Malcolm Lowry in the fall of the Empire

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to offer a reading of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano focused on the importance of modern history and the presence of the British Empire in the narration of the last day of Geoffrey Firmin. Following Edward Said’s notion of a “contrapuntal reading” of canonical texts, my view is that being an Anglo-Indian, the (British) Consul lacks a sense of belonging in regard to a British identity. He lives, therefore, both in a interstitial and a liminar situation which anticipates the breaking up between a sense of national identity and a sense of imperial identity, which constitutes, in fact, one of the main subjects in contemporary theoretical studies about identity (especially in Postcolonial Studies). From this point of view, the current interpretation breaks with a very common reading of the novel in which Mexico is just seen as an “infernal paradise”, an image which has perpetuated a degrading stereotype of the country, even in some serious critical studies about the author.