MARTIN KUESTER

(Post-)Modern Bricolage: Classical Mythology inSheila Watson's Short Stories

Abstract: The essay analyzes the short stories ofSheila Watson with regard to her intertextual and par-odic use of classical Greek mythology. While Watson's acclaimed novel'fhe Double Hook was based onArnerindian m1-thological structures, her short stories, mostly set in the confines of a mental hospital, drawon figures from classical Greek mythology. Instead ofjust transplanting mythological figures into a NorthAmerican environment, Watson parodically creates plots around them. Her manner of constructing mythsis reminiscent not only of the bäcolage structure of Amerindian myths detected by Claude Ldvi-Strausslrut also o{ Roland Barthes' myths in Mythologies.In Watson's stories, Oedipus is not only haunted by hismother, but he even becomes an eloquent alcoholic artist figure highly aware of his verbal material.Watson's Antigone buries a bird rather than her dead brother. Coherent mythological relationships arethus rcplaced with playful allusions, and modernistic cohesion is replaced with postmodcrn ludism, so thatWatson's creative and plal.ful use of classical European source material can be seen as a forerunner of theparodic strategies contemporary postmodern Canadian poets and novelists use in their appropriation ofclassical mythology.

There is no doubt that although she has published only a relatively small number of literaryworks, Sheila Watson is one of the most influential writers in Canada today. Authors such as

the novelists Robert Kroetsch and George Bowering have identified her as one of their majormodels, and the poet Stephen Scobie (269) has gone so far as to suggest that one should referto his own generation of Canadian writers as the Watson - rather than Atwood - generation.Sheila Watson's fame is largely and deservedly founded on her single novel, The Double Hook,one of the first and finest monuments of literary modernism in Canada. In this novel, "the OldWorld's beliefs come under pressure from the physical experience, and the gods, of the NewWorld" (Kroetsch lB5). The m1'thology of the New World is represented in The Double Hookby the Indian trickster figure of Coyote.

In addition to her important novel, however, Watson has also written five short stories,

which deserve close attention, even though they are often bypassed by the stream of literarycriticism. Michelle Gadpaille, Ibr example, considers "the dense mythical parables of SheilaWatson" to be lying "outside the main traditions" (viii) that she includes in her introduction tothe Canadian short story. With the exception of the latest, "And the four animals" (firstpublished in l9B0), which is set in a mghical reahn comparable to that of The Double Hook,Watson's stories - "Brother Oedipus", "The Black Farm"o ooAntigone", and "The RumbleSeat" (first published in 1954, 1956,1959, and 1975 respectively) - are collected under thetitle Four Sroner. They offer a strange combination of characters and setting: the charactersare adaptations of well-known figures from classical myhology; most of the time they actwithin the confines of a contemporary British Columbia mental hospital. Watson's stories arethus not primarily based on North American mythology - such as The Double /{oolc was - butdeal with the European classical heritage transplanted into a different century and to adifferent continent.

226 Martin Kuester

My aim in this paper is not only to illustrate the importance of this Greek streak of mythol-ogy in Watson's stories but also to draw attention to the parodic strategies that she uses in herpersonal and idionsyncratic reception of classical mythology. According to contemporarytheorists of parody such as Linda Hutcheon, the concept of parody covers every intertextualrelationship between an original text and its ootranscontextualized" repetition that involves theintention to be different. The parody repeats an ooold" text within a new context: it repeats itwith a difference, or even with a vengeance.

Several critics have identified similar structures of intertextual borrowing in contemporaryCanadian poetry and novels. In his essay "Modern Canadian Poetry and the Classical Tradition",Valter Pache outlines the fashion in which the poetry of colonial and postcolonial Canada

reacts to such "a Protean concept" as the classical tradition. For Pache, this trend is exemplifiedby four different stages: first, the acceptance of classical m1'th as "timeless ideal and formalinspiration ensuring participation in the master discourse"; second, the use of m1.th as an "elitistinstrument of imposing order on a chaotic reality"; third, the view of classical myth as reprrsenting the "oppressive prison of literary tradition"; and fourth, the creative use of mythologyin the form or "playful 'appropriations'by contemporary writers who show themselves fami-liar with classical m$h without being imprisoned by it" (155). The fourth and contemporarystage can be found not only in the contemporary poetry of authors such as Margaret Atwood(see Godard), but also in the novels of writers such as Robert Kroetsch. It is my intention toshow that Sheila Watson's stories belong to this latter stage of playful reception, too.

Before proceeding to the analysis of Watson's stories, some words about the concept o{myth might be in order, as this concept has doubtless changed since the times of ancientGreece and has taken new and unprecedented meanings in the context of anthropological andpoststructuralist theories. The changes this term has undergone might themselves byinterpreted as parodic in the sense that the old term has been (and keeps being) applied tonew concepts and contexts. While in ancient Greece myth could be explained as "one story ina mlthology - a system of hereditary stories which were once believed to be true by a particu-lar cultural group, and which served to explain ... why the world is as it is", more recentlyanthropologists such as Claude L6vi-Strauss have shown more interest in "the mlths of a par-ticular culture as signifying systems whose true meanings are unknown to their proponents"(Abrams I I l). In Ldvi-Strauss's interpretation of native North American mfhology, mlths are

produced not by the organized and organizing mind of an engineer but rather by the savage

mind of the bicoleur. They often o'look more or less like shreds and patches, if I may say so;

disconnected stories are put one after the other without any clear relationship between them"(L6vi-Strauss, Myth 34). Myhical thinking, also that of the natives of Watson's BritishColumbia, builds narrative that is loosely structured around the "odds and ends" of history,around "des bribes et des morceaux, t6moins fossiles de l'histoire d'un individu ou d'unesoci6t6" (L6vi-Strauss, La peruöe sauxroBe 32). In Karlheinz Stierle's words: ,,Der bricoleurerschafft nicht aus dem Nichts, sondern indem er auf ein Arsenal von schon Vorhandenem

zurückgreift und dieses,umfunktioniert"' (457). Vhile "fs]trictly speaking, within the anthro-pological context, the bicoleur is the native mind itself' (Morgan 252), Sheila Watson has

built her own mythical story in a similar fashion.That she is aware of structuralist theories of myth is obvious from her references to L6vi-

Strauss and Roland Barthes in her essay "Myth and Counter-MJth" on Wyndham Lewis.

Angela Bowering points out many parallels between the French structuralists' work and

Watson's in The Double Hook (97), and these affinities are much stronger in the short stories:'Watson

uses features of Greek mythological characters and joins them together into stories

that deal with everyday situations ("Brother Oedipus", "Antigone"), but which also touch thespiritual needs in present Canadian society ("The Black Farm", o'The Rumble Seat").

Sheila Watson 227

When old mfhical elements are integrated into a new context, they do of course not retaintheir exact old significance. Still, a shadow or trace ofthe old significance stays with them as a

connotation. As L6vi-Strauss puts il

Comme les unitds constitutives du mythe, dont les combinaisons possibles sont limit6es par le faitqu'elles sont emprunt6es ä la langue oü elles possödent d6jä un sens gui restreint la libert6de mancuvre, les 6l6ments que collectionne et utilise le bricoleur sont ooprdcontraints". (La pensöe

sawage 29),

At first sight, it may seem preposterous to equate L6vi-Strauss's structuralist concept ofmyth with that created by Roland Barthes to reflect "some myths of French daily life" (l l).Nevertheless, it is fascinating to see that Barthes uses the concept of L6vi-Strauss's conno-tations in the structuralist model of myth that he develops in Mythologies. In his structuraldefinition the linguistic sign, which according to Saussure consists of signifier and signified, is

itsel{ re-used on a higher level: it now serves as a signifier within another, metalinguistic'osign" that exists on the level of my'th. This new signifier now functions on two levels simul-taneously: on the one hand - as form - within the new m1th, on the other - as meaning -within the old language. The effect of this is a "constant game of hide-and-seek between themeaning and the form which defines m1.th" (Barthes 118).

Most of the sources of Sheila Watson's stories have long been identified. Wayne Grady (B)

states that Watson's stories "take their structure, loosely, from the Theban plays of Sophocles

- Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colomn, and. Antigone." Judith Miller goes even further in claim-ing that "Watson presents her version with the assumption that readers know the classic storyofAntigone and her defiance of the King of Thebes, and will appreciate how the author chan-ges it in giving it a contemporary setting" (213). While I have no trouble agreeing with Gradyand Miller here, I would quarrel with Grady's ensuing verdict that "it is fun, though not parti-cularly instructive, to go through the Sophoclean trilogy to see what is borrowed and what isnew" (Grady B). In an age that pays more and more attention to intertextual aspects in modernand postmodern writing and that has rediscovered parody as an important mode of literaryreception and developmen! such an attitude is no longer acceptable. Watson's way of dealingwith ancient myths is rather indicative o{ a certain stage in the development of Canadian shortstories which corresponds to (and has in fact preceded) the fourth stage that Walter Pache hasmentioned in the evolution of Canadian poetry.

The story titles 'oBrother Oedipus" and "Antigone" are already clear indicators of classicalcontent in Vatson's stories and of o'self-conscious allusions to Sophocles". (Other evidencepoints to "Ecclesiasteso Shakespeare, Joyce and Puss in Boots" [Neuman a6]). But as soon as

readers have focused on an ancient Greek environment in the first sentence of ooBrother

Oedipus", the second sentence already counteracts some of the expectations called forth bythe title. Watson makes sure that the classical references are read in a different, parodic frame,and that she is not the only "artist" using parodic methods in her creation:

Perhaps our father, who was a doctor, chose the name in some moment of illumination as he snip-ped and sewed together fragments of human life. (Four Stories 7).

The possessive adjective in the first sentence invites readers to rack their brains for the nameof the classical Oedipus's possible siblings. Vhile Stephen Scobie (273) claims that there arenone mentioned in classical mythology, and while he is right as far as other children of Laiusare concerned, one might possibly come up with the names of Oedipus's daughters (andsisters), Antigone and Ismene, or - as Wayne Grady does - with those of his sons (and

228 Martin Kuester

brothers), Polyneices and Eteocles. As Oedipus later on addresses the narrator as "my sensible

brother here", the choice probably lies between the two latter ones (although the Oedipus

in the story denies having any sons). After the mention that Oedipus's father was a doctor

has already undermined the classical context of the Oedipus my'th, the second sentence

completely deconstructs the classical horizon of readerly expectations, because it now

clearly refers to a contemporary setting which is in its turn reminiscent of the Provincial

Mental Hospital in which Sheila Watson's father was a doctor during her childhood(Scobie 259).

The narrator describes himself in contrast to his brother Oedipus, an alcoholic artist figure

who - in order to live up to readerly expectations and Freudian clich6s - as a child "was most

attached to our mother". In their youth, their mother ruled over the realm of the family:

"A small woman, tough and robus! she conditioned what our father had begotten since his

occupation confined him to the more difficult work of reconditioning nature at large" (7). For

this reason, the narrator has trouble seeing this "neat and well-shaped - flat, and tight, and

leathery" (8) woman in poetic or even mlthical terms: he "would never have considered

comparing her to the sea or to the earth as poets compare these free vague symbols to a

mother" (7-S). In the main action of "Brother Oedipus" (if there is any in the traditional

sense), one sees Oedipus in a situation of everyday generational conflicts, quarrelling with his

wife and - surprisingly - with his mother, who complains about the roots of Oedipus's willow

clogging up her drain. Torn between his mother, whom he admits he hates o'because of the

way she treated our father by bringing us into the world", and his wife, whom he takes to be

"wise only in the phrase of living - budget, taxes, ownership" (17), Oedipus the artist sets out

to cut down the willow trut turns out to be too drunk to do more than chip away its bark.

This is not exactly the stuff that mythology is made of, even if the willow is compared to

Persephone's shrub and might have a direct connection to hell. Oedipus, the irresponsible

aftist hgure has "solved the problem of relationships" in a perverted way: stimulated by youth-

ful enthusiasm for the social theories ofVeblen, he has oosuperannuated social consciousness"

and exchanged it for the "individual unconscious" (10) and solipsistic gardening. He has

"gone back to the elemental womb, tomb - cave, grave". If he does not find serenity digging in

the garden, at least he finds his bottle ofVat 69 in "the arched earth cave". Thus "Oedipus's

mind *rs of different textüre" (B) than that of the narrator, his "sensible brother". Oedipus is

the poet, the creative spirit using language in flexible (and inconsistent) ways. And by using

langr-rage (and a Shakespearean echo), he participates in life:

'The world,' shouted Puss, 'is a vast amphitheatre. We are all actors in a rite. My sensible brother

here is a mere spectator.' (lB).

By speaking, o'He imposes his ideas on everyone" (I2- l3), and he analyzes rhetorical

tropes and clich6s such as the cost of liainglry exposing their ambiguity:

.The cost of living,' Oedipus said as he came through the door, 'is an ambiguous phrase. You see it in

terms of the pricä set on steak tetrderloin and frozen strawberries, not in the term of the animal and

berry itself, not in terms of your own fibre and mine which is errdlessly consumed by the very fact

that we share our life with tüe cow and, like the berry, ripen to decay'' (13)

In his linguistic practice, he is inconsistent (or, to put it positively, playful) as far as the

keeping "pu-.t

of diff".ent levels of discourse is concerned: when he metaphorically states that,,Wä üi" on a rented plot", his mother is shocked because she thought "you owned the

house". When, ho*ever, his wife fears that they metaphorically may have to "live on the

Sheila Watson 229

mercy of the state", he reverts to a literal interpretation and objects that "The state has no

mercy" (13). These examples illustrate that already in her relatively early stories Vatsonachieves the stylistic effects that Barbara Godard praises in The Double Hooh: "To exhibitwords afresh and to dissociate them from a conventional context and stale association and

then to display them with more of their power and capacity for vibration - more, in short, oftheir being - is Watson's aim" (Godard 157).

Intertextual relationships in the Oedipus story thus inject some classical connotations intoa rather nondescript contemporary environment. But neither the classical myth of Oedipus

nor its contemporary parody, the clich6 of the Oedipus complex, contributes to a coherentinterpretation of the story in modernistic terms. The story seems to be an assortment of odd

characters, single features of whom can be derived from their classical namesakes. Is Watson

telling her readers that European myths are narrative patterns like any other ones and do notdeserve special treatment in a New Vorld environment any more?

The next story to tre considered, "The Black Farm", answers this question in the affrrmative.It lacks the frame structure of the mental hospital that is possibly there in "Brother Oedipus"and becomes even more obvious in o'Antigone". Nthough "The Black Farm" can be inter-preted as depicting an incident among patients, one can also read it as an allegory. Referringto "my brother Oedipus", the narrator may well Lre identical with that of the former story.

Right liom the start, a traditional myth has been turned upside down, because here it is

Daedalus rather than Icarus who destroys himself, and he does not die because he came

too close to the sun but rather because he was aiming for complete blackness. One might be

tempted to talk about the carnivalization of the original myth:

When a man has traf6cked in light and colour and softness hc may tire o{ them at last. He may see

God, not in the port-hole lights of heaven, but in the black keel which nightly bearing down on him{orces him back below the coloured fishes of day's flood, or, deeper still, into the eyeless socketsbeneath the sea itself. (19).

Adhering to a more traditional lifestyle, Oedipus and the narrator are opposed to the radicalvalues of the self-made man and of salesmanship that their uncle Daedalus represents:

True enough, Puss said. He's tried to persuade the world that he's made it jab-proof and hole-proofand scratch-proof, that it's crush-resistant and head[sic]-resistant and stainless; but he ignoreslemon juice and the Siamese cat. He forgets the catechism and original sin. (20 - 2l)

Daedalus's values are nowadays the trade mark of the North American ethos, even thoughthe origins of the rags-to-riches story lie in European legends, as intertextual references tofairy tales like 'oJack and the Bean-Stalk" and to the legendary figure of Dick Whittingtonshow (22). Daedalus even starts buying up the hills around Europa (Europe?), perhapsconceiving "some scheme to help" (21) her: "His buying the land will protect it from others,she added. It is still in the family" (23).

However strongly Oedipus objects to Daedalus's crass materialism, the narrator also sees

that his brother, the poet, needs Daedalus as his worldly counterpart in society, "that Oedipusrailed at our uncle because he saw in him what I think poets have called his own antimask"(29). Daedalus, too, confronted with his approaching death, is in search of'"eternal verities",albeit of "blackness in all its manif'estations" rather than the true light of wisdom. This com-plete blackness he can only find in death. As he writes white on black in his final message

before he sets fire to his estate,

230 Martin Kuester

The god of the abyss has spoken. All black ß white.There are no eternal ueities. (36\

Sheila Watson's version of the Daedalus myth is a rather grim one, and the stark burnt land-scape reduced to a near-vacuum prepares us for the setting and mood of The Double Hooh.The names of Oedipus, Daedalus, and Europa signal the existence of a mythical realm, butotherwise the connections between this realm and the classical one, from which the names aretaken, do not seem to lead readers very far. Watson has, however, integrated other, non-European mythologies into the European context given by the Greek mythological names. Inan essay centering on The Double Hook,Leslie Monkman draws attention to the syncretism ofEuropean and American religions in the Haitian voodoo cult: "practitioners of Haitian voodoohave no difficulty in assimilating belief's in their gods with the creed of the Roman Catholicchurch" (65). As Monkman shows, Watson has included the Gu6d6 figure of Haitian voodooin ooThe Black Farm":

[Ghede] is, said Oedipus, death at the cross roads. He stands at the intersection of time and eternity.LIe is corpse and phallus, king and clown. He is the last day of the week and the cross in every ceme-tery. He sings the song ofthe grave digger. (35).

European my.thology is thus only one of the sources from which Watson draws the personnelof her stories. It has clearly been removed from the central, privileged position that it had inmodernism.

In o'Antigone" things are somewhat different. The story once again starts with a possessiveadjective referring to the narrator: "My father ruled a kingdom on the right bank of the river"(37). At first sight, nothing seems to speak against an identity of the narrators in "BrotherOedipus" and this story. Warned by the experience of the first story, one is willing to interpretthe setting metaphorically, substituting "mental hospital" for "kingdom". Such an interpreta-tion - in a kind of hermeneutic circle - reconfirms the interpretation of o'Brother Oedipus"being set in the same context. The introduction of mythical names is better motivated herethan it was in the earlier story:

My father ruled men who thought they were gods or the instruments of gods or, at very leas! god-afflicted and god-pursued. He ruled Atlas who held up the sky, and llermes who went on endlessmessages, and Helen who'd been hatched from an egg, and Pan the gardener, and Kallisto the bear,and too many others to mention by name. (37).

One soon finds out, however, that their mythical environment and capabilities seem to haveundergone an act of carnivalization, whereas the narrator obviously does not think of himseHas one of the carnivalized gods. Wondering about his identity, Stephen Scobie even goes so faras to claim that 'oAt times he is clearly the voice for the author's irony, distancing Watson's

sardonic commentary through the minimal means of an insubstantial persona; at othertimes, he is little more than a narrative convenience" (273). While in "Brother Oedipus" thenarrator was identified as Oedipus's brother, in ooAntigone" his love for Antigone might also

suggest that - judging by Sophoclean standards - he is Haemon, who commits suicide afterAntigone's death, and that his father is Creon. This view is shared for example by JudithMiller (213), who approaches the story from an unprejudiced point of view which does notpresuppose that a reader has read ooBrother Oedipus" before analyzing "Antigone". Such a

reading is of course encouraged by the fact that Watson's stories were first published indepen-dently of each other in various journals over a stretch of years.

Antigone is an outsider just like Oedipus, whom she accompanies to Colonus in Sophocles's

Sheila Watson

play. She does not accept the arbitrary order imposed by Creon: "Antigone might have learned

lh"i .to human being can be right always" (38). She is also a bicoleuse who repudiates the

orderly, ooscientific" itructure of the world to which her sister Ismene has accommodated

(cf. Miller 220-22I). She accepts neither Heraklitos's paradox nor Ismene's philosophical

"diagrams to live by, cut and fashioned after the eternal patterns spied out by Plato as he

rummaged about in the sewing basket of the gods" (42). Rather,

Antigone is different. She sees the world flat as I do and {eels it tip beneath her feet. She has walked

in th"e market and seen the living animals penned and the dead hanging stiff on their hooks. Yet she

defies what she sees with a defiince which is almost denial... It is defiance not belief and I tell her

that this time we walk the bridge to a walled cave where we can deny death no longer. (42)

As Shirley Neuman points out, Watson's Antigone is not punished for her act of defiance, the

burial of a dead bird (rather than a dead brother) in public ground. And, one is tempted to

add, Haemon lives on to tell the story. Creon's kingdom is 'obut a demented inversion of Greek

m1'ths and Greek tragedies": ooThis modern parable provides no moral resolution of its duali-

ties but leaves us with the irresolution of the question implicit in its final scene in which Creon

turns his back on his defiant niece: what can a character like Antigone do, how can she rebel,

with no figure to rebel against?" (Neuman 4B). Once again, as at the end of "Brother Oedipus"

and of "The Black Farm", the motivation behind Watson's new version of old myths seems to

be nothing more than a playful parodic adaptation.

The setting of the fourth story, o'The Rumble Seat", is a TV show in which Oedipus, intery.

viewed by Pierre (reminiscent of the Canadian writer and media personality Pierre Berton),

tells a oosad story" (49) typical of his religious upbringing. The show is watched, among others,

by the first-person narrator and his uncle who is so incensed that he loses his cool. Oedipus

tells about an incident when he and his sister, who were both brought up "inside the walls ofa madhouse" (54), spent one Sunday mass not in their own family pew at church but rather

in the com{ortable padded one belonging to the Murphys. Some nuns watching from the loft

had caught them in the act and criticized them for wearing fancy clothes. The vulture-likecameras in the TV studio remind Oedipus of "the nuns perched in their choir loft looking

down at the squatters in their padded pew" (49).

Oedipus's story is however not the only centre of interest in "The Rumble Seat", which also

focuses on Pierre who is a typical representative of the media age and uses the TV stage as a

platform to show off his wide-ranging knowledge. He internrpts his guest time and again withlearned though profane litanies from Webster's Neu Collegiateo so that Oedipus at first gets

side-tracked into incomprehensible muttering. Showing off his expertise and mixing various

mythologies in an expert manner, the omniscient Pierre succeeds in combining Heraklitos,

Dante, twentieth-centrrry technology, and a Sophoclean character into a single short para-

graph:

Panta rei, he said. Everything flows. But not fast enough. Nel mezzo del camin, on the throughway,we still find the Volkswagen with Laius behind the wheel. It is better to be the instrument of fate

than its victim. (50 - 5l)

Confronted with Pierre's litanies, Oedipus's voice turns into nothing trut "a mere rumble", and

only "[w]ith total irrelevance Oedipus returned to the initial question" (51). Pierre's anti-

clerical scepticism and his liberal anti-establishment points of view that reach us through the

white noise of"[r]6flexes verbaux de la conversation frangaise" (51) are parried by Oedipus

with his traditional mythical role: "I am Oedipus who knew the famed riddle" (53). But he has

231

232 Martin Kuester

to admit that it is probably too late for him. Too many have already deconstructed the oldm1'th and turned it into something new: "For some I have already become a complex, forothers a thematic design like the sphere, the cylinder, and the cube" (53). He has beenreduced to one of Ismene's diagrams that Antigone scorns in her story - "cut and fashioned"after Plato's "eternal patterns" (42). Still, Oedipus's stories of his first meeting God and of thecom{ortable pew have a mystery of their own that makes Pierre, who can only quote from hisown scepticist studies, lose control ofthe show in the end (61).

Demythologization as envisaged by Pierre does not seem to be the real answer. His use o{mythological material is tedious and unproductive. Do we need myths to live by? For FrankDavey, who sees spiritual paralysis caused by mythically motivated authority as the focusof the stories, the mythological names serve "to avoid the semblance of realism" (823). Ithink Vatson's answer would be more positive: myths survive in spite of the "enlightening"influence of contemporary media. As Wayne Grady has pointed out in a review of Four Stoies,in all her writing, "Vatson's prime concern is the importance of myth in culture, and the frag-mentation of individual and society when its culture is demythologized" (8). In this sense,

Grady may have been right in claiming that it is not very instructive to hunt for Watson'smythological sources, but it is interesting to see that the mythological figures themselves havehere become aware of their reduced status as clich6s.

Trying to ascertain in what manner Watson has joined the parts of ancient mJths togetherinto new stories (or myths?), one might not be amiss looking for inspiration in the actions ofthe mythologically named inhabitants of the mental hospital. When, under the influence ofalcohol, Oedipus finally attacks the problem lying at the heart of the fight with his mother andstarts cutting down the willow, for some time he inefficiently "chip[s] away at the bark" (]B).He certainly is not a specialist tree surgeon:

oA surgeon,' said Oedipus, ointerferes with the natural cycle o{ growth and decay. He is a thing mon-strous in nature and tolerable only because of the perverted philosophy which we inherit from thatbarbarous age, the age of reason. That age set loose a whole pack of surgeons - the economist, thesocial reformer, the town planner, the street cleaner, the organizer of departments of public worksand the curriculum reformer. Behind it all I see the blandfaced Locke with theories of equal rightsand baths for everybody.' (14)

Instead of being a seasoned gardener, a tree surgeon corresponding to L6vi-Strauss'sengineer, he is more of abricoleur. And here Barthes' concept of myth might help us to inter-pret the empty phrases to which Oedipus has recourse. In fact, it is the constant gameof hide-and-seek mentioned in Barthes' definition of contemporary myth that Oedipus playswith the members of his family when he switches from one level of discourse to another,from the literal to the metaphorical. Furthermore, the mythical figures like Oedipus areon the one hand rooted in traditional mythology, the original "language" from whichthey stem, and on the other they act within contemporary society, albeit in a rather secludedpart of it.

Ve remember that modernists such as Joyce and Eliot had also used ancient mphs inorder to give a formal structure to their narratives. While in many modernist texts a definitemythical structure can be found, in other texts control and order are the very notions rejectedby the authors: classical mJths used in a Joycean fashion cannot express incoherence in theworld that we have become accustomed to calling postmodern; the mfh of the bricoleur is auseful structural device in postmodern works of literature. In Robert Kroetsch's words, "theModernist was tempted by the cohesive dimension of mythology, while the Postmodernist is

more tempted by those momentary insights that spring up here and there'o (Neuman andWilson ll2). Sheila Vatson takes fragments and snippets of classical myths and joins them

Sheila Watson

together in a postmodern but also autochthonously Canadian manner, so that one has in FourStories "less a synthesis than a juxtaposition", and a "rather arbitrary"' one at that, in the

setting of the stories which is "simultaneously local and universal, realist and my'thological"(Scobie 272).

So when Stephen Scobie claims for Sheila Watson that "she placed the Canadian novel

firmly within the modernist tradition, at the same time as she anticipated much of what we are

forced to call, for want of a better word, post-modernism" (269), one should probably placeThe Double Hook (and the story "And the four animals") in the first group, whereas her FourStoies belong to the second. Following Barbara Godard's lead, Scobie grounds his distinctionbetween modern and postmodern trends in Watson's writing on the opposition of conservativemessage and progressive medium:

Thus, the "traditional" elements in Watson's vision, such as her Roman Catholicism, or her scholarlydevotion to Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Elio! and the writings of "high modernism," have to be balancedon the one hook, against, on the other hook, the "revolutionary" concern with seü-reflexivelanguage poised on the knife-edge ofsilence. (270)

Villiam H. New goes in the same direction when he counts Sheila Watson among the 'sign-directed'postmodernist Canadian short story writers (106). fu I hope to have shown, however,the question of language is not the only parameter one may use to decide about the post-modernity of Sheila Watson's writing. Her "ironic re-enactment of old myths in moderndress" (New 107) in Four Stories points forward to the postmodern use of myth in works byother writers such as Robert Kroetsch's Studhorse Man or What the Crou Said.

These myths of the postmodern are not stable, however. They are rather, to return to WalterPache's description quoted at the beginning "pla1d-rl 'appropriations' by contemporarywriters who show themselves familiar with classical myth without being imprisoned by it".And Sheila Watson hersell, we should remember, quotes Roland Barlhes to the effect that'.'The best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify in its turn, and to produce an artificialmyth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology" ('Mlth and Counter-M1'th"130). Of course, a postmodern bricoleur cannot and will not be limited to the material thatclassical mythology provides. Watson herself also includes material from other mythologiesthan the Creek one, and Puss-in-Boots is not a figure of ancient m1'thology either, but otherCanadian writers go much further in the parodic integration of foreign materials into theirwork, a technique which on the one hand is typical of all twentieth-century art, but whichfinds it own Canadian variety in many of the works of the writers of the Watson generation,whether it be in Margaret Atwood's poetry and fiction or in novels such as George Bowering'sBurning Water,Timothy Findley's Fa,mous Lost Wortls or Robert Kroetsch's The StudhorseMan.l

I I would like to thank Susanne Welti for her diligent work as a collector of my'thical allusions inWatson's work and for her insightful suggestions concerning Watson's "my'thical method". For a moredetailed treatment of parodic strategies in general as well as in Canadian literature, see also myFraming Truths: Parodic Struc.tures in Contemporary EngJish-Canadian Hßtoical Noaels (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 1992).

233

234 Martin Kuester

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Press, l9BB.Davey, Frank. l'Wats91 Sheila". The Oxford. Companion to Canad.ian Literature. Ed. William Toye.

Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983. 822 - 823.Gadpaille, Michelle. The Canadian Short Story. Toronto: Ox{ord University Press, l9BB.Godard, Barbara. oooBetween one Clichd and Another': Language in The Double Hook." Sndi.es in

Canadian Literanre 3 (1978):149 -165.Grady, Wayne. "The riddles of the shrinks." Rev. of Four Stories by Sheila Watson. Boolr in Canada

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Kroetsch, Robert. The Loaely Treachery ofWords. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989.L6vi-Strauss, Claudc. Myth and. Meaning. London: Routledge, 1978.L6vi-Strauss, Claude. La percöe satnage. Paris: Plon, 1962.Miller, Judith. "Rummaging in the Sewing Basket of the Gods: Sheila Watson's 'Antigone'." Studies in

Canadian Literature 12.2 (1987) : 2I2 - 221.Monkman, Leslie. "Coyote as Trickster in The Double Hoolt." Sheila Watson and The Double Hook. Ed.

George Bowering. Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 1985. 63-69.Morgan, Thai's. "The Space of Intertextuality." Intertextuality and Contemporary Atnerican Fiction. Eds.

Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 239 -279.Neuman, Shirley. "Sheila Watson." hofi.les in Canadian Literature 4. Ed. Jeffrey M.Heath. Toronto:

Dundurn Press, 1982. 45-52.Neuman, Shirley and Robert Wilson. Labyinths of Voice: Conaersatiotts with Robert Kroeßclr. Edmonton:

NeVest Press, 1982.New, William H. Dreams of Speech and, Violence. The Art of the Short Story in Canoda and Netn Zeaknd.

Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1987.Pache, Walter. "Modern Canadian Poetry and the Classical Tradition." hobing Canad.ian Culture. Eds.

Peter Easingwood, Konrad Gross, and WoHgang Klooss. Augsburg: AV-Verlag, 199f. l4l - 156.Scobie, Stephen. "Sheila Watson (1909)." Canadian Witers ond Their Work. Eds. Robert Lecker, Jack

David, and Ellen Quigley. Fiction Series. Vol. 7. Toronto: ECW Press, 1985.259-312.Stierle, Karlheinz. "Mlthos als 'Bricolage' und zwei Endstufen des Prometheusmythos." Terror und

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