God's Plenty by W. J. Keith

Author:W. J. Keith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2017-02-21T18:41:39+00:00

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1 I have written in more detail about this story in my article entitled “The Atmosphere of Deception.”

8

Signs and Portents:

None Genuine Without This Signature

WHEN HOOD DECIDED to call his next volume of short stories None Genuine Without This Signature, he was well aware that, in making the title of one of his finest stories do double duty, he would be encouraging both readers and critics to interpret the phrase as a clue to the unity of the whole volume. As might be expected, the reviewers—myself, I have to admit, included—took the hint. However, the phrase in question, as it occurs in the title story, is promptly surrounded by ambiguity: when the commercial production of fruit-flavoured “lotions, shampoos and soaps” is proposed, it is decided that the signature of Ma Hislop, the originator, should appear on each bottle, but there is no question that she should use her “real signature” (158, 161). The story itself, though serious in its intention, is the reverse of solemn—its alternative title is “Peaches in the Bathtub”—but Hood’s clue has been picked up with decided solemnity.

The opening story, again presenting a warning in its splendid title, “God Has Manifested Himself Unto Us as Canadian Tire,” is built on the conviction that the divine signature which should illuminate the things of this world has been parodied and vulgarized by commercial exploitation. Much of the text consists of an anthology of advertising signs or slogans, and “sign” appears in this sense, though not so flamboyantly or conspicuously, in many of the subsequent stories. The word also occurs in the sense of signing a contract, and various cognate words like “significance” and “significant” are employed elsewhere. Similarly, Don Stanley in “Crosby” takes over all the attributes of the crooner, including his signature—or “stigmata” (41)—in a metaphorical sense. On the other hand, “A Childhood Incident,” an accomplished but somewhat inconsequential story that Hood took the trouble of resurrecting from his West Hartford years for inclusion here, seemingly offers no link of word, image, or idea. Copoloff-Mechanic, never at a loss, claims that it “examines the displacement of religious values as the signature of the contemporary ­psyche” (120), but this smacks of desperate word-juggling (the plot concerns a child accidentally locking another child in a steamer trunk!). Comparable sleight-of-hand uses of “signature” occur in critical commentary of other stories (see Garebian, Hugh Hood 47, and Copoloff-Mechanic 122, 126, 150).

When I reviewed this book, I remarked that the stories “lose much by being extracted and belong not only to the volume as a whole but even to the order within the volume (“Case” 239). That judgment is still defensible, but not to the extent that I once thought. None Genuine is not, I now believe, as integrated a collection as Dark Glasses, and certainly not a work like Around the Mountain, to which the just-quoted remark applies perfectly. Nonetheless, though in a less systematic but more creative or literary fashion than academic commentators suggest, most of the individual stories benefit from existing within the context of the others.

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