Ferris Wheels, Faust, and Forms of Influence in Malcolm Lowry and Graham Greene

Ferris Wheels seem to fascinate film-directors – notably Carol Reed in The Third Man (1949), based on Graham Greene’s story and script. Though Ferris Wheels figure less conspicuously in twentieth-century novels, Malcolm Lowry provides an exception in Under the Volcano (1947), a novel also comparable to The Third Man in other ways. One explanation might be that Greene simply drew on Lowry’s example when developing his film-script (later published as a novella) – work begun very shortly after Under the Volcano had appeared. More plausibly, each writer might be understood to have responded separately, though similarly, to the unique pressures of their age. Identifying how these stresses were represented in their work, through cognate symbologies, may suggest some productive ways of reading historically.

An unknown Capote. The American writer’s juvenilia and unpublished short stories

The article sets out to acquaint readers with early works by Truman Capote that have never been published in collections of his early prose. It concerns his school exercises, some of which appeared in The Trinity Times newspaper, as well as short stories penned before 1942 during his time at Greenwich High School. A brief abstract of these works gives an idea of the talent of the writer, who became aware of his vocation very early in life. The article discusses Capote’s other manuscripts discovered in American archives, including a draft ‘Article about a group of young people in Moscow’, referred to by Capote as ‘A Daughter of the Russian Revolution.’ This documentary piece describes the children of the Soviet elite whom Capote met during his visits to Moscow in 1956, 1958 and 1959. Among his other important finds, D. Zakharov mentions the manuscript of the short story Another Day in Paradise, dedicated to the writer Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano), whom Capote met in Sicily. The article raises the question of including the aforementioned works in the writer’s general bibliography, offering arguments in favour of their subsequent publication.

Malcolm Lowry no ocaso do Império

Este artigo propõe uma leitura de À sombra do Vulcão, de Malcolm Lowry, centrada na importância da história moderna e na presença do Império Britânico na narrativa do último dia de Geoffrey Firmin. Seguindo a noção de uma “leitura contrapontística” dos textos canônicos ingleses, formulada por Edward Said, discuto que, por ter nascido na Índia, o Cônsul (britânico) não consegue ter um sentido de pertencimento à Grã Bretanha, senão que se encontra em uma situação intersticial e liminar que antecipa a ruptura entre uma identidade imperial e uma identidade nacional, uma das maiores problemáticas abordadas nos estudos teóricos atuais sobre a identidade (especialmente nos estudos pós-coloniais). A partir desta perspectiva, a ênfase na situação imperial permite uma leitura que rompe com as interpretações do México como um “paraíso infernal” que perpetuou o estereótipo do nosso país mesmo em estudos críticos sobre o romancista.

“THEY ALL KNOW WHAT I AM”: LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN AND ALCOHOL

Drink literature is something which has been drawing critical attention for a few decades. This is most transparent in the number of studies concerning various attempts to literarise alcohol, in whatever form or genre. What is immediately striking, though, is that most literary works fitting this thematic context are written by male writers, to mention Malcolm Lowry or Charles Jackson, and they usually feature male protagonists. Women seem to be inconspicuous here, both as authors and as literary characters, the latter usually limited to marginal figures who are victims of male drunkenness. This article targets the ‘neglected’ gender in the fictional representations of alcohol by briefly surveying the motif in the literature written on the British Isles and then focusing on two women writers, Jean Rhys and A.L. Kennedy.

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947): singular experiences

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano places the committed drinker, in the form of ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin, in the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ festival, so that the main character encounters ‘hell’ in physical and spiritual dimensions. The novel is technically innovative in its aim to register the subjective experience of the Existential drinker: Geoffrey Firmin’s world is constructed through a highly-individualised, expressionistic symbolism, a mid-century representation of the modern, alienated self, abandoned and suffering despair in a Godless world – the latter made evident by the novel’s attention to the rise of totalitarianism, which forms the backdrop to the events here on a day close to the onset of World War II. There is discussion of the novel’s difficulty and form, and a comparison of some aspects of the novel with Kafka’s The Trial, and how these relate to representation of the Existential drinker.