得同眠》中的鬼魅糾纏

Listening to (Talks with) Ghosts: Haunting in Margaret Sweatman's When Alice Lay Down with Peter

瑪格麗特‧史威特曼的《當愛麗斯與彼得同眠》是一部將兩位蘇格蘭移民的家族史與1869年到1979年間加拿大重要的歷史事件相互羅織的歷史小說。這部小說借用部分鬼故事這個文類的敘事手法來增加加拿大情境裡鬼魅糾纏的層次。挪用這些鬼故事敘事手法時，史威特曼聚焦在見鬼者這個身份上，凸顯鬼魅糾纏的空間面向與經濟基礎，並將擁有與剝奪、佔有與驅逐的辯證關係用來重新檢視「1869－70年紅河抵抗」與「1885年西北叛變」兩次美蒂斯人（Métis）抗爭的歷史。本論文將探討史威特曼的小說如何將殖民與被殖民的二元對立複雜化成印地安人、美蒂斯人、白人移民三者間的土地爭奪戰，以及她的文本如何召喚讀者成為見鬼者，聆聽鬼魂敘述移居者國族主義希冀原住民化的不可得。

Margaret Sweatman's When Alice Lay Down with Peter (2001) is a multigenerational saga that interweaves the stories of two Scottish settlers and their descendants with influential historical events in Canada between 1869 and 1979. Commonly classified as a magic realist text, the novel also employs a few conventions of ghost stories to multiply the layers of haunting in the Canadian context. By manipulating these conventions of ghost stories, Sweatman shifts attention to the figure of the ghost-seer, foregrounds the spatial dimension and the economic basis of haunting, and applies the dialectical relationship between possession and dispossession to revisiting the history of two Métis uprisings, the Red River Resistance of 1869-1870 and the North-West Rebellion of 1885. Her fictional account rejects the binary relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, highlights the in-between position of the Métis, and exposes the dispossession and displacement inflicted on Indian populations by the conflict between Métis nationalism and Canadian settler nationalism. This article examines how the manipulation of these conventions enables Sweatman's novel to turn its readers into ghost-seers listening both to ghosts speaking and to talks with ghosts, to differentiate the multiple layers of haunting involved in the tripartite struggle over territory between white settlers, the Métis, and Indian communities, and finally to shatter the dream of indigenization in the settler-invader society of Canada, where the very fact that the craving for indigenization has been rekindled during the recent decades makes it more compelling than ever to revisit When Alice Lay Down with Peter.