The Making of Malcolm Lowry's ‘Under the Volcano’ by Frederick Asals (review)

538 LETTERS IN CANADA 1997 The second development is a matter of heuristic generalization. By distinguishing the features proper to cognitional operations in this or that special field from the features conunon to those in every field, one moves from heuristically characterizing the respective contents that mathematicians , physicists, sociologists, and so on seek to know (namely, reality as mathematical, physical, sociological, and so on) to heuristically characterizing what everyone at least implicitly seeks to know (namely, reality as such). That is to say, we are all metaphysicians, in fact if not in name; the findings of explicit metaphysics stand to the findings of the other disciplines as the heuristically general content stands to heuristically special contents; and the ground of explicit metaphysics is knowledge of the general features of oneself as concrete knower. The third development is a matter of practical integration. Further selfstudy manifests that in academic disciplines, just as everywhere else, we encounter objects not simply as knowers but also as choosers. We are oriented not only to know the real but also to know and choose the really good. Moreover, the latter orientation presupposes, subsumes, and transforms the former. Hence our basic horizon is practical rather than merely cognitional; philosophy is metaphysics but even more basically it is ethics; and the ground of explicit philosophy is knowledge of the general features of oneself not just as concrete knower but even more fundamentally as concrete chooser. Flanagan presents this essentially Socratic claim by expounding it positively, by suggesting how various philosophical problems are rooted in incomplete or incorrect self-knowledge, and by illustrating both the positive and problematic elements through frequent recourse to the histories of selected special disciplines (notably mathematics, physics, biology, and psychology) and the history of philosophy. His eight chapters proceed by addressing more or less sequentially the topics of Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), Lonergan's largest and best-known work; but they also give important supplementary attention to Method in Theology (1972). Taken collectively, these chapters constitute a stimulating and reliable introduction to Lonergan and, more broadly, to the fundamental philosophical issues on which Lonergan himself spent a lifetime of devoted labour. (MICHAEL VERTIN) Frederick Asals. The Making ofMalcolm Lowry's 'Under the Volcano' University of Georgia Press. x, 476. us$85.00 Chapter 9 of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano concludes with the vision of 'an old lame Indian' carrying on his back 'the weight of the past': literally, 'another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than himself'; symbolically, the burden of Mexican history. Under the Volcano might also HUMANITIES 539 be said to carry the weight of its own past, the many drafts that preceded the 'final' published text of 1947 ('final' in quotation marks because years after its publication Lowry did notconsider Under the Volcano quite finished and planned further revisions). There was actually only one earlier complete draft, a 1940 typescript that was rejected by a dismayingly large number of publishers before Lowry withdrew it and began revising steadily nntil mid-1945, when he finally mailed off the manuscript again, with minor revisions continuing after the book's acceptance. But Lowry wrote numerous intermediate drafts of individual chapters or passages, and although a significant amount of manuscript evidence has been lost (including most of the pre-1940 material), so much remains that the sheer amount of textual evidence might well prove daunting to scholars intent on following the book's development between 1940 and 1947. Luckily Frederick Asals has been undeterred by this embarrassment of textual riches. Patiently reading through the manuscripts year after year and taking voluminous notes was only part of his job, since the question remains: what to do with all of this? How to organize a description of Lowry's revisions when that process did not take a consistent or easily summarized form? For Lowry did not work straight through his manuscript , revising sequentially from the latest draft; typically~ he worked on severalchapters at once and often consulted earlier drafts of a passage, with the result that passages excised from one draft might appear in a future draft, their function perhaps altered as he found a new means of using material...