‘How Can I Be Escaping From Myself When I Am Without a Place On Earth?’: Autonomy and Commitment in Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano
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2010
- 20.500.13089/5lvm
Ce document est lié à :
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13089/5k6c
Ce document est lié à :
https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm
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info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/isbn/978-2-36781-409-4
Ce document est lié à :
info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/isbn/978-2-84269-890-4
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess , https://www.openedition.org/12554
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Pascale Tollance, « ‘How Can I Be Escaping From Myself When I Am Without a Place On Earth?’: Autonomy and Commitment in Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano », Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
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Résumé
Under the Volcano may be read, as its author claimed, as ‘a political warning,’ and yet it is a novel from which no simple message can be drawn. Far from merely condemning its main character for escaping into an unreal, self-made world, the book underlines the fictionality and autonomy of all discourses. Commitment needs to be rethought in the light of this ‘fictional condition’ which invites us to consider the character’s ‘escape’ less as a denial of truth or reality than as a refusal to love. Besides, the Consul appears not just a doomed character but as a figure through which any stable vision of the world, of meaning and values is challenged. Beyond its character, the text becomes an autonomous machine which liberates meaning and transforms disintegration by making it part of a creative process. Commitment in Under the Volcano can thus be approached as a form of resistance to terror-through terror.
