The Ascent of the Artist in Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With his first novel, The Mountain and the Valley (1952), Canadian writer Ernest Buckler chose to stay true to the longstanding tradition of the Künstlerroman, best illustrated by one of the greatest modernist writers of the twentieth century, James Joyce and his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Like Joyce who chose to revisit the genre, Buckler decided to write about the throes of a young artist who seeks to escape from tradition and life in the country. The Mountain and the Valley relates the intellectual coming of age of David Canaan, a young character whose artistic sensitivity sets him apart from the rest of his community in the Annapolis Valley, a valley in the Nova Scotian hinterland of Canada. The story is set in the small town of Entremont which, as its very name suggests, is surrounded by two mountains that isolate and confine the characters to a life of routine and deny them access to time and progress. The North and South Mountains do not merely enclose the characters in the seasonal life of the farmer, they frame the narrative of David Canaan that begins and concludes with the ascent of the South Mountain where he dies prematurely at the age of thirty. This article will study the relationship between the image of the mountain, the plotline and the very act of writing itself as a creative process that the writer constantly interrogates. Is writing the only way to represent the emergence and uniqueness of a writer who is awakening to his own consciousness? I will try to explain how the mountain not only shapes the novel, but also a text made salient through contact with a seeming monolithic mountain. As a result, salience will be understood as the emphasis laid on the artist’s awakening, an awakening that cannot be studied separately from the geographical space the protagonist inhabits. Relief-related discourse will inevitably lead to discourse related to the awakening to one’s own consciousness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".