ABSTRACT
Malcolm Lowry powerfully adapts the myth of the Mexican “anti-paradise,” reconfiguring the aesthetic of negation produced in the literature of AngloAmerican informal imperialism into a critique of global imperialism. Throughout Under the Volcano (1947), Mexico is obsessively represented in antiaesthetic terms as a fallen paradise: Yvonne exclaims, “My God, this used to be … beautiful … It was like Paradise”; the Consul calls Mexico “the godless garden,” “this paradise of despair.” Lowry’s letter to his publisher Cape famously explicates Mexico’s Manichean qualities:
The scene is Mexico … the age-old arena of racial and political conflicts of every nature … where a colourful native people of genius have a religion that we can roughly describe as death, so that it is a good place … to set our drama of man’s struggle between the powers of darkness and light … We can see it as a kind of timeless symbol of the world on which we can place the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel and indeed anything else we please. It is paradisal; it is unquestionably infernal.2
