AND MIGUEL MOTA LANE EDITED BY RICHARD J. Malcolm Lowry’s Poetics of Space offers new and controversial readings that seek to readdress Lowry’s masterpiece Under the Volcano and many of his MALCOLM Lowry’S other writings. With contributions by international Lowry scholars, the collection focuses on Lowry’s spatial dynamics and engages with the P notion of Lowry as a multi-media artist who influenced and was deeply OETICS influenced by a broad range of modernist and postmodernist aesthetic practices. OF Space Acutely aware of the world of film and deeply immersed in a vast range of literary traditions and the avant-garde, Lowry worked within an inter- textual space that transgressed aesthetic boundaries. Malcolm Lowry’s Poetics of Space offers a new approach to the author’s life and work that EDITED BY RICHARD J. LANE AND MIGUEL MOTA will undoubtedly inspire a fresh debate. MALCOLM LOWRY’S POETICS OF SPACE MALCOLM LOWRY’S Richard J. Lane is Professor of English at Vancouver Island University, BC. He directs the Seminar for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Literary Theory Research Group at VIU, where he is also the principal investigator of the MeTA Digital Humanities Lab. Lane is also a director of Innovation Island Technology Association, as well as an Associated Researcher at The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. Miguel Mota is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. In addition to his work on Lowry, Mota has published in the areas of contemporary British literature and culture and on the relationship between literature and film, including articles on Jeanette Winterson, John King, Mike Leigh, Derek Jarman, and Peter Greenaway. ISBN 978-0-7766-2340-5 Page left blank intentionally 0059_Poetics_of_Space_5.5x8_ES_01_vs04_September30_2016.indd 2 2016-09-30 6:17 AM Malcolm Lowry’s Poetics of Space 0059_Poetics_of_Space_5.5x8_ES_01_vs04_September30_2016.indd 1 2016-09-30 6:17 AM Page left blank intentionally 0059_Poetics_of_Space_5.5x8_ES_01_vs04_September30_2016.indd 2 2016-09-30 6:17 AM Malcolm Lowry’s Poetics of Space — Edited by richard j. lane and miguel mota University of Ottawa Press | OTTAWA 0059_Poetics_of_Space_5.5x8_ES_01_vs04_September30_2016.indd 3 2016-09-30 6:17 AM The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Copy editing: Robbie McCaw Proofreading: Marionne Cronin Layout: CS Cover design: Édiscript enr. Cover image: Dollarton, North Vancouver, still image from After Lowry: A Film Essay Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Malcolm Lowry’s poetics of space / edited by Richard J Lane and Miguel Mota. (Canadian literature collection) Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7766-2340-5 (paperback).--ISBN 978-0-7766-2341-2 (PDF).-- ISBN 978-0-7766-2342-9 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-0-7766-2343-6 (MOBI) 1. Lowry, Malcolm, 1909-1957--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Space in literature. I. Mota, Miguel, editor II. Lane, Richard J., 1966-, editor III. Series: Canadian literature collection PS8523.O96Z7644 2016 C813’.52 C2016-906249-X C2016-906250-3 © University of Ottawa Press, 2016 Printed in Canada by Gauvin Press 0059_Poetics_of_Space_5.5x8_ES_01_vs04_September30_2016.indd 4 2016-09-30 6:17 AM Contents introduction Richard J. Lane and Miguel Mota 1 . i situating under the volcano 1: Under the Volcano . the Beach: Malcolm Lowry and the Situationists 13 Mark Goodall 2: Lowry, Sebald, and the Coincidental Landscape 31 Laurence Piercy 3: Lowry and Jakobson: Spatial Pyrotechnics and Poetic Writing in Under the Volcano 45 Christine Vandamme 4: Pathologies of Knowledge: David Markson, Under the Volcano, and the Experience of Thought 61 Mathieu Duplay 5: Phantom Priapusspuss: The Phantom-Dog Tradition in Under the Volcano 71 Charles Hoge . ii the spatial dynamics of sight and sound 6: Spectatorial Bodies and the Everyday Spaces of Cinema 87 Paul Tiessen 7: Projecting the Volcano: The Possibilities of Margerie Bonner Lowry’s Film Proposal 101 W. M. Hagen 8: Soundscapes in Lunar Caustic 113 Ailsa Cox 0059_Poetics_of_Space_5.5x8_ES_01_vs04_September30_2016.indd 5 2016-09-30 6:17 AM 9: Dwelling In-Between: Rituals and Jazz as Reconcilable Opposites in “The Forest Path to the Spring” 129 Catherine Delesalle 10: The Expressionist Gaze in the Psychic Space of Under the Volcano 145 Josiane Paccaud-Huguet . iii charting the human landscape 11: From Liverpool to Eridanus in the Twinkling of an Eye 161 Annick Drösdal-Levillain 12: Outgrowing the Alienating Inscape? The Voyage Out in October Ferry to Gabriola 175 Pierre Schaeffer 13: The Path to Translation: Ex-isting and Becoming in the Divinely Grotesque Comedy of “Elephant and Colosseum” 191 Pascale Tollance 14: Placing Agency in the Cultural Landscapes of La Mordida 205 Ryan Rashotte 15: The Poetics of Exposed, Irreparable Space in Lunar Caustic; or, Reading Lowry Through Agamben 221 Richard J. Lane . coda After Lowry: A Film Essay 237 Miguel Mota . contributors 239 0059_Poetics_of_Space_5.5x8_ES_01_vs04_September30_2016.indd 6 2016-09-30 6:17 AM Introduction richard j. lane and miguel mota iven that Malcolm Lowry saw himself not only as a writer of words, but also as being written by those words, it is hardly surprising that Lowry Gcriticism has always drawn strong connections between Lowry’s writ- ing and his life. Even aside from the two substantial and influential biographies in the conventional sense (by Douglas Day, in 1973, and Gordon Bowker, in 1993), much of the scholarly criticism involving Lowry has had the hint of the biographical about it, even when the principal approach has been formalist or post-structuralist. The most important recent collection of critical essays on Lowry (Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen’s A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century, 2000), though clearly encouraging a new, postmodernist reading of Lowry, nevertheless begins with an implicit acknowl- edgment of the central place of biography in critical approaches to Lowry’s work: “His habit of personal mythmaking sometimes obscured with its transforma- tions what (in so far as it could be determined) had actually occurred, but even when Lowry’s own fictions were penetrated, dark areas remained, incidents, even periods, wholly or partially mysterious” (11). For its part, Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey’s Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, published in 2009 to celebrate the centenary of Lowry’s birth, offers a suggestively hybrid collection of personal reminiscences, scholarly pieces, fiction, and photographic repro- ductions of visual works that, while acknowledging the impossibility of fully doing so, nevertheless seeks to “place” Lowry by addressing the geographical, psychological, and creative “voyaging” undertaken by the author throughout his life. This search for the “mystery” of the life in the work is perhaps inescapable, given the extent to which Lowry turned himself, and has subsequently been turned by others, into a “textual” being. It is perhaps equally unsurprising that such a connection between “textuality” and “identity” wrought such anxiety through- out Lowry’s life and work. Sherrill Grace’s early assessment of Lowry as “Ortega [y Gasset]’s man in the process of creating (as opposed to finding) his identity through the creation of masks” (Voyage 102) resonates in Patrick McCarthy’s later insistence that “for Lowry, writing was both his life and a threat to his life: although he seems to have assumed that he could discover or define his identity 0059_Poetics_of_Space_5.5x8_ES_01_vs04_September30_2016.indd 1 2016-09-30 6:17 AM 2 Malcolm Lowry’s Poetics of Space only through writing, he also feared that the process of composition would leave him without any identity apart from the work” (Forests 4). The question becomes, then, not how to extricate Lowry’s writing from his life—for that is surely an impossible, perhaps even undesirable, task, the two being so ingrained—but, rather, how to create a critical space within which the relations between writing and life can be both materially located and given imaginative play. One possibility is to see space itself as a category capable of such mobility. In his essay “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault suggests that if the “great obsession” of the nineteenth century was history, then that of the twentieth was space: “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (Foucault 22). Yet, as Foucault himself insists, space has a history and is impli- cated in various historical discursive practices and relations: The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (23) How to situate Malcolm Lowry in space, then, given that “space” can mean so much to so many, produced as it is by a seemingly infinite web of relations— especially in an age when the virtual increasingly challenges the material as the place of the imagination? In her article “The Creative Process: An Introduction to Time and Space in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction,” Grace writes intriguingly of Lowry’s “fear of space”: Just as Lowry cannot be fully appreciated without prior knowledge of his voyage theories, those theories cannot be understood without an aware- ness of Lowry’s reverence for time and his fear of space.