Malcolm Lowry in the fall of the Empire

• Autor(a) principal: Anaya Ferreira, Nair María
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Gonzalez Bezerra, Mara, Cesco, Andréa
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Belas Infiéis
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/belasinfieis/article/view/22998
• topic: Malcolm Lowry, escritor pós-colonial?. México na literatura inglesa. Análise do discurso colonial. Identidades pós-coloniais. Modernismo e ocaso do império.; Malcolm Lowry, postcolonial writer?. Mexico in English Literature. Analysis of colonial discourse. Postcolonial identities. Modernism and the fall of empire.

The purpose of this article is to offer a reading of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano focused on the importance of modern history and the presence of the British Empire in the narration of the last day of Geoffrey Firmin. Following Edward Said’s notion of a “contrapuntal reading” of canonical texts, my view is that being an Anglo-Indian, the (British) Consul lacks a sense of belonging in regard to a British identity. He lives, therefore, both in a interstitial and a liminar situation which anticipates the breaking up between a sense of national identity and a sense of imperial identity, which constitutes, in fact, one of the main subjects in contemporary theoretical studies about identity (especially in Postcolonial Studies). From this point of view, the current interpretation breaks with a very common reading of the novel in which Mexico is just seen as an “infernal paradise”, an image which has perpetuated a degrading stereotype of the country, even in some serious critical studies about the author.