UNDER THE VOLCANO- MALCOLM LOWRY

Literary renown is a mixed bag. The sophistication of talk around culture has a life of its own. One downside of that sophistication is that meaning becomes severed from experience and is embellished with conceptual padding ‘‘Under the volcano’’ by Malcolm lowry is written too close to the bone, predicated on the author’s own alcoholism and interior struggle. It is a literary, intertextual, convoluted novel in that it generates a baroque profusion of images, motifs and linguistic inventiveness of/on its own that is mediated through a stream of consciousness which is both prodigiously rich and keenly aware of an intrinsic emptiness at the heart of it all. Set over a single day (barring the first chapter) the novel delineates the intensification of the drunken, addled , complicated inwardness of Geoffrey Firmin, an english ex consul in Quauhnahuac, mexico , on the day of the dead (palpable symbolic overtone) in november 1938, and his ignominious death. The city of Quauhnahuac , derives its name from the two volcanoes popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl. The volcanoes function both as scenic backdrop, fierce and looming and as emblematic of the larval rush of unspooling events, including world war 2 and the ravages of history. Geoffrey firmin, orphaned in India, comes to England as a teenager with his younger brother Hugh, has poetic gifts and writerly ambition but with the eruption of ww1, is decorated by the state after being court martialled for actions (whose guiltiness in unproven ) involving captured german officers burned alive in the boiler . When the novel begins Geoffrey firmin is sunk in the stupor of mescal and alcoholism, with visible tremors and frequent top ups of strychnine , estranged from his wife Yvonne and subject of concern for his brother Hugh. Yvonne an ex hollywood actress, who took up films to support her impecunious and alcoholic father returns to Geoffrey on the fatal day, seeking a reunion after divorce and having her letters to him unanswered. Hugh , who’d left his career in songwriting and guitar playing to be a sailor, having dabbled in communism with interest in the spanish civil war, is a journalist, hoping to set sail again this second time. Jacques Laruelle , a french film director, who had a brief acquaintance with Geoffrey (while he was with the taskersons ) , in love with yvonne, is the character the novel begins with, one year after the tragedy . Mexico’s flora and fauna, cultural landmarks and the redoubtable beauty and awe inspiring impersonality of the volcanoes is captured compellingly.

‘‘Under the volcano’’ has clear references to Dante, conrad , melville and its fusillade of words and images spiral out into and coil back on a nihilism whose core is unfathomable. Geoffrey firmin is at one level not a character but a disaggregated cipher for the compendium of influences, preoccupations, obsessions and circuitous inner torments of Malcolm lowry. What makes geoffrey firmin plausible is that in him the stupor of drunkenness is captured piquantly. He sees too much and too little at the same time, the object world is exaggerated , its forms accrue momentarily grotesque forms, conversations are punctuated by inner associative mnemonics and thoughts obtruding and overruling quotidian interchange, lapses of attention reveal an involuted self communing in extremis, patterns of obsessive futility and ennui preponderate alternating with quasi mystical intimations of completeness of being, history , personal and general, interposes reminders of an irretrievable morass of vainglory and powerlessness . Elsewhere acuity of percipient shrewdness is revealed when some essential quality of the context he is in induces hypervigilance , as in the instance of geoffrey abstaining from drink at laruelle’s house during the latter part of the day before the weight of contradictions propels him to submerge in drinking . What lowry does is to convey this tangled mishmash, this overwrought too muchness within Geoffrey firmin in fevered, suggestive prose which has an intensity that crystallizes imagistic, observational, half glimpsed experiential fragments and the roiling dense psyche in a phalanx whose linguistic cornucopia is hard for the reader to grasp without submitting to this ferment and welter on its own terms. Yvonne’s love ( despite her putative prehistory with laruelle and hugh ) cannot be the deliverance that would salvage existential despair, Hugh’s political reconfigurations, his attempt to find in communism a foothold to the larger chaos leads to an argument at the salon ofelia with Geoffrey. Geoffrey firmin dies as a form of diminuendo, with yvonne’s mislaid letters restored to him, but no longer having the power in their protestations to redeem his irreclaimable self damnation , and shot at by the local police chiefs after ingesting copious mescal, under misapprehension as to his identity. Yvonne, trying to find geoffrey after his disappearance from salon ofelia is trampled by a horse, oscillating between existential dread and cosmic mystical vision conjoined in a awe inspiring unity . Divided into 12 chapters, the novel has a numerological patterning that is singular , including the number 7 stamped on a horse which makes pointed reappearances at key moments in the latter part of the novel.

But despite the stylistic anguish of ‘‘under the volcano’’ and its verbal calisthenics it cannot transcend the sum of conceits that comprise it. And that is attributable to too close a coalescing between lowry and geoffrey firmin . Geoffrey firmin ceaselessly contends with a squandered potentiality that is unformulated and unrealizable. Interims of compunction and precipitate unreasoning vistas of happiness are too sparse and insubstantial to amount to much. The desideratum of cumulative failures are never established save as self explanatory abdications from some whole that is unclarified . Faustus sold his soul , Jim in conrad’s lord jim is impaled on the anvil of a conception of honour that becomes a yoke but Geoffrey firmin’s despair is existentialism in a void. His is a malaise that may have been exacerbated by drunkenness but seems to have been conceived as an interior formlessness that makes inarticulable failure itself a categorical imperative. Snippets of geoffrey firmin’s past are minimal and atomized , without any overarching framework of a character graph to gauge the nature of his self condemnation as a failure. Demonstrably the first world war, failed marriage, the broken relations between mexico and britain , modernity have all contributed to the irrefragable accidie that beleaguers him but one only sees him embroiled and ensconced in the fastnesses of his own nature , tortuously circumnavigating the quadrangles of an enclosure that has no release .As a documentation of the chronic alcoholic’s plunge into self destruction and the febrile, polyglot inner life of a hypertrophied sensibility ‘‘under the volcano’’ has a scrupulous exactitude , stemming from biographical factors. Perhaps geoffrey firmin is a casualty of a world which is inherently pointless, subsumed in the primitivism of ineradicable violence and the death of meaning - but these are internalized as imperatives by his fevered imagination, rationalized through the circumlocutions of the alcoholic’s self negating feedback loop . Has this brokenness come as a result of eventful and painful encounters with reality or is an externalization of an inexpressible interior disarray is undetermined . ‘Under the volcano’’ is modern in its despair, in its reliance on the multifarious semblances of meanings generated by the unconscious in a meaningless universe and its desperate falterings and fumblings to seek an anchor, an immanence that is unreachable and inexistent. But it is also a subjective representation of this manifestation of existentialism through the prism of Geoffrey Firmin. The diminuendo of Geoffrey firmin’s death ratifies an incontrovertible nothingness ,of a cul de sac that can offer no exoneration or hopefulness . Lowry endows the mexico he details in its variegation with the subfusc quality of the spectral and the plenteous pitiless immensity of nature . ‘‘Under the volcano’’ is distended by a patina of thematic , conceptual richness and proliferative imagery that makes the story possess more weight than it does. But such weightiness cannot withstand the barrage of criss crossing conceits that shape it . Geoffrey firmin is consumed by a failure he cannot encompass or process or even apprehend except as absence from some incommunicable totality , a totality he experiences the cordon sanitaire of his corporeal being forecloses and debars him from broaching. From one lens his disintegration is the logical conclusion of an unformed listlessness of self forever floundering in the morass of its own making , to which outward reality only functions as a restatement of exile. At another it is the steadily worsening disintegration of an atrophy at the heart of being, compounded by everything in relationships and external world that has augmented its defeatism and affirmed a complexity that needs must be recoiled from and staved off with alcohol. Inebriation cannot be a portal into a deeper interconnectedness that forges conjunctions of meaning from the shards of a depleted , attenuated self but it can expend the inchoateness of what the unconscious has provisionally coralled in a pell mell fashion . The immensity within meets the immensity without and geoffrey firmin’s death becomes an infinitesimal ripple in an indifferent universe. ‘‘Under the volcano’’ has a foredoomed beauty of its own but it is a tragic , contingent beauty culled from unrelieved anomie that can say nothing more about the parameters of its anticlimax except the iterative immediacy and delimited constituents of its irreducible angst, churning in a turbid vortex .