Seeing Death: The Use Of The Deities Coyote, and The Old Testament God in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook
The Double Hook by Sheila Watson starts with “in the folds of the hills/under Coyote’s eye/lived/…” which immediately ties together two important foundations to the novel: the godly Coyote, and the sense of sight (pg 3). What characters can see, or what they are not seeing defines every character in this novel. This is a novel where little happens in terms of plot and so it is driven by the observations, and subsequent actions made by the characters. Hovering just in the periphery of these character’s lives are Coyote and the Old-Testament God. An analysis of some of the character’s acrs throughout the novel, the placement of the Coyote and/or God throughout the text, and reading Watson’s use of Coyote as an anti-trickster embodying the Old-Testament God will demonstrate that Watson’s use of these deities throughout her novel are symbolic of the human desire to create stories around what is not understood specifically the drive to create myths to make peace with death.
The interchangeable use of Coyote and the Old-Testament God has been noted by many critics of The Double Hook most obviously because of William’s observation that “I don’t know about God...your God sounds only a step from the Indian’s Coyote” (Watson 66). This explicit connection between the Old-Testament Christian God and the Shuswap Coyote has lead many critics to question the role of Coyote, and Indigenous figures throughout the novel. Traditionally these readings have claimed that The Double Hook strips its characters of progressive society to examine the nature of humanity (Willmott 109). The exact opposite has also been argued urging a reading of the novel that “aligns itself with a modernism that sees society as a degenerated or degraded form–and if we ask degenerated from what then we discover the primitivist aboriginal as a positive foil” (Willmott 110). The problem with either of these discourses is that they reduce Indigenous societies to symbols, and props to prove some nostalgic modernist point about “primitive” societies. It is reductions like these that make scholarship surrounding The Double Hook, or at least scholarship surrounding Watson’s use of Coyote in The Double Hook complicated. Most of these scholars, much like Watson herself use the Indigenity of Coyote as a symbol relating to a point about Western society without any care to questions of cultural appropriations, or the actual Shuswap stories of Coyote.
This misunderstanding in Western scholarship is explored by Linda Morra who reads The Double Hook using Youngblood Henderson’s figure of the “anti-trickster.” Morra argues that “Watson’s Coyote might be characterized as the ‘anti-trickster’ the figure who is a ‘cognitive legacy of colonization,’ an expression of Christian rather than any specific Indigenous mythology” (83). Morra’s reading contextualizes the figure of Coyote as one that is misunderstood/misused by Watson, and so her reading of the figure is through the lens of what Coyote becomes after this appropriation. Morra’s conclusion matches up with what most scholars had also concluded, and with what William explicitly states: the figure of Coyote is used as another way to embody the Old-Testament God. However, to stop at this conclusion in an analysis of Watson’s use of the figures of God and Coyote is premature. Watson maybe using Coyote with the modernist method of blending cultural beliefs, but that does not answer how the figure of this interchangeable Deity is used throughout the text, or the significance of this use for the characters in the novel.
Of all the characters in the novel it is the jinxed troublemaker Kip that is connected most with Coyote. Ara hears thunder “and in a loud voice: Coyote cried:/Kip, my servant Kip” (21). The connection between Kip and Coyote is one that also ties together the strong theme of sight throughout the text. A close reading of the following quote illuminates the function of Kip’s character:
“[James ]opened the door as if to look out. Kip was standing on the doorstep, peering into the darkness of the room. Light flowed around him from outside. The sun was shining again low in the sky. The mist rose in wisps from the mud of the dooryard, and steamed off the two horses standing there.
If you want to go down to Wagner’s now, Kip said, I saw your old lady climb down through the split rock with Coyote, her fishes stiff in hand.
He smiled.” (33)
In this quotation James opens the door only to find Kip blocking his view. We are told that Kip is “peering into the darkness,” and this is important because it highlights how Kip is always watching. To watch is Kip’s primary action, and he can not help himself when James opens the door. It is his nature to look. Kip lets light into the room from outside, and he comes bearing news about Mrs. Potter’s death so he both literally and figuratively illuminates the room. Earlier in the novel Felix remembers how Angel lit candles “burning against the mist that brought death (24). Kip brings news of death, and also sets the events in motion that will lead to Greta’s abandonment by James and her suicide. He is described in this passage as being surrounded by mist connected by Felix earlier with death. Kip acknowledges here that he can see Coyote, and that he “saw your old lady,” proving both his connection to the Being, and the perception of his sight. Finally Kip smiles which ties together the notion of mischief, and laughter with that of Coyote, something that will be touched on later. Everything in this passage ultimately revolves around Kip’s sight: he knows Mrs. Potter is dead because he saw her. Kip’s character arc is that of a man who sees, who sees too much, and then a man who can no longer see. Watson makes sight a choice in The Double Hook, as highlighted with this exchange between Theophil and Kip:
“These eyes seen plenty, [Kip] said.
It’s not always right for the mouth to say what the eyes see, Theophil said. Sometimes too, it’s better for the eyes to close.
Sure, Kip said. Sure. But sometimes, he said, when the eye’s open a thing walks right in and sets down.” (42)
Theophil of all people is right. In the final events of the book Theophil stays in bed sleeping while the rest of the community ends up at Felix’s after the birth of Lenchen’s baby because he is following his own advice and keeping his eyes closed. While that might not be the right move, as will be explored with the Widow Wagner, Theophil is right in that it is because Kip talked about what he saw with James that his sight is taken. Therefore vision in connection with the deity Coyote can be dangerous if used to cause trouble.
The Widow Wagner has almost the exact opposite character arc to that of Kip’s. She is a woman who is connected with the Old-Testament God, and who moves from a refusal to see, to an opening of her eyes. Almost every line the Widow says is prefaced with a call of “Dear God,” and in one particular instance “Dear God, she cried. Then she stopped short. Afraid that he might come. Father of the fatherless. Judge of widows. Death and after death judgement” (42). Again we have a connection between the Deity haunting the community, and death. There is also a connection between this deity, fear, and judgement. Perhaps more specifically there is a fear of judgement that can also be attached to the Deity’s connection to sight. The Widow calls to God, and then stops afraid of what will happen when he comes to judge her.
“She had paid enough. Had come with Wagner. Her lips closed. Her eyes shut. Had
come into the wilderness. She had done wrong. She had seen the wrong. It was God who would judge.
She covered her eyes with her hand.
She had cried out against God. She had set wrong on wrong. She had been judged. Eyes looking from the creek bottom. From the body of another old woman. Knowledge. Silence. Shame” (emphasis added 69).
Later in the text the Widow admits that she has already been judged perhaps by God, and definitely by the community. Specifically she feels judged and shamed by Mrs. Potter the other old woman in the hills. The pain of her own shame causes the Widow even in this passage where she is reflecting on, and acknowledging it to cover her eyes from it. Her desire to be blind to her own shame makes her willfully blind to the condition of her daughter for much of the novel. “So you do know, [Ara] said. It would be hard to believe that you didn’t. The Widow kept her eyes shut. Dear God she said, there’s nothing one can hide…” (110). In this exchange the Widow has finally acknowledged Lenchen is pregnant and starts making baby clothes which Ara comments on. The Widow again instinctively closes her eyes at the knowledge that the rest of the community knows too because it is reflex for her to hide from their judgement. Still she goes with Angel and Ara at the end of the novel to support Lenchen in her birth. Sight, and judgement come together in the figure of God, and the fear of judgement in the Widow culminating in her character having to stop choosing blindness, and opening her eyes to the truth of the world.
It is not only the Widow who still feels the judgement of Mrs. Potter in the community. The text, and the community of characters are haunted by Mrs. Potter. The first description of Mrs. Potter is rather powerful as we are told that “if God had come into the valley, come holding out the long finger of salvation, moaning in the darkness...defying an answer she would have thrown her line against the rebuke” (emphasis added 4). Mrs. Potter is immediately connected with a deity (God), and the attribute of defiance. We see this again in Greta’s description of her mother:
“I’ve seen Ma standing with the lamp by the fence, she said. Holding it up in broad
daylight. I’ve seen her standing looking for something even the birds couldn't see.
Something hiding from every living thing. I’ve seen her defying. I’ve seen her take her hat off in the sun at noon, baring her head and asking for the sun to strike her. Holding the lamp and looking where’s nothing to be found. Nothing but dust. No person’s got a right to keep looking. To keep looking and blackening lamp globes for others to clean.” (16)
Mrs. Potter is characterised by the fact that even death could not stop her relentless fishing. This fishing, and Greta's description above paints Mrs. Potter as a person who was restlessly searching for something, and is made restless after death in her search. Her search goes beyond the realm of the natural as we told she is “looking for something even the birds couldn’t see.” Greta detests the looking. She ties it together with a sort of rebellion or “defying,” and a violation of some sort of natural “right.” The act of looking becomes like with Kip something violating, and something wrong, but it also becomes something powerful. Mrs. Potter is seen by Greta (and there is an irony there of Greta complaining about the right to look when she is watching) to be committing a great violation on the natural world, and her family with her constant searching. The fact that she still searches implies she never found what she was searching for. Mrs. Potter is a character whose voice we never hear unlike the other members of the community. Mrs.Potter is only seen, and commented on. The comments about Mrs. Potter are universally negative. Unlike the other characters who are lenses through which we view the story Mrs. Potter is a smudge on the glass of Watson’s novel; she hovers over the point of view of the other characters, and can not seem to go away. Unlike the other characters who serve, or fear the Deity over their land Mrs. Potter remains set apart from them in her defiance of it.
Watson use of God/Coyote is interesting in that it is limited to the community in which the main characters live. In part four when James goes to town the presence of a Deity hovering over the characters lives is almost nonexistent. When James reaches the town the passage echoes that of the one that starts the novel with “In the town below…” followed by a list of people in town (82). An immediate difference is that the people in this list are not “under Coyote’s eye.” The presence of Coyote only appears once in part four and it is when James “asked himself now for the first time what he’d really intended to do when he’d defied his mother at the head of the stairs. To gather briars and thorns/said Coyote./To go down into the holes of the rock/and into the caves of the earth./ In my fear is peace” (89). In this passage it is revealed Mrs. Potter is finally defeated, not by any deity, but rather by the defiance she taught her own son. It is at the river where his mother fished, and where he still sees her that James is robbed by Lilly and forced to return to the community. Laughter happens very little throughout the text, but one moment where it does is when James looks into Felica’s after he is robbed: “Traff had gone over to Lilly...they were both laughing. Alone outside the glass of the cabin window James laughed too. Laughed looking in at someone else (99). The laughing thieves, or tricksters, are connected to Coyote in their laughter, and James is as well through the act of looking. Earlier in the text Felix remembers an incident with Angel and a bear “bowing to the spirits let out of the sack, Angel thought, by the meddler Coyote...He chuckled, remembering the noise and the white face of Angel when he picked up the bear in its devotions. Picked up paper blown off the fish-shack roof” (24-25). This memory of another trick when Angel believes a piece of fallen roof covering to be a bear is connected with Coyote, and the act of laughter. The only trace of God or Coyote in the town are in James’ memory of killing his mother, and perhaps in the laughter of the thieves who force his return. The presence of a Deity lurking in the lives of people is therefore something Watson makes clear is unique to the isolated community of people in the hills.
In The Double Hook the characters are defined, and define each other by what they see. Eyes fill the text, and the characters, like it or not, are always looking. There are things that can not be seen by most of the characters, and since it cannot be seen it cannot be understood. The figure of the Deity in this novel is entangled with Death. Angel tells Theophil that “Old Mrs. Potter’s dead... Kip seen Coyote carry her away like a rabbit in his mouth. There’s no one he hasn’t got his eye on.” (44). The phrasing makes it ambiguous whether the figure who has eyes on everybody is Coyote or Kip, but Coyote is explicitly tied with death in holding Mrs. Potter in his jaws, and in the first paragraph of this essay was a description tying Kip (who is tied to Coyote) with the mist of death as well (33). When Greta dies “a coyote barked. This time they could see it on a jut of rock calling down over the ledge so that the walls of the valley magnified its voice and sent it echoing back: Happy are the dead/for their eyes see no more” (105). Coyote, who scholars have connected with the Old Testament God as being one in the same for Watson, is connected here with sight again, and with death. The Deity that haunts the edges of the community is interpreted by the other characters interchangeably as God or as Coyte, but shaving those titles away reveals they stand in for the fear of Death. “Ara felt death leaking through from the centre of the earth. Death rising to the knee. Death rising to the loin” (5). In this passage Ara personifies Death by giving it a capital D, and makes It seem like a third godly figure plaguing the text. Watson uses the the figures from Christian and Shuswap mythology to point out the cultural use of storytelling as a way to face the things that can not be seen or understood. Coyote, and God appear in the novel when the community which is small, paranoid, and always on the verge of disaster i.e always feeling close to Death need to interpret their experience with death which is a force they cannot see.
To try and understand Watson’s use of Coyote through out her text as a genuine use of the Indigenous figure is a waste of effort because Watson’s cultural appropriation of the figure, and subsequent scholarship surrounding it are rife with misunderstanding. Instead one can analyze of how the characters in Watson’s novel use and interpret deities to create an understanding of their own world. God/Coyote is tied intrinsically to the sense of sight for the characters in the novel. When they can not see they use God/Coyote to fill in the blanks of their world view. Thus the figures are used to highlight the importance and significance of storytelling in a community.
Works Cited
Morra, Linda. “The Anti-Trickster in the Work of Sheila Watson, Mordecai Richler, and Gail Anderson-Dargatz.” Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations, edited by Reder, Deanna, and Linda M. Morra, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010, pp.77-89.
Watson, Sheila. The Double Hook. McClelland & Stewart, 1959.
Willmott, Glenn. “Sheila Watson, Aboriginal Discourse and Cosmopolitan Modernism.” The Canadian Modernists Meet, edited by Gerald Lynch and Dean Irvine, University of Ottawa Press, 2005, pp 101-11 http://books1.scholarsportal.info/viewdoc.html?id=35090, Accessed 1st April 2018.