Author Description

Malcolm Lowry's reputation as a novelist rests primarily on the masterpiece Under the Volcano. Lowry is also well known for what he did not write; that is, for his anguished inability to complete his works. Under the Volcano is one of only two novels published in Lowry's lifetime; the bulk of his writings were still in various stages of composition when he died in 1957. In Forests of Symbols, Patrick A. McCarthy addresses the central enigma of the writer's life: his dependence on writing for his sense of identity and his fear that the process of composition would leave him with no identity apart from his work. Reading across Lowry's corpus - complete and incomplete, published and unpublished - McCarthy looks not only at the ways in which acts of reading, writing, and interpretation define Lowry's characters but also the threat they pose to those characters' sense of a coherent identity. In particular, McCarthy examines the extent to which characters like the Consul, the protagonist of Under the Volcano, embody problems inseparable from the author's anxiety about his status in relation to the world around him and to the texts (his own and others') that played so great a role in his concept of his identity. According to McCarthy, the impediment to Lowry's completion of his writings stemmed from the conflicting images to continue and to finish - to keep open the infinite play of meanings and yet to create a coherent and balanced work that can have significance for others while also embodying the author's identity. These desires are present, in various forms, throughout Lowry's work. McCarthy also discusses other ways by which Lowry was victimized by his own views on life and art: his anxiety about becoming a plagiarist should he be too deeply influenced as a reader; his even greater fear of success as a hindrance to his productivity; and his concern that his life was "being written," perhaps by his own fiction. In his final revelation of Lowry as a writer caught between romantic and modernist concepts of art and the self, McCarthy examines Lowry's scheme of organizing all his writing into a single masterwork titled The Voyage That Never Ends. Considering Lowry's deep inner divisions, McCarthy judges this totalizing vision to be as heroic as it was hopeless. This major study of the writer's oeuvre engagingly addresses the paradox that has drawn readers and scholars to Lowry's life and work.