Of Acedia, Romantic Imagination and Irony Revisited: A Background Note for Readings of

"Under the Volcano"

Author(s): Camille La Bossire
Source: College Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter, 2004), pp. 170-182
Published by: College Literature
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115178
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OfAcedia,Romantic
and Irony
Revisited:
Imagination
A Background
Note for
Readingsof UndertheVolcano
La Bossi?re

Camille

La

Camille
sor

of Canadian,

American
at

British,

comparative

the University
most

is a profes

Bossi?re

recent

and

"He

literature
His

goes

fevers."

are The

action

balance

disease

equilibrium

"I feel

of

the whole

...

the

terrible

into a block

enveloped

in fire."

(Sartre, Nausea)

be

Aiken,

(Conrad

in
Stephen
Volcano

impression

turned

may

is
but

.. .The

indecision

of being

"This

of

hot

{Amiel's Journal)

irony."

neutral

a natural
and

impossible

produces

of

cold

is preserved,

becomes

Equilibrium

Early

the

"Of Repentance")

the
So

maladie?"

. . . from

(Montaigne,

perfect.

to Sources (2003).

wondre
and Criseyde

reeling
. . . like

"In Mozart

Progress of Indolence (1991)

and Back

this

Troilus

drunkenness

of Ottawa.
books

is

"What
Chaucer,

misery,

but

it

of

ice

is blest."

"Psychomachia")

of its reception,
history
remarked
of Under the
Spender
the

(1947)

that its "central

paradox

is

CamilleLaBossi?re m

... that it is a novel

about action, that is, about action negated"

(1965, xxvii).
to
Lowry's big book spun about that self-con
According
Spender, Malcolm
in a "despair . . . that is really acedia,
tradiction tells of a life of ensnarement
as it were, hermeti
the spiritual apathy of the religious who have become,
source
off
from
of
their
sealed
the
(1965, xxviii). A host of
religion"
cally
other

commentators

Day among
Douglas
the spiritual condition

in the

1960s?Walter

them1?would

and
Allen, Anthony
Burgess,
sense of
rehearse Spender's
effectively
in Under theVolcano, and would
do so in

characterized
of a medieval
recollective
Christian
frame of reference
... the
of
caritas"
(Wenzel 1960, 55) or "the
[as]
negation
in ambiguity"
(Kuhn 1976,39
complete paralysis of the will" by "suspension
in
The
Never
Sherrill
her
That
Ends:
Malcolm
Grace,
40).2
Voyage
Lowry's
a language likewise
and value, o?"acedia

proceeds quite traditionally, then, in a way faithful to a history

at least as old as the Schoolmen,
when
practice of spiritual discernment
in Under the Volcano "a book about failure and acedia""about
recognizes

Fiction,

and
she
the

hell man

inflicts upon himself through his emotional

sterility and acedia"2* ;"it
is a story of hellfire, and hellfire, for Lowry, means paralysis of the will" (1982,
of Under the Volcano
41, 58). It goes without
saying that the contextualizing
in such terms presumes the virtue o? caritas, the abiding pertinence
of which
is tabled anew.
the face of it at least, commentary
thus suggestive of awork of para
seems entirely apt, since Lowry's novel timed
inwit or conscience
on an All Souls' Day fairly bristles with signs of an intelligence
steeped in tra
On

medieval

Christian
Paradise Lost
readings of Hell. Even Milton's monumental
a very much
source
in
the
secondary
cyclopedic
history of a
that
Under
the
Volcano
recollects
for
meditation.
doomsday
Certainly, Lowry's
ditional

constitutes

tale of an exile in spiralling pilgrimage

in a place and
downward
concludes
a language the metaphysical
sense of which had been established
long before
the composing
o? Paradise host: drinking deeply while "at an agonized
stand
to stand for "El Infierno," Consul Geoffrey
still" in a cantina made
Firmin
feels as if he "were being filled with boiling ice ... or there were a bar of red
hot iron across . . . [his] chest, but cold in its effect" (Lowry 1962, 346, 349,
allusion here, to Milton's
oxymoron
351). The
resuming Hell's grammar,
"cold performs
th'effect of fire" (1940,149:
2.595),4 resonates with
whereby
the power and sense of an even older wisdom
literature. As the whole
of the
invites
Lowry oeuvre
unreason
dead-ended

the recognition,
Dante's
and
rhymes of the unlove
at the center of the innermost
frozen circle of the

in the sublunary
tale of charity stymied by ambiguity
Inferno,5 Chaucer's
.
.
.
world
of "cold
hete" that Troilus and Criseyde revisits (1957, 395.420),6
Marlowe's
of a devil's pact sealed by a feverish, would-be
gnos
tragi-comedy
in relentless illogic that concludes
in despair,7 and, more
tic's indwelling
lat

172

31.1 [Winter
2004]
CollegeLiterature
de la Barca's La Vida es sue?o, z commedia of unremit
terly yet, priest Calder?n
an
set
in
ambience
o? "fuego y Wefo"[fire and ice],8 figure
ting subjectivity
sense of the
texts
in
the
line
of
that underwrite Milton's
prominently
long
unreason

as "encap
basic to Pandemonium,
the ultimate site of "includence"
sulation in self-contradiction"
(Tellenbach
1980,146).
commentators
That
extensive
fine of affiliation
understood,
being

to Under the Volcano as a story about the freezing hellfire of acedia

attending
have understandably
shadowed
(as it were) a Lowry in at least partial recur
on
to
in the enduring
sion
the theology
which
books
tradition of Inferno
"found"
helle,"

sense. "Accidie

is lyk hem that been in the peyne of

to Canterbury
in the last of his tales of a pilgrimage
in the form of a sermon for repentance
and charity from a

their ethical
so Chaucer

wrote

(1957, 250. 686),

of Revelation
3:15: "I would
thou wert cold
parson alert to the injunction
.
as it does to situate Under the Volcano in the
or hot
.." (1957, 769). Working
oeuvre
an
of
for
moral
fruitful, conscientiously
action,
progress
undyingly
casts an author impelled by a loving,
Grace's affective response accordingly
as she senses it, "the strong ethical
issues from a will keen "to close the emotional

ethical

intention:

Volcano

thrust" of Under

the

and imaginative gap

and book, reader and text," to break out from the infernal
in "the Good Ship Solipsism" naturally entails
interior circling that voyaging
Sue
Vice
she distinguishes
the affec
(1982,122).
responds appositively when

between

world

from
tivity of Lowry's master-work
from postmodern
gamesters
writings
their

funhouses:

"his

art

is not

heartless.

the "environmentally
themselves
enjoying
. . .Under

the Volcano

amoral"

tenor of

in the privacy
...

is a

of

collage

a conscience"

truth of late-medieval
Friar Luis de
(1992, 135).9 The
lov
Leon's dictum that "No se puede vivir sin amar" [one cannot live without
seem
to
in
have
twice
Under
the
Volcano
would
blazoned
(11, 199),10
ing],
retained its substantial cogency.
even
But readings of Under the Volcano as something
of an exemplum

with

consistent
metaphorically
conscience
have become
readership
ambiguity
all
been
Meditation

with

a traditional
difficult

increasingly
to the (post)modernist
or ambivalence,
even whimsicality,
attentive

slow in coming
on Itself: Reflexiveness

that

Christian

sense of charity and

As to why
so, a
terminal
reflexiveness,

to maintain.

play of
in Lowry's big book has not
as a
to recognize.
In his essay "Tragedy
in Under theVolcano',' to cite a particular
as
such interpretations
deems "fallacious"

ly acute rejoinder, Stephen Tift

work to suggest that "the crux of the Consul's
tragedy" resides in "the inabil
to
The
love"
manifest
of
of loving',"
(1978,46).
ity
signs
"shifting definitions
"ironic
consistent
of a shiftiness
with
of
the Good
Lowry's
handling

so Tift goes on to argue, point to "an ambivalence

that can
are
Christian
echoes
be ignored" (47). "Lowry's
ironic," as
decidedly

Samaritan
hardly

theme,"

CamilleLaBossi?re 173

Richard

Hauer

Costa

agrees

(1978, 42), and as findings

by David

Markson

(1978,16), Duncan Hadfield (1990,96) andRonald Binns (1984,41,64), for

instance,

additionally

confirm.

in view of the superbly modern

character
logically enough
achievement
that "the masterpiece
of the forties" has been
to represent, the main body of Lowry commentators
has increas

And, again
of the aesthetic
recognized
ingly come

to find for the virtue of the "romantic

irony" basic to Under the
sense of "the grammar essential to the
Volcano and the still abiding modernist
to I.A. Richards
in
best poetry"
1993, 573): "Irony," according
(La Bossi?re
...
a
as
to
in
in
is
of
such
"a
"the
achieve
bal
1924,
way
bringing
opposites"
Since it issues from "the recognition
anced poise" (1938,250).
that the world
is paradoxical
attitude alone can grasp
and that an ambivalent
its contradictory
1955,
14), irony in that mode
totality" (Wellek
naturally
serves to "make us at home in indecision"
iswhere
(Burke 1953,14). Home
to
a
has
the romantic irony is,which
siting
proved congenial
readership in
in its essence

affective
terminate

ethically inde
sympathy with Lowry at his ambivalent, ambiguous,
of "ambiguities
and uncertainties"
available to
best. The complex

to Grace's edi
theVolcano, so Frederick Asals's contribution
tion of Swinging
theMaelstrom: New Perspectives on Lowry speculates, "was
to drawing us to it in the first place" (1992, 109).
instrumental
probably
some justification.
Asals's use of the extensive "us" is not without
readers of Under

on Under theVolcano so closely asso

surprisingly, then, commentary
a
of
mode
of
itself
with
the
ciating
ironizing now not so new has sec
appeal
since radically subjective, turn of
onded the creative efficacy of a doubtful,
in
Lost. Like readers of The
mind
with
the
fallen
Lucifer's
Paradise
cognate
Heaven
and
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
and
Prometheus
Unbound
Hell,
Marriage of
Not

to revisit the notion

of Lowry have surely had occasion
that "The
is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven
of Hell, a Hell of
Heaven"
120: 1.254-55).n
coordinate
with
that
1940,
(Milton
Nicely
the reckoning
that with Under the Volcano Lowry achieved "self
hypothesis,
a commonplace
"self-creation"
has now become
(see Falk
mastery"
through
students

Mind

1976, 575; Costa

1972, 127). In the words of Grace's intro
1992, 53; New
to Swinging theMaelstrom,
the artist of Under the Volcano "constitutes
duction
an
act
himself" by
that renders the world "a home for the human imagina
tion": for Lowry as for the Nietzschean
and Blake aficionado
philosopher
man"
is
"the
of
that
best
of
"the
novelist who makes
Gasset,
Ortega y
image
as
his
life
he
of the "dynamism"
goes along" (1992, 3, 15). Recognition
up
act of creation" akin
of Under theVolcano as a testament to "the never-ending
state of becoming
that underlies
romanticism
and
laid to rest the image of an
(Grace 1982,2, xvi) has ostensibly
or overcome
with
apathy or spiritual paralysis.12 Like the

to "the Nietzschean
expressionism"
artist riddled

174 College
31.1[Winter
Literature
2004]
of Biographia Literaria and Aids toReflection?so
Grace, for one, fur
Coleridge
ther historicizes
the romantic thinker of Under the Volcano?a
intent
Lowry
on realizing "the considerable
of . . . imagination"
powers
synthesizing
viewed
life "in terms of polarities
that must be balanced. He felt that the
or
of
reflects the vitality of the universe
activity
unifying
balancing opposites
and illustrates the creativity of the mind"
(1982, 3).
For all the support that it lends to a latter-day-romantic
artist's creativi
ty, though, the locating of Under theVolcano in a tradition of ironic and imag
inative reflection founded on the synthesis or balance of opposites
sits per
all too well with a history of that principle's
affiliation with
the work
s
to
As
of
hellfire.
Grace
reference
lit
ing
wide-ranging
nineteenth-century
call to mind,
the most heady of English
romantic writers
erary sages might
found in "cold performs
th'effect of fire" a sentence to illustrate his cardinal

haps

a "proverb to collect and explain all the

axiom, that "Extremes meet,"13
instances of which would
constitute
and exhaust all philosophy"
(Coleridge
own
com
1969,110).
striving to achieve just such a cyclopedic
Coleridge's
ice?a
grammar that "assume[s]
prehension
by way of the logic of burning
a circularmotion,
to our Understanding
the snake with
it'sTail in itsMouth"
(1956-71,4.545-46)14?is
of philosophico-literary

duly registered

in the summa of his life in the way

(so he translates from

theorizing:
"imagination"
or reconciliation
is
the
in
which
"reveals
itself
the
balance
Schelling)
faculty
of opposite or discordant qualities" (Coleridge
1907, 2.346). As Grace's sup
abbreviated
for
the Coleridgean-style
Lowry
ple, necessarily
genealogy
philosopher
nineteenth
of German

suggests,15 many
century?among
idealism Carlyle

an exponent
them, fellow

of the creative

in the
imagination
readers of Coleridge
and students

and Emerson?took
out
comprehension
by that definition. What
worldand self-creation might
also call to mind,
held

up the promise of whole

such a genealogizing
for

though, is the inducement

to encapsulation
in hellish
self-contradiction
signed by leading
repeatedly
thinkers in "the Reflective
imaginative
Age," "the age of the first person sin
"the Age of Suicide"
gular," or, again in the words of Emerson,
(1903-04,
5.366,12,198;
1939, 2.445).
the reckoning
that "on a fundamental
level" Lowry "retains
Certainly,
as
ties with
the nineteenth-century
moralists
such
and Carlyle" in
Coleridge
. . .
an "almost religious vision of self and world
passionately,
personally
own
intense
(Grace 1982, 121) squares nicely with Carlyle's
expressed"
as
of
the
and
reach
of
creative
intention
the
logic,
apperception
imagination

as
to "The Hero
it. "Imagination,"
according
to
Poet" (1840), "is the faculty which
enables him
discern the inner harmo
at
Centre
"the
of
1908,
337,
325). Again, Dante's
Being"
ny"
(Carlyle
Inferno
to provide
is made
the
medieval
representative
testimony:
poet's "mystic"

he

seems

to have understood

CamilleLaBossi?re 175

song of "fiery snow" reflects a depth and an integrity of insight matched

only
(329, 321, 325). Pole "rhymes" with pole at "the innermost
by Shakespeare
of coherence"
"inward harmony
heart" of all that exists, which
only the
can encompass,
and only the poet's vatic
"musical thought"
imagination's
song, "a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable
speech" can express (316).
a
of
himself
had
achieved
poetic integration
degree
Carlyle
comparable
to Dante's
the production
of Sartor
just a few years before On Heroes, with
Resartus
from
the
wisdom
of
"the
of
(1833-34).
Serpent
Spun
Eternity,"
Sartor

images

the

"fever-paroxysms,""delirious

vertigo,"

"circumambulations"

wanderer
of ametaphysical
brought to peer into the mir
ror of "the Infinite Brine" under the sun of an arctic June midnight
(Carlyle
so imagined
1908, 153, 87, 78, 130, 153). The "dizziquilibre"
(Ducharme
come to find a duly double-sided
1976, 94) would
response, from Jerry A.

and "circulations"

celebratory The Pythias Drunken Song,for example, on Sartors reso

in German
of "the style problem
idealist philosophy"
(1978, 56), to
Kenneth Burke's relating of Carlyle, writer of the "Zero Moment,"
with
the
as
at
centre
Dante's
who
"cancels
the
of
the
himself,
Inferno,
"Light-Bearer"
. . . sends forth
freeze
the
more"
that
him
all
of
his
wings
draughts
beating
(1968,120). As his good friends and antagonists John Sterling and Ralph

Dibble's
lution

occasion
for perplexed
often to
observation,
snow
of
subtends
the
whole
of
fiery
Carlyle s
funny effect,
logic
as
is
moral guide.16 "A Truth in art is that whose
endeavour
contradictory
also true," nice critic of Sartor and The French Revolution Oscar Wilde would
Emerson

Waldo

found

ample

a suicidal

(1969, 432). A.L. Le Quesne's

Carlyle, then, strikes a still
as awould-be
not
note
it
its
when
affirms
contemporary
subject
prophet and
teacher of ethics, but as an artist malgr? lui, a seer gifted with "double vision"
in balance"
and a player adept "at keeping opposites
(1982, 82, 93).
come

to observe

to the thought of Colerige

A devotee
and Blake and the main dissemi
saw and juggled in much
nator of Sartor in America, Ralph Waldo
Emerson
seconded the Sage of
the same way. Indications are that the Sage of Concord
of the harmony underlying
in
the superficial differences
perception
to Emerson
in July 1850,
their way of seeing things: "I see," so Carlyle wrote
in response to Representative Men, "where the rock-strata, miles deep, unite
. .. souls are at one"
the more
(Slater 1964, 459). Unlike
again; and the two
Emerson
could
be
celebrative
wary Carlyle, though,17
altogether forthright,
Chelsea's

enter
in announcing
infernal character of his imaginative
the substantially
is its own place, and in itself/ Can make aHeaven
of Hell,
prise. "The Mind
a Hell of Heaven," he copied in his journal of 1823 (even as he prepared to
aUnitarian
become
preacher), adding the comment: "There is no danger of
excess
in
the
any
2.330). Supported
practice of this doctrine"
(1960-present,
in that conviction
Emerson
and Milton,
by Blakean-style
readings of Dante

176 College
31.1[Winter
Literature
2004]
more

than not

often

is happy

turn of mind

balancing

with

to identify the grammar of his own synthetic,

the logic of Hell: "Extremes meet:
there is no

to
Aids
repeats in concert with Coleridge's
straight Une," as he untiringly
for
"It
is
cold
what
7.181, 9.14,
health,
flame;
example).
Reflection (1903-04,
what affinity! "Emerson writes of the "truth" of the universe such as only the
can embrace
(3. 171):
fully insightful poetic imagination
Line

in nature

Unit

and

In vain

is not

universe

produced,

found;

are

round;

all rays

return;

Evil will bless, and ice will burn. (Emerson 1903-04, 4. 125)
"bitumen, fastest of cements," drawn from "the floor of the Pit," the
makes
"all things cohere"
the singer of "a
(4. 24, 17). Like Nietzsche
poet
divine hell" in "The Intoxicated Song" that wraps up Thus Spake Zarathustra

Using

(1964,330),
thetic poet
of Night,
Now,

Emerson
the poet of "Bacchus" celebrates the power of the syn
or "unity" from "spin": "He turns the woe
to create "equ?ibrium"
/ By its own craft, to amore rich delight" (9. 125).
sense by the nine
the topsy-turvying
of traditional Christian

literary thinkers and moralists with whom Lowry retains fun

teenth-century
ties logically enough
of acedia. Shrewd
entailed a transvaluation
damental
cited in Lowry's "Those Coal to Newcastle
historian of ideas Aldous Huxley,
in his 1923 essay
makes
that point
Blues"
1992,
44),
precisely
(Lowry
retraces to the onset
"Accidie." Proceeding with due circumspection,
Huxley
the "triumph of the daemon meridianus," "the progress" of a
of "romanticism"
medieval
"deadly sin" to the status of "a literary virtue, a spiritual mode," "an
in the inspiration of much
of the most
lyrical emotion fruitful
essentially
literature" (1971, 21, 22). The cases of master of neg
characteristic modern
ative capability Keats' "Ode on Indolence," Baudelaire's
Spleen Poems in Les
"Indolence: A Moral
Sue's La Paresse, ByssheVanolis
Thomson's
Genevan
of
aesthetics
Henri-Fr?d?ric
Essay," suspension-obsessed
professor
Dance
"The
of
the
Seven
Amiel's Journal intime, Symons's
Sins," the
Deadly
Fleurs duMal,

essay "Sloth"
chapter of Joyce's Ulyssses set deep in Lotusland, Evelyn Waugh's
own wryly
ambivalent
and, of course, Huxley's
compositions
inspired by a
a
as
to
in
Crome
cite
but
few
of
the
host
of available
acedia,
Yellow,ls
witting
instances, eloquently
of romantic
lyrical
Huxley's

own

time

attest to the cogency of his timely recollection. The fact

in
vice transvaluated
and prolonged
sloth as a medieval
seems

obvious

enough.

of this essay in the form of background

notes, then, is to
a
as
that
the
the
of
for caritas and,
of
Under
Volcano
book
and
suggest
reading
even
mistaken.
against acedia, is substantially partial, perhaps
consequently,
The

intention

text of Lowry's novel "about" hellfire itself makes

that point, and elo
"stone [d]" folk in a
in
of
where
the
"frozen,"
response
chapter eight,
quently,

The

CamilleLaBossi?re

to make up their minds," doing "nothing"

to help
it "impossible
bus, finding
a dying Indian lying on the side of a road (1962, 248, 251), is cast in a lan
on "'the balance or
guage referring to an I.A. Richards
invoking Coleridge
or discordant
of opposite
1984, 321). Spender's dictum, that Under
the spiritual apathy of the religious who
cally sealed off from the source of their
reconciliation

qualities'"
(Ackerley and Clipper
theVolcano is a book about "acedia,
as it were, hermeti
have become,
be
consequently
the values
embracing

religion," might

revised to read, more aptly, as follows: aU-too-humanly

the Lowry of Under theVolcano was anything but
of a prolonged
romanticism,
a region where
sealed off from the source of his religion. Indwelling
"cold
atten
of
he
suffered
the
of
th'effect
travails
ethical paralysis
fire,"
performs
dant on fidelity to the central paradox of his art.
Notes
1
Though

of "the masterpiece

essary gestures...
In Consul

character

whose

is "yet

he

forties,"

the nec

to make

unable

to Burgess,
desired

creates

Lowry

whose

opposite,

(1964,

"a giant
to
inability

love is" (1964, 60). For Day, in one of his several accounts of the

of "the

greatest

"deadly

sloth

author:

the

Firmin,
Geoffrey
according
. . . etches
the
sloth or accidie

love defines what

writer

of

heal the breach between himself and the world"

thatwould

419-20).

of his sloth," soAllen observes of

in the imprisonment

"clear-sighted

the protagonist

religious
. . . accidia

novel

of

the

is his worst

2 "The word

twentieth

like

century,"
(1968,

enemy"

like

character,

xx).

[acedia] itself has become quite fashionable among the literati,"

cause to remark in the preface to his The Sin of Sloth: Acedia
had
Wenzel
Siegfried
inMedieval Literature and Thought (1960, vii). Evelyn Waugh says asmuch in "Sloth,"
his

to Ian Fleming's

contribution

in all his full theological

stage

and

novel"

(1962,

Seven

of The

58).

See

also, Robertson

Reinhard

substantial

Kuhn

reference

s
study
to Conrad

the

daemon

Aiken's

of

poem

Sins:

Deadly

"the man

of

sloth,

one of the stock figures of the

1962

Davies's

of the Sins" (1977). Perhaps even more

Deadliest
Lowry,

project

implications, has become

secular

sermon,

"The

appositely engaging for readers of

inWestern

meridianus

literature

makes

"Psychomachia."

3 Grace's use of italics here indicates the Late Latin from which
the Middle
English "accidie" derives. "Acedia" has its own entry in the 1953 College Edition of
Webster's

New

World

Dictionary.

4This allusion is unmentioned

inAckerley

and Clipper's A Companion

toUnder

the Volcano.

5 See La Bossi?re 's"Conrad eDante"

(1977) for an account of the logic of agony
in
the
Inferno.
imaged
6 "For hete of
cold, for cold of hete, I die," as Chaucer's Troilus at sea is brought
to lament (1957,395.420).
EN. Robinson
specifies Boethius and Dante as the major
sources for "the idea of fate" discussed in this tale (1957, 389). In his short story
"Through
sixes

and

the Panama,"
sevens:

"All

Lowry
stereless

cites
within

this Chaucerian
a boot

am

text
I / Amid

in the voice
the

of

sea, betweexen

a Troilus
windes

at

177

178

31.1 [Winter
2004]
CollegeLiterature
two

in contraries

/ That

stand

evermo"

7 In his

essay

Faustus:

"Harlequin

to Blake

87). References

(1961,

end of the doomed, endlessly voyaging

the Panama" (94, 91).

Marlowe's

and

the

leg

also figure in "Through

Flying Dutchman

of Hell,"

Comedy

Gerald

Morgan

observes that "'the tragical history' of the doctor and devils may be seen to belie its
title, except in that degree to which we involve Marlowe in our own 'hyperpathetic'
assumption of subjectivity, which seldom allows other than hellish mirth" (1967,27).
8 See
"the

La Bossi?re
of

aesthetics
9 Grace

because

another
see

somnambuUsm,"

likewise

foregrounding
work

For

(1978).

"The

remarks:

of

language

the

reader

must

the parody,
the
are
Joyce
foreign

distance,

Nabokov,

or

with

and

respond

even

to Lowry's

(1982,121). Richard K. Cross anticipates Grace andVice

associates

Under

of men

manner

game-playing

from

the Volcano

the

sort

"narrower

like Nabokov,

to

response

(1990).

Ackerley
ironic

cool,

in Barth,

of Lowry's

contextualizing

emotionally"

in this regard when

of

avant-garde

and

Borges,

writing

anti-realist
to Lowry's

he dis

Pynchon,"

. . .

the

writing,
on the

grounds

of Lowry's concern with establishing "relations between the self and the largerworld"
to Brian O'Kill, "the verbal and cultural texture" of Under the
(1980, ix).According
Volcano

in

firmly

"belongs

the modernist

Woolf,

10 For

of "the

reading

and

precious

we

tradition

associate

with

Eliot,

Joyce,

signals seem to be indicated, all round.

Proust, and Kafka" (1989, 18).Mixed

aesthetically

in which

manner"

elegant

that

dictum is inscribed, see Hadfield (1990).

11
See, for example,Woodcock
(1978). In a reading of Under theVolcano that par
in his essay "The Own Place of theMind," Michael Cripps is able
allelsWoodcock's
to

affirm

like

that,
hell'

through

seems

advances
that Cripps
in agreement
with

wise

to

able
unlike

the

follow

path

'right
he was

Firmin,

Geoffrey

the self and see clearly" (1982, 99). But, ironically enough,

able to see far beyond

case

was
the novelist
"Lowry
to the Consul,
because,

Blake,
is closed

that

the

to

rely

on

the

of Milton's

epistemology

of

representation
Satan

a second

Blake

yet who

and

the
like

distances

himself from "the absolutism of the self" which that figure promulgates (99).
12The
efficacy of Under theVolcano for inducing sympathetic participation in this
is amply

regard

the

that "puts
"four

when

he

the Volcano

to choose

Bartelby

Not

funeral.

since

ing and bullfights

their
of
tion

of

ulating,
Kafka's

"acedic
a

though
art

not

as well,

39). Richard

that what

sharing
Hauer

negative

Jake

(1972,

72). As

even

indifferent

to ethically deadly
has

the

Barnes

Stanford

the

to his

of

and

all

of

its

dif

that

of Under
Melville's

at his mother's
to

entourage

fish

good

characters so moved

us by

to Camus

s tale

response

(1989, 40). Like

us

caused

impassive
his

Lyman's

"making

doubts"

responds
four main
characters
which

is a novel

here

and
not

indicates,
appositely
own
indifference"

effect
effect

A.

one,

Costa

has a group of fictional

clerk Meursault"

for

capability
to remain

Meursault

brought

at Pamplona

Lowry's

Binns,

the uncertainties

"interweaves"

galvanic
to and Camus's

Hemingway

French

character]

of

"that

to move"

inability

the

situation

(1984,

remarks

resembles

to Ronald

According
the

into

characters"

leading

ferently

demonstrable.
reader

feel

"even
can

[the

representa

somehow

be

stim

the arch-expressionist
the

absence

of

passion

passionately," the words of Geoffrey Clives The Romantic Enlightenment (1960, 182).

CamilleLaBossi?re 179

13 "Extremes

meet"

the

heads

list

of

the

in Coleridge's

meditated

aphorisms

Aids toReflection. The illustration of that proverb with "cold performs th'effect of
fire" is recorded in The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1957, item 1725).
14 From the
letter to Joseph Cottle dated 7March 1815. Coleridge's
Coleridge
concern

is to make

here

a series

vert

who

of

for

example,

is to con

all Poems

of...
has
though

of Coleridgean-style
For additional

Ultramarine.

inspire

end

the Ouroboros

60),
(1980,
a close
reader

Melville,
helped

common

that "the
image

as in Cross

in Lowry
criticism,
as in
about
writings
low mariner

the point

a Whole."'The

into

similarly
not

been

invoked

nearly

so often

idealism
historical

a fel

and

background

(1966), which highlights Donne's Biathanatos, a treatise on suicide. For a

of
Under theVolcano as "a suicidal discourse," see Bromley (1970, 294).The
reading
see Colie

common

Spanish

name

in

for fireworks

the

of "fiery

shape

is "borra

tails"

serpents'

chos (drunks)" (Lambert 2000, 226).

15

since
"he wrestled
with
Lowry,
constantly
epistemological
of perception
and consciousness"
Iwrite
the nature
(Grace
1982,1).
since Grace
does not explicitly
refer to the perhaps
all too obviously
anal
"suggests,"
case of Emerson.
an indication
an
For
of Lowry's
substantial
with
ogous
affinity
"Philosopher"
about

questions

Emerson

likewise wrestling with

in which

Bonner,

he

that '"The possibility

observed'"

cites

44; my

(1965,

see his letter of 1942 to John Stuart

such questions,
entire

from

paragraphs

an

For

emphasis).

account

see La Bossi?re

oeuvre,

to make

Emerson

the

lies in the identity of the observer

of interpretation

in the Emerson

idealized
16

two

of

the

entrapment

solipsistic

(1989,

chap. 2).
as documented
in his Tales & Essays:
See Sterling's
diagnosis
Carlyle
. . . like
assertions
"all manner
of random
and amorphous
[which]
bursting
own
his
and
cause"
1848,
injure
reverting
Congreve-rockets,
(Sterling
Proceeding
his logic

with
of

self-contradiction:

"denies
Carlyle
not know
them
For

the books

he

. . . and

accounts

sustained

whimsical

characteristically

immediately
of Carlyle's

17 "Poor

. .. souls

18 For

Bossi?re

.Poor

to

and Emerson

himself

..

an account

own

in his

of Huxley's

acts &

crows"

letter

own

Carlyle
of answer

1.307).

By

10.550,

logic

of

the condition
qualifies
to Representative
Men
in wrestling

I do

God

343).

self-contra

(1978) and La Bossi?re

ambivalence

for

aristocrat"

purposes;

circular

makes
cannon

Carlyle

(1960-present,

in the

(1980), Harris

devils!"?so

share

cock

chides

. . . sansculotte

&

entanglement

diction, see Ikeler (1972), Baumgarten

Emerson

panache,

"covenanter-philosophe
... denies
reads
his
the

point

and the

(1990).
he

takes

in 1850.

with

acedia,

The

Aesthetics

see La

(1997,45-48).

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