Ethics, Spectres, and Formalism in Sheila Watson's The Double Hook

Aware of the dangers of rationalism and moralism, this is a view that does not dream of mastering or eliminating undecidability and of establishing transparency.

Chantal Mouffe

Northrop Frye began his 1963 Massey Lectures, entitled The Educated Imagination, by asking: "What good is the study of literature? Does it help us to think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life?" Such questions are currently of great concern to many literary scholars in the United States, where there has been a tremendous surge of interest in "the turn to ethics." Writers including Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller, and Marjorie Garber, to name only a few, have charted the connections among literature, literary theory, politics, and moral philosophy that have become increasingly apparent over the last twenty years. At the same time, critics have also identified troubling connections between the legacy of modernist humanism and the so-called "turn to ethics." Gauri Viswanathan, for example, notes the entanglement of the roots of literary criticism with the "civilizing mission" carried out in England's colonies through the supposedly moral influence of "good" English literature.

In what follows, I turn to Sheila Watson's modernist classic The Double Hook (1966) to trace how this novel complicates any simplistic notions of literature's ethical engagement. By strategically introducing obstacles to communication, most obviously the trope of the spectre, I argue that Watson's narrative frustrates the hermeneutical impulse to cross barriers and merge self and other, particularly when this impulse is directed at Native North Americans. Ironically, because The Double Hook relies on tropes of obstruction and features of modernist drama that prompt readers to relinquish "the exorbitant (and unethical) but usually unspoken assumption that we should know others enough to speak for them," this text might be good for us (Sommer 206). In other words, literature is good for us when it teaches us the resistance of the other.

An exploration of the relationship between ethics and literature is both timely and valuable because the debates that raged in the U.S. about the "turn to ethics" have instigated a resurgence of interest in ethical criticism in Canada.¹ In light of the uncertain relationship between literature, imperialism, and ethics, however, it is worth asking whether a scholarly turn to ethics in Canada would be "good" for anyone. Leaving aside the question of whether or not it makes sense to label the recent interest in ethics a "turn,"² what I want to consider in my reading of The Double Hook are the implications of the recent critical attraction to the idea that literature and literary criticism should be "good for us." In using the word "good," I am invoking the standard definitions of the field of ethics, also known as moral philosophy, which involves "systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behaviour."³ Put somewhat differently, moral philosophy concerns "how we ought to live and act so as to live a (variously conceived) good life" (Eskin, "On Literature" 574). Michael Eskin argues further that anything that goes by the name of ethical criticism "must be supported by the skeleton of a minimum of abiding, fundamental concern that make it what it is—such as the overall question of literature and its significance for the moral potential of the human being in a given community" (Eskin, "The Double" 560).

Contemporary ethical criticism, however, is not simply concerned with our relationship to literature and to the good but, more specifically, with our relationship to the other: "[I]t is the singular encounter between reader and text-as-other, soliciting a singularly just response on the reader's part that is at stake in 'ethics and literature' " (Eskin, "The Double" 560). Indeed, ethics is ultimately about otherness: "the decentered center of ethics … [is] its concern for the 'other.' Ethics is the arena in which the claims of otherness … are articulated and negotiated" (Harpham 394). In framing the question—"Why are critics of Canadian literature attracted to the idea that literature and literary criticism should be ethical or good...