Malcolm Lowry's Memory Machine: An Eclectic Systeme

In Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, the death of British Consul Geoffrey Firmin figures the disarticulation of Lowry's culture under the pressure of imperial decline, ascendant fascism, postcolonial nationalism, and the erosion of traditional gender roles. Lowry writes as though the events with which the novel is concerned resist coherent narrative representation. The most severe symptom of this crisis of representation is the deterioration of subjectivity as a cultural norm. The effects of this crisis can be seen most clearly in the novel's temporal structure, which both promises that memory can restore subjectivity to a central position and undermines this promise by showing memory to be a product of socio-cultural mechanisms rather than individual cognitive activity. Lowry reworks narrative discourse to assert a materialist understanding of textual production in which texts, authors, readers, and socio-cultural structures both produce and are produced by a interlocking network of machines.