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Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 43.1 | 2020 Revisiting Canadian Modernism: Sheila Watson’S the Double Hook (1959) 2 Commonwealth Essays and Studies 43.1 | 2020 Exception Revisiting Canadian Modernism: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) André Dodeman Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/4267 DOI: 10.4000/ces.4267 ISSN: 2534-6695 Publisher SEPC (Société d’études des pays du Commonwealth) Electronic reference André Dodeman, « Revisiting Canadian Modernism: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) », Commonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], 43.1 | 2020, Online since 30 October 2020, connection on 21 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ces/4267 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ ces.4267 This text was automatically generated on 21 December 2020. Commonwealth Essays and Studies is licensed under a Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. Revisiting Canadian Modernism: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) 1 Revisiting Canadian Modernism: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) André Dodeman 1 Robert Kroetsch once wrote in the 1970s that Canadian fiction evolved directly from Victorian fiction to postmodernism in the 1960s, and although such a statement was meant in jest, it nevertheless showed to what extent readers were more familiar with realist and postmodernist writers than with the modernist innovations of the 1950s. The fact that most modernist texts of the 1950s had been printed by small presses had the effect of relegating Canadian modernism to a short period of transition in Canadian literary history, not to mention the acclaimed rise of Canadian postmodernism in the 1960s and early 1970s with internationally famous writers like Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood. In the first half of the twentieth century, the realist tradition held a strong position in Canada thanks to writers like Frederick Philip Grove and Hugh MacLennan who familiarized readers worldwide with a specific local or regional Canadian time and space by resorting to the more well-known, classic modes of realism and romance. It was in the aftermath of World War Two, which destabilized notions of order and meaning, that writers began experimenting with narrative form and reshaping Canadian fiction. Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952) and Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel (1954) are only two examples of innovative experimentation with storytelling, but it is more importantly Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook – published in 1959, but completed in 1952 – that critics identify today with the emergence of Canadian modernism. 2 Watson’s novel played a role in challenging classic modes of storytelling and former realist conventions, and in contributing to a specifically Canadian modernist aesthetic. The result is a story that, to this day, remains exceptional in its inclination to resist clear-cut classification. In the United States and Europe, modernist novels were concerned with representing the fragmented nature of the world and the long-term effects of the First World War.1 There is no denying that Watson was inspired by these Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 43.1 | 2020 Revisiting Canadian Modernism: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) 2 models, but rather than drawing a macrocosmic portrait of a fragmented world, her novel sought to represent a microcosmic dislocated community in the British Columbia interior in need of spiritual reconnection and social reconstruction. 3 This article will first examine Watson’s aesthetics of narrative and spatial fragmentation in the novel before focusing on the problematics of linguistic fragmentation, which has always been one of the major concerns of European and American modernist texts. Watson’s narrative technique and stylistic devices question the very ability of language to speak for a community that is unable to articulate their own concerns and find meaning to their existence. The result is a highly exceptional novel that is now associated with a specifically Canadian modernist aesthetic, which problematizes the relationship between a vast and ominous landscape and the language that is used to represent and appropriate it. Recent readings of The Double Hook in this light have allowed many readers and academics to develop a more profound understanding of Canadian modernism. A fragmented narrative for fragmented spaces 4 In The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature, published in the early 1960s, Frank Joseph wrote that one of the main differences between realist and modernist aesthetics is the presence or lack of “historical depth” within the narrative. In modernist novels, such “historical depth,” he writes, has been replaced by a “spatial fusion” (qtd. in Morriss 2015, 77) of past and present in which plot and character seem to evolve in a centripetal fictional world outside history. Time becomes purely mythical in the story as the characters go through a collective crisis in a nameless landscape without clear time indications. The Double Hook is set in a small, rural and extremely isolated community located at Dog Creek, in an area more commonly known as the Cariboo country, in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The isolation of this small community from a vaster outside world is illustrated by the incipit, a form of dramatis personae that not only serves to introduce the readers to the characters, but also grounds the characters in a local space and prefigures the content of the entire chapter: In the folds of the hills under Coyote’s eye lived the old lady, mother of William of James and of Greta lived James and Greta lived William and Ara his wife lived the Widow Wagner the Widow’s girl Lenchen the Widow’s boy lived Felix Prosper and Angel lived Theophil and Kip until one morning in July (Watson 1959, 19) This modern technique of disrupting the classic layout of narrative recalls earlier works by Lost Generation poets such as e.e.cummings and writers like John Dos Passos whose U.S.A. trilogy displayed the same features of break and fragmentation to Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 43.1 | 2020 Revisiting Canadian Modernism: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) 3 challenge classic conventions, disrupt the readers’ expectations and awaken them to the political and cultural transformations of the modern world. In Watson’s incipit, the spaces between the opening lines foreground the break between the first two haunting figures of Coyote and the mother and the small community made up of James, Greta and William, the Widow’s family, Felix Prosper and his wife Angel and finally Kip. It also foregrounds Watson’s deliberate choice to downplay the classic function of the omniscient narrator by reducing it to an exterior, impersonal function dominated by the trickster figure of Coyote and his all-seeing eye/I. Even though Watson openly admitted in an interview that she “wanted to get rid of reportage” and “the condescension of omniscience” (Watson 2015, 165), this barely perceptible, yet all- encompassing narrator serves to expose the deeply fragmented nature of the community by dealing with each character separately in the opening chapters of the novel. The only action that brings the characters together is the haunting figure of the slain mother seen fishing on everyone’s property. 5 As mentioned above, the novel’s regional setting, the community’s isolated location and the absence of any clear time indication anchor the characters in a mythical time and space which foregrounds Watson’s intention to draw universal meaning from a rural, microcosmic community in the British Columbia interior. Many reviews and articles have been written about The Double Hook and its recreation of a mythical time of beginnings. The plethora of biblical references in the story has led Margot Northey, in “Symbolic Grotesque: The Double Hook,” to write that “the message of The Double Hook is religious” and that the story is “about redemption written from a Christian vantage point” (Northey 2015, 62). It is true that the story begins with the crime of matricide that will affect the entire community and act as a triggering moment in the narrative. James, the leader of the community, kills his own mother by throwing her down the stairs: James was at the top of the stairs. His hand half-raised. His voice in the rafters. James walking away. The old lady falling. There under the jaw of the roof. In the vault of the bed loft. Into the shadow of death. Pushed by James’s will. By James’s hand. By James’s words: This is my day. You’ll not fish today. (Watson 1959, 19) This in medias res beginning, enhanced by its dominant ING forms, deprives the incipit of the causality so characteristic of realist fiction and gives the scene a mythical dimension. Killing his own mother, who is understood to have ruled over the community with an iron fist, becomes an original act of rebellion and a sin that disrupt the apparent tranquility and unity of the community. In his chapter entitled “Sheila Watson, Wyndham Lewis and Men Without Art,” Dean Irvine associates James’s clenched fist with “what the German expressionists called Aufbruch, an awakening from a repressed condition and a violent breaking free from the past” (2016, 185). This inaugural matricide constitutes an original sin that echoes the biblical myth of the fall, the main consequence of which was the isolation of humanity and man’s permanent separation from the divine. The crime itself is the triggering act that moves the plot forward to elicit a silent, fragmented, and postlapsarian world. It is only after James’s descent from the hill to the “town below” and his subsequent return that the community begins to rebuild itself on more solid grounds. 6 The community is a nameless microcosm in a nameless valley, the position of which can only be determined in relation to the nameless “town below” and the “Indian reservation” in between.
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