Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer
##common.pageHeaderLogo.altText##

Articles

Volume 17, Number 1 (1992)

Wrider/Espider: The Consul as Artist in Under the Volcano

  • Patrick A. McCarthy
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1992-01-01

Abstract

The plight of the artist is central to Malcolm Lowry's fiction; Under the Volcano contains numerous references to artists and artistic figures. Lowry establishes the Consul's role as artist in several related ways: the Consul's identification with writers or literary characters; his simultaneous involvement with and isolation from the world (with its consequent fragmentation and dissolution of the self); and his meagre writings -- a poem, an unmailed letter, and the unwritten book. The unwritten book highlights Lowry's theme of the instability of language and its failure as a means of salvation. The association of writing with death and entrapment is also a recurrent theme: the Consul's solipsistic reading of the world dooms him to isolation. In Lowry's view, any art not founded on the capacity to love is doomed to failure: the Consul therefore fails as an artist.