Malcolm Lowry\'s Under the Volcano:

Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano: A Postcolonial Interpretation

Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano was one of the earliest novels to describe the postcolonial condition. As a wandering expatriate writer, Lowry himself directly experienced the feeling of displacement from one's national identity - a feeling that has increasingly become the norm in a globalized and globalizing world model that is fraught with problems. In many ways, Lowry was a predecessor of the view later expressed by Hannah Arendt - that, when one is no longer a "member" of a nation-state, then that person dwells "outside the common world" (Arendt 302). Lowry's depiction of his characters also resonates with Homi K. Bhabha's conception of national identity, of those "wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse" (Bhabha 164). This paper, then, will evaluate the postcolonial themes of Lowry's work in order to show the ways in which the expatriate author anticipated postcolonial modes of thought via the modernist project.

Indeed, the expatriate experience was a major facet of the modernist project. From Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and James Jones to Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, nearly all of the significant writers of Lowry's generation dealt with this theme in their literary works. This theme was also a significant part of their lives, however. Indeed, in order to "make it new," it was viewed as necessary to detach oneself from one's native land and immerse oneself in exotic places. The resulting sense of dislocation was viewed as the key ingredient for the creation of works of art.

Lowry differs from the prototypical modernist, however, and the sense of dislocation that imbues the expatriate experience is given a markedly different treatment from that of his expatriate predecessors in Under the Volcano. The character of the Consul, who in many ways is meant to serve as an extension of Lowry himself, finds himself in a state of symbolic homelessness, as he is lacking a national identity. He ultimately becomes a victim of his own status - quite literally, when the Mexican police murder him. As Miller has noted, the Consul ultimately finds himself in a position in which he proves to be as defenseless as any undocumented alien. Despite (or perhaps because of) his efforts to transcend the constraints of national identity, he becomes, in the end, a victim of the xenophobic (and extrajudicial) violence that lurks under the apparent normativity, legality, and rationality of the sovereign nation-state (Miller 5).

The fact that Lowry deliberately set his novel in the year 1938 is also significant. From a geopolitical perspective, this was the time when the threat of fascism's triumph in Spain was reverberating throughout the Western world. This certainly includes that isolated stretch of Mexico wherein Under the Volcano takes place. What is more, the first chapter of the book looks at the events of 1938 from the perspective of the year 1939, shortly after the Second World War has begun. Thus, the set of war, and the simultaneous strengthening and dissolution of national boundaries that comes with it, serves as the backdrop to Lowry's novel.

On a local level, this violence is extended via the characters of the corrupt local police force. They are merely emblematic of the violence occurring on a massive scale in the larger world. By the time we reach the final chapter of Under the Volcano, it becomes clear that the police serve as key figures in an allegory that is not merely local, but about things that are happening in a larger geopolitical context. In one famous scene in the book, the Consul finds himself alone and drunk in a bar that a host of disreputable characters frequent - including the corrupt local police force. He is then harassed by the Chief of Rostrums: "Where your papers? What for you have no papers?... Where your passaporte? What need for you to make disguise?" (Lowry 370). In response, the Consul appropriates the modernist writer's stance as a subject with no fixed identity - a traveler on a constant road of adventure that is merely there to transmute that adventure into art. The Consul attempts to convey that he is a writer named William Blackstone - and hence, not a threat to Mexican national sovereignty. But the Mexican authorities have no respect or understanding of the modernist's plight. They still feel the pangs of territorial appropriation, the constraints of being a victim of the colonial project: "You are no a de writer," the Chief responds, "you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Mejico" (Lowry 371). Thus, the police in the cafe are not merely symbolic of fascism - they are fascists themselves. The logic of state-based nationalism, as depicted by Lowry in this scene and throughout Under the Volcano, thus serves as a metaphor for the postcolonial desire for states to assert their sovereignty while still under colonial pressure.

From a contemporary perspective, one cannot help but consider Under the Volcano from a post-9/11 standpoint. In an era when the borderlands between the United States and Mexico are once again the scene of tremendous controversy, and the American national identity is being asserted in the wake of such threats as terrorism, the threats proffered by Lowry's text seem to be a chilling reminder of the constant possibility of violence. Of course, the conditions that the United States - and Mexico - not to mention Canada, where Lowry lived for a long time (to the extent that he is often considered a Canadian writer, despite the fact that he was British) - currently finds itself in are linked to colonial and postcolonial circumstances. Canada was formerly known as British North America, while Mexico became the victim of appropriation of large stretches of land by the United States not long after becoming liberated from Spain.

Acutely aware of these circumstances, Lowry put himself in the "dangerous" position of observing America from (geographically) marginal viewpoints - isolated parts of Mexico and the southern coast of British Columbia. This engagement with marginal areas entails an ultimate rejection of all forms of national identity, as we can make out in Under the Volcano. The ultimate message of Under the Volcano, then, is an endorsement of what Spivak terms "planetarity," rather than "globalization." The latter term implies means of control over human beings that is ultimately rooted in a hegemonic promotion of values. "Planetarity," on the other hand, attempts the address the ways in which human beings exist as "planetary subjects rather than global agents" (Spivak 73).