Written by guest blogger, Jonathan Butler.
Before writing the article, “Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and the Drunken Discourse of Literary Solipsism,” I’d been thinking about the novel Under the Volcano—and reading and re-reading it—for about ten years. It is for me one of the richest and most elaborate of 20th Century novels and it is for sure one of my “desert island” books, if I had to take only five or ten with me.
Having read two biographies on Lowry, of particular interest to me was the connection between Lowry’s protagonist, the Consul, and the author himself.
Like many novels—especially first or second ones—this connection between author and protagonist is especially strong and visible to a knowing reader. What I had to contend with, however, was a predominantly postmodern sensibility that had taken over for some time, and which precluded, to a large extent, consideration of authorial background in the analysis of texts. E.D. Hirsch, and critics such as the likes of him, who at one time privileged authorial intention, were no longer in vogue, so I felt a bit old-fashioned, a bit archaic, in wanting to write about this subject and publish it in a prestigious journal.
Nevertheless I felt that to do justice to the book I had to do precisely that. So even though a lot of contemporary critics see the novel in terms of a self-sustaining symbolic system, I wanted to take that system and pull it outside the novel from time to time and connect it to Lowry’s own life because his writing of the novel, for me, seems to be a kind of extension of himself, a way of narrativizing or framing his own experience in order to get some aesthetic distance from it, some understanding perhaps, or relief—ultimately a hopeless hope, as it turned out.
Plus there was this fascination I had with pure persuasion, Kenneth Burke’s notion of discourse generated for its own sake, its own pleasures, with no true desire to connect with another. I wanted to explore this further, since Burke treated it at length in his own novel, the ironically titled Towards a Better Life. I think there are some delights to be had in self expression, of course. But sealed off from any intention whatsoever to connect with others? That has yet to be proven a salubrious choice of life for anyone—and indeed fatal for a notorious few.
I also have a background in philosophy and saw immediately a connection to Heidegger, especially his Letter on Humanism, which was written in the same year Lowry wrote this novel, 1947. I thought the parallels to Heidegger were striking, as I explore in the article, and really make the existential aspect of the novel worth highlighting—and analyzing—as a motif which contributes greatly to the appreciation of the overall literary effect of the novel. It’s a fantastic, amazingly complicated book, a work of genius, a work of art that is both an aesthetic product and a confession of authorial angst and despair—so I wanted very much to address both of these facets of the work.
This article, and one I published five years ago on Burke’s novel (titled, “Pure Persuasion: Metarhetorical Motives in Kenneth Burke’s Towards a Better Life”), are part of a book I’d like to write on metarhetoric. I am reading William Gass’s The Tunnel right now, which would make up a third chapter in that book. It’s a project that gives me great delight to look forward to, although I’d likely need a year off teaching to finish it.
Jonathan Butler’s article, “Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and the Drunken Discourse of Literary Solipsism,” is featured in the latest issue of University of Toronto Quarterly (Volume 86, Issue 1), available to read here and on Project MUSE.
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