11/2/2015 A World Apart and Kindred: M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time https://canlitweb.arts.ubc.ca/article/a-world-apart-and-kindred-m-wylie-blanchets-the-curve-of-time/ 1/4 Tweet 0 (#) A World Apart and Kindred: M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time By Maleea Acker In the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Curve of Time, published in 2011, Timothy Egan refers to Muriel Wylie Blanchet as “a wonderful ghost” (vii). His choice of words is perhaps more apt than he realized. Blanchet creates a poetic narrative of substance and depth. Through alternations between a “lyric” and a “domestic” construct of time, Blanchet integrates landscape and the natural world with her own lived experience, creatingwith an unruffled, measured tonea surprising world of beauty. Analogous to British water narratives such as Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series and Kenneth Grahame’sWind in the Willows, Blanchet’s pragmatic competence on water breeds a fearlessness and kinship with the natural world rather than a sense of wilderness as hostile threat, and imbues each scene with an otherworldly grace. In this, Blanchet’s narrative departs from those of many of her BC contemporaries, by creating a paean to the coastal landscape. Situating the Narrative In The Curve of Time, Blanchet gathers her young children and embarks on fifteen summers of cruising through Vancouver Island’s Inside Passage on a 25foot boat, after her husband’s unsolved disappearance in 1927. Curve is one of a trilogy of books written by women on midcentury West Coast cruising life. Kathrene Pinkerton’s Three’s a Crew first appeared in 1940, and Beth Hill’s Upcoast Summers appeared in 1985. All three books are accounts of events that take place between 1924 and the outbreak of the Second World War. Curve first appeared in the United Kingdom with Blackwood & Sons in 1961, but its publication, due to poor publicity, went almost unnoticed in Canada (Campbell xiv). Blanchet died later the same year, while in the midst of a second book. Curve was first published in 1968 in a Canadian edition (which included the material from her new manuscript) with Gray’s Publishing (xv). The book was well received, has been reviewed several times, and was revisited by Cathy Converse’s biography of Blanchet, Following the Curve of Time: The Legendary M. Wylie Blanchet. However, Critical writing about The Curve of Time, however, aside from Nancy Pagh’s multiauthor examination inAt Home Afloat: Women on the Waters of the Pacific Northwest (Pagh 2001), is nonexistent. The Curve of Time is superior in style and sensibility to both Pinkerton and Hill’s narratives. Partially, this might be due to the cast of characters in each;Curve is distinctive in that it is essentially the journal of a single woman; no spousal relationship mediates her interactions. Blanchet obviously spends a great deal of time in her own head. Her children are not developed as significant personalities; rather, they seem to be part of the natural world she travels through and are often referred to as “somebody” (98). Thus, there is little to interrupt the relationship she fosters with landscape. This allows Blanchet’s natural world observations to shine, without long narratives on social matters to dilute the immediacy of the text. Pinkerton, conversely, spends much more of the narrative discussing her husband and daughter and describing their social encounters with other cruising folk. Landscape is background to her more humanitycentred vignettes. Hill’s Upcoast Summersis a compilation of the journals of Francis Barrow, which gives the account of his coastal boating with his wife Amy between 1933 and 1941, and thus reads more as a collage than a constructed narrative. Its reportage style lends itself much more to an account of the trials and successes of the islands’ European settlers. Blanchet draws from the adventures of each summer on the water to create an episodic reverie; the permeability of each summer’s separation from the next is bolstered by the text’s first account: “[W]e thought of that year as the year we wrote down our dreams” (8). The descriptor suggests not only that each year had a dreamlike quality, but also that she was, predominantly, too spellbound or occupied with life on the water to distinguish one year from another. In conjunction with Blanchet’s explanation of the titlean envisioning of time as a curve along which “our consciousness roves” (8)the sense is of entering a different dimension, one made of mutable, tangled reveries, of bendable time; where the multiplicity of memory renders each scene that follows with a sense of otherworldliness and beguiling beauty. In thus beginning the narrative, a spell is cast; we learn to expect the unexpected, to expect shifts and change, very much like the tides and currents that affect this family on a daily basis. We are, she seems to hint, at the mercy of larger forces. Lyric and Domestic Understanding In the first chapter of Curve, Blanchet employs an interesting juxtaposition, skipping back and forth between passages of lyric and domestic experience in order to establish an alternative understanding of coastal life. She repeats this technique throughout the narrative. I take notions of lyric and domestic understanding from Jan Zwicky’s work in Lyric Philosophy. Lyric experience, for Zwicky, is experience set free from time; it is a direct, unhindered connection with the world, which occurs outside of mortal and bodily experience. Domestic experience, conversely, is life lived within the constraints of mortality, time, and relation. The domestic is our daily existence, the pedestrian, lovely sighs of a dog while one is reading on a sunlit afternoon in a warm room; lyric is our exceptional existence, the profound, shiverinducing sense of timelessness upon hearing the varied thrush’s song in an otherwise silent forest. We cannot, argues Zwicky, live in lyric, but we can visit. The domestic is where we predominantly exist. The effect of these shifts in attention between lyric and domestic time is one of mercurial wanderingwandering with deftness and awareness; Blanchet’s light touch and loose grip on her subjects heightens the complexity of landscape and her relationship to it. In Jervis Inlet, one of the long, narrow fjords that winds its way into the BC interior from the mainland coast, Blanchet lyrically describes a stream in which she fishes for trout, having left her children at the shore’s edge. Blanchet’s descriptors in this passage are mesmerizing: sunshine “drift[s]” through the alders; light “flicker[s] on the 0 Like Twitter (#) Print (#) Facebook (#) Hootsuite (#) Tumblr (#) Email (#) Gmail (#) More... (296) (#) AddThis (//www.addthis.com/website- utm_source=AddThis%20Tools&utm_medium=image&utm_campaign=AddThis%20com