Because Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano is so stunning and powerful a depiction of alcoholism, the fact that the novel is much more than that is sometimes forgotten. In his 1965 introduction to the novel, which is included in the 1971 Lippincott version, Stephen Spender tells us, quoting Conrad Knickerbocker, that "Lowry at first saw Under the Volcano not so much as a novel as ‘a sort of mighty if preposterous moral deed of some sort,’ testifying to an underlying toughness of fibre or staying power" (Spender, p. xxvii). Indeed, in demonstrating his toughness of fibre, Lowry has created in Under the Volcano a rich and complex novel about history, politics and political intrigue, literary recapitulation and homage, journey, myth and ritual, autobiography, sexual inadequacy and infidelity, alienation and despair, and alcoholism. Perhaps the weight of those other elements makes the alcoholism of the main character if not justified at least understandable. As Spender writes: "For those who seek it out, the clinical history of the Consul’s longing for companionship, fear of sex, deeply idealistic puritanism, rejection of the world, and suppressed homosexual tendency, is embedded in the narrative" (Spender, p. xiii).

But it is not just subject matter but also form that makes Under the Volcano a difficult read. As W. M. Hagen notes, "The plot unfolds and gains density through a technique of multiple consciousness, changing point of view in each chapter [through a kind of limited omniscience] and using many ... stream of consciousness techniques" (Hagen, p. 139). Thus, a film-maker adapting Under the Volcano is faced with not just making sure that the story of the originating factor in the novel makes it to the receiving factor in the film but with ensuring that the elements of history, politics and political intrigue, literary recapitulation and homage, journey, myth and ritual, autobiography, sexual inadequacy and infidelity, alienation and despair, and alcoholism of the mighty and preposterous deed that is the novel are also represented in the film, a near-impossibility. The novel contains such a breadth and depth of references and allusions as to make it nearly unreadable except by the sturdiest and most tenacious of readers. Such complexity and density seldom appear in commercial films of more or less standard length. That is, the literary ambitions of the novel far outweigh its rather lean plot. And so this film re-presents a classical question in adaptation, that is, how to represent the interior nature of some novels in the exterior representations of the cinema.

Although Chapter 1 of the twelve-chapter novel serves as a prologue done as a flashback, the bulk of the novel, Chapter 2 through Chapter 12, takes place in the space of about 12 hours on the Day of the Dead, November 1, 1938, in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. The main characters are:

The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that "A corpse will be transported by express!" (Lowry, Volcano p. 43). She and Geoffrey leave the bar, and on the return to his house, she learns that Jacques is still there in Quauhnahuac and that Hugh is there, too, staying with the Consul. This news is painful to Yvonne because she has had brief affairs with both Hugh and Jacques. Their presence reminds her not only of her infidelities but of the reason that caused them, that is, the Consul’s alcoholism.

At the house, the Consul continues to drink, even as Yvonne and Hugh alternately implore him not to and then acquiesce to his drinking. After spending some time at Jacques’s house and at the festival for the Day of the Dead in Quauhnahuac, the Consul, Yvonne, and Hugh take a bus to the nearby town of Tomalin to attend the bull-riding. On the way, they encounter a Mexican peasant on the side of the road who has been mortally wounded under ill-defined but suspicious circumstances; they can do nothing for the unfortunate man as right-wing paramilitaries intervene.

At the bull-riding, the Consul runs away after having confronted Yvonne and Hugh with his knowledge of their affair. He visits a series of cantinas, heading ultimately for El Farolito, the Little Lighthouse, one of his favorite cantinas, where he, too, is killed by fascist thugs. The gunshots that kill the Consul frighten a horse which bolts. It runs a short distance away where it tramples and kills Yvonne, who with Hugh has been searching for the Consul. All of this transpires under the seemingly eternal watch of the two volcanoes Poppocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, all of this in a single day.

As a novel of history, Under the Volcano is set at a particular time and in a particular place. The bulk of the novel is set on November 1, 1938. In the ten or so years prior to that time, the world had seen the Great Depression, the Japanese invasions of Manchuria and other parts of China, the Rape of Nanking, Hindenberg’s appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany and a re-militarized Germany, the Italian invasions of Ethiopia and Somalia, and most recently, the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi Anschluss of Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

In defiance of these rightward shocks, there was in Mexico an openly socialistic government under President Cardenas, the first progressive since Benito Juarez, the previous seventy years having been filled with corruption, embezzlement, and exploitation of the peasants for the enrichment of the very few, mostly well-connected landowners and capitalists and the politicians they bribe. Cardenas’s reform politics seized huge tracts of land from the wealthy and redistributed it to peasants, revivifying an old tradition that provided farm land for peasants in the form of "the ejido, a tract of common land for a village" that was financed by the national government (Edmonds, p. 77).

The Cardenas government also nationalized foreign holdings in the Mexican petroleum industry. This and other actions caused the British government to sever diplomatic relations with Mexico inasmuch as British companies were among the largest foreign owners of the Mexican petroleum industry. These and other socialist policies by the government also antagonized the Mexican upper class. Moreover, there was sympathy among the Mexican aristocracy for the Phalangists in Spain, the Nazis in Germany, and the Fascists in Italy; and the interest went in both directions. Mexico would give the Nazis a foothold in the Americas, and so right-wing extremist groups flourished (Edmonds, pp. 78-79). Moreover, instability and growing fascism in Mexico would require the United States to redirect some of its attention there, diluting its inevitable efforts in Europe, making an Allied victory more difficult, a strategic reality that Edmonds curiously misses. With the gathering militarism and political unrest in the world, the weight of all this history bears down upon the characters of Under the Volcano, shaping their lives, putting them into the situations in which they find themselves. This sense of world history falls most especially on the Consul, a man of culture and education, a failed poet, so sensitive that his failure gives him at least one reason among his many for drinking heavily. Literary critic Michael Cripps explains:

But that is not entirely true. While it may be accurate that Firmin is a quietist, his quietism is a passive attitude towards life that he achieves only by actively drinking, drinking actively, drinking heavily, behavior which is not quite the quietism of a Gandhi but more the anxious and self-destructive quietism of a non-violent and sexually inadequate poet who seeks not to accept the world or to change it through non-violent protest but to anesthetize himself against it for fear of what his inadequate response to the world might be. Moreover, it is at least partly because of his drinking—and the meandering but exhortative internal conversations that he has with himself and the lectures that he delivers while deeply in his cups—that we know that this history, the tragic history of the world, bears so heavily down upon him and causes him so much pain. In a sense, Firmin stands in for an everyman who is aware at the end of the 1930s of the likelihood of war but can do nothing about it. History gives him this knowledge but prevents him from taking any actions to forestall it.

But we also know that Geoffrey Firmin’s personal history bears down heavily upon him as well. The present for Firmin is dependent wholly on the past. Chapter 1 is all about history, mostly Firmin’s personal history, reminding us of the way in which the past shapes the present. As Jacques Laruelle remembers the events of that previous Day of the Dead, we are reminded that history bears down upon people and shapes their lives and the events that surround them with no regard for those people’s wishes. From Laruelle’s reminiscences, we learn that Firmin was born in India. He is an orphan. His Hindustani mother died when he was a child. His English father remarried and fathered a second son, Hugh, with his second wife. But his father disappeared, apparently voluntarily, into the Himalayas when Geoffrey was about twelve and Hugh was an infant, and soon thereafter the stepmother died, too, and so the boys were brought up separately by different sets of their father’s relatives in England. As a teenager, Geoffrey having showed some talent as a poet, was sent to live with his distant relative, "cousin" Abraham Taskerson, a famous English poet, and his family, consisting largely of "the other Taskerson Boys—at least six, mostly older and, it would appear all of a tougher breed, though they were in fact collateral relatives of young Geoffrey Firmin—[who] tended to band together and leave the lad alone" (Lowry, Volcano pp. 16-17). Young Geoffrey was so affected by his parents’ leaving him alone in the world that he "would sometimes burst out crying if you mentioned in his presence the word ‘father’ or ‘mother’" (Lowry, Volcano p. 16). So the Consul’s young life was measured in tragic loss of parents and in personal isolation.

We know further that Firmin served in the British Navy in World War I aboard a Q-ship where he distinguished himself as a second in command who assumed command on the death of the captain in an engagement with a German U-boat. But even in this adventure, he encountered tragedy and horror:

Of course, with the hindsight that Laruelle has in Chapter 1, the prologue, by November 1, 1939, again the Day of the Dead and the anniversary of the death of the Consul and Yvonne, he knows that tragedies of a world-wide import are happening in Europe and Asia. With the hindsight Lowry had as he worked and reworked the novel before its publication in 1947, he knew that people did, indeed, as the recent war horrendously demonstrated, commit such atrocities as putting people in furnaces, a hindsight the contemporary reader shares. These and other fragments of his personal history, especially his failure as a poet, his sexual inadequacy, and Yvonne’s infidelities with both Jacques and Hugh bear down mightily on Geoffrey Firmin, whose sickness of soul is belied in his name that is a pun on "infirm."

We also learn not only that the history of the Consul’s turbulent relationship with Yvonne but that chance, too, shapes his present. In his letter to Yvonne that was not sent but which Laruelle finds in the volume of Elizabethan drama that the Consul had lent him, the Consul writes:

The imagery in the letter testifies not only to his anguish and loneliness but to his ability to express himself poetically. In the letter, he asks Yvonne to return to him even if only for a single day, ironically just as she would if she were dead and the Consul prepared the way for her to return during the Day of the Dead celebration. Laruelle burns the letter, a poetic but ceremonial gesture as well in keeping with the celebration about him. In Chapter 12, the Consul retrieves a lost packet of letters from Yvonne at the cantina El Farolito. He puts them into the pocket of his jacket, which by chance also holds Hugh’s telegram to The Globe describing fascist activities in Mexico. The paramilitaries watching him, thinking that the letters are secret communications, discover the telegram and use it as a flimsy and mistaken but useful reason to murder him. Chance, miscommunication, and missed opportunities to communicate foul their life together as well.

The Consul and Yvonne seem interminably linked no matter how bad things might get between them. Although we do not know why he started drinking—it may be in part his frustrated creativity and the loss of his chance to be a recognized poet, it may be due to his difficulties with love and with sex, it may be his tragic and lonely youth, it may be that he rejects the world and finds it easier to do so when drunk than when sober, or it may be simply because he likes to be drunk—we do know that his drinking was one of the main problems that drove Yvonne away and in part what brings her back inasmuch as she wants to help him control if not stop his drinking.

But the Consul’s fatalism prevents him both from acting to help himself and from being helped. As he drinks in his house, he commands himself to "[l]ook up at that niche in the wall over there on the house where Christ is still, suffering, who would help you if you asked him: you cannot ask him" (Lowry, Volcano p. 65). The strength and salvation that he could request remain unrequested, the crucifix being less a reminder of Christ’s sacrifices than of the Consul’s feeling of torment, terrible, inevitable, continued, just like the artifactual Christ on the wall who never resurrects but remains perpetually dead. Memories of the several Mexican revolutions and echoes of violence in Spain and elsewhere, violence justifiable because it is committed in the name of protecting individual freedom, appear throughout the novel, always linked with the implicit questions of "What is a person to do when she or he learns of such injustices? What can a person do?" Hugh tries to act, at least in his own small journalist’s way. The Consul has given up trying to act. But in both cases the end results in nothing gained, only bloodshed. There is nothing to be done, given the weight of all the personal and external history bearing down upon the Consul, who reminds us in his letter to Yvonne that nothing will ever change in spite of our desires and our actions or inactions because "Time is a fake healer" and even "you [Yvonne] cannot know the sadness of my life" (Lowry, Volcano p. 40).

As a novel of politics and political intrigue, Under the Volcano relies upon the personal histories of its characters and the external history of the world to shape the politics of the characters. Marx said that all history is the history of class struggle. Certainly the politics in Under the Volcano embody the theme of class struggle. Mexico is an exotic location, American but European, New World but Old World, too. Mexico is not quite tame yet not quite entirely wild, not civilized but with a veneer of civilization borrowed, hand-me-down, from Europe and the United States. It is a land where corruption has split the nation into a tiny class of upper-class capitalists and land owners on the one hand and a huge class of peons on the other who are subjected to constant repressive violence:

Diaz was president of Mexico 1877-1880 and 1884-1911. The presidents who followed Diaz were no better until Cardenas. Hand-picked by his predecessor to continue politics as usual, he showed himself to be a progressive politician. The socialist activities of the Cardenas government infuriated and alarmed the upper class in Mexico and the foreign powers that were more interested in maintaining the status quo of cheap labor, cheap resources, and political stability bought at the expense of repression and exploitation of the masses. As a result of the political tensions in Mexico, the Consul writes in his unsent letter to Yvonne, "England is breaking off diplomatic relations with Mexico and all her consuls—those, that is, who are English—are being called home .… I shall not go home with them" (Lowry, Volcano p. 36). This ambiguous statement suggests that the Consul does not consider himself English. At least in some way, he feels alienated and estranged from the English establishment, perhaps even England and English culture themselves, for he rejects them.

In the first instance in which he is identified in Under the Volcano, Geoffrey Firmin is identified as "the Consul"; that is, he has an official capacity, representing the interests of England. He is first so named by Dr. Vigil, who says, "Oh, I know, but we got so horrible drunkness that night before, so perfectamente borracho, that it seem to me, the Consul is as as [sic] sick I am" (Lowry, Volcano p. 5). And indeed throughout the novel Geoffrey Firmin is referred to by the narrator far more often as "the Consul" than as Geoffrey Firmin. In fact, his title is used far more often than his name except when he is addressed by Hugh and Yvonne and occasionally himself. So he is stuck with a title instead of a name to identify him, but he rejects the office and the associations that accompany the title. Just as Aschenbach in Death in Venice changes his name and becomes someone other than himself, the Consul is no longer Geoffrey Firmin. Yet, as the doctor suggests, he is a sick man, not an ordinary consul.

For Geoffrey Firmin remains in Quauhnahuac, even after having resigned from the British Foreign Office, even after having resigned from his position as Consul, even after British consuls have been called back to England. Neither Lowry nor the Consul clarifies this ambiguity, this contradiction between what should be and what is. But there are hints that there is more to the Consul’s activities than merely representing England and her interests. In Laruelle’s reminiscing in Chapter 1, we are told of "the days when in America every small town along the Mexican border harboured a ‘Consul.’ ... Of course, they were not Consuls but spies" (Lowry, Volcano p. 24). The suggestion is made that Firmin, too, is a spy of some kind, that "Senor Firmin was such a Consul ... an English Consul who could scarcely claim to have the interests of British trade at heart in a place where there were no British interests and no Englishmen, the less so when it was considered that England had severed diplomatic relations with Mexico" (Lowry, Volcano pp. 29-30).

This possibility is offered without confirmation and is indeed contradicted by the possibility offered with equal probability that the Consul’s position in Quauhnahuac was a sinecure that he had been given in a place where he could be the least embarrassment and do the least harm to England (Lowry, Volcano p. 31). Yet the Consul stays on in Quauhnahuac even after he has resigned. It could be that he stays there much for the same reason that he drinks, that is, because he wants to. After all, he has a house there, apparently some money from an unidentified source (perhaps savings, divorce settlement, inheritance, whatever—Edmonds suggests that in an earlier draft, the Consul was involved in silver speculation that was a bit shady if not entirely illegal), and Mexico provides an economy where his funds could go much further than they would if he were elsewhere. Cheaper money equals more alcohol; more alcohol means more drunkenness. And he has said that he does not want to return to England anyway.

But there are sufficient suggestions that there are other reasons for him to have been in Quauhnahuac in the first place and for him to stay now. There are enough pro-fascist activities to be noticeable throughout the novel for the Consul to have been ordered to watch them. He lives near enough to Alcapanicingo Prison for it to be almost always in his sight, and it becomes a familiar yet unfriendly landmark connected with evil, the history of violence and repression of progressivism.

When Hugh arrives from Texas, he has flown into Mexico with Weber, the "semi-fascist bloke" whom Hugh suspects "of running ammunition" (Lowry, Volcano p. 97). When Hugh climbs onto Laruelle’s roof, he takes some binoculars and looks at a nearby town crying, "I think I’ve got Parian in pretty good focus" (Lowry, Volcano p. 199), suggesting the necessity of keeping an eye on the activities of the people there. Geoffrey seeks to travel to Parian and the cantina named El Farolito, the Little Lighthouse, on his alcoholic journey of escape from Quauhnahuac. When the Consul is in the washroom at the cantina named Todos Contentos y Yo Tambien, he overhears Hugh explaining some local politics to Yvonne in the restaurant, saying, "A Nazi may not be a fascist, but there’re certainly plenty of them around, Yvonne. Beekeepers, miners, chemists. And keepers of pubs. The pubs themselves of course make ideal headquarters. In the Pilsener Kindl, for instance, in Mexico City—" and the Consul rejoins though no one can hear him, "Not to mention Parian, Hugh" (Lowry, Volcano p. 299). The Consul’s personal politics are never precisely stated, but he seems to be at least sympathetic to the struggle of ordinary people, including Mexican peasants, for freedom and the right of self-determination. The Consul is at least aware of nefarious fascist activity in the area. Possibly he has remained in Quauhnahuac to keep watch on those activities if not, as Hugh perhaps might have done, to fight against them.

He is, of course, in no position physically to confront anyone, drunk, out of shape, unstable, and alone, but he could always report on troublesome activities to the Foreign Office. His being a kind of low-level spy would account for his remaining in Quauhnahuac. His being a spy would account for Sr. Bustamente and M. Laruelle discussing different aspects of the Consul’s life and from their discussion emerging an image of "a man living in continued terror of his life" (Lowry, Volcano p. 30). It would account for his having "run into the cantina El Bosque [The Woods], kept by the old woman Gregario ... shouting something like ‘Sanctuario!’ that people were after him" (Lowry, Volcano pp. 30-31). Of course, alcoholic delirium or the weight of all his tragedies bearing down upon him would do the same thing, that is, make him both paranoid schizophrenic and pantophobic. We are never quite sure which cause provokes his behavior. Perhaps we are invited to believe that he is subject to both.

There are other political overtones to the novel. Hugh is labeled a "professional indoor Marxman" by the Consul. Moreover, we know that Hugh was recently covering the Spanish Civil War and that his sentiments were decidedly Loyalist. We also know that Jacques Laruelle was playing with the idea of "making in France a modern film version of the Faustus story with some such character as Trotsky for its protagonist" (Lowry, Volcano p. 28). Thus, the overall shape of the politics of the main characters of Under the Volcano is generally leftist if not openly socialist or communist. Yet, because of the weight of history and the activities of the fascists, neither the Consul nor Hugh can act upon his beliefs. The one time that Hugh tries, when he wants to help the dying Mexican peasant whom they encounter on the way to Tomalin, the approach of the paramilitary sinarquistas and the warnings of the Consul prevent him from doing anything other than to watch the poor man die and note that one of the other passengers on the bus, probably a sinarquista himself, steals the dead man’s money, money intended for use on an ejido. The progressive actions of the people are stopped; the helpful actions of enlightened people are prevented or nullified.

Under the Volcano is not only a work of history, it is also itself a work of literature. One of the first things that we know about the Consul is that he is a failed poet. Under the Volcano, although not a poem, is a work of literature. While it is true that all works of literature are at least somewhat interconnected and interdependent, this novel foregrounds the importance of intertextuality and the importance of the weight of the existing body of literature—much of it that exemplifies the problems of the Consul—to Lowry’s and the Consul’s acts of creating more literature. For the history of literature is a history of creative minds engaging in discourse, often anguished, about the problems inherent in the human condition. Thus, Under the Volcano is not only an example of a funeral drama in the form of a dance with and a journey towards death, it is a recapitulation of and homage to several identifiable works of literature. We also know that the Consul is "working on a book" as mentioned by Yvonne: "But Geoffrey said something this morning about going on with his book—for the life of me, I don’t know whether he is still writing one or not, he’s never done any work on it since I’ve known him, and he’s never let me see scarcely any of it, still, he keeps all those reference books with him" (Lowry, Volcano p. 118). Under the Volcano, in short, is a work of literature about a man of literature making or at least planning to make a work of literature while he embodies works of literature in the living out of his life and its completion in death according to well-known literary forms and with overt references to other works of literature.

As if to emphasize the connection with past literature and theme, the novel opens with three quotations from other works of literature. The quotation from Sophocles’ Antigone "evoke[s] not only the tragic inevitability of the Consul’s death (like Polyneices he is to remain unburied, ‘dinner for birds and dogs’), but also the sense of wonder and loss felt at the destruction of such a piece of work as man" (Ackerley and Clipper, I.1). The quotation from Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan "reflect[s] Bunyan’s worst moments of doubt and torment ... and neatly sums up the Consul’s Faustian dilemma: his inability to even desire the salvation offered to him" (Ackerley, I.2). The final quotation from Goethe’s Faust is spoken "by an angel bearing the immortal part of Faust upwards, epitomiz[ing] the striving associated with the Faustian figures created by Goethe and Marlowe and imply that Lowry’s Consul is not unworthy of their company" (Ackerley, I.3). Thus, the issues of the intertextuality of Under the Volcano and of Lowry’s wanting for it to be a great work of literature are immediately foregrounded, issues that are emphasized by the novel’s being written in the twelve-chapter form of an epic.

The proximal literary antecedents for Under the Volcano are Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, especially The Inferno, on the one hand, and on the other, the Faust legend as embodied in the dramatic poem Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the play Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. In the opening page of the novel, we find the words "The Hotel Casino de la Selva stands on a slightly higher hill ..." (Lowry, Volcano p. 3). "Selva" is one of the Spanish words for "woods." One of the cantinas in the novel is named El Bosque, and bosque is another Spanish word for "woods." The theme of being in a darkling woods is reiterated throughout the novel. The Consul journeys through such a woods on his flight from Tomalin to Parian. Hugh and Yvonne journey through such a woods on their horseback ride. The woods and the notion of being lost within them while yet trying to find a way out of them are the imagery that opens Dante’s Inferno: "When in the middle of my life, I found myself lost in a wood." Indeed, Chapter 6 begins with these words in Dante’s Italian, slightly altered by the insertion of a mild oath in English, "Nel mezzo del bloody cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in" (Lowry, Volcano p. 213), although as Ackerley notes the line should end in "per" and not "in." Although it is Hugh and not the Consul who speaks these words at the beginning of Chapter 6, they apply equally well to the Consul, for though he is past the chronological middle of his life, he is stuck in late adolescence playing the role of the perpetually drunk undergraduate, not quite sure how to resolve his inner struggles and move forward into maturity. In short, he has spent that life trying hard not to get to the somewhere, the anywhere that he should be going, purposefully lost in a confusion at least partly of his own making. When the Consul breaks away from Hugh and Yvonne at Tomalin, he tries to get to somewhere that he should not be going but wants to go, the cantina El Farolito, the Little Lighthouse in Parian. Ironically, a lighthouse traditionally warns sailors away from shallows, rocks, and other hazards, yet in the case of the Consul he is attracted by the deadly marker and not warned off by it. Moreover, a lighthouse as a vertical structure significantly taller than the surrounding geography might reasonably be compared with the image of the Purgatorio of Dante’s epic, as the lightsource on top of the lighthouse might be compared with the lovelight-filled Paradiso. Yet this comparison is ironic, given the sins that the Consul commits along the way and at the cantina; rather than purging himself, he commits more sins. And rather than being a place of love and salvation, El Farolito is a place of sin, evil, fornication, and death. Moreover, whereas Dante is reunited with Beatrice in Paradise where he is redeemed out of love, the Consul is separated from Yvonne forever and fails to accept redemption. As if to emphasize this Dante-Consul connection, the Consul is early in the novel attended by a Dr. Vigil, whose name suggests the Virgil of Dante’s poem, and who like Dante’s guide wants to reclaim the Consul by helping him dry out.

We also know that Hugh refers to the ravine—which dominates the lower part of the landscape of Quauhnahuac as much as Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl dominate the skyline—as the Malebolge (Lowry, Volcano p. 100), which is a direct reference to the 8th circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, the place where God puts "seducers, panderers, flatterers, simoniacs [people who trade in ecclesiastical privileges], sorcerers, barrators, hypocrites, thieves, sowers of discord, and falsifiers (likened by Hugh to journalists)" (Ackerley, p. 151, note 104.1). While it is not entirely untrue that journalists are sometimes falsifiers and that Hugh’s judgment is not inaccurate, the Malebolge is far more interesting in terms of the Consul’s relationship to it. He is, after all, as a representative of British government and business interests, perhaps something of a flatterer, barrator, and falsifier, and what is more likely, he sees himself that way, thus making his murder and the disposal of his body in the ravine all the more "logical" within the universe established in the novel. The 8th circle of Hell is not, however, where God puts drunks, so perhaps Lowry is emphasizing more than just the Consul’s multiple iterations on the sin of drunkenness.

Under the Volcano contains many other references to other works of literature, notably: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which provides a reminder of the growing military conflagrations in Asia and Europe; Conrad’s Lord Jim, an appropriate character to contrast with the Consul and with Hugh as well, given Jim’s striving to redeem himself with an act of courage after an instant’s cowardice aboard a seemingly doomed ship; and to the two versions of the Faust legend, both stories of sin and redemption. David Markson finds other influences, specifically, "Jung, Spengler, Freud, Frazer, Spinoza, Jessie L. Weston, Oriental metaphysics, and ‘the occult’" (Edmonds, p. 63).Ultimately, of course, the Consul cannot be redeemed because he rejects all his chances for redemption. He refuses to be a model of British Consular behavior, he resigns from the Foreign Service, he rejects the efforts of Yvonne, Hugh, Laruelle, and Dr. Vigil to dry him out, he rejects the warnings of the old lady when, drunk and in deep peril at El Farolito she thrust "her hand restlessly into the Consul’s pocket, which he as restlessly removed thinking she wanted to rob him. Then he realised she too wanted to help. ‘No good for you,’ she whispered. ‘Bad place. Muy malo. These man no friend of Mexican people. ... They no policia. They diablos. Murders" (Lowry, Volcano pp. 367-368). His entire life in the novel is a rejection of love, rejection of life, rejection of redemption, rejection of self.

Despite the importance of literary references to the novel, the Consul’s literary aspirations are self-defeating. His drinking helps him conciliate his frustrated creativity and the loss of his being a poet. (The notion of his being a poet is lost in the film although he does talk about writing a book.) Moreover, we do not know what happened to his urge to write poetry. Although his letter to Yvonne, never sent and found the following year by Dr. Vigil, is a work of beautiful prose poetry, there is no sense that he spends any time working on his poetic skills (Lowry, Volcano pp. 35-41). Even the unfinished sonnet (Lowry, Volcano p. 330) remains unfinished, becomes an object of veneration for him because it is unfinished; that is, not finishing it is more important to him than finishing it, yet we do not know why. We know only that poetry is no longer a major part of his life, that he has had no significant career as a poet and seems not to write much if any poetry now. The literary theme of journey connected with change, most often with damnation and redemption, death and life, is an old one, going back in Western tradition at least to the account of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. In the specific works of literature referred to by Lowry in Under the Volcano, the theme of journey is exemplified most obviously in Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its depiction of a man lost in the dark woods of confusion and sin who journeys through Hell and Purgatory on his way to Paradise, who is redeemed from his sin and confusion by his love for God which is refracted first through and thence directed by his pure love for Beatrice. The novel invites us to see parallels between the journeys that Dante and the Consul take, but the parallels make the differences even more striking. Dante is redeemed and achieves Paradise, uniting with "the Love that moves the stars," but the Consul cannot save himself, rejects the attempts of others to save him, and dies ignominiously, alone, and with no sense of redemption available to him. Lowry also draws upon the Jewish Cabbala for some of his inspiration and imagery. "The Cabbala is used for poetic ends because it represents Man’s spiritual aspirations" (Lowry, "Preface to a Novel" p. 28), aspirations represented by the journey in the novel, the journey towards Parian, towards El Farolito, the Little Lighthouse, towards death. The Tree of Life from the Cabbala, a representation of Man’s journey through life "is called Kether, or Light" (Lowry, "Preface to a Novel," p. 28), but of course the Consul’s journey towards the light does not result in either enlightenment or redemption.

Lowry emphasizes the notion of journey throughout the novel. The Consul is, after all, a British subject, a "mestizo" born of a Hindustani mother and an English father, out of place in India the land of his birth, out of place in England where he was sent to live with paternal relatives after the deaths of his parents, out of place finally in Mexico where he is stationed as a British Consul. His life is a continual journey, but unlike Dante, he does not learn the lessons along the way at each stop that would allow him to be successful at his next stop.

The novel itself takes the form of a journey, completed largely within a single twelve-hour period. The verbs, actions, images, and descriptions (which I have italicized) in the opening sentences of each of the chapters emphasize the notion of journey:

Echoing the notion of the journey, one of the first things that the Consul and Yvonne encounter on their walk back to his home (their home) in Chapter 2 is the funeral of a child which "came sailing out of nowhere, ... the tiny lace-covered coffin followed by the band..." (Lowry, Volcano p. 56), playing the hopelessly out of place song La Cucaracha. In a sense, the entire novel is a funeral drama, a funeral cortege for the Consul, who is hopelessly out of place in Mexico and indeed in the world, as his unfinished sonnet reminds us:

The ultimate journey, his last dance with death, the last act of the funeral drama is the Consul’s lurching from bottle to bottle and cantina to cantina on that last day of his life. Amongst the places he drinks are: the bar at the Hotel Bella Vista; a bar he passes on the way home; the street where he has fallen and is "revived" by a long drink from the bottle of an Englishman passing by in his sports car; his home; his garden; his home again; Jacques’s home; the Terminal Cantina El Bosque; the bus on the way to Tomalin; the cantina Salon Ofelia; the cantina El Farolito in Parian. Each of these drinking locations represents a further alienation for the Consul rather than representing stations of the cross or a journey towards redemption. Alienated from fellow human beings and especially from Yvonne and Hugh, and estranged from God, the Consul journeys onward through the dark woods of alcoholism and personal failure to the illusory paradise of drink. Rather than finding salvation, however, he finds an ugly, ignominious death.

Closely connected with the novel’s being an exercise in the literatures of life and death, of sin and redemption, and of journey and destination is the notion that it is also a funeral drama and a dance with death; that is, it is a novel of myth and ritual. The novel does, after all, open on the Day of the Dead, November 1, 1939, and the bulk of it is spent in recounting the events of the most recently past Day of the Dead, November 1, 1938. The Day of the Dead is resplendent with myth and ritual, a pseudo-Christian Mexican custom that has its roots in pre-Columbian culture. It gives the living a reason to remember the dead, and in so remembering they visit the graves of their ancestors to prepare the way for the souls of the departed to return to Earth for a friendly visit. The holiday is, of course, also a reason to hold a carnival complete with celebration, rides, fun, food, and drink. Yet the sense of carnival that the Mexicans bring to the festival of the Day of the Dead does not invigorate the souls of the Europeans, that is, of the Consul, Yvonne, Hugh, and Laruelle. They are almost oblivious to the celebration, which serves more to foreshadow the impending deaths of the Consul and Yvonne than it does to provide any sense of resurrection. And they do indeed return on the Day of the Dead the year following their deaths for a visit in the form of Laruelle’s reminiscences.

The physical setting also emphasizes the mythic nature of the novel. Lowry attributes unknown powers to the ravines, or barrancas, that run through the Mexican valley where the novel is set: "Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country ..." (Lowry, Volcano p. 15). "The sea-borne, hieratic legend" is an obscure reference that Ackerley suggests combines Christian and indigenous religious beliefs to explain the formation of these geologic structures (Ackerley, p. 29, note 21.6). But at least as interesting is the reference to Moloch, a god to whom the pagan Canaanites sacrificed children. Although this reference to Moloch could refer to the loss of Yvonne’s infant children, more likely the reference is to the man-eating nature of the history of the world and to the internal cannibalism that the Consul sets upon his own soul, stricken with grief, failure, rejection of life, rejection of self. The day of Christ’s crucifixion, though a day of agony and utter hopelessness, is also a necessary day that must be consummated on the way to redemption, to resurrection and rejoicing. Yet for the Consul, Christ’s death heralds the opening of the ravines that are to swallow him, not redeem him. Christ’s passion has been in vain, for the Consul rejects it, or more precisely, fails to accept it. As the Consul himself notes in his drunken conversation with his neighbor Quincey, he feels like an Adam cut off from God (Lowry, Volcano p. 133). Adam being the first man was at least alone if not alienated by definition. Although the Consul does pray, his prayers are not answered. In his home he notices the omnipresent Catholic crucifix and reflects on his inability to seek salvation. The emptiness in his soul left by the absence of God and Christ is filled with drink, with love of drink, with worship in cantinas rather than churches.

The other salient characteristics of the physical setting are the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl. With their physical domination of the landscape, they emphasize the relationship of the novel to myth by way of the natural phenomena over which the characters have little or no control. The sense of the weight of history is maintained by the exotic Indian names of the volcanoes. Their ancient nature emphasizes the sense that history moves inexorably in ways irrelevant to the wishes of human beings; that is, the volcanoes were formed, have erupted, continue to emit tiny plumes of gas and smoke, and could well erupt again at any time, indifferent to the people living near them. Their uncaring, stolid, powerful presence reiterates Lowry’s sense of the history of the world, a history of violence, tragedy, failure, and betrayal that bears down heavily on all humankind and especially on the Consul and those trying to save him. But since history does not care what human beings aspire to do, the efforts of Hugh, Yvonne, Laruelle, and Vigil to save the Consul as well as the possibility that the Consul might act to save himself will come to naught just as entreaties to the volcanoes, ancient gods or no, would have no effect. The downward motion and the outcome of this dance with death are already known, the only unknowns in the equation being the precise shape of the story, the actual path that the Consul will take as he journeys on to his inevitable death, much like Aschenbach but for far different reasons.

In Death in Venice, on his journey towards death, Aschenbach is accompanied and sometimes led by a series of grotesques. Throughout the Under the Volcano, the Consul is accompanied by "pariah dogs," that is, ownerless semi-wild dogs that live on the streets. This association emphasizes that the Consul, too, is an outcast, though one of his own making. And in the last line of the novel, such a dog marks the Consul’s body as "Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine" (Lowry, Volcano p. 375), giving him a dead Cerberos which cannot guide him, a distinctly un-Viking funeral dog to mock rather than to honor him, an un-Christian funeral that does not include any sense of grace, salvation, and resurrection. The word "pariah" itself relates both to the Hindustani subcontinent from which both the Consul and the word come, being the name of the lowest caste of untouchables, as well as to Parian, the village towards which the Consul walks inexorably through the last half of the novel so that he can get to his goal, El Farolito.

Even the Consul’s drinking episodes take the form of rituals. In the first such episode in the novel, as Yvonne watches, the Consul lectures a familiar bartender:

The Consul has similar relationships with all the bartenders in all the cantinas he frequents. What we learn is that the Consul’s drinking has long been a rite, something that happens with precision and regularity over a very long period of time, a form of worship that never tolerates serious deviations from its liturgy. Perhaps Yvonne entered her adulterous relationships with Hugh and Laruelle because she has grown tired of the drinking, the ritual, or both. Perhaps her fatigue and disgust caused her ultimately to leave the Consul completely and divorce him by remote control from America. We do not, however, learn why she has returned to him. Perhaps she has missed the familiarity of playing her role in the ritual, painful though it is.

The epigram "No se puede vivir sin amar" [One cannot live without love] is given mythic proportion when the Consul paints it high on Laruelle’s house in golden letters, and the film producer leaves it there, a reminder to them both of Yvonne’s infidelity with the Frenchman. Yet it is an ironic reminder, since it is precisely because he cannot love that the Consul cannot ultimately live. Moreover, the sentence pronounced in Spanish is very like the sentence "No se puede bebir sin amar" [One cannot drink without love], b’s and v’s being somewhat similarly pronounced, and it is precisely because he cannot love that he finds that he must drink. Drinking and death are thus united, an idea that is reiterated throughout the novel.

His misadventure in the whirligig (Lowry, Volcano pp. 221-223) brings together bits of his insobriety, his suffering, his loss of identity, and his inability to perceive a world bound by physical realities and cultural conventions, and his inability to work within it. The carnival ride provides for him a car like a "confession box" whose counterbalancing is noticeably empty, there being in the Consul’s world no God to whom he can confess. Even if there were a God in the other car, the Consul would be perpetually 180 degrees out of phase with that God, continually chasing and being chased but never saved by that God: "The Consul, like that poor fool who was bringing light to the world, was hung upside down over it, with only a scrap of woven wire between himself and death." But the Consul is no Christ; he cannot even light his own way in the world. The carnival ride which is supposed to be an evocation of psycho-sexual thrill becomes instead for him a torture. It is to him "symbolic, of what he could not conceive, but it was undoubtedly symbolic. Jesus. All at once, terribly, the confession boxes had begun to go in reverse." Of course, the blasphemy is merely the Consul’s expletive, but it is Lowry’s way of equating the symbolic mayhem of the carnival ride with the lack of a personal Jesus in the Consul’s life. He is even, upside down, confronted with, for no apparent reason, the number 999, which right-side up is the traditional numerical sign of Satan. His possessions are lost—"his notecase, pipe, keys, his dark glasses he had taken off, his small change he did not have time to imagine being pounced on by the children after all, he was being emptied out, returned empty, his stick, his passport ..."—his identity stripped from him. Ultimately, his encounter with the "Maquina Infernal" is a metaphor for his encounter with life, which is for him an infernal machine, the Moloch machine that is his life, a reminder of the Dante’s Inferno in which he lives and to which he will be cast since there is for him no God, no Christ, no salvation.

In his introduction to the novel, Stephen Spender writes, "We finish Under the Volcano feeling that the Consul with all his defects is the cosmos—and that he is also Malcolm Lowry. This is perhaps another way of saying that Malcolm Lowry and his hero are romantics" (Spender, p. xvi). This is also perhaps another way of saying that the novel is somewhat autobiographical. It would be a grave mistake to make the judgment that the novel is "really" about Malcolm Lowry, but it would be equally unwise to suggest that the novel has nothing to do with Malcolm Lowry. In fact, Lowry and Geoffrey Firmin are very much alike. Both "Geoffrey Firmin" and "Malcolm Lowry" are bisyllabic binomials. Both drunks, both alcoholics (there is a difference between the two, but both men are both things), both writers, both wanting to create something great to leave to the world, both alienated, both with failed marriages, both living in south-central Mexico, both having lived or wanting to have lived in British Columbia, both dying in their forties. (Although Lowry could not know that he would die in his forties at the time he wrote the novel, perhaps he was aware, like kindred soul Jack Kerouac, of the unlikelihood of his living to old age.) In a letter to Harold Matson, Lowry’s agent, Margerie Lowry writes "only a person whose whole existence is his work, who has dominated and disciplined the volcano within him, at what cost of suffering even I do not wholly understand, could have written such a book" (Margerie Lowry, unpublished letter to Harold Matson, quoted in Edmonds, p. 63).

However, Under the Volcano is an unusual autobiography. Although it is certainly autobiographical, Lowry spreads himself over several characters. The most obvious recipient of Lowryan characteristics is Geoffrey Firmin, the Consul. His name is a pun on infirm, but it also suggests vermin much like the Consul sometimes sees on the walls of his bathroom when he is afflicted with alcoholic psychosis or "the DTs" (delirium tremens). Lowry was also well-acquainted with alcoholic psychosis. But there are parts of Lowry in the other characters as well. For example, Hugh serves as an example of what Firmin could be if he were more able to act, a younger and less jaded, a less paralyzed by anxiety and despair, a less drunk version of Firmin and Lowry. Laruelle represents a successful creative artist, which neither Firmin nor Lowry believe themselves to be.

But like Firmin, Lowry suffers. In his own words:

Although Ruth Perlmutter is comparing Lowry and F. Scott Fitzgerald when she writes, "Both guilt-laden alcoholics, they consciously translated their ‘crack-ups’ into accounts of individual suffering, a lesion of spirit in a spiritually empty age, drunkards in a drunken world" (Perlmutter, p. 561), she could just as easily have been describing Lowry and the Consul.

As a novel about relationships, Under the Volcano depicts a bleak and depressing story of the failed relationship between the Consul and Yvonne. In both the dimensions of true love and of sexuality, theirs is a doomed relationship. Even when Laruelle reconstructs in Chapter 1 the events of the previous year, his thoughts of the Consul and Yvonne mingle with thoughts of the doomed Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlotta, each couple as out of place in Mexico as the other (Lowry, Volcano p. 13). The ubiquitous posters advertising the 1935 MGM film Mad Love, advertised in Spanish as Los Manos de Orlac [The Hands of Orlac], with its story of the doomed relationship between Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre) and Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), reiterates this theme of doomed love. Moreover, the current showings of Los Manos de Orlac represent a revival, the film having been shown in Quauhnahuac a year or so before. A "revival" is literally a return to life, but the theme in the film is of doomed love and death. No matter how many times the film is revived, it tells the same story, the outcome is inescapable. Being brought to life again means death again. This tragic outlook on life, too, mirrors the tragic inescapability of both the return of Yvonne to the Consul and their ultimate resultant deaths.

We really do not know why she left him, probably at least in part because of his drinking, but we do not know that for sure. It could be that she was tired of trying to take care of him, tired of not being taken care of by him, for it is certainly difficult to maintain a relationship of any kind with someone who is constantly drunk and makes no effort not to be. It could be that his chronic alcoholism left him incapable of satisfying her sexual desires. Whether he was too tired, too drunk, or impotent is irrelevant. She is, after all, in her late 20s when she leaves him and about 30 when she returns, a young woman with a young woman’s needs.

Her needs may help to explain the affairs that she has had with both Hugh and Jacques. When she returns to Quauhnahuac and she walks home with Geoffrey, the Consul ungallantly but circuitously reminds her of her affairs as they walk on when he says, "Though had you of course ever been Consul to Cuckholdshaven [evidently a real neighborhood in London, but here a metaphor for his knowledge of her infidelities], that town cursed by the lost love of Maximilian and Carlotta, then, why then—" (Lowry, Volcano p. 59), linking the image of impossible love and cuckholdry. In spite of their problems, however, they do seem genuinely to care about each other. Not quite sure of her reasons for returning, Geoffrey asks, "‘Have you really come back? Or have you just come to see me?’ ... ‘Here I am, aren’t I?’ Yvonne said merrily, even with a slight note of challenge" (Lowry, Volcano p. 71). Yet they continue to dread to talk about their relationship, either the failures in the past or the possibilities of a future (Lowry, Volcano p. 74). This scene occurs several times in the novel, he not sure why she has returned, she reassuring him. From time to time, they reach out and touch if not fully embrace each other. Their marriage is not without moments of tenderness and affection.

She wants him to need her help, but she does not think that he does. She is torn between the ideas of "Geoffrey here alone, but now in the flesh, redeemable, wanting her help," and "Geoffrey not only not alone [but] not wanting her help [and] living in the midst of her blame, a blame by which ... he was curiously sustained" (Lowry, Volcano p. 63). And so when "[t]he Consul hummed [and] Yvonne felt her heart melting, [a] sense of a shared, a mountain peace seemed to fall between them; it was false, it was a lie, but for a moment it was almost as though they were returning home from marketing in days past. She took his arm ..." (Lowry, Volcano p. 64). However she is wrong. He does need her and her help; he just does not know how to ask for it or accept it.

At Jacques’ house, she asks him "suddenly, almost piteously, ‘Haven’t you got any tenderness or love left for me at all?’" (Lowry, Volcano p. 196), and he responds but only mentally, "Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound..." (Lowry, Volcano p. 197). Indeed, the Consul remarks to himself "how he had suffered, suffered, suffered without her" (Lowry, Volcano p. 197). But despite the depth of his feeling for Yvonne, despite his feelings of "desolation, abandonment, and bereavement" while she was gone (Lowry, Volcano p. 198), he also fatefully realizes that he cannot love her in the way that she needs to be loved, that she cannot stay with him without his loving her that way. In a running monologue with himself (Lowry, Volcano pp. 78-79), the Consul blames himself for throwing Hugh and Yvonne together—who else but to each other would they turn to seek support and comfort when they were working so valiantly and vainly to save Geoffrey from his alcoholism?—yet although he forgives Hugh he cannot entirely forgive Yvonne. Later, the Consul again talks of Hugh’s and Yvonne’s infidelities, but this time more openly, when they were trying to save him (Lowry, Volcano pp. 309-313). Of course, Yvonne has sought solace not only with Hugh but also with Laruelle. The Consul alludes to both infidelities by remarking to Hugh and Jacques on their first meeting, "But I really think you two ought to get together, you have something in common" (Lowry, Volcano p. 191). And the Consul has also left a postcard from Yvonne under Laruelle’s pillow where he would be sure to find it, thus implicating the film producer.

We do know that sexuality has long been a problematic issue for the Consul. As a boy living with the Taskersons, it was generally acknowledged that he "was a virgin to put it mildly" (Lowry, Volcano p. 21). His one moment of adolescent sexuality about which we know anything also happens at Leasowe, where he "picks up" a girl and takes her to the "Hell Bunker" on the golfcourse near the Taskerson home, where he is caught in the act by Laruelle and his "pick up" as "the moonlight disclosed the bizarre scene from which neither he nor the girl could turn their eyes" (Lowry, Volcano p. 21). They wind up laughing at young Geoffrey, and although both boys try to commiserate at a local pub they are turned away for being underaged: "Alas, their friendship did not for some reason survive these two sad, though doubtless providential, little frustrations" (Lowry, Volcano p. 21).

Why does Yvonne return? Again, we do not know for sure, but there is always the hint of the possibility of redemption, and because she is in love with Geoffrey, she can be blind, it seems, to all his faults. But there is a strong tension between his desire for the bottle and his commitment to her, and the Consul is finally incapable of love. Drinking is intermixed with everything else, particularly sex, particularly his relationship with Yvonne. Even when he has run away from Hugh and Yvonne in Tomalin and wound up ultimately at El Farolito, there in the location of his most profound drinking he finds the letters from Yvonne that he has misplaced, the finding of which has been one of his goals throughout the novel (Lowry, Volcano p. 342). Even when he is offered a prostitute (p. 347), he imagines that she becomes Yvonne. Finally, his failed relationship with Yvonne is mirrored in his failed relationships with other people and ultimately with God. Whereas Beatrice redeemed Dante, Yvonne cannot redeem the Consul. The unwillingness to participate in a loving relationship with the Christian God of Love prevents the Consul from participating in a loving relationship with humankind, or perhaps it is the Consul’s inability to participate fully and actively in a loving relationship with another human being that prevents him from understanding the kind of love that God feels for him.

As a novel about alcoholism, Under the Volcano stands alone. Pauline Kael opines that "the novel, written by a drunk, is widely regarded as the best novel ever written about a drunk" (Kael, "Sneaks, Ogres, and the DTs" p. 85). Indeed, of the over fifty pages of notes I took while reading the novel—just the novel, not the secondary sources—nearly 40% are related to drinking and drunkenness. In the index of Ackerley’s A Companion to Under the Volcano, the entry for "alcohol" lists 164 references and reminds us to "see also Farolito; Fountain; Thirst." The reviewer for New York magazine writes that the novel "could be described as alcoholic consciousness—the amazing connections and associations, the blinding terrors and wild exhilarations that engulf a man of intellect and spirit who is far, far gone in drink" (Denby, p. 63).

Alcohol and alcoholism, drink, drinking, and drunkenness are a large part of what this novel announces its intent to portray. Alcoholism is the central pillar of Geoffrey Firmin’s character. Critic Conrad Aiken dubbed the novel Poppagetsthebotl, alluding both to the volcanoes and the theme of alcoholism. (Lowry, "Letters from Lowry," p. 45). Although Spender suggests that "By the time we have finished this novel, we know how a drunk thinks and feels, walks and lies down, and we experience not only the befuddledness of drinking but also its moments of translucent clairvoyance, perfected expression" (Spender, p. xiii), that assertion is not quite true. We do not know all of this information about a drunk, that is, just any random drunk, but a specific drunk of great intellect, education, and poetic and scholarly abilities who has experienced great emotion: tragedy, joy, fear, love, hate, horror, bravery, sorrow, and self-abnegation. Film critic Pauline Kael is closer when she writes that "Lowry had a mystique about alcohol: he somehow got himself to believe that this self-destruction (and only this self-destruction) would give him access to the states of mind necessary to set words on fire. To put it bluntly, his hero Firmin has come to Mexico to see into the heart of darkness and write an unwritable book" (Kael, "Sneaks, Ogres, and the DTs" p. 86). That is, this is a novel not just about drunkenness and not just about any drunk.

Moreover, Spender fails to recognize the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic. He claims that the Consul is but a drunk; in reality, the Consul is both. Perhaps the difference is lost on people who have been close only to drinking and have not been close to drunks and alcoholics. A drinker is what the medical literature calls a "social drinker." A drunk likes to drink and likes to feel drunk. Drinking is a sport, an exuberant activity, a Hemingwayesque embrace of the enjoyable things in life. A drunk probably spends too much time drinking and being drunk, but he drinks and gets drunk only because he wants to. An alcoholic, on the other hand, does not only want to drink and feel drunk, an alcoholic needs to drink and to feel drunk. It is quite possible to be a drunk and not be an alcoholic. It is less likely but nonetheless possible to be an alcoholic without being a drunk. Drunks are fun, or at least think that they are, but alcoholics generally are not. Drunks love to drink. Alcoholics generally loathe drinking, aware of its corrosive action on them, their health, their behavior, their lives, their relationships. Pete Hamill describes the difference in his memoir, A Drinking Life, writing that:

In all the major critical analyses, both critics of the novel and critics of the film display sufficient knowledge and expertise to make their analyses useful within the limits that they set for themselves. Yet while these critics share their credentials that allow them to write with authority on film or literature, only Hamill admits to being an alcoholic or a drunk. An understanding of alcoholism is a minimal requirement to commenting on Under the Volcano, especially since "Lowry was interested in conveying the awe and wonder, the pity and the terror that alcoholism could arouse if its victim was a person otherwise intelligent and noble" (Gilmore, p. 286), and perhaps it takes an alcoholic to appreciate an alcoholic.

An alcoholic like Hamill is far more likely to understand why the Consul is in constant search of the "pleasant evanescent feeling of tightness" (Lowry, Volcano p. 68). We know that he drinks but we do not know why he started drinking. He might drink as a result of any of the sorrows, losses, and horrors he has faced. Alcohol is a natural form of retreat for dealing with such pain. Moreover, the use of alcohol has a long history in human behavior. Alcohol is even a part of the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist. The use of alcohol is a rite of passage for young men as they become accepted as adults. But the reason that most people turn to alcohol is because of its ability to numb the body, the mind, and the soul. Although some people are genetically predisposed to be more likely to develop addictive behaviors, genetics neither predestines alcoholism nor protects against it. Probably the reason that most alcoholics become alcoholic is that they turn too often to alcohol for its numbing pleasures and its ability to distort reality, both its pains and its pleasures, and thus they become both physiologically and psychologically addicted to it. And what pleasures and distortions it brings. In the mind of the drunkard, physical and logical laws are rendered nonsensical, thinking is distorted, sorrows are diminished and deflected. Lowry’s descriptions of the Consul in Under the Volcano show that he understands the alcoholic mind as do Hamill’s descriptions of himself in his book A Drinking Life: A Memoir. Most of all, alcohol numbs or seems to numb the intrusive pains of the world. A drunk understands that; an alcoholic understands and needs that, the Consul lives that. As Pete Hamill describes, the reasons for drinking are not as important as the experience of being drunk:

Alcohol becomes for the Consul a way for dealing with the external realities that he cannot control and the internal realities that he fears. While other people might find in themselves the wisdom to choose a course of action and the courage to embark upon it, while still other people might find that wisdom, courage, and direction in religion, the Consul finds it in alcohol. Or rather, he finds the ability not to do anything about his quandaries. Alcohol becomes in a sense for him his religion because it "saves" him, saves him from himself and from a world he can neither control nor tolerate. And so he worships at the cantinas. (In a scene invented for the film, it is from a cantina and directly to a church that he goes with Dr. Vigil, who urges him to pray "to the Virgin of Soledad. For those who have nobody with. For those who are lost. Ask her to return you spouse to you.") The Consul’s epic journey is a pilgrimage that he undertakes, ultimately to the cantina Farolito, the Little Lighthouse in Parian, which attracts him rather than warns him away. In his pickled brain, each bottle becomes a friend, a friendly bottle, a drink, another drink, and another, and another bottle, and so on. He does not even stop at "pleasantly tight," but often moves on to "muy borracho" and even "absolutemente borracho," the classic pattern of a drunk who seeks to become ever more drunk. The chimes of a church in the city remind him that "unless of course it seemed utterly impossible, one dreaded the hour of anyone’s arrival unless they were bringing liquor" (Lowry, Volcano p. 73).

In short he is a drunk, someone who enjoys being drunk, enjoys that "pleasant tightness" that alcohol brings to his soul and his mind. But he is also an alcoholic, someone who needs to drink because both his body and his brain are dependent upon their ethanol fix as much as any junkie is addicted to any other drug. He is aware of his dependence as when he confesses to Yvonne, "It’s really the shakes that make this kind of life unsupportable. But they will stop: I was only drinking enough so they would. Just the necessary, the therapeutic drink" (Lowry, Volcano p. 49). Alcohol is his palliative, the drug that gets him through the day. Yvonne asks him to stop drinking but he will not. Indeed, he leaves her in the street and goes into a cantina while she waits: "The opportunity to join him ebbed. A mood of martyrdom stole upon her. She wanted the Consul to see her, when he emerged, waiting there, abandoned and affronted. By glancing back the way they had come she forgot Geoffrey for an instant" (Lowry, Volcano p. 56). From his action and her response, we understand the sense of urgency and ritual repetition that the consul brings to his drinking as well as the pain it causes Yvonne.

He is not an ungregarious drunk. He wants her to join him, although she knows that she does not want to and he knows that she will not. When he invites her to drink and she declines, he thinks in this lucid debate of what terrors await him both in and outside of drunkenness especially because he will confront them alone, without Yvonne:

This is the internal debate of a man who knows that he should not drink but will drink because he must, each drink leading to another in an unending success broken only briefly by the unconsciousness of alcoholic stupor, the alcoholic’s substitute for sleep. His "familiars" are voices in his head, voices that speak to him, his conscience and anti-conscience really. They speak to him as he speaks to Yvonne and to others. "‘Strange,’ the Consul commented, half trying to rise for the drink Yvonne had ratified in spite of himself and the quick voice that protested: ‘You bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I’ll kick your face in if you do, if you have a drink I’ll cry, O idiot’!" (Lowry, Volcano p. 71). But he drinks nevertheless and warns Yvonne of the burdens that she will be taking up by returning to him. He makes no promise to change: "Yet it’s awfully courageous of you. What if—I’m in a frightful jolly mess, you know" (Lowry, Volcano p. 71). He is a jolly mess because of his desire, naked, pure desire to drink. Even though his drinking sometimes leaves him with the "inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull" (Lowry, Volcano p. 126), what he wants to do is drink. Drink to forget, drink not to feel, drink to divorce himself not only from relationships but from life itself:

Drinking is the primary goal in his life. He arranges his life for the single purpose of drinking. These voices that urge him to drink are not unexpected. Drinking is for him, after all, a religion, each drink an act of devoted worship. His ethanolgod speaks to him just as the Living God of Love speaks to Christians. As Pete Hamill writes, "Naturally, I got drunk in celebration" (Hamill, A Drinking Life p. 224) for drinking to the point of drunkenness became his mechanism for both handling problems and expressing any joys that happened in his life, much like the Consul.

Nonetheless the two states, sobriety and drunkenness, are almost interchangeable for him, but of course since he is never sober, he can never truly test his assertion. The narrator—not the Consul—one time decides that "it was one of those occasions when the Consul had drunk himself sober ..." (Lowry, Volcano p. 16), an impossibility of course. Yet for him, drinking gives him a peculiar kind of sobriety, the only state in which he can face his life:

It is easy for a reader to distinguish that Firmin is more than just a drunk, that he is an alcoholic. He keeps bottles hidden in his house and garden to provide for those times when he discovers that he needs a drink—which is nearly all his waking hours—but he is nonetheless terrified when he cannot find or remember where to find one of his strategically located bottles bearing his necessary liquid inebriated sobriety. Although the people around him believe or at least want to believe that he is not quite a hopeless alcoholic because they still find in him a sense that he can be rescued or redeemed, whenever there is contest between his desire for the bottle and his desire to reconnect with life and with Yvonne, the bottle wins: "And then the whiskey bottle: he drank fiercely from it" (Lowry, Volcano p. 90). A social drinker seldom drinks fiercely. An alcoholic frequently does because his alcohol is as precious to him as is bread to a starving man. He often cannot keep track of how many bottles he has drunk (Lowry, Volcano p. 292). He mentally divides his drinking into two varieties, inconsequential and serious (Lowry, Volcano p. 288), and the inconsequential excuses himself to himself while he excuses the consequential by drinking more until his moment of transitory concern washes away.

As a chronic alcoholic, he is subject to the diseases associated with alcoholism. He wears no socks because of his peripheral neuritis. He is undoubtedly undernourished and suffering from several nutritional diseases because he gets most if not all of his calories from alcohol and not from healthful foods. The most horrible disease from which he suffers is alcoholic psychosis:

The hallucinations that he experiences originate, ostensibly, in reality but quickly become real horrors to him, horrors which mirror the insidious horrors of the world around and the world within his aching soul. Yet, though he is a chronic alcoholic, it takes a long time to die by alcohol because the human body is resilient. These sufferings could last for a very long time.

In his encounter with the "Maquina Infernal" (Lowry, Volcano pp. 221-222), the whirligig where he loses the contents of his pockets, his contact with the solid physicality of reality, and any remaining notions of a God, the experience that is intended to trump the rider’s sense of balance and proprioception has a different effect on him: "At last the earth had stopped spinning with the motion of the Infernal Machine. The last house was still, the last tree rooted again. It was seven minutes past two by his watch. And he was cold stone sober" (Lowry, Volcano p. 224). As with the alcohol, his attempts at breaking his contact with reality actually leave him, if only in his own eyes, more sober than intoxicated, more in touch with reality than he was before. He drinks mescal, the hallucinogenic alcoholic drink, when "nothing less than mescal will do" (Lowry, Volcano p. 281), that is when alcohol alone is not enough to make him "sober."

When he visits the salon Ofelia, stumbling into the washroom and finding disparate tourist pamphlets to read, the description of his reading mimics the drunkard’s tendency to read over things a second or a third time, perhaps because the meaning of the words is lost on the first reading due to his drunkenness, perhaps because the reader likes the sound (Lowry, Volcano pp. 296-298). As he gets drunker and drunker, the scenes in the novel are almost like intense cross-cutting in a film, with things moving faster, churning bits of memories, of words, of conversations, of tourist books, of accusations, of lessons learned (Lowry, Volcano pp. 300-302).

Under the Volcano contains no judgment either positive or negative about the Consul’s drunkenness. He seems not to care himself except from time to time when he realizes how much it hurts Yvonne to see him this way and to endure his failures and fumblings. Lowry does not seem to care, either, about the Consul’s drinking, for it is the sickness of the Consul’s soul that leads him to drink. The doctor "said simply that so far as he knew there was nothing wrong with [the Consul] and never had been save that he wouldn’t make up his mind to stop drinking." (Lowry, Volcano p. 117). Indeed metaphorical if not physiological drunkenness seems to be something of the accepted state of the world as Hugh reminds us, "Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it’d die of remorse on the third" (Lowry, Volcano p. 117), a damning if not entirely true assessment. Yet as Stephen Spender quotes Conrad Knickerbocker quoting Lowry, "The real cause of alcoholism is the complete baffling sterility of existence as it is sold to you" (Spender, p. xxvii); that is, the apparent ability of alcohol to blot out reality helps to explain the Consul’s deep sense of alienation and despair. If alcoholism is the central pillar of Geoffrey Firmin’s character, alienation is its capital. The Consul, alienated, substitutes a relationship with alcohol for the relationships that he should have with God, himself, his wife, his brother, his friends, the world. Unable to act, seeking neither to save himself nor to kill himself, he becomes obsessed with drinking because alcohol is an acknowledged though terrifically harmful way for people to deal with problems and because it is addictive psychologically, physiologically, spiritually.

The context of alienation, then, in Under the Volcano is of a man so despairing of the weight of the inhumanity and violence of history and politics, and of personal artistic, romantic, and sexual failure, that he "rejects love to protect his isolation" (Spender, pp. xx-xxi). More precisely, his alcoholism allows him to withdraw himself from the world, providing a portable personal void that is immediately available on demand, and his demand never desists. Within that void, he examines in dialogues with himself and with others as well the psychological aspects of his alienation. His behavior is a manifestation of his self-examination. Finding himself incapable of acting, his life becomes a long desperate act of flight, of alienation from himself, from others, from God. In the index of Ackerley’s A Companion to Under the Volcano, there is no entry for "alienation," but the entry for "sick soul" lists 122 references and reminds us to see also "Alcohol." The Consul’s main problem with life and living seems to be the fervent but futile attempts to find an answer to the question of "why was he always, always, more or less here" (Lowry, Volcano p. 294), "here" being a multi-layered metaphor for his squalid drunkenness (which is in itself one of the answers to "why he was here"), his fear of life, his fear of love, and his fears for what the frightful horrors at loose upon the world do to its human inhabitants.

The setting in Mexico serves because it is "is the most Christ-awful place in the world in which to be in any form of distress, a sort of Moloch that feasts on suffering souls, in fact: moreover, if you are known to take a drink, the bastardos will count every one you have, and wait around to trip you up" (Lowry, "Letters From Lowry" p. 44). Moreover, Lowry calls Mexico "the meeting place of many races, the ancient battleground of social and political conflicts where ... a colourful and talented people maintained a religion which was virtually a cult of death. It is the ideal setting for the struggle of a human being against the powers of darkness and light" (Lowry, "Preface to a Novel" p. 28), a convenient microcosmic example for the state of the whole of the world in the 1930s and 1940s, a world in some ways alienated from itself as it is about to consume some sixty million people in useless, cruel, criminal violence.

This is not solely the Consul’s opinion of the world. His opinions are also reflected in Dr. Vigil who notes that "though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless, it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value" (Lowry, Volcano p. 5), a mocking reminder that perhaps the world was not always so uncaring of her human children as it is at the time of the novel and has been on the whole ever since. Hugh shares some of this despair, and though he feels a need to act in defiance of this despair, he, too, is becoming jaded. While "Hugh, at twenty-nine, still dreamed, even then, of changing the world (there was no other way of saying this) through his actions" (Lowry, Volcano p. 9), in reality he has ceased to act, turning in his resignation to The Globe and leaving the noble futility of the Spanish Civil War. He still thinks of returning, but we do not believe that he will. When the war became hopeless, he left, and he left as a journalist, one not quite connected to the reality of combat, not as a valiant if doomed Loyalist foot soldier. Much like his romantic flirtations with becoming a poet-singer and a sailor, his devotion to his dreams is tenuous, half-hearted, unrealistic, unrealizable. It is as if he can only half-way live his life. Granted, he is better off than Geoffrey who cannot live even a hundredth part of his. And Hugh’s two current acts of attempting to help "change the world" for the better, trying to dry out Geoffrey and trying to help Yvonne find Geoffrey after he runs off, ultimately end with the deaths of both the Consul and his wife. Hugh may still want to be a man of action; he may still make decisions and act upon them, but with little sense of accomplishment. Hugh thinks of "some youthful password of courage and pride—the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one’s soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do, good, what was right... [but] feeling it in his heart still, the boundless impatience, the immeasurable longing" (Lowry, Volcano p. 124). This idealism is more or less perhaps what Geoffrey would have felt a few years earlier, or perhaps he still feels this way and chooses to drink rather than to be disappointed by his inability to respond to that longing. In both cases, the result is the same: stasis, horror, and ultimately death, soon for Geoffrey and Yvonne, delayed but no less inevitable for Hugh.

The Consul is ambivalent towards life and living, towards love and loving, especially loving Yvonne, perhaps because of the inevitability of sorrow and disappointment. He is saying by his feelings for Yvonne and by his drinking that he wants to love but knows that to love he must reach out to someone else, and he is afraid that if he does, there will be no response. He sees life as a sham which is "sold to you." Even when he and Yvonne were together in the past of the novel, he was in pain, and his pain led to her being in pain as well. In his letter to Yvonne that was not sent but which Laruelle finds, "I think I know a good deal about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace" (Lowry, Volcano p. 36). As his retreat into alcohol makes him believe that he is sober, he believes that the death of his soul leads him to peace, but even if he accepts the delusion of peace, the world about him remains in turmoil, and as long as he is alive, drunk or not, his observing that turmoil will continue to gnaw at his soul and chip away at the illusion of peace he has purchased in a bottle.

This is a frightening discovery, to learn that your soul must die before you can find peace, a kind of ultimate alienation, for a Christian certainly but even for someone like the Consul who has rejected God and Christ, the death of the human spirit is just as bleak if not quite as damning. Yet that is what the Consul spends his time doing, killing his soul in ounces of alcohol and minutes of time. Lowry reminds us of each, noting both each new drink taken by the Consul and the slow passage of time throughout the final eleven chapters, telling us from time to time that the Consul, Yvonne, or Hugh notes the time, which we ultimately know flows inexorably to the end of the day when the Consul and Yvonne meet their deaths as the result both of their decisions and inconsequential circumstances and coincidences that move beyond their control. Seeing this reality, that your soul must die to provide you with peace, is an ultimate alienation, yet it provides a frighteningly clear picture of his situation as the Consul realizes that "This must be not unlike, he told himself, what some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head" (Lowry, Volcano p. 75). If as Kael suggests the Consul is confronting a "heart of darkness," he is here echoing the terrifying knowledge of self and the world that Kurtz feels when he cries, "The horror! The horror!" But he is unable or unwilling to sort out the madness from the reason. Even though he believes that "it’s amazing when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the shadow of the abattoir!" (Lowry, Volcano p. 86), he does not seek to escape that shadow. Like Kurtz, the Consul is dead, too, even before he has physically died.

The Consul’s tragic death might not have happened but something else equally tragic probably would have even if he had become a poet because the weight of culture and civilization would have crushed Geoffrey Firmin no matter what station in life he might find himself. He is like the "scorpion not waiting to be saved" (Lowry, Volcano p. 338). He is truly under the volcano of the weight of history, the weight of failure, the weight of alienation. Spender writes that the Consul’s "neurosis becomes diagnosis, not just of himself but of a phase of history. It is artistically justified because neurosis, seen not just as one man’s case history, but within the context of a wider light, is the dial of the instrument that records the effects of a particular stage of civilisation upon a civilised individual: for the Consul is essentially a man of cultivation" (Spender, p. xiii). Perhaps, but it is terribly sad that he was unable in all that cultivating to have learned at the Methodist school or at Cambridge that all lives are made up of chances, choices, and binary possibilities which sometimes manifest themselves as beneficial and detrimental poles on opposite sides of those choices. It is the rare life that finds itself consistently at one of these poles, a rare life or a dull one. Perhaps the Consul stands for the fatality and ambivalence of the failed poet, the frustrated lover, and the ineffectual liberal in every man of the middle twentieth century, stuck in a time period that seems to ignore his desires and pleas.

John Huston was well into his 70s when he was approached by producers Moritz Borman and Wieland Schulz-Keil to direct a film adaptation of Under the Volcano. Huston was a hit or miss director; his films either "worked" or they did not. His unqualified successes include such films as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen, Moulin Rouge, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, and The Man Who Would Be King. His less successful films include such imperfect but not unworthy films as The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick, The Unforgiven, The Misfits, Freud, The Night of the Iguana, Reflections In A Golden Eye, and The Bible. It is not surprising that Huston, who had lived for several years in Mexico (one of his five wives was Mexicana), would be attracted to the story of the suffering of an individual stuck in a culture that did not claim him and a world which he did not want to claim. Huston was a prodigious drinker and perhaps alcoholic himself, a larger than life maverick in Hollywood who most often worked outside of the studio system in the last half of his life. He was also an expatriate and a rebel who ultimately renounced his American citizenship to take up residence in Ireland and become an Irish citizen, perhaps for personal, creative, or political reasons, perhaps to avoid American taxes and take advantage of the fact that creative artists such as writers and film-makers pay little or no income tax under Ireland’s tax code. Hamill suggests that "It is easy to imagine Huston and Lowry wandering the streets of Cuernavaca together, visiting its cantinas and brothels, speaking of prizefighters and Mexican gods and the tragic end of the Spanish Republic" (Hamill, "Against All Odds" p. 22).

But not everyone has Hamill’s understanding. It is not surprising that so many other film-makers were discouraged in their attempts to make a film version of the "cult classic" novel. The standard belief was that a film version could not be made or should not be made, probably because of the complexity in Lowry’s writing with which he hoped to "give his protagonist tragic dimensions, in part by layering the novel ‘Waste Land fashion,’ with motifs drawn from an incredible variety of (mainly) Western cultural and historical sources" (Hagen, p. 139). Yet, a number of significant screenwriters, directors, and actors were drawn to the challenge, including Orson Welles, Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Luis Bunuel, Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Zachary Scott, and Robert Shaw. It is not surprising then that the film that Huston ultimately made has problems and has been subject to much criticism. What is remarkable is the power of the film, whatever its problems might be.

Lowry himself says of the novel that it "can be read simply as a story during which you may—if you wish—skip whole passages, but from which you will get far more if you skip nothing at all. It can be regarded as a kind of symphony or opera, or even as something like a cowboy film" (Lowry, "Preface to a Novel" p. 28). Although Lowry is being disingenuous, that kind of simplicity is what remains in the film. Director Huston’s most successful films have strong characters and strong, linear plots, or as Hamill says, "Huston’s special talent has always been for the spare and laconic" (Hamill, "Against All Odds" p. 22). If there is one thing that Under the Volcano does not have it is a linear plot. Lowry himself says that his style in the novel "may assume an embarrassing resemblance to that of [sic] the German writer Schopenhauer describes, who wished to express six things at the same time instead of discussing them one after the other" (Lowry, "Preface to a Novel" p. 23). Yet the film does tease out of that complexity in typical Huston fashion a linear film that more or less tries to do justice to some of the main themes of the novel by following the activities of that strong central character of the Consul through that final tragic day in a linear fashion. This simplicity and linearity of plot is largely due to the producers’ selection of a script by Guy Gallo from a possible sixty-seven candidates. Knowing Huston’s predilection for strong characterizations and linear plots, the producers chose Gallo’s script because "the screenplay thankfully made the action comprehensible, even if motivation and the larger significance were minimized" (Hagen, p. 140).

Gallo, a Yale doctoral candidate in drama and in his late 20s when he wrote the script and became involved in the production in 1983, explains or at least tries to explain the changes he made in writing the script. In interviewing Gallo, Hamill, himself a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, pursued the question of how to make a filmable script from a novel that was infamous for being unfilmable. Gallo replied, "‘You see, you gotta distinguish between what appeals to you about Under the Volcano as a writer, which are the lyricism and the complexities of the pattern, and what appeals to you thematically, which is actually the story’" (Hamill, "Against All Odds" p. 23). Gallo’s argument here is essentially that a film-maker can strip away everything else from a novel—style, tone, language, structure, allusions, references, symbols, and the like—and still be left with a narrative, a "story" that stands independently of the literary qualities that make the novel a novel rather than an outline, a precis, a scenario, or a short story. Enough film-makers agree with this theory that a great many films have been made in this way, by stripping away everything or nearly everything except the story.

Some critics find the Gallo script and Huston’s direction to be at least partially successful. Jack Kroll writes, "My God, a movie for grown-ups! And John Huston’s Under the Volcano is an especially unlikely one at that. Making a film from Malcolm Lowry’s celebrated 1947 novel would seem closer to impossible than unlikely" (Kroll, p. 82). Some critics find the film to be less successful. Pauline Kael writes, "It is not surprising that the adapters and directors who were attracted by the novel were defeated by it—and I include Huston and Guy Gallo" (Kael "Sneaks, Ogres, and the DTs" p. 86). And David Denby mourns, "With great regret I must report that John Huston’s long awaited version of Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano, is a failure" (Denby, p. 63). For the purposes of this study, it is necessary to examine how well the film does at creating the sense of alienation that is central to the character of the Consul, a sense of alienation that comes from the weight bearing down upon the Consul, the weight of the inhumanity and violence of history; of personal artistic, romantic, and sexual failure; of self-examination that results in an ambivalence towards life and an incapability to act; of inability to extricate sanity from madness and horror; of the frightening discovery that his soul must die to find peace; of flight from all those troubles into an obsession with alcohol that results in the Consul becoming first a drunk and ultimately an alcoholic. The novel accomplishes this portrayal of alienation and its resultant alcoholism by examining the elements of history, politics and political intrigue, literary recapitulation and homage, journey, myth and ritual, autobiography, sexual inadequacy and infidelity, alienation and despair, and alcoholism that dominate the Consul’s life. The film, however, does not attempt so epic and operatic a portrayal.

Once Huston was committed to the project and the script was chosen, the film that emerges was more or less inevitable. Yet the loss of the psychology that is as important a part of the novel as is its naturalism, that is, the loss of motivations and inner torment, hinder the potential success of the film. The problem confronting Gallo, Huston, the actors, and the crew—especially the cameraman and camera crew—was how to find a suitable way of transforming those lost elements into something that could be shown on the screen, that is, how to make the uncinematic cinematic.

There is much that is cinematic in the style of the writing itself. These cinematic elements may be a result of Lowry’s flirtation with film-making. As Spender writes, "After Paris ... [Lowry] joined his friend John Davenport in Hollywood and worked on several movie scripts. He was deeply interested in the cinema, less so in Hollywood" (Spender, p. xxiv). Hamill goes further, claiming that "Lowry himself longed to write the screen version of his own novel" (Hamill, "Against All Odds" p. 21). Spender further writes that "the most direct influence on this extraordinary book is not, I would suggest from other novelists, but from films, most of all perhaps those of Eisenstein. The movies—that is, the old, silent, caption-accompanied movies—are felt throughout the novel" (Spender, p. xvii). This expansiveness is unconvincing because the novel is no more especially reflective of Eisenstein than dozens of other directors. I wonder how Lowry, roughing it in British Columbia, could see many films repeatedly enough to become steeped in their technique and have that technique find its way into his writing even if he did "trek through the snow to the Vancouver Film Society to see Murnau’s The Last Laugh and Lang’s Destiny" (Perlmutter, p. 566), but I agree that the cutting back and forth between the dialogue of several characters and amongst one character’s thoughts reflects a "cinematic" editing style. Further, this "cinematic" style may reflect the influence of radio technique in which the speeches of characters run into each other much as they did on radio dramas of the type that Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air did, with performers stepping on each other’s lines as people do in real life. Ruth Perlmutter sees Lowry’s writing as "filled, not simply with countless movie allusions but with the kinetic tension of film—movement and stasis; light and dark; temporal shifts; matched looks with matched spaces; the uneasy balance between apocalypse and happy endings; the merging of an individual’s inner thoughts, memories, and allusions to the cultural past with an objective camera-eye view of their movements and actions" (Perlmutter, p. 565). Perhaps, but a writer need not ever have seen a film to write in such a fashion. Nonetheless, the technique can fairly be described as "cinematic," but that description is ironic, for these are the very elements that are least represented in the film.

Moreover, there is an overt preoccupation with the cinema in the novel. Posters advertising Los Manos de Orlac, the Spanish title of the 1935 MGM film Mad Love, show up everywhere. There are other signs as well. Advertisements for cafeasparina, warnings to keep children from destroying public gardens, and the like show up frequently throughout the novel. Their presence is never heralded by a "logical" introduction on the order of "The Consul looked up and saw a sign advertising Los Manos de Orlac playing at the Cine Royal in Quauhnahuac." Rather their presence is immediate; they simply appear, mimicking the kind of transition that a cut from one shot to the next, an edit, in a film can provide. But these cinematic aspects of the novel are not found in the film. Probably because of Gallo’s script and Huston’s preferences, the cinematic aspects of the novel were discarded because they were seen as extraneous to the central character and a linear plot. In his discussions with Huston, Gallo found himself answering the questions that the director asked him that were aimed at making the screenplay linear and "present tense," that is, externalizing the internal:

This decision to leave out those images is unfortunate. It is precisely film’s ability to be plastic, to weld disparate images together either within the composition of a single shot or by the magic of editing one shot up against an entirely different shot, that subtleties of motivation, background, allusion, reference, symbol, and psychology can be portrayed.

The novel opens with a detailed description of the setting, a prologue in the form of a series of literary "establishing shots" which barely exist in the film. The film opens with a long shot of a volcano, and a quick cut to a medium shot of the Consul (Albert Finney, in an extraordinary characterization) in evening clothes walking with the deliberateness of inebriation through a cemetery amongst the people visiting the graves of their departed relatives. He is accompanied by a pariah dog. The retinue of tiny carved skulls displayed in one of the vendor carts reflects in the lenses of the sunglasses that the Consul is wearing.

This is not an establishing shot, although it is not entirely fair to suggest that there are no establishing shots in the film. There are establishing shots in the film, but they do not serve the purpose of introducing the prologue that is entirely missing from the film, as is the character of Jacques Laruelle who provides that prologue in the novel. Rather, the opening credits might be construed as a kind of prologue. Behind the credits there appears a series of marionettes appropriate for celebrating the Day of the Dead, swinging back and forth in slow motion on strings under the control of hands that are not seen. These prenarrative shots vaguely establish a sense of macabre fatality, of a puppet show about to be seen. The shot of a volcano (not two volcanoes as there are in the novel, another unfortunate trimming) is accompanied by a caption that tells us that today is "The Day of the Dead, November 1, 1938." The shots of the festival tell us that there is a tension between the themes of death and life. The Consul by his attire and dark glasses announces that he is a misfit amongst the indigenous people, and the images of the skulls reflecting in his dark glasses reifies the tension between death and life in the Consul. Yet with all these symbols working on the surface of the film, nothing takes the place of our learning the history and background of Firmin and how he arrived at his position of alienation from fellow human beings, especially his wife, and from God. The youth in India is gone. The tragic English father and Hindustani mother are gone. The Taskersons are gone. The adolescent scars from fumbled sexuality are gone. Equations between the Consul and Yvonne on the one hand with Maximilian and Carlotta on the other are gone. The poetry and its loss are gone. The horrific tale of what happened aboard the S.S. Samaritan is told briefly and thickly by the thoroughly drunk Consul and if you do not listen carefully, you miss it entirely. Thus, the sense of history that the novel brings to its narrative is suggested but not emphasized, introduced but not expanded. The novel tells us about the meaning of the Day of the Dead probably because of Lowry’s reasonable assumption that most readers of the novel would know nothing about that uniquely Mexican version of the festival to celebrate All Souls’ Day, would need an explanation to understand the inter-relationships between that festival and the novel. The film tells us nothing, only fills in the images of a festival happening and makes no attempt to explain further.

Even where the novel is overtly "cinematic," the film fails to pick up on the cinematic opportunities. For example, the image of the poster that advertises Los Manos de Orlac is a recurring theme in the novel, emphasizing fatality, impossible love, evil, doom, and the like. Los Manos de Orlac borrows its visual style from German expressionist films, which is natural inasmuch as its director, Karl Freund, had first gained a reputation as a cinematographer and great visual stylist on such films as F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1925) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927, restored 1984). Although known primarily as a cinematographer, Freund had also directed the Boris Karloff film The Mummy (1932) before directing Mad Love (1935). Although the novel does little to explain the plot of the film and thus the meaning of the allusion, the novel includes the unsubtle comment about "that poster looming above him now, showing the murderer Orlac! An artist with a murderer’s hands, that was the ticket, the hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was Germany itself that, in the gruesome degradation of a bad cartoon, stood over him" (Lowry, Volcano p. 25). Of course, Lowry is misremembering the film inasmuch as Orlac was not a murderer in the film. In any case, the film contains no such equation between the mad evil in the film, which is presented in the visual stylization of German expressionism, and the mad inhuman evils of Nazism. Although the theme of Los Manos de Orlac could be said crudely to mirror the relationship between the Consul and his wife, the impending sense of doom, the sense of ritual and repetition that a film "revival" provides is never explored in the film but is left rather as a trivia point for film buffs. In the film, the Consul and Dr. Vigil simply speak briefly about the film, the doctor explaining the plot briefly, and the Consul rejoining thickly and with pleasantly apologetic self-recognition, "Some things you just can’t apologize for."

They leave the cinema to attend the Red Cross Ball at the Hotel Bella Vista and encounter there Herr Kraussburg, the German attaché. Herr Kraussburg is indeed a cartoon, committing the gauchely egregious sartorial faux-pas of wearing a four-in-hand tie with a wing-collar shirt, but he is not overtly evil, only evil by association. The Consul drunkenly lectures the gathered partiers, speaking on the theme of "a corpse will be transported by express" by declaring that the people of the world will have to become accustomed to piles of unburied corpses in the war that is inevitably coming, but again he is drunk, and despite a stellar performance by Albert Finney, it is difficult to catch all the thickly spoken words; it is difficult to find the allusive connections between Los Manos de Orlac and the murderous fascist thugs at loose in the world. And unless you have seen Mad Love or read about it in detail greater than either the novel or the film provides, you do not know that the hands of Orlac actually save the Yvonne in that film from the murderous hands of the mad Dr. Gogol. In Mad Love, the hands of concert pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive, cast perhaps as an intertextual filmic reference to his previous role as the daring surgeon of the title in Frankenstein) are mutilated in a train accident. Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre), the ugly, repulsive, and bizarre but brilliant surgeon who has fallen in love with Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), an actress who plays in the theatre of the Grand Guignol, grafts the hands of the recently-guillotined knife-murderer Rollo onto Orlac, a neat trick inasmuch as microsurgery is still four decades off. In the climactic scene, as Gogol strangles Yvonne, Orlac expertly flings a knife and kills the murderous, insane doctor, thus saving his wife from a would-be murderer’s hand with murderer’s hands. Of course, the Consul does not save his Yvonne, and indeed proximately causes her death. But as the Consul has said, there are some things that you cannot apologize for.

The sense of politics is also diminished in the film. Other than being aware of the time-period because of the titles on the screen and the brief skirmish with the banal Nazi Herr Kraussburg, we have no feeling of inescapable political machinations in the film. The local fascist minions who appear to keep a watch on the Consul in the novel do not exist in the film. The drunken fascist chalk-talk of the gun-running Weber is not in the film and neither is Weber himself. There is little discussion of politics in the film other than Hugh’s acknowledgment that he has recently been in Spain covering the civil war there, losing a friend, and winding up in a pile of journalists and beer bottles during an altercation of some kind. Other than the cultural baggage we carry into the film with us, that is, a general knowledge about World War II and its horrors, there is little sense in the film that the weight of history and political intrigues are crushing down upon Geoffrey Firmin and causing his alienation. The specifics of Mexican politics are explained at least vaguely in the novel; the film says nothing about them, relying perhaps on the American notion, derived largely from other movies but not entirely untrue, that every public institution and every politician in Mexico is corrupt.

Nor does the film contain much of a sense of literary recapitulation and homage or indeed of recapitulation of and homage to other films. A brief snippet of Mad Love can be glimpsed through the open door of the Cine Royal as the Consul tells Dr. Vigil that he has received a letter from his wife’s lawyer that finalizes his divorce from Yvonne. The layers of cultural and literary complexity that Lowry pours into the novel are entirely absent in the film, most likely because literary allusions of the type that occur in the novel are rather difficult to achieve in film but also because such allusions detract from the film’s attempt to remain linear and spare. Yvonne and Hugh talk briefly about Geoffrey writing a book, but that is the only piece of self-referential literariness that remains from the novel. Moreover, it is a book on mysticism that he is allegedly writing, as in the novel, but because the history of his having been a failed poet is missing from the film, we have little sense of the import of literature in being both a part of the Consul’s life and a force that shapes it.

Yet the film cries out for the use of inventive form, visual stylizations, creative framing, poetic editing. The film could contain homages to other films, other films directed by Huston, other films starring Finney, or other films with similar themes. One possibility is the 1947 film noir classic Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum at its anti-hero center and his doomed relationship with Jane Greer. Hamill cleverly alludes to this earlier film in the title of his article on the making of Under the Volcano, acknowledging that the film Against All Odds, released in 1984 at about the same time that Under the Volcano was released, is a loose remake of Out of the Past. There are ample choices from among Huston’s films to draw allusions or visual references, especially The Maltese Falcon (1941), another film noir classic, The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), a tale of greed and sanity pressed to its limit, also set in Mexico, and The Night of the Iguana (1964), a tale of a alcoholism and a fall from grace. He could even choose to make a visual or stylistic allusion to Chinatown, which he did not direct, but in which he acts the role of an evil, incestuous millionaire. Chinatown itself is a visual and thematic homage to film noir, and it serves as an instance of updating the style of film noir to make it work in a contemporary, color (as opposed to black-and-white), wide-screen film. But none of these possibilities is explored. Allusions in film to works of literature are rather difficult to make, usually coming off rather clumsy when they are made, but there is no reason why Huston could not make allusions to other films. Woody Allen does it for laughs, for example, in Bananas with a shot of a baby carriage rolling down a long staircase in a shot caricaturing the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film Battleship Potemkin. Francis Ford Coppola does it for no apparent reason, appropriating the lavender and golden sunsets of Gone With The Wind for use in The Outsiders. Or Huston could borrow the styles of other films. Kael suggests that he has an obligation to look elsewhere for stylistic inspiration, writing, "For the story to mean anything resembling Under the Volcano, we would have to see something of what Firmin—with his psyched up consciousness—perceives. Possibly, it would have to be done by visual metaphors, or by techniques comparable to the hallucinatory intensifications of Werner Herzog’s "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (Kael, "Sneaks, Ogres, and the DTs" p. 86). Such visual metaphors exist in other films, too: The Trip, The Last Movie, Altered States, Catch-22, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and many others. Most obviously, Huston could reach back to German Expressionism in a way that Lowry can only imprecisely approximate in the labyrinthine workings of the novel and the frequent references to the poster for Los Manos de Orlac. The visual and thematic stylings of German Expressionism might provide the kind of visual evocation of Lowry that the film lacks. But the film version of Under the Volcano makes little attempt to make allusions to other films or works of literature, makes no attempt to providing a recapitulation of literary motifs and themes, no attempt to borrow the visual and editing styles of other films. The overwhelming weight brought to the novel by references to The Divine Comedy, Faust, Dr. Faustus, and even the Bible is absent from the film.

The film contains a very limited recapitulation of the literary motif of journey, a journey that serves both as a literary form and as a plot device the achievement of which is the Consul’s goal. But we know nothing of his goal of getting to Parian in the film, nothing of the beckoning of El Farolito, nothing of the progress of the journey in the film mimicking the progress of Dante through the Inferno and Purgatory, indeed, no noticeable references to The Divine Comedy, or Faust and Dr. Faustus at all. The volcano under which the Consul is smoldering is not exploited as a visual motif. The malebolge, the ravine, is entirely absent.

Eliminating the references to works of literature may not have been an entirely unwise idea, however. Whereas the watching of a film is an isolated event of limited duration, the reading of a book does not have to be. A reader can pause, ponder a reference in the novel that she or he is reading, no matter whether the reference is obscure or well-known. If the reference is obscure, the reader can go to a library and try to find more information, drag a college literature text off a shelf at home to try to find the originals for "malebolge" and the like. Other than film scholars, the people who watch films are less likely to do so. Still, the film version of Under the Volcano seems too timid in its attempts to find visual equivalents for metaphors, allusions, and psychological states. Kael suggests looking to Aguirre. I would not, because I find Aguirre pretentious and not at all clear in what it is trying to do. Nonetheless, the point is that Huston could have looked elsewhere, could have done more, could have done something, and yet he did not.

The film contains little sense of myth and ritual. The early shots of the festival establish its existence, and the Consul remarks "Only in Mexico is death an occasion for laughter," but we do not enter the world of the festival. It becomes an ironic comment on the happenings in the film, but it is not a participant in those happenings. Because of the limited time of the film, only one hour and fifty minutes, there is no sense of repetition that we would associate with ritual behavior. We do get a sense that the Consul spends a great deal of his time drinking, but there is no sense of the worship of alcohol that the ritual of repeated drinking has in the novel. The film does, however, provide a neat condensation that links drinking and myth, alcoholism and religion. In the film, after the Consul enters the cantina next to the Cine Royal where he encounters Dr. Vigil and Sr. Bustamente, the proprietor of the cantina and the theatre, we learn in quick succession that the Consul is an inveterate drunk who frequently drinks at the cantina; that he is not wearing socks, a state which, without further explanation, we take to be an indicator of his being so drunk that he has misdressed himself; and that he is divorced. He proceeds with Dr. Vigil to the Red Cross Ball where they both order several drinks, emphasizing the Consul’s prodigious drinking habits. After the encounter with Herr Kraussburg, the doctor and the Consul enter the sanctuary of a church and pass a reliquary. The doctor explains that the patron saint of the church is the Virgin of Soledad (solitude) "for those who have nobody with, for those who are lost," and he suggests that the Consul ask for Yvonne’s return, which the consul does, praying "I’m dying without you. Come back to me, Yvonne." Dissolve to a long shot of the bus approaching the town the next morning, quick cut to the interior of the bus that shows us Yvonne, although we do not know it is she. This sequence, coming early in the film, quickly exposes several themes of the novel, specifically alcoholism, lost love, and the ironic machinations of history that bring people together and as easily tear them apart.

She debarks from the bus and hears his voice as he lectures Fernando the barman about his tragic experience aboard the S.S. Samaritan. She enters and they acknowledge each other. This encounter gives them the opportunity to discuss his drinking, and he says, "It’s the shakes that make this life impossible," so we know that his drinking is so great a part of his life that he suffers from delirium tremens when he stops drinking. When the Consul and Yvonne return to his home, to their home, the script injects a bit of silliness as Yvonne greets her cat saying, "My little Oedipus!" and the Consul rejoins, "No, he hasn’t forgotten you." This is a rather clumsy attempt to inject the theme of Oedipal confusion into the film, perhaps following up on the notion that Geoffrey’s identity and sexual problems come from a feeling of childhood abandonment. Surely enough, after a brief interlude when she goes off to shower and he panics from not being able to find a bottle of alcohol in the house and so goes off to find one of his cached bottles in the garden, they get together on her bed. After some whimsical badinage about the names of the Mayan months, they inexpertly begin the foreplay to an act of love, but he stops, mid-passion, and says, "I’m sorry. It isn’t any good." Even though she cries out for him to stay, we do not know what "isn’t any good." His interest? His desire? His strength? His ability to get and maintain an erection? We do not know. But the ambiguity is not a problem; rather it underscores the ambivalent nature of the Consul’s relationship with Yvonne that we find in the novel. Brief and unsatisfying as it is, this episode is exemplary of the fact that most of the dialogue, though lean and used only to advance "the plot," is straight from the novel. That is, though the film is in one sense a pared down version of the novel, it does not deviate much, at least in terms of dialogue, from the novel.

In quick succession, the Consul falls in the street and is "revived" by a passing English motorist, Hugh returns, and Hugh and Yvonne rescue the Consul from a moderate attack of alcoholic psychosis. Hugh asks Yvonne if she has "really come back to him [the Consul] or what [because he would] like to know precisely what the situation is." She hesitates but tells him that she has returned, meaning that she is aware of his desire perhaps to pick up their relationship again but that she is committed to staying with Geoffrey. But their horseback ride together, their exploration of the cervezaria, and their encounter with the peasant who later is the victim of the sinarquista, all of these elaborations on the themes of lost love, history, and politics are entirely absent from the film.

Many of the salient events of the novel happen in the film. The carnival where he encounters the Maquina Infernal, the bus ride to Tomalin, the encounter with the dying peasant, the bull riding, which has been changed to bull fighting for the film, and the stop at the Salon Ofelia where the Consul confronts Yvonne and Hugh with his knowledge of their infidelities. But there are some major excisions and revisions. The numbers of cantinas that they visit is greatly reduced, but the Consul does have a chance to list off the cantinas he frequents. And rather than running away from Hugh and Yvonne, he gets on a bus, but they pursue him nonetheless. The final scenes where he is offered a prostitute are altered a bit. In the film, Hugh and Yvonne encounter him there and, disgusted, she runs away and Hugh follows her. In the novel, Hugh and Yvonne are trying to get to the Consul rather than get away from him and have no knowledge of his encounter with the prostitute. All of these changes, arguably, contribute to the linearity of the plot, thus making it, in the logic established within the film’s production by the screenwriter, producers, and director, more filmable and watchable.

Yet what is lost is considerable. The sense of alienation that permeates the novel, alienation that derives from the weight of history, politics, literature, myth, ritual, autobiography, sexual inadequacy and infidelity, and drunkenness have been concatenated with most of the weight bearing on drunkenness, for that is ultimately what this film is about. This is a film about a drunk, a sad, tired, handsome, ruined, unhappy, ill-fitting drunk, but a drunk, nonetheless, without the multiplicity of other issues contributing to and feeding of that drunkenness, not even alcoholism. Alcohol is the seton to his soul, but that is all it is. There is no sense of a drunken world around him that would go mad if it were to sober up. Although the novel "could be described as alcoholic consciousness—the amazing connections and associations, the blinding terrors and wild exhilarations that engulf a man of intellect and spirit who is far, far gone in drink" (Denby, p. 63), there is no sense of the tragedy of alcoholism in the film. Geoffrey Firmin is merely a man who likes to drink because it keeps him tight and as close to happy as he can be. As Kael points out, the film reduces the Consul to an imitation of Lowry, writing, "In 1957, Lowry, sotted and depressed, swallowed an overdose of Amytal and drowned in his own vomit. That is, essentially, what Firmin is doing throughout the movie" (Kael, "Sneaks, Ogres, and the DTs" p. 65). Yes he is an alcoholic, too, but whereas the novel emphasized both, here the emphasis is on just the drunkenness, the disconnection with the world, not the addiction of alcoholism. The grand encounter with the Maquina Infernal is no longer a metaphor for a world gone mad with one man in it striving not to be mad, vice versa, or perhaps both; it becomes just another example of boneheaded but extravagant drunken behavior.

These problems in the film are a result of the narrative plan for the film and of the visual plan. In paring down the "story" to a linear and "watchable" form, Gallo and Huston have reduced the importance of history, politics, and even personal failure that make the Consul a tragic figure. As a drunk rather than as a drunk and an alcoholic, the Consul loses some of the importance and tragedy that he has in the novel. He can no longer stand for some sort of "everyman," and becomes an individual without the complex web of symbols, allusions, and relations that enlarge his importance in the novel. Moreover, although it is true that film does a much better job of recording visual and auditory reality than it does psychology and allusion, it is not impossible for a film to become, as this novel does, a synthesis of the realism, naturalism, and stream of consciousness. But Huston will not allow such a synthesis to happen. In filming a story of a strong single character, he has literally left no room for illustrative devices to enlarge the importance of that role. The film is tightly framed, allowing for little or no development of nuances and subtleties within a frame. Moreover, the use of rather long takes from a mostly stationary camera emphasizes the realistic and puts the emphasis on the actors’ characterizations. Because of the strong performance of Albert Finney, the film is not a total disaster, but his performance is of a drunk, not of a tragic hero, drunkenness being amenable to portrayal on screen in the spare and linear form adopted by the screenwriter and the director. As Huston says, "Well, Volcano is there and it will never get done otherwise. [We wound up] doing it in the same vein that we did Wise Blood. Which was basically: small, tight, putting every fucking dime on the screen, rather than on bullshit. And that’s what we’ve done" (Hamill, "Against All Odds" p. 26). His defiance hides the apology; that is, he has made a film of the unfilmable, but he admits that to do so he has made some choices, some sacrifices.

Not every critic found the film a failure. Richard Schickel suggests that "for once the simplifying narrative imperatives of the screen (and the imperatives of the talent assembled for the effort) have served a difficult book well. In recounting what is either an ascent to Calvary or a descent into hell, Screenwriter [sic] Guy Gallo has carved a clear path through the tangled subtropic that is Lowry’s imaginative world (Schickel, p. 68). Perhaps, but sharing the tangled subtropic of a tortured soul filtering a cruel world through an alcoholic mind is precisely what Lowry wants the readers to experience. As Kael writes, "It isn’t what Firmin says in the novel that expresses his consciousness; the whole inchoate novel does it" (Kael, "Sneaks, Ogres, and the DTs" p. 86), and I would add that it is not what Firmin does, either, not a depiction of his actions that expresses his consciousness. Yet that is what the film delivers to us.

Although the Consul of the novel could be equated, as Stephen Spender suggests, with the cosmos, the Consul of the film cannot fulfill so large a demand. In the novel, there is a sense of tragedy that extends beyond a single human life. The Consul in the novel is under both a personal and an external volcano, but the Consul of the film is a weakling by contrast, sparring only with a very personal and private volcano. The sense of nobility and horror that are recalled by a mind in the novel that expresses itself in remarking, "But it’s amazing when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the shadow of the abattoir!" (p. 86) is missing from the film. This sense of hope that is announced at the beginning of the novel with the quote from Goethe’s Faust: "Whosoever unceasingly strives upward ... him can we save" is likewise missing. The Consul does not, after all, commit suicide. He drinks alcohol, not hemlock or cyanide, and the "strychnine" that he drinks is not really strychnine but a local apothecary’s potion to help Geoffrey stop drinking, not to poison him, an herbal Antabuse, I suppose. This sense of hope gives the Consul a tragic dimension in the novel that he lacks in the film. To borrow from the Buddhism of the land of his birth, the Consul of the novel is a Bodhisattva, one who can reach nirvana but delays doing so through compassion for suffering beings—largely himself but also the rest of humanity if he truly can be equated with the cosmos—but the Consul of the film is just a drunk. As an attempt to portray the entirety of the novel, the film is a failure, but as a portrayal of one man’s alienation, which he seeks to attenuate through drink and which ultimately leads him to alcoholism and self-destruction, the film does a reasonably good job. A great deal of the credit for this minor success goes to Albert Finney for his stunning performance of a man at odds with the world who responds to his anguish with the flight of alcohol.

The anguish of a sensitive soul in the middle of the twentieth century could account for the alienated loneliness of the Consul and for his seeking comfort in alcohol, that traditional refuge of those too strong to be meek in the face of horrors personal and external. Edmonds suggests that "The Consul turns to alcohol to assuage not only his feelings of guilt and shame that all men share for the human condition ... [and that] Lowry uses the Consul’s alcoholism as a symbol of the sickness which afflicts the whole of mankind in our century" (Edmonds, p. 98). Alcohol helps the drunkard in periods of loneliness because it becomes his only friend, or more precisely, it tricks the alcoholic into believing so. The Consul is lonely and cannot reach out to Yvonne for friendship because he knows that loving her means giving her more than he is able to give, much as he might want to give it. Lowry, too, "liked to stress the lonely nature of his genius, his general separateness from influence" (Bradbury, p 188). Such is the loneliness portrayed in Under the Volcano. Both novel and film show that loneliness. But the so-so film lacks the universal dimension that makes the novel great. The preproduction decisions, the small budget, the choice of script, the staging, the style of acting, and so forth made the outcome more or less predetermined. The budget was only $4 million at a time when an episode of, for example, Miami Vice was about $1 to 1.5 million and when an "average" Hollywood film would cost between $10 and 20 million. Moreover, Huston finished Under the Volcano in five days less than its allotted shooting schedule of eight weeks. A simplistic response to these data suggest that perhaps given more time and a more generous budget, the director, his camera crew, his actors, and his screenwriter might have been able to come up with the visual creativity that the film needs, that the novel demands.

The adaptation of Under the Volcano revives an old debate, here voiced by Hagen: "Any review of [negative] reactions [to the film] almost convinces one anew of the truth of two cliches: that quality literature doesn’t often produce good film and, conversely, that the best films often derive from popular fiction. Alternatively, one is tempted to project different treatments of the whole" (Hagen, p. 140). Perhaps, but such grandiose statements can hardly be confirmed simply by this one example. If John Huston has made an inadequate adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s stunningly complex and powerful novel, that fact does not generalize into an indictment of film’s ability or inability to adapt all great works of literature. On the contrary, given the suggestions by Kael and others, Huston or another film-maker could likely find potent filmic equivalents for the complexities of the novel. Given the economics of film-making in the world, no other film-maker will likely be given another chance anytime soon to do justice to this novel. Spielbergism, the application of too much money to a film in the hopes of creating a blockbuster and the enormous profits that result is both a good and a bad reality in Hollywood today. On the one hand, Spielberg has had the opportunities to handle such powerful themes as those explored in Schindler’s List and Amistad. On the other hand, when studio executives spend enormous amounts of money on a limited number of films each year in the hopes of producing as many hugely profitable films as possible, they leave little money for films of more limited appeal, as a film version of Under the Volcano no doubt would be. It is not impossible to make a great film from a great novel, to make a great film even from a great novel as complex, rich, and powerful as Under the Volcano; however, John Huston's and Guy Gallo's Under the Volcano is not a great film.