Of Acedia, Romantic Imagination and Irony Revisited: A Background Note for Readings of Under the Volcano

Abstract

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.