A Walk with Love and Death: A Personal
Approach
In a recent lecture we were asked to reflect on the
self-satisfaction or complacency with which, we, students of
philology generally analize the highly complex world of literary
history. In the same lecture we were urged to adopt a new
attitude, a new insight, critical and personal, and to learn to
mistrust the working of systems on literary criticism, and the
deceiving tradition which insists on a taxonomic practice andin
the pinning of butterflies on a piece of paper ...
And it is thus, how, from underneath, from the border or from the
excenter, there appears on occasions, the throbling of true
literature, of literature as life, a life carried out to the last
consequences, drunk to the last drop. And it is in this way that
we find ourselves in front of a work as honest, complete, and
extreme as ‘Under the Volcano’
of Malcolm
Lowry.
It’s in that wholeness, in that passions for limits and for
the excessive where the tremendous force of the novel lies.
As with other great novels of this century – Ulysses or
Rayuela among others – Under the Volcano aims at totalizing
will, starting from the symbolic experience of some concrete
characters. It aspires to be a ‘ novel of wholeness ‘.
It’s a complex issue to start the analysis of the novel, to
opt for one of the many paths which, naturally, fork. Under the
Volcano as a symbolic report of a whole generation; as an elegy
of the last free individually who still believe in the dignity of
the human spirit: “ the days when an individual life hels
some value and was not a misprint in a communiqué “ (p.11),
individuals who were the witnesses of a world who was crumbling:
“ there were always these, jumping about between the streams
of molten lava, smoking cigarettes ...”(p.242).
The novel is also a portrait of a historic era. The Interwars
periods- and its characters- disenchanted after the horrors of
the World War and of the Spanish Civil War -which was seen as
almost inevitably lost- and critical with totalitarian systems:
“An artist with a murderer’s hands; that was the
ticket, the hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was German
itself”(p.31)”
and critical as well with easy militancy represented by the
character of Hugh: “he was simply submitting to that absurd
necessity he felt for action”(p.217).
In the tragedy of these outsiders, of these misfits, there is a
repeated warning to humanity, a getting aware after two terrible
world wars. The novel ends with this message-epilog:”¿LE
GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN? ¿QUÉ ES SUYO? ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO
DESTRUYAN! “
Under the Volcano; as a journey to the end of the night, a
great literary testimony of the experience of an alcoholic, as
the process of self-destruction of a man -Geoffrey Firmin,
consul of Quauhnahuac- developed in a particular calvary,
via crucis from ‘cantina’ to ‘cantina’ in a
state of permanent drunkness, passing from the utmost lucidity:
”the consul had drunk himself sober” ,
“ from one sonambulism to another; he was drunk, he was
sober, he had a hangover; all at once” (p.344)- to states of
terrifying hallucination caused by the ‘mezcal’, or the
lack of alcohol.
Lowry addopts the drinker’s voice, that of the hallucinated;
and in doing so he has to abandon the realistic discourse and
make use of a whole series of new stylistic resources which let
him transcribe the disorder and chaos which unceasingly flow
through the Consul’s mind. This makes Under the Volcano an
innovating vanguardist experience, a poetical novel,
hallucinated, visionary, fragmentary, intertextual, a collage
novel, bilingual, scattering discourse and reality.Under the
volcano is also an exercise in structural novel, it’s a day
which is all days which is ‘the
day of the Dead’ which is the last day of a life: “
It was alrady the longest day in his entire experience, a
lifetime”(223), a porous and circular novel, which goes
building ,deconstructing and destroying itself all the time.
This process of the self destruction of a man is the process of
damnation of his soul, his particular descent to hell, the
continous attraction for the abyss or to a death continously
announced.
On many occasions the Consul refers to his fall, always
identifying hell with the space surrounding him,
with“Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect,
wherever you turnes the abyss was waiting for you round the
corner”(p.21)
or with Mexico, a vey important symbol throughout the novel, a
symbol of an earthly paradise and hell :” but the name of
this land is hell. It is not in Mexico of course but in the
heart”(p.42), an extremely poetical passage , always under
the influence of its mithology and folklore-The Day of Dead-, a
territory on the other hand, amoral, wild frontier like, a free
land for free spirits, like Don Quixote, like
William Blackstone, like Geoffrey Firmin ...
The ‘cantinas’ become in basic spaces:
“But if you look at the sunlight there, ah, then perhaps
you’ll get the answer,see, look at the way it falls through
the window : what beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the
early morning? Your volcanoes outside? (...) for not even the
gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with
such celestial complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen
that rolls up with a crash, as the unpadlocked jostling jalousies
which admit those whose souls tremble with the drinks they carry
unsteadly to their lips. All mistery, all hope, all
disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging
doors (...) how, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to
understand the beauty of and old woman from Tarasco who plays
dominoes at seven o’clock in the morning?”(p.55)
The Consul identifies his concrete hell with the ‘cantina El
Farolito’ located under the volcano where he will be
murdered at the end of the novel anf for which he feels a
tremendous attraction:”He was safe here ; this was the place
he loved- sanctuary, the paradise of his despair”(p.339).
“I like it.I love hell. I can’t wait to get back there.
In fact I’m running. I’m almost back there
already”(p.316).
It is thus how the consul gets continously overcome by his
interior conflict, unable to follow his own metaphors,
downhill..., in his continous face to face with his personal
disaster, with death- whose presence is disturbing and constant,
like that of the volcanoes- which he decides to embrace
senselessly and beautyfully, and find in his fall an element of
triumph.:
“ In Parián did Kubla Khan...the sheer height was
terrifying. It was a tremendous, an awful way down to the bottom.
But it struck him he was not afraid to fall either”(p.340)
“Parián, where he was drawn on beautifully...towards
ineluctable personal disaster, always in a delightful way of
course, the disaster might even be found at the end to contain a
certain element of triumph”(p.143)
In this process of ruining his soul, of embracing damnation,
of being unable to save himself-or of allowing Ivonne’s love
to save him- is where the main conflict-existential as well as
moral-is developed.
Under the Volcano is above all the story of a redeeming love- of
we get a glimpse again and again; even though we already know the
tragic end of characters- and which is always ruined by an
anihilating fate, by the neverending turn of the”wheel of
law, rolling; missing all the oportunities until it was too
late”(p.221)
and by a series of circumstances which forbode that there is no
way back, that “all the events of the day indeed had been as
differents tufts of grass he had half-heartedly clutched at or
stones losed on his downward flight, which were still showering
on him from above”(p.362)
These mismatching circunstances reach its highest point in a
terrible way when the Consul, reborn like William Blackstone dies
in ‘El Farolito’ at the hand of paramilitary elements
of the ‘Unión Militar’, it is an heroic and senseless
death, inevitable and tremendously tragic. A few moments before
dying the Consul reads Ivonne’s love letters and deep down
in his dispairing fall
He long for a last possibility of salvation: ”If we could
rise from our misery, seek each other once more...Who was to
stand between? he thought desperately. He wanted Ivonne at this
moment, to take her in his arms, wanted more than ever to be
forgiven, and to forgive: but where should he go? Where would
find her now?”(p.347-8)
“He knew he’d half-hoped all along Ivonne would come to
rescue him, knew, now, it was too late. She would not
come.”(p.361)
“Why am I here, says the silence, What have I done, echoes
the emptyness,why have I ruined myself in this
wilful manner”(p.342)
It is here, in this incapacity for salvation, in this constant
mismatching where the emotional strenght of the novel lies.
Under the Volcano is first of all a love story, a chronicle of a
continous and tragic misunderstanding, of the incapacity of
the soul for redemption.
Geoffrey Firmin dies at the side of the road, does anybody dare
to question the greatness of his battle?
“ ‘No se puede vivir sin amar’, they would say,
which would explain everything.”(p.375)