A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature Essay

In Rabelais and His knowledge domain, the formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin makes the one reference to Canada that appears in the body of his work. Discussing the French hu human raceists comic dis localisement of Pantagruels northwesterly journey to the icy underworld, he points to the unhomogeneous levels of correspondence among Rabelaiss text (itself a parodic reworking of Dantes Divine Comedy) and Jacques Cartiers journal account of his 1540 voyage to Canada.It was Cartiers colonial venture, Bakhtin suggests, that had a particularly complex and important effect on the European imagining of otro mundo the new world (397-400). For Bakhtin, this effect was felt up just about tellingly on what might be best described as the implications of the Word in the Old World imagination, for it was Cartiers discoery of the mod World that prompted an essential reconsideration of the intellectual and imaginative structures that had until this point guaranteed the Old World a confidence in its linguistic centrality and a certainty in its imaginative enterprise.So radical were the restructurings necessitated by this new information that throughout the earliest explorations of the New World whole editions of journals and maps were destroyed or bought up and mystical because they were thought to disseminate the wrong kind of information (Huggan, 7) or, in the more abstract sense, to articulate the wrong dustup, spread the wrong Word.But as journeys and journals accumulated, so, too, did the notions of Canada as a problematic new land and new language, as a site at which Old World and traditionally worded certainties were confronted by an openness of place that refused to be fixed, refused to accommodate its particularities and paradoxes to the tropes or metaphors privileged by familiar verbal codes.Every journey across this new land became another imaginative office of what were at once the knowable and the radically unknowable realities of the place a number of the earliest cartographers had labeled, somewhat ominously, terra incognita the unknown land. Such mappings were not a luxury, as Margaret Atwood has observed, but a necessity, for without the sense of certainty they provided, these early Canadians would not survive (Atwood, 18-9).Atwoods observations were not in themselves particularly revolutionary but were building on echoes of such notable antecedents as Northrop Frye, who saw in this confrontation both the source of our deep terror regarding the imminence of Canadian geography and of our national myths and mythological patterns (626), and Desmond Pacey, who defined the Canadian imagination as mainly a function of a collision between an imagination demonstrateed fixedly in Old World language and a geography so various and inescapably impressive that in itself it offers an inexhaustible challenge (437-44).More recently, W. H. New has invited a wide-cut rethinking of the most basic terms of this challenge, suggesting that from Car tiers earliest contact the word land has to be seen as a particularly complex discursive terrain, a ground of contestation upon which an ongoing history of our relations with place and space plays out. As New suggests, Canada in this sense becomes a semiotic site at which immutableness vies recurrently with fluidity, position with positionality, the place of social residence with the condition of being there. For Sheila Watson, the condition of being in the her The reduplicate Hook (1959) is very much a process of doubling guts on the assumptions and Words that have traditionally been part of the foundation of Old World thought and action. Faced with an inexhuastible challenge to survive, Watons characters open the novel trapped in silence, the doubling screen of the spoken into the lethal pits-and-snares of the unspoken or, worse still, into the morass of the never said. And is it is in this doubling back of language that Watsons characters find themselves hooked not once (on the self-glorifications of protective silence) but twice, by the fear in which silence finds its most solid footing. The Double Hook opens with an act of matricide, an act that is itself a doubling back to (re)collect both classic (the story of Orestes, for instance) and biblical (1 Timothy) allusions for use in this new land. It is the most deep un-natural doubling, as son erases his own origin, his own naming, his own source.At the same time, it is an act that resonates deeply through a family that lives suspended in silence and that includes among its various acts of violence the suicide of Greta, who remains dumb despite her impulse to use her voice to shatter all memory of the girl who had stayed too long (32) and the blind of Kip, a young boy who attempts to speak of and against the repressiveness shaping his valley home. But as Watson reveals, this Canadian place is a one in which any convey to double away from the exhaustive struggle to find language is often a fatal sl ide.As the character known only as the leave behinds boy shouts in response to the violence erupting in the silences around him Can a man speak to no one because hes a man? Who says so? Ive held my tongue when I should have used my voice like an axe to cut down the wall between us (116). The boys emphasis here is crucial, for what Watson demands to here in her Canadian place is not the language of another or the displacing silence of the fearsome but a radical and potent questioning of the potentialities of a language that can articulate the freedoms that Cartier and others had (en)visioned for this place.As Barbara Godard explains, Watson remains sensitive everlastingly to the thinness and inarticulateness of modern language (153) and is always in search of ways to disturb the readers conventional consciousness of words and their so-called corresponding realities (153). Watsons warning, and her practice in The Double Hook, is for the need to interrogate language in the modern wo rld, to bring language back doubled onto itself as a act of demythologizing and dismantling Watsons novel proposes in its own writing an understanding of language and reality that finds its most profound articulation in the doubling onto itself of language itself.In this doubling back of language upon itself, another act of murdering ones origins, Watson signals her departure from realistic verisimilitude (154) and from the strictures that bound, not freed, Cartier and subsequent explorers, to the language of their realities and their worlds. In the fold of the hills / under prairie wolfs eye (11) language begins to redouble its energies, unfold its potentials to mean beyond the literal into the circular encounterings of allusion and echo and irony.When James flees his ranch on horseback spare-time activity the murder of his own mother, he becomes, briefly, a perverted image of the classic Western hero riding off into the sunset and silence of the horizon. But as he soon recognize s, his is not a semiotic site located in that system in his place, in his language, a person only escapes in circles no matter how far the rope spins. In other words (in new words), he must double back and begin to fill the silence, to despoil the double back language (silence) that has reified around the edges of his folded valley.In his doubling back, he must meet again with Felix, a character whose own languages the vernacular of the valley, the riteized formalness of religion, the silken transcendence of music has itself been emptied of meaning, reduced to cliche He wondered If a bitch crept in by my stove would I let her fall on the hot iron of it? Ive got no words to clear a woman off my bench. No words except Keep moving, scatter, get-the-hell-out. His mind sifted ritual phrases. Some half forgotten. Youre welcome. Put your horse in. Pull up. Ave Maria.Benedictus fructus ventris. Introibo. Introibo. The beginning. The whole thing to live again. Words said over and over h ere by the stove. His father knowing them by heart. Gods servants. The priests servants. The cup lifting. The bread breaking. Domine non sum dignus. Words coming. The last words. (41) Doubling back into his own languages through words ritualized and words said over and over, Felix lives, in this moment, trapped like James, forever in the ellipses of the half forgotten and in the promise, always frustrated, of words coming. In the end, though, it is Felix, with the assistance of Kip, who brings the novel back from the creases of its own doubling, back to the eminence of language made meaningful with its own resonant doubleness, allowing it to be both glory and fear, articulation and reflection, the said and the unsaid. It is Felix, who steps to the side of Angel in the moment of her deliverance to assist in the miracle, and who, even the new mother admits, didnt do bad for a man Especially for a man who never raised a hand to help one of his own mares in have (116).Fishing with Kip in the now meaningful silence that follows the birth, there is a conversation between the two generations of valley men during which the older mans sense of responsibility and wonder serves as a corrective to the younger ones suspicion and fear When a house of full of women, Kip said, and one of them Angel, its best for a man to take his rest among the willows. When a house is full of women and children, Felix said, a man has to get something for their mouths. (117)Caught again in a silence, Kip pauses to reflect on Felixs refocusing of the valley, his doubling of the reality of the presence in the house (and children) that effectively reinscribes community over isolation, family over individual. When Kip speaks again, it is to accept his role in the branding that had scarred his face I keep thinking about James, Kip said. I unbroken at him like a dog till he beat around the way a porcupine beats with his tail (117). Pausing momentarily sooner he answers, Felix slips past the rit ual responses, the formulaic platitudes that have defined him in the past.Rather than parable or vulgar dismissal, he engages the younger man with a reflection upon Jamess burden and, more importantly, a question that at once engages Kip but also looks to his future in the valley James got more than a porcupine has to answer for, he said. Howre you going to pick up a living now? To pick up living in the valley is, as Angel makes clear when she names her new baby Felix, is through the model of the older man, who passes on the will to speak and the will to be heard to a valley.Moving beyond language into love, and through love back to harmony and rebirth, Felix reimagines the silence of the valley, shaping its contours with words and allowing the connecting moments of reticent to reverberate with meaning, to double back into the words of the father-figure in order to find a path to the future. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Survival A Thematic consort to Canadian Literature. Toronto Anansi, 1972. Frye, Northrop. literary History of Canada. Toronto U of Toronto P, 1965. Godard, Barbara.Between One Cliche and Another Language in The Double Hook. Studies in Canadian Literature 3 (1978) 149-65. Huggan, Graham. Territorial Disputes Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction. Toronto U of Toronto P, 1994. New, W. H. Land Sliding Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing. Toronto U of Toronto P, 1997. Pacey, Desmond. The Canadian Imagination. The Literary Review 8 (1965) 437-44. Watson, Sheila. The Double Hook. 1959. Toronto McClelland and Stewart, 1989.