Sheila Watson: Essays on Her Works

By Guernica

Sheila Watson published the iconic novel, The Double Hook, in 1959 and influenced the writing styles of many Canadian authors who followed her, including: Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt and others. This is the first collection of essays devoted to all of Watson's writing as well as her work as editor and mentor. The collection examines not only The Double Hook but also the first novel she wrote, Deep Hollow Creek (published in 1992), her short stories and the McLuhan connection. The contributors include: Caterina Edwards, E.D. Blodgett, Mary G. Hamilton, George Melnyk, Margaret Morriss, Margot Northey, Glenn Willmott, and Sergiy Yakovenko. The collection also features material from Sheila Watson herself, including her notes on How to read Ulysses. Joseph Pivato is editor and contributor. The cover photo is by Rowland McMaster from 1976.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781550718959

Book preview

SHEILA WATSON

ESSAYS ON HER WORKS

Edited by

Joseph Pivato

GUERNICA

ESSENTIAL WRITERS SERIES 40

TORONTO—BUFFALO—LANCASTER (U.K.) - 2015

Table of Contents

Introduction: Scholarship on Sheila Watson

Joseph Pivato

Brief Biography of Sheila Watson

Mary G. Hamilton

The Nature of Modernism in Deep Hollow Creek

Glenn Willmott

Symbolic Grotesque: The Double Hook

Margot Northey

No Short Cuts: The Evolution of The Double Hook

Margaret Morriss

Originary Grammarians: Laure Conan and Sheila Watson

E.D. Blodgett

The Power of Silence: The Genotext in Sheila Watson’s Rough Answer

Sergiy Yakovenko

Touching Sheila Watson: Always someone to kill the doves

George Melnyk

Sheila Watson in Her Own Words

Sheila Watson

Sheila Watson: The Habit of Mentoring

Caterina Edwards

Forests of Symbols: Tay John and The Double Hook

Joseph Pivato

Sheila Watson in Edmonton: A Student Perspective

Joseph Pivato

How to read Ulysses

Sheila Watson

Bibliography for Sheila Watson

Mary G. Hamilton

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Introduction: Scholarship on

Sheila Watson

Joseph Pivato

Sheila Watson would not have approved of some of the essays included in this collection. There are several that deal with her life story and its relation to her writing, an approach which she did not support. She told an interviewer in 1984: I’ve wanted what is on the page to speak for itself. I’ve never, not even now, wanted to talk about what I have written … (Meyer 167). She resisted giving interviews and only gave six, all after she retired from the University of Alberta in 1975. She never published any autobiographical material, but late in her life she sent her papers to her life-long friend, Fred Flahiff, at the University of Toronto, with instructions that he write her biography. His always someone to kill the doves: A Life of Sheila Watson was published in 2005.

Sheila Watson, like the modernist writers she read and taught, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, believed that the text should stand on its own without the biographical information or personal intentions of the author influencing the reading. For the most part this is how her novel, The Double Hook, was read up until 1974. That year Frank Davey edited a special issue of Open Letter entitled Sheila Watson: A Collection. It included four of her short stories, some of which had been published in the 1950s, her essays on Wyndham Lewis, an essay on Michael Ondaatje and one on Gertrude Stein. At the end of this historic volume was Watson’s first published statement on her writing of The Double Hook which she entitled What I’m Going to Do. Since then paragraphs from this three-page statement have been quoted numerous times in the many articles, book chapters and graduate theses that have been devoted to Watson’s writing. It is referred to several times in the essays included in this volume, an indication of how What I’m Going to Do has influenced readings of The Double Hook and later of Deep Hollow Creek. Part of What I’m Going to Do is included in the present volume in the section, Sheila Watson in Her Own Words.

When Sheila Watson retired from the University of Alberta in 1975, her colleagues put together a collection of essays in celebration of her literary achievements. This Festshrift, Figures in a Ground: Canadian Essays on Modern Literature Collected in Honor of Sheila Watson (1978), included essays by a number of writers: Henry Kreisel, Michael Ondaatje, Marshall McLuhan, E.D. Blodgett, Eli Mandel, Rudy Wiebe, Robert Kroetsch and Douglas Barbour. The volume began with a three-page biography by Diane Bessai, the first published documentation on Watson’s life.

Until the late 1970s all critical attention on Watson was focused on The Double Hook. This is evident in the volume edited by George Bowering, Sheila Watson and The Double Hook (1985) which includes 18 previously-published articles on the novel. The collection opens with Diane Bessai’s brief biography of Sheila Watson which is followed by Kreisel’s Sheila Watson in Edmonton, and Watson’s What I’m Going to Do. The refocus on Watson’s life and intentions as a writer are sometimes referenced in the critical essays in Bowering’s collection. Leslie Monkman’s "Coyote as Trickster in The Double Hook, examines this figure from American Indian mythology in terms of the positive and negative values that it brings to the isolated community depicted in the novel. In Native myths the trickster is the creator and destroyer, giver and negator who dupes others but also dupes himself. Monkman suggests that Coyote’s positive values emerge indirectly when the violent deaths in the narrative lead not to fear and despair but to hope and love. This dichotomy is also suggested in Watson’s 1974 statement, What I’m Going to Do":

And there was something I wanted to say: about how people are driven, how if they have no art, how if they have no traditions, how if they have no rituals, they are driven in one of two ways, either towards violence or towards insensibility—if they have no mediating rituals which manifest themselves in what I suppose we call art forms. (183)

Watson’s use of religious references is the focus of Beverley Mitchell’s "Association and Allusion in The Double Hook. Mitchell maintains that almost all the characters in the novel have parallels to figures in the Old Testament and that Felix is linked to the New Testament especially with all his repeated invocations of phrases from the Catholic mass. She argues that Coyote can be identified with the Old Testament God, Jehovah, a figure feared as a God of vengeance rather than one of mercy. Coyote does repeat many phrases from the Bible, but these can also be read as ironic or parodic by this trickster figure. The subtext of this study is that we are made aware of Watson’s Roman Catholic background. Also of note is John Lennox’s The Past: Themes and Symbols of Confrontation in The Double Hook and ‘Le Torrent’" (1973), an early example of a study in Comparative Canadian Literature in the tradition of the Sherbrooke School (Pivato).

The most interesting essay in Bowering’s collection is Barbara Godard’s "Between one Cliché and Another: Language in The Double Hook," (1978) which examines Watson’s exploration of language in art and communication. By placing Watson in the modernist tradition of authors who focus on our problematic relationship with language itself, she associates The Double Hook with the experimental work of younger writers such as bpNichol and Nicole Brossard who are more radical in pushing the boundaries of language. Dawn Rae Downton’s essay "Message and the Messengers in The Double Hook" is, in part, a response to Godard’s feminist arguments.

Bowering’s collection included almost everything that was published about The Double Hook up to 1984. In addition to some book reviews, and short passages from books, we find some weak essays, examples of early critical work on Canadian literature. (See the bibliography in this volume).

Stephen Scobie, Watson’s former colleague from the University of Alberta, produced a very comprehensive bio-critical study, Sheila Watson and Her Works (1984), which is part of the Canadian Writers and Their Works: Fiction Series by ECW Press of Toronto. After a brief biography, Scobie tries to reconstruct the tradition and milieu of modernism which form part of Watson’s literary education: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. In Toronto she read the mythopoeic theories of Northrop Frye and studied with Marshall McLuhan, absorbing his mosaic approach to literary interpretation. (See her essay "How to read Ulysses" in this volume). Scobie argues that her spare poetic writing style in The Double Hook is a direct reaction against the clumsy intensities of Frederick Philip Grove; the dreary and derivative banalities of Morley Callaghan; the urbane and academic essay-writing of Hugh MacLennan … (6).

Scobie gives a frank evaluation of some of the essays included in the Bowering collection to determine the critical response to The Double Hook up to 1984. The most interesting section of his study is Scobie’s detailed critical analysis of the four stories which appeared together in Open Letter (1974). He explains: Wit plays a great part in establishing the setting of these stories, a setting which is simultaneously local and universal, realist and mythological (14).

Stephen Scobie’s work is the first detailed study of Watson’s short stories and he demonstrated his own sensibility as a poet in his careful reading of these short poetic-prose works. He makes the following striking observation in reading the fifth story:

And the four animals, then, represents a first sketch for the landscape of The Double Hook, the major difference being that it is farther back in mythological time, it is not yet peopled—except by the dogs, by Coyote, and the observing eye. For this is a landscape which both exists, autonomously, and also is being brought into existence: it is a landscape created, and landscape perceived. (22)

And the four animals was first published separately in 1980, but was actually written in the early 1950s, before The Double Hook and is a kind of experiment in poetic-prose style and location. The spare language and the peculiar disembodied perspective of the watching eye suggests the narrative voice in The Double Hook. Scobie correctly observes that the clear link between the short story and the novel is a landscape that is bare, minimal, primitive, and is simultaneously a specific, localized setting (the B.C. interior in the drought years of the 1930s) and a symbolic, mythological country … (19). Scobie goes on to give a very detailed reading of And the four animals and identifies many parallels to The Double Hook. He considers the problem of regional versus international writing in terms of Watson’s writing style and her balancing the influences of Frye’s emphasis on archetypes and McLuhan’s mosaic approach full of eclectic references. Two of Watson’s favourite authors, James Joyce and William Faulkner, demonstrated that small regional settings can be successfully combined with work of universal appeal and meaning. In addition to examining Watson’s language style, Scobie also explores the biblical allusions and religious implications in this story with its final apocalyptic vision.

The much quoted final 20 pages of Scobie’s study are devoted to The Double Hook. Building on his cogent observations of the language and setting of And the four animals and Watson’s own comments on the genesis for her novel, Scobie presents a systematic reading of the characters. In her talk, What I’m Going to Do, Watson explained her intentions in The Double Hook: And there was something I wanted to say about how people are driven, how if they have no art, how if they have no tradition … if they have no mediating rituals … (183). She is referring to the characters in her narrative, both white and First Nations, who have lost Christian rituals and Native traditions. Coyote seems to symbolize this loss of faith in all of the communities in the novel. (All references to The Double Hook are from the 1969 edition.)

In his monograph Scobie also examines Margaret Morriss’ The Elements Transcended, an exploration of the elemental symbolism in the narrative: earth, air, fire, and water. Morriss argues that these elements have a real basis in nature and also function symbolically in the novel. For example, we can see that the fire which Greta uses to destroy herself and the Potter house is real, but also functions symbolically as a ritualistic fire of cleansing and renewal. Fire is also used in many religious rituals, which Watson alludes to throughout the novel.

In his study Scobie devotes some time to examining the most controversial character in The Double Hook, Coyote, who has been seen as saintly or satanic or a trouble maker who also fools himself. He also reviews Leslie Monkman’s study Coyote as Trickster … which explores the function and meaning of Coyote in the context of American Indian mythology. When Kip remarks, That if you hook twice the glory you hook twice the fear […] [t]hat Coyote plotting to catch the glory for himself is fooled and every day fools others […] [and] how much mischief Coyote can make, (61) he is alluding to the figure of Coyote as trickster, creator and destroyer, giver and taker, deceiver and self-deceived. Coyote, along with Mrs. Potter, spreads fear throughout the isolated community in the valley. People like Felix and Angel confront fear and overcome it leading to the beginning of hope for the future. At the beginning of The Double Hook many of the characters are in a state of paralysis, the insensibility which Watson refers to above. With the return of James and his determination to take on his responsibilities to himself, to Lenchen and their unborn child and to the rest of the community, the regeneration of the valley begins.

Watson Scholarship and the Computer

Since the milestone publication of Scobie’s and Bowering’s volumes on Sheila Watson’s work, there has been a continual production of studies. Of significance is the first publication of her early novel, Deep Hollow Creek in 1992 which was written in 1937-38, and the appearance of all her short stories in one volume, A Father’s Kingdom in 2004. The Afterword for Deep Hollow Creek is by novelist Jane Urquhart and that for A Father’s Kingdom is by modernist scholar Glenn Willmott.

No less than eight MA and PhD theses on Watson were produced in the 1990s. The explosion in digital communication has re-awakened interest in McLuhan’s pronouncements on technology and experiments in writing like The Double Hook. This relation is explored in Gregory Betts’ article, "Media, McLuhan, and the Dawn of the Electric Age in Sheila Watson’s Deep Hollow Creek and The Double Hook." (2009) Betts examines mediating technologies in both novels and how they participate in the creation of a new culture bringing together white and Native characters:

A hybrid of the First Nations and European diasporic cultures emerges in both works. Using McLuhan’s theories, I argue that the surface differences between the two novels disguises an internal similarity in the particular way that human technologies participate in the development of a unique, hybridized culture in western Canada. (255)

In my brief review below I mention a selection of publications which strike me as interesting to readers and scholars of Watson’s work. In the 1970s Watson’s The Double Hook often received brief comments in books devoted to ‘more significant works’ of literature. In contrast the 1990s saw whole chapters devoted to Watson. In his book, Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West (1994), Arnold Davidson devotes a chapter to The Double Hook and examines it in the context of Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John and Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands. This volume makes it clear that Watson is recognized as a major contributor to the creation of a literature about the Canadian West. In her book Imagining Culture: New World Narrative and the Writing of Canada (1995) Margaret Turner spends a chapter analyzing The Double Hook and describes Watson as she moves between literal and metaphoric planes in her dismantling and construction of new world discourse (79).

Sheila Watson’s short stories are the subject of Valerie Legge’s article, Sheila Watson’s ‘Antigone’: Anguished Rituals and Public Disturbances (1992). In her critical article, "Canadian Letters, Dead Referents: Reconsidering the Critical Construction of The Double Hook, (1994) Donna Palmateer Pennee examines the canonization of Watson’s novel and argues that sacrifice is central to the canonization of this novel, the formation of a literary-critical community, and by extension, the formation of the nation ‘on its way to itself’—or, that beneath the canonization site is a dead woman’s body… a mother is murdered (on the very first page of the novel) so that the son’s narrative can go forward …" (235).

The first detailed study of Deep Hollow Creek seems to be Genn Willmott’s "The Nature of Modernism in Deep Hollow Creek (1995). This rich and perceptive essay is included in this volume. As Gregory Betts’ article above indicates, Watson’s second published novel is getting more attention. The joint study of Watson’s two novels is the focus of Representation of the ‘Native Condition’ in Watson’s The Double Hook and Deep Hollow Creek (2004). Author Samara Walbohm argues that a close comparison of Watson’s novels suggests that her depictions of First Nations people and culture are not simply aesthetic instruments within mainstream texts. Specifically, Watson’s representation of Native figures in Deep Hollow Creek grants First Nations people, their culture and their myths, a narrative distinction and status not present in The Double Hook (82). Walbohm’s essay makes us realize how few studies of Watson have focused on the First Nations characters in her novels. This is slowly changing as evidenced by Glenn Willmott’s Sheila Watson, Aboriginal Discourse and Cosmopolitan Modernism." (2005) Two of the few early studies on Native questions are Angela Bowering’s Figures Cut in Sacred Ground (1988), and Steven Putzel’s Under Coyote’s Eye (1984) which examine The Double Hook.

Before her death in 1998 Sheila Watson donated her literary documents to the University of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. At St. Michael’s her literary executor Fred Flahiff published always someone to kill the doves: A Life of Sheila Watson, which provides valuable information on Watson’s personal life, marriage and writing activities. (See the essay by George Melnyk in this collection). McMaster University has a site in its Literary Digital Collection devoted to Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and the editing process of various pages between the author, Fred Salter and McClelland and Stewart.

A team of researchers at the University of Alberta is working on editing and digitizing the Wilfred Watson Archives which are housed on the Edmonton campus. The team leader is Paul Hjartarson and the project is part of the larger Editing Modernism in Canada project (EMiC) which has centres in Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto and Victoria. With Shirley Neuman, Hjartarson is editing the Sheila Watson-Wilfred Watson letters.

We should also note the international reception of The Double Hook which has been translated into Swedish as Dubblekroken (1963), into French as Sous l’oeil de coyote (1976), and into Italian as Il Doppio amo (1992). This has resulted in critical essays on the novel in Italian and German (Kuester). The international dissemination of all this information on the writing by and about Sheila Watson is now made easier by the internet.

This Collection and Scholarship on Watson

This volume represents some of the best scholarship available on Sheila Watson. We have not included any of the essays in the Bowering collection from 1985, with the exception of Margot Northey’s 1976 essay "Symbolic Grotesque: The Double Hook, a solid example of early work on Watson. Poet E.D. Blodgett’s Originary Grammarians: Laure Conan and Sheila Watson is an excellent example of a comparative study in Canadian literature. While Blodgett examines several of Watson’s short stories, Sergiy Yakovenko focuses on one, Rough Answer, in his original essay. In his seminal study, The Nature of Modernism in Deep Hollow Creek, Glenn Willmott places Watson’s early novel in the context of her other narratives and modernist writing in Canada. Margaret Morriss was able to use the Sheila Watson papers archived in St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto in order to study Watson’s revisions to the final drafts of her major novel. The result is ‘No short Cuts’: The Evolution of The Double Hook," an important and revealing study of modernist practice by Morriss. A second comparative study by J. Pivato looks at the possible rapports de faits between Tay John and The Double Hook in the context of the many perceived associations between the two works. The essays collected in this volume examine the writing of Sheila