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Notes on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano
Martin H. Fulmer
Professor Jeff Parker
Packet 2
March 15, 2012
Notes on Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
--Set in Mexico, south of Mexico City. Third person omniscient narration. Refers to the city, Cuernavaca, as “Quauhnahuac” (3), known as the city of eternal spring.
--Lowry uses the volcanoes like Barth uses metafiction, as a way to pattern this narrative with meaningful repetitions, as The Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, stumbles drunk through Q, seeing the volcanoes repeatedly until finally at the end he hallucinates climbing to the top of Popocatepetl and falling in even as it erupts, when actually he falls into the ravine, another fixture of the novel that Lowry uses to help in pattern and unify the narrative, so that as the novel ends, Geoffrey Firmin falls to his doom and “Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine” (391).
--At first, the reader is confused by the first chapter. The first chapter centers around Dr. Vigil and M. Jacques Laruelle as they leave the Casino exactly one year to the day after The Consul’s death. Thus Chapter 1 opens “on the Day of the Dead in November, 1939” (4), while chapter 2 and the rest of the chapters occur on the Day of the Dead in November, 1938 (46). See also, “what had happened just a year ago to-day seemed already to belong in a different age” (5).
--Another fixture of the novel that is repeated and used to help pattern the narrative is the movie poster Las Manos de Orlac. Con Peter Lorre (63). Also, the boxing poster, often they are paired together.
--Hugh is “twenty-nine” and Laruelle is “forty-two” (9).
--Consul and Laruelle were childhood friends and met during the “Taskerson days.” The Consul was an “Anglo-Indian orphan, a broody creature of fifteen, so shy and yet so curiously self-contained, who wrote poetry that old Taskerson apparently encouraged him with, and who sometimes burst out crying if you mentioned in his presence the word ‘father’ or ‘mother’” (17), when Laruelle first came to the states from France.
--Yvonne has had affairs with Laruelle and Hugh, Geoffrey’s younger brother. Hugh’s story is told as a bildungsroman right in the middle of this novel. Though the Consul wants Yvonne back desperately, he barely interacts with her when she does come back. The fact she comes back surprises Laruelle (or was it Dr. Vigil), and the Consul’s drinking manages to alienate him from Yvonne despite the willingness to reconcile by both parties. G was known as “The Old Bean” back then in Taskerson days (17).
--The events on the S.S. Samaritan, “a steamer bound from Shanghai to Newcastle, New South Wales, with a cargo of antimony and quicksilver and wolfram” (33), when it encounters a submarine whose party boards G’s ship and is captured and maybe burned in the furnace at G’s orders. G is kind of mysterious about the whole thing so that an air of uncertainty as to whether he did or did not order the burning hangs over the whole story.
--Falling motif also patterns and unifies the novel, “the words themselves slanting steeply downhill” (36).
--“You like the garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy!” (135).
--Chapter 6 is Hugh’s bildungsroman, I think, “he was twenty-nine” (157).
--Hugh is a singer-songwriter and has some success but then goes sailing and comes back forgotten and humiliated that his publicity stunt backfired.
--“Do you like this garden, the notice said, that is yours? See to it that your children do not destroy it!” (243), calls into question G’s earlier reading.
--in Chapter 8, G et al encounter a dead body while riding the bus to Oaxaca. There is also a pelado who takes the corpse’s hat and replaces it “with hands now blotched with half-dried blood” (254), makes another connection with the Peter Lorre poster.
--Chapter 10 sees G drink mescal despite his earlier assertion that he wouldn’t drink mescal.
--A brief summary of events, “he saw dimly too how Yvonne’s arrival, the snake in the garden, his quarrel with Laruelle and later with Hugh and Yvonne, the infernal machine, the encounter with Senora Gregorio, the finding of the letters, and much beside, how all the events of the day indeed had been as indifferent tufts of grass he had half-heartedly clutched at or stones loosed on his downward flight, which were still showering on him from above” (377).
Notes on The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Martin H. Fulmer
Professor Jeff Parker
Packet 2
March 15, 2012
Notes on The Moviegoer
--five parts that span a week in the life of thirty year old Binx Bolling right around mardi gras. First part has seven chapters, second part has twelve, third part has seven, fourth part has four chapters, and fifth part has but two chapters and is followed by an epilogue. I’m not sure I see how wp arrived at this design….
--Binx is a bachelor who asks his cousin to marry him. She’s his step-cousin, his uncle’s daughter and his blood aunt’s step-daughter, an emotionally troubled young woman named Kate. Binx and his aunt are constantly plotting behind Kate’s back how they can save her from herself. Even while Binx toys with the idea of marrying Kate, he’s seeing his secretary, which he’s done with other secretaries of his in the past. There was Linda, for instance, now there is Sharon. Sharon is from Alabama.
--The Moviegoer involves pop culture references and the narrative wanders in a way that reminds me of Under the Volcano. Binx is, of course, more sober than the Consul, but he leads a life validated by his identification cards that certify his right to exist, so to speak (check this reference—it needs citation—I’m paraphrasing, I think, but it’s close to the original). He later admires “the St. Louisan for his neat and well-ordered life, his gold pencil and his scissors-knife and his way of clipping articles on the convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences; it comes over me that in the past few days my own life has gone to seed” (191). He continues to say, “I no longer eat and sleep regularly or write philosophical notes in my notebook and my finger-nails are dirty. The search has spoiled the pleasure of my tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly. As late as a week ago, such a phrase as ‘hopefully awaiting the gradual convergence of they physical sciences and the social sciences’ would have provoked no more than an ironic tingle or two at the back of my neck. Now it howls through the Ponchitoula Swamp, the very sound and soul of despair” (191). Several of the pop culture refs are to movie stars and various movies like Orson Wells’ The Third Man, which is a killer flick.
--Binx fought in the war and was wounded. When he was shot, he had the idea of the search. Now he tries to keep to the search as a way of staving off the malaise, which is a term Binx uses to describe his alienation.
--Sounds like Nietzche, or Edward Abbey, when Kate says, “They all think any minute I’m going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I’m as cheerful as a nit-wit. But if I could not kill myself—ah then, I would. I can do without Nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide” (195).
--Binx says, “marry me anyhow, and we can still walk abroad on a summer night, hope or no hope, shivering or not, and see a show and eat some oysters down on Magazine” (194), but Kate says, “No no” (ibid).
--I don’t believe Binx when he says, “Ten years ago I pursued beauty and gave no thought to money. I listened to the lovely tunes of Mahler and felt a sickness in my very soul. Now I pursue money and on the whole feel better” (196).
--Awesome line, “The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he mangages to sin like a proper human” (200).
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