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

Abstract

Aware of 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 Educated Imagination, by asking: What is 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 United States, where there has been a tremendous surge of interest in the to ethics. Writers including Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller, and Marjorie Garber, to name only a few, have charted connections among literature, literary theory, politics, and moral philosophy that have become increasingly apparent over last twenty years. At same time, critics have also identified troubling connections between legacy of modernist humanism and so-called turn to ethics. Gauri Viswanathan, for example, notes entanglement of roots of literary criticism with civilizing mission carried out in England's colonies through supposedly moral influence of English literature. In what follows, I to Sheila Watson's modernist classic Hook (1966) to trace this novel complicates any simplistic notions of literature's ethical engagement. By strategically introducing obstacles to communication, most obviously trope of spectre, I argue that Watson's narrative frustrates hermeneutical impulse to cross barriers and merge self and other, particularly when this impulse is directed at Native North Americans. Ironically, because 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 for us (Sommer 206). In other words, literature is for us when it teaches us resistance of other. An exploration of relationship between and literature is both timely and valuable because debates that raged in U.S. about turn to ethics have instigated a resurgence of interest in ethical criticism in Canada. (1) In light of uncertain relationship between literature, imperialism, and ethics, however, it is worth asking whether a scholarly to in Canada would be for anyone. Leaving aside question of whether or not it makes sense to label recent interest in a turn, (2) what I want to consider in my reading of Hook are implications of recent critical attraction to idea that literature and literary criticism should be good for us. In using word good, I am invoking standard definitions of 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) life (Eskin, On Literature 574). Michael Eskin argues further that anything that goes by name of ethical criticism must be supported by skeleton of a minimum of abiding, fundamental concern that make it what it is--such as overall question of literature and its significance for moral potential of 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 but, more specifically, with our relationship to other: [I]t is singular encounter between reader and text-as-other, soliciting a singularly just response on reader's part that is at stake in 'ethics and literature' (Eskin, The Double 560). Indeed, is ultimately about otherness: the decentered center of . …