Review: Under the Volcano
Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between the gloomy nations,
Swelling, belching from its deeps red clouds & raging Fires.
Albion is sick America faints! enrag'd the Zenith grew.
As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven
Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o'er the Atlantic sea;
Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace: his terrible limbs were fire
With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers
Surrounded; heat but not light went thro' the murky atmosphere
—William Blake, America A Prophecy
“And as we stand looking all at once comes the wash of another unseen ship, like a great wheel, the vast spokes of the wheel whirling across the bay —” —Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Spoilers ahead.
On January 23, 1933, as it had many times before, one of Mexico's most active volcanoes, Popocatépetl, erupted. Nearby Ixtaccíhuatl, its twin volcanic mountain, lay long dormant. El Popo, as it is known, has figured in Mexican folklore since pre-Columbian times. The Nahuas formed several myths and legends about the peaks, which intertwine their fates through the lenses of love and loss, but also recount Popocatépetl's many eruptions. In most of these legends, Popocatépetl is an angry warrior grieving the death of his lover. He is the active volcano, the smoking mountain, and she is the dormant volcano or the sleeping woman in Nahuatl parlance.
Six years and nine months later, on the Day of the Dead (herein November 2) 1939, Malcolm Lowry situates us beneath these storied peaks, in the town of Quauhnahuac, or Cuernavaca. The story opens with a conversation between M. Jacques Laruelle and Dr. Arturo Díaz Vigil. They are discussing their mutual friend? acquaintance? the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, who met with a tragic end the year before, as well as his wife Yvonne and his half-brother Hugh. Like all who experience or witness such tragedies, they trade their many incredulities and speculate about what they could have done to prevent it, even as other events in the world threaten to sweep away the memory.
At its root, Under the Volcano is a story of dichotomies, of irreconcilable duality. The characters map to one and then the other at various times, but always roiling beneath the surface is the (self) destructive urge of mann (or ᛗ), something akin to Eliot's shadow, what falls “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act”. A cloud hangs over our characters: each at war within themselves, and each at war with one another. Lowry takes us through each devastating moment throughout the course of that day to watch a tragedy unfold along a trajectory that is as unavoidable as it is historically contingent. At every turn these warring dualities hold a silent mirror to the dissolving world order in ways that remain relevant and resonant. Especially today.
Structurally, the work is beholden to Ulysses, with its focus on a singular day. Lowry's day is compressed into 12 hours, with each chapter covering roughly one hour. This is also a nod to Homer, Virgil, and Milton. Though dense, the prose itself falls at times into a metrical rhythm, and so we can best understand this as an epic poem in blank verse, a fever dream of stream-of-consciousness through the lens of alcohol, especially mescal. Except for a few solid strands, it isn't important to grasp the inundation of language and layers and meanings that tug at one another with cross-purposes. There is a plot, but we already know the end. Lowry's goal seems less to impart a coherent order of events than to lead the reader through the psychological state of a man who will surely die. Read it once to let the words wash over you. A subsequent re-read may reveal more.
The central character, around whom the others orbit, is the Consul. Geoffrey Firmin, whose British Consulate post has been abolished via a breakdown in diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Mexico, is and has long been an alcoholic by the time we meet him on November 2, 1938. This is the last day he will live. The weight of his choices presses in on him, and later in the day he prophesies his own death. “Ah, ignoratio elenchi,” he says during one of his final tirades. “Can't you see there's a sort of determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.” By this point Lowry has revealed through confusion, unsteadiness, and hallucinations that Geoffrey suffers from delirium tremens (DTs), often brought about by his attempts to refrain from alcohol. He knows and admits, while simultaneously denying, that he has a problem. His alcoholism must at least in part be responsible for the dissolution of his marriage with Yvonne, who seems to have sought comfort with M. Laruelle. She, in fact, had left him the year before only to return on this day to seek reconciliation. Geoffrey is the first and most fundamental dichotomy: there is sober Geoffrey, now long dormant, and there is drunk Geoffrey, self-destructively active.
Mirrored outwards, Geoffrey's relationships each with Yvonne, Hugh, M. Laruelle, and even Dr. Vigil are their own dichotomies. Yvonne/Geoffrey are the lover/loser, Hugh/Geoffrey are the idealist/cynic, Laruelle/Geoffrey represent the temperate/intemperate, and Vigil/Geoffrey represent health/illness. They are of course false dichotomies because there is, in Geoffrey's view, only one outcome in each. The tyranny of determinism has extinguished all other paths so that the only choice remaining is self-annihilation. Yvonne came back, but she will leave again, because Geoffrey will drive her away. Hugh will if necessary die for his ideals while Geoffrey will die for his lack of them. And Geoffrey has cut himself off from the possibility of either temperance or health. The fault lines are already under strain, and the volcanic forces within him will permit no other end. He will erupt.
But there are other dichotomous mirrors here. The Consul, in his official capacity, had been a representative of the United Kingdom in Mexico. In 1938, when Lázaro Cárdenas ordered the expropriation of all oil companies in Mexico, the United Kingdom suspended diplomatic relations, leaving Geoffrey jobless if he were to remain in Mexico. Similarly, the situation in Europe was deteriorating. That same year the Second Spanish Republic launched an offensive from Ebro against the forces of the Spanish State under Franco, which it would eventually lose. Hitler's Anschluss and pressed claims on the Sudetenland also presaged the coming storm, much of which was in full force by the opening of the novel in 1939. The eruption in Europe had already begun.
Geoffrey Firmin's last hour takes place in a bar, the Farolito. This we have come to expect. He has fully capitulated to his addiction, and he knows with the foresight of self-fulfilling prophecy that Yvonne will not come back to him. It is still the Day of the Dead, a fact that had remained in the background for much of the novel. But as the Fiesta moves from graveside processions to the bars, the Farolito fills up with revelers, including several public officials who begin to suspect him of being a thief, a murderer, a Jew, a spy, and/or an American. His permanently drunken state leaves him ill equipped to fend off any such accusations. His drunken ramblings speculating on the fate of the Indigenous man who died outside El Amor de los Amores on the way to Tomalín either implicate him or the policeman.
Lowry presents, through prose that is dense, cerebral, and at times delirious, an acute documentary of the decline and fall of a man in the specific, and of ᛗ writ large. Painted against the backdrop of the looming Second World War, the parallels are stark. Historians have offered multiple causes for the War. Lowry offers this singular, metaphorical collapse, which amalgamates most or all of those causes and spearpoints them into one man. It is as good a starting place as any. This is no Christ, but he will suffer for the sins of the world nonetheless, and rather than spare us the same misfortune, when he inevitably erupts, Geoffrey Firmin will take us down with him. In Geoffrey's death, we have our final dichotomy: Christ/Antichrist. Caught out in a lie, bearing papers that apparently belong to Hugh, one of the officials present in the bar, the Chief of Rostrums, admonishes him, “Wrider? You antichrista. Si, you antichrista prik.”
We can't be certain what happened to Yvonne and Hugh. Yvonne's final chapter appears to lead to her death as well. Hugh had intended to travel on to Spain to fight with the Republicans, but Lowry leaves us with no closure there either. It is likely, given the theme, that Geoffrey Firmin's death did, indeed, destroy those close to him, like an eruption of Popocatépetl. Laruelle and Vigil have escaped the damage. In the larger panoply, of course we know that some will escape and others will not. But even those who do escape must confront the ruin left behind.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed
Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron