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Articles

Volume 01, Number 1 (1976)

Malcolm Lowry and the Northern Tradition

  • Halvard Dahlie
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1976-01-01

Abstract

For many Canadian novelists emerging in the last twenty-five years, Canada's geography, history, and culture have been a source for creating a distinctive mythology that is unmistakably connected to the northern, the frontier, and the paradisaical aspects of Canada. Northrop Frye's The Bush Garden hinted at the emergence of such a view, and writers such as Robert Kroetsch, in Gone Indian, Margaret Atwood in Surfacing, and Leonard Cohen in Beautiful Losers, have further contributed to it. Malcolm Lowry, although an outsider, has also followed this trend, transforming the landscape of his adopted British Columbia into a mythological paradise that serves as the informing metaphor of much of his work. Although for Lowry this was a private and even selfish vision, he nevertheless succeeds in adding to the fictional possibilities of a northern tradition and developing the journey as a means for salvation or self-realization.