Australian writer Gail Jones’s short story, “The House of Breathing,” is haunted by the marvelous and doomed beauty of the Titanic, the ghostly ship that shadows every transatlantic crossing. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. This is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. “To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. The journey then haunts its performative journey before that journey begins, haunts its own embarkation, and will later haunt its passage, its accomplished journey. While he refers to use-value and commodity forms, his discussion of the wooden table in all its forward and historical dictates fits the performance of the migratory gesture perfectly. Derrida’s contention that the ghost is there by virtue of not being there is absolutely key to my analysis. The crossing becomes ghostly, transformative, an apparition that transubstantiates the reincarnation of migration itself, that holds the gestures of that phenomenological voyage as ghostly recrudescence. There must have been lessons available in some form, but swimming pools were rare, and trained instructors even rarer and so, true to my origins, I cannot swim a stroke.ģ The new world is haunted, despite its physical distance, by the specter of the transatlantic crossing, the water that buoyed the immigrants who came to North America in the early half of the 20th century. And yes, it is true that, as a result of growing up on the prairies, I cannot swim. I know of course the fundamentals of drowning this death results from asphyxia when water enters the lungs and causes suffocation. I live on the high plains of western Canada, and although rivers curl through the foreland thrust sheets (the official designation of foothills) of the Rocky Mountains-and yes, with heavy rains and spring melt those rivers occasionally even flood-we are far from the sea. This trope surprises me each time it reappears, for drowning is a means of death entirely remote from my world, except perhaps for the farms that drowned in dust in the 1930s. This ficto-critique partakes of a crossing and hyphenated crossover, and in the process, unpacks how fictions of modernity have learned to breathe under water instead of drowning.Ģ Over a lifetime of writing stories about the seductions and configurations of landspace on the Canadian prairie, I find myself writing, over and over again, about drowning. This is not a conventional paper, but a recuperation of haunting, and a re-haunting of migration’s intricate outcome.
Australian writer Gail Jones’s short story incites this analysis but also demands that as a Canadian critic/writer investigating Jones’s story, I must provide an inter-textual narrative that takes up the necessity of reincarnating an individual crossing and its private reverberation within the larger metanarrative of immigration. 1 This ficto-critical response to “The House of Breathing” comprises an exploration of the hyphen between one world and another, and a reading of one writer’s fictional reincarnation of the forever sunken Titanic juxtaposed with my own writerly reading of drowning and its concomitant presence in transatlantic discourse, brought together by the narrative of haunting itself.