Jack Hodgins's Island: A Big Enough Country

ALLAN PRITCHARD Jack Hodgins's Island: A Big Enough Country I In the story 'More than Conquerors' in Jack Hodgins's latest book, The Barclay Family Theatre, a Finnish painter, asked why he has chosen to hide himself away on Vancouver Island, answers that the island is 'a big enough country': 'Insist that he become a Canadian painter, or a North American painter, and he would panic. How was it possible to identify with anything so unimaginably huge except by induction, except by seeing the small first and knowing it so well it must include all of the rest?'1 No one can fail to recognize that Hodgins is setting out here the paradoxical principle upon which his own art is based. He does not of course claim any novelty for this idea that the best way to the universal lies through the local. Thomas Hardy long ago in his General Preface to the Wessex novels provided a classic statement of the principle, and it has been well understood by those Canadian writers who in recent years have given us Deptford, Manawaka, and Jubilee; but no Canadian writer shows the paradox more sharplythan Hodgins or combines the opposites in more extreme forms, the most intensely local elements with the largest themes and the most universal myths. An examination of the relation between these opposites brings us to the heart of the achievement Hodgins has sustained, thus far, through four books, two sequences of stories and two novels.2 This investigation may begin on a small scale with a story, 'Three Women of the Country,' which although it is relatively early already shows his methods and skills fully developed,3 and exemplifies well not only the way in which he works from the local to the universal but also the way in which the strong local elements save him from vagueness and abstraction while the larger themes and allusions save him from becoming lost in local detail. In this story, while there is little elaborate formal description, the sense of place is built up gradually through numerous details to establish a rural Vancouver Island setting, where the sun rises behind a fir ridge and sets behind blue scarred mountains, a land of forest and small farms, fir and alders, stumps and blackberry bushes, cedar rails and shallow streams, a place with a single main highway and side roads, from which it is possible to rise on logging roads into the foothills to gain a wider view of the scene: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 1, FALL 1985 22 ALLAN PRITCHARD I a thick green rug with roads like worm trails winding through, farm fields like shaved-off squares. The strait, blue-white from here, looked full and thick and slow' (p 49). The characters, though they are not all native, belong to this farming-logging area almost in the way that many of Hardy's characters belong to Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native (the first part of which is titled 'Three Women'),4 and they are displayed in activities identified with the local way of life, such as attempting to rescue a calffrom a well and gathering wild blackberries from the logging slash to make jam, as much as Hardy's are revealed through the traditional activities and customs of the heath-dwellers. Yet this story of the young Charlene Porter's relation with an older woman, Edna Starbuck, is concerned with themes of innocence and experience so far from limited to Vancouver Island as to be an individual version of virtually the archetypal short story subject. Hodgins brings this universality home to us partly by allusions that link his island with other places, actual and literary. Thus as an indication that his story is about frontiers between innocence and experience, illusion and reality, he employs the place-name Cut Off that Ethel Wilson had used in her story 'A Visit to the Frontier,'5 and through further allusions he associates his island particularly with other islands. There is reference to Miranda and Caliban to suggest affinity, partly ironic, with the themes of innocence and experience on the island of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and subtle...