Under the Volcano's rehearsal of the Coleridgean sense of imagination, with its ironic, synthetic grammar figured as "cold fire," seems inconsistent with readings of the novel as something of a para-medieval exemplum for caritas and therefore against acedia. The retracing of that image from Lowry's use of it in the crucial chapter eight to its source in Milton and Dante, where it exemplifies the unreason of Hell, where love has no place, provides an interpretive context more comprehensively founded in intellectual history and more consistent with Lowry's demonstrably ironic handling of the Good Samaritan theme and with the ethical consequences that logically follow from that handling. The Lowry so contextualized is aptly read as a latter-day Romantic indwelling a region where "cold performs th'effect of fire," there suffering the travails of ethical paralysis attendant on fidelity to the principle of self-contradiction basic to his art.
Michel de Montaigne, ironic assayer of perception and judgment, once observed that what may seem hot to one individual or group is not unlikely to seem cold to another. There is much in the criticism of the first of Frederick Philip Grove's published prairie novels, Settlers of the Marsh (1925), to suggest that the sceptic's ancient wisdom has worn well with time and much use. On the one hand, there is commentary such as Desmond Pacey's in the Literary History of Canada. (1965): while admitting to 'some improbabilities' in the relations of the three main characters in that fiction, he finds in favour of Grove's 'acute and profound' analysis of the 'motives' of the protagonist Niels Lindstedt and praises the 'brilliant fidelity' with which the author describes the northern Manitoba bush country and the homesteader's life there. In 1969, Ronald Sutherland also finds great virtue in the 'psychological depth' of the novel, judging Settlers of the Marsh Grove's 'finest achievement.' More recently, a reader's guide restates the value of 'the psychological realism of Grove's characterizations and the naturalistic description of the farms laid precariously upon the northern Manitoba landscape.'
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