Figures Cut in Sacred Ground: Illuminati in ‘The Double Hook’ by Angela Bowering (review)

154 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 For Lynch, Mariposa is also the embodiment of Canadian values as against the American materialism displayed in the plutocracy of Arcadian Adventures: 'The Envoi narrator suggests the simple need to reaffirm the values of "Mariposa," a community that, for all its acknowledged faults, symbolizes Leacock's, the Tory humanist's, hopes for rerouting the Canadian train that may careen southward.' Since the topography of Arcadian Adventures is Montreal's, there may be some question about identifying the book as an attack on specifically American developments, in spite of the American references in it. There are other problems with Lynch's views as well. What are the values of Mariposa which need affirming? Lynch declares that, even though the Whirlwind Campaign to payoff the church debt failed, it did promote 'sociability and gregariousness.' But the organizer of the campaign, Henry Mullins, brings out its true lesson - that 'there were so many skunks in Mariposa that a man might as well be in the head office in the city.' Similarly the innocent narrator describes Judge Pepperleigh's court as 'one of the most precise instruments of British fair play ever established,' and adds that the scene in the court when the Judge tried his own son was more affecting than anything ever recounted in Roman history. But the reader observes that for a judge to try his own son is a miscarriage of justice, and for him to praise his son instead of condemning him for smashing the face of a Liberal organizer is simply monstrous. Just when we are prepared to accept the narrator's simple-minded view of Mariposa's merits, Leacock jolts us with a smashed face or a suicide; more than human kindliness is involved. Lynch assumes that Dean Drone in Sunshine Sketches and Farforth Furlong in Arcadian Adventures both demonstrate the failings of High Church Anglicanism. But neither of them emphasizes incense, vestments , or ritual; their sermons are 'low' rather than 'high,' and Furlong even considers that a church is a suitable place for a musical performance or harvest festival but not a place of prayer - hardly a High Church sentiment. Lynch works the High-Low distinction to death; it is a good example of his tendency to grab hold of a hobby-horse and, as Leacock might say, ride it off in all directions. The two Leacock books which Lynch analyses in detail do deserve the kind of stress he gives them, but often the interpretations he gives them possess more ingenuity than accuracy. This is a good book to argue with. (D.J. DOOLEY) Angela Bowering. Figures Cut in Sacred Ground: Illuminati in 'The Double Hook' Western Canadian Literary Documents Series 8. NeWest Press. 134. $22.95i $12.95 paper Figures Cut in Sacred Ground starts from Sheila Watson's remark that 'What HUMANITIES 155 I was concerned with [in The Double Hook] was figures in a ground from which they could not be separated.' Bowering's book offers the reader a detailed guide to the mythological background of Watson's figures and ground through an examination of the novel's 'illuminati,' a term which Bowering uses to refer both to 'those figures that appear in the pages of medival manuscripts, illuminating ... the script of the text while figuring forth the divine action implicit in the sacred writing which is their ground' and to 'the perceptual enlightenments that occur in a single moment in the mind either of a "character" or of a reader.' The information brought to bear on these 'figures' is drawn from an extraordinarily wide spectrum of human belief-systems: Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, North American Indian, and Judaeo-Christian. In support of her investigation of the figures, Bowering also pays considerable attention to language as 'the ground of emerging being' which the figures illuminate. The discussion of the etymologies of Watson's names and other elements of her vocabulary and syntax is substantial, wide-ranging, and careful. This discussion is particularly useful, since, apart from Barbara Godard's paper (1978), the language of The Double Hook has received less than its fair share of attention. Bowering's critical apparatus for her book is appropriate for her...