Breathing Under Water: A Ficto-Critical Response to Gail Jones’s “The House of Breathing”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This ficto-critical response to "The House of Breathing" comprises an exploration of the hyphen between one world and another, and a reading of one writer's fictional reincarnation of the forever sunken Titanic juxtaposed with my own writerly reading of drowning and its concomitant presence in transatlantic discourse, brought together by the narrative of haunting itself.Australian writer Gail Jones's short story incites this analysis but also demands that as a Canadian critic/writer investigating Jones's story, I must provide an inter-textual narrative that takes up the necessity of reincarnating an individual crossing and its private reverberation within the larger metanarrative of immigration.This is not a conventional paper, but a recuperation of haunting, and a rehaunting of migration's intricate outcome.This ficto-critique partakes of a crossing and hyphenated crossover, and in the process, unpacks how fictions of modernity have learned to breathe under water instead of drowning.2 Over a lifetime of writing stories about the seductions and configurations of landspace on the Canadian prairie, I find myself writing, over and over again, about drowning.This trope surprises me each time it reappears, for drowning is a means of death entirely remote from my world, except perhaps for the farms that drowned in dust in the 1930s.I live on the high plains of western Canada, and although rivers curl through the foreland thrust sheets (the official designation of foothills) of the Rocky Mountains -and yes, with heavy rains and spring melt those rivers occasionally even flood-we are far from the sea.I know of course the fundamentals of drowning; this death results from asphyxia when water enters the lungs and causes suffocation.And yes, it is true that, as a result of growing up on the prairies, I cannot swim.The prairie teems with non-swimmers.There must have been lessons available in some form, but swimming pools were rare, and trained instructors even rarer and so, true to my origins, I cannot swim a stroke.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".