"Under the Volcano": the novel as psychodrama
Description
While it is generally conceded that Under the Volcano is a masterfully crafted novel, many critics contend that Malcolm Lowry was able to write only autobiographical fiction. Lowry himself was dissatisfied with the first (1940) draft of Under the Volcano, because 'the pattern didn't emerge properly.' He felt he had achieved a 'a spiritual victory,' but not 'an aesthetic one.' By a comparison of the 1940 typescript version of Under the Volcano with Claude Houghton's Julian Grant Loses His Way, a 1933 novel from which Lowry borrowed heavily, and by an analysis of Lowry's manipulation of time and method of character development in the published text of Under the Volcano, I argue that Lowry's revisions are in the direction of psychodrama, a sub-genre of the modern novel exemplified in a number of twentieth century works. Three distinctive characteristics of psychodrama emerge from this reading of Under the Volcano: a post-mortem point of view, phenomenological displacement of time, and the use of collective character. These techniques provide the basis for an approach to other innovative novels which have proved difficult for critics, specifically Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fe, and Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable By precisely defining psychodrama, and by examining in detail its characteristics in Under the Volcano, I offer a reading of the novel consistent with Lowry's claim in his 1946 letter to his British publisher, Jonathan Cape, that 'the four main characters . . (are) intended, in one of the book's meanings, to be aspects of the same man, or of the human spirit.' The human spirit, or psyche, dramatized in Under the Volcano is, I argue, that of the Consul, not Malcolm Lowry