12: Outgrowing the Alienating Inscape? The Voyage Out in October Ferry to Gabriola
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Gabriola he has turned out what set out to be an innocent & beautiful story of human longing into quite one of the most guilt-laden & in places quite Satanically horrendous documents it has ever been my unfortunate lot to read, let alone have to imagine I wrote" (Lowry, Sursum 2:664).Here, in a nutshell, Lowry delineated the evolution of his most ambitious work-in-progress since the publication of Under the Volcano in 1947, which would become his second posthumously published novel, October Ferry to Gabriola. 1 Somehow, his autobiographical story of a bus trip from Victoria to Nanaimo that he and his wife, Margerie, undertook in October 1946, in order to catch an outward bound ferry to the British Columbia Gulf Island of Gabriola, had got out of hand and was well on its way to becoming a formidable, autonomous behemoth, ill fitted for inclusion, as had initially been planned, in the Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place collection of stories. 2 The plot of the story seems straightforward: a semi-retired criminal lawyer, Ethan Llewelyn, and his wife, Jacqueline, have set out on the aforesaid bus trip with a view to catching a ferry to Gabriola while a threat of eviction from their little foreshore cabin in Eridanus on Burrard Inlet hangs over their heads.The quest for a new "paradise" is thus the main reason for the trip, and the skeleton of the story, which covers a single day, October 7, 1949, comprises three parts dealing, successively, with the bus trip to Nanaimo (chapters 1 to 27), the arrival in Nanaimo and the search for a ferry to Gabriola (chapters 28 to 32), and the sea crossing itself (the last five chapters).But this deceptively simple outline does not reflect the complexity of the novel.The text becomes indeed truly "Satanic," to use Lowry's own coinage, on account of the overwhelming and paralyzing presence of the past manifesting itself through two major sources of torment coalescing in Ethan's mind: the recent threat of eviction from Eridanus and the constantly rekindled sense of personal and professional guilt caused, respectively, by his involvement in
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".