The Past Recaptured

Abstract

E. ι RNEST BUCKLER excels in conveying the texture of youth, and in The Mountain and the Valley presents a young man who suffers a series of blows and gradually loses, but finally, if ambiguously, recaptures the power to "begin again." Unlike novels about boys growing to maturity ( Who Has Seen the Wind, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sons and Lovers) which conclude by looking ahead to the expanding future of adulthood, The Mountain and the Valley concludes by looking back at youth, but at a youth which, on re-examination, expands in significance. From Prologue to Epilogue the novel circles the thirty years of David Canaan's life until his final walk up the mountain, which proves to be a means of rediscovering his own past. This experience is matched by the patchwork rug stitched together by Grandmother Ellen. As she works, each rag evokes memories of the clothing it came from, the person who wore it, the time it entered the family wardrobe. Thus she stitches together a family tapestry and brings the past into a pattern: "The years were like a ribbon she was in the act of pleating." David does the same as he climbs the mountain, and Buckler does the same in his novel: as Ellen fits a last scrap of white lace into the centre of her rug, David's "vision" turns white, he dies in the snow, and the novel comes to an end. Throughout the novel, David's maturing is studied in terms of time. His growing self-awareness entails a growing sensitivity to time and its role in his life. He discovers that his life — or lifetime — is essentially temporal, that his sense of himself and his relation to others and to the Annapolis Valley depends on his relation to his own past, present and future. Consequently, when his awareness grows so intense that he is "nothing but one great white naked eye of self-