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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
The variety of moods and techniques and the astonishing erudition of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano have frustrated critical attempts to grasp the work as a unified whole and have fostered instead an emphasis on decoding and explicating. The generic characteristics that Mikhail Bakhtin discerns in the tradition of Menippean Satire, however, provide a fresh and integral interpretation. Bakhtin's description subsumes such formal and thematic aspects of the work as its suppressed comedy, variety of styles, topicality, wide adaptation of other genres, fantastic inventiveness, frequent sharp contrasts and abrupt transitions, scandalous eccentricity, intellectual seriousness, three-leveled world view, utopianism, and psychological abnormality. These apparently heterogeneous characteristics are organized and unified within both Bakhtin's theory and the book's world by the model of carnival festivity. As an annually recurring celebration of change, carnival allows us, furthermore, to understand Lowry's spatializing sense of the book as “trochal,” like the regularly turning wheel of a machine.
1 Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, ed. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (1965; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1969), p. 66. Further citations from Lowry's correspondence are drawn from this volume with parenthetical page references.
2 Notably Perle Epstein, The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry (New York: Holt, 1969), and Tony Kilgallin, Lowry (Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1973).
3 Dale Edmonds, “Under the Volcano: A Reading of the ‘Immediate Level,‘ ” Tulane Studies in English, 16 (1968), 63-105.
4 Malcolm Lowry: A Biography (1973; rpt. New York: Laurel, 1975), pp. 304-26. The “levels” are chthonic, human, political, magical, and religious. See also the useful critical material and valuable annotated bibliography of criticism in Richard Hauer Costa, Malcolm Lowry (New York: Twayne, 1972).
5 Translated from the 2nd Russian ed. (1963) by R. William Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), pp. 87-108. Further page references to this edition are given parenthetically. I have found Bakhtin more useful for my purposes than the treatment of Menippean Satire by Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 308-12.
6 Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947; rpt. New York and Scarborough, Ontario: NAL, 1971), p. 34. Since different editions vary in pagination, I shall give page references to this edition parenthetically and follow them with chapter numbers.
7 Lowry's letter of justification charts further Dantean references (esp. p. 67). Note by the way the doubleness here. The opening of the Inferno is also the opening of the whole Commedia; the threshold of Hell also begins the path to Heaven.
8 This research emerges much more fully in Bakhtin's second book, Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), upon which Barbara Babcock-Abrahams draws in an ambitious theoretical essay, “The Novel and the Carnival World,” MLN, 89 (1974), 911-37.
9 Lowry here authorizes the kind of interpretation for which R. G. Peterson could find only critical and scholarly, but not authorial, warrant in “Measure and Symmetry in Literature,” PMLA, 91 (1976), 367-75.
10 “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Sewanee Review, 53 (1945). I cite Frank's essay from the revised version in The Widening Gyre (1963; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 10, 13. See also the application of Frank's idea by Victor Doyen, “Elements towards a Spatial Reading of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano,” English Studies, 50 (1969), 65-74.
11 So Roman Jakobson would define the shift from “realistic” literature to “symbolism.” See “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 77-78.
