The aesthetic basis underlying Lowry's work centers around two key ideas, time and memory. Crucial to all of his writing is the need to decipher and to justify the past, both as it is retained in memory and as it recurs in experience. As complex as such a problem is, it becomes more so when neither memory nor experience conforms to the limits or patterns that a conventional view of reality suggests, and accordingly, Lowry required a world-view that could accommodate such apparently irregular phenomena as premonition, coincidence, recurrence and telepathy. This study will examine some of the shapes which reality assumed in Lowry's life, and the means he employed to represent and to understand it through his art. It will also suggest the usefulness of comparing Lowry's approach to existence with the theories of Ortega and J. W. Dunne. The first chapter considers the nature of time and memory in general and looks at some of the specific treatments accorded these subjects in literature. In addition, it examines Lowry's special metaphysical needs and his search through a variety of doctrines and philosophies, primary among which are Western mysticism and occultism and various Eastern beliefs, for some elucidation of his problems. Throughout, it attempts to keep Lowry's efforts in a perspective of contemporary fiction, since the problems of a universal outlook which he faced and the solutions he posed, while individual, are neither as unique nor as esoteric as they might at first appear. Chapter II focuses on some of the solutions Lowry arrived at. It assumes that the disparate body of ideas at work in Lowry's aesthetic can be subsumed, for convenience, within two metaphysical systems--Ortega's philosophy of man and history and Dunne's serial universe. These theories are considered in some detail in an attempt to show that Lowry's conception of the nature and purpose of literary activity parallels Ortega's hypothesis, while his methodology, the execution of his objectives, makes use of serialism. Chapters III and IV analyze Under the Volcano and Dark as the Grave, respectively, in light of the above considerations and try to show how these ideas are operative in Lowry's work both on the aesthetic level, in terms of his approach to literature, and also on the thematic and structural levels within the fictive worlds of the novels. The final chapter is a brief summary, synthesizing Lowry's various conceptions of time, memory, and reality around a general aesthetic theory. It will be seen that Lowry makes free use of a number of different but compatible systems of thought in his writing. Thus the chapter will also consider some of the resultant critical problems which beset his work and the corresponding need, in any evaluation of his art, for critical breadth and flexibility. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how Lowry expanded Under the Volcano beyond the narrative level and yet also managed to infuse this dense, expanded structure with an organic unity. Passages from the earlier drafts of the novel have been juxtaposed with the printed version in order to reveal salient aspects of method and purpose in the novel's composition. Chapter I attempts to demonstrate that Under the Volcano is essentially a lyrical novel and discusses the background and aims of this twentieth century genre. What chiefly distinguishes the lyrical from the non-lyrical novel is that it transcends chronological time, to some degree, and presents a spatial pattern. Chapter II discusses the cosmic outlook which prompts a writer to aim at presenting simultaneity rather than succession, and examines textual revisions which reveal Lowry's intention to give his theme a cosmic or universal scope. Chapter III examines how Lowry has expanded moments in the narrative through the use of leitmotif. In tracing these flexible motifs, we see that Lowry has used variation to make one symbol or image embrace both positive and negative poles and thus render his central theme, the dichotomy of human experience. Chapter IV traces how Lowry has used another musical device, counterpoint, to expand moments or scenes in the narrative and thus suggest simultaneity. The final chapter discusses the prevailing atmosphere of poised tension and the wave pattern which emerge from the novel's structure and how this pattern not only gives the expanded structure a unity, but also renders theme. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis is an investigation of a group of central themes which run through Lowry”s work; it centres on such key-words as 'isolation', 'alienation', and 'self-absorption'. Lowry's protagonists are seen as men trapped in "a Liverpool of self"; they are characteristically torn between a desire to escape from their prison and a desire to remain in it. Although Lowry invests his self-absorbed heroes with a certain splendour, fulfilment only comes to them when they become capable of reaching beyond themselves and entering into community with another. In the Introduction, I have briefly reviewed Lowry's early life and works. We can find, in his insecure childhood and in his obsessive identification with Conrad Aiken and Nordahl Grieg, evidence of his own alienation; the search for a stable human relationship is central to even his earliest work. Chapter I is a discussion of Lunar Caustic; I distinguish between the two major versions of this book, finding in each a distinct aspect of the search for relationship. The chapter concludes with some observations on the probably structure of The Voyage That Never Ends as Lowry first conceived it. After his second marriage in 1940, the relationship between man and wife became, for Lowry, the prototype of the community which his protagonists seek. In Chapter 2 I discuss Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid and La Mordida, in which the marriage relationship is central. Chapter 2 concludes with an analysis of Sigbjørn Wilderness' 'metaphysical alienation'; Chapter 3 traces the cyclical pattern of Hear Us 0 Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place in terms of the constant struggle to break down the distinction between the inner world of the mind and the outer 'real' world. In "The Element Follows You Around, Sir!" and "Ghostkeeper" we see this 'real' world itself in the throes of a kind of nervous breakdown; in Chapter 4 I attempt to find the meaning of these puzzling stories, and conclude that, like the rest of Lowry's work, they affirm the necessity of the individual to find himself in relation to others. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Although Malcolm Lowry is recognized as a major writer largely for the novel Under the Volcano, his lesser known works, Lunar Caustic, "Through the Panama" and "The Forest Path to the Spring", in Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, are as clearly representative of his place as a twentieth century writer as Under the Volcano, These three novellas were intended by Lowry to be a part of his proposed cycle, The Voyage That Never Ends, and their relationship to the rest of his work can be clearly seen. This thesis examines Lunar Caustic, "Through the Panama", and "The Forest Path to the Spring", in terms of the clear relationship to the proposed cycle. They are analysed primarily in thematic terms, through an analysis of each novella as a separate entity. At the same time, the integral relationship between them will be shown. All Malcolm Lowry’s work is an attempt to defeat chaos and alienation by establishing identity through the exploration of the various masks of self. This process of exploration can be called the quest for self. Accepting this as a basis, the thesis attempts to define and clearly evidence the aspects of the quest in the three novellas. The process is one of discovering the separate masks of self in each novella, and then establishing the links between each mask and their progressive nature. This should clearly delineate the interconnective nature of the three novellas and their link to the remainder of Lowry’s work. This thesis hopes to prove that the design and pattern of Lowry’s operation of the quest, while beginning in despair and chaos, eventually moves to a point of order and redemption, while at the same time showing that in personal and creative terms, the quest and its literary reconstruction are primarily destructive. In the novella Lunar Caustic, despair and chaos prevail and the protagonist fails in his quest for self, although the terms of that quest have been established. Sigbjorn Wilderness, the protagonist of "Through the Panama", moves further towards an acceptance of himself in terms of his past and the disordered world around him. It remains, however, for the nameless protagonist of "The Forest Path to the Spring", to finally reach a point of self acceptance and of salvation. He does this as a composite figure, made up from his predecessors in Lunar Caustic and "Through the Panama", and from Malcolm Lowry himself. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The fictions Malcolm Lowry wrote subsequent to Under the Volcano seem to demonstrate little of the technical expertise he manifests in the earlier work, and one of the few unanimously held findings of his critics is that in Lowry's later fictions something has gone wrong. This thesis explores the "problem" of the later fiction. It shows how Lowry, throughout his writing career, experiments with fictional form, and how each of his later works marks an intermediate point in a process of fictional evolution towards a "new form." This "new form," although never fully realized, is initially shaped in the notebooks Lowry used to record the events which he later transformed into the material of his autobiographical fictions. Lowry's "new form" is in fact a development out of the structure of his notebooks: the journal form. The journal form inherently creates opposing perspectives upon events; conflicting narrative rhythms ensue from this. The "new form" is an ideal Lowry aspires towards: it is intended to structure a new type of realism -- the means by which human beings assimilate and order what has happened to them —• and to contain, and thus make contiguous, Lowry's diverse themes, images, and oppositional narrative technique. Lowry's theoretical approach to the "new form" is discussed in the Introduction. Chronology is then reversed. Chapter I discusses "Ghostkeeper" as Lowry's reflection upon his fictional method. Chapter II approaches "Through the Panama" as Lowry's use of the journal form to unify disparate narrative voices. Chapter III examines and compares the manuscript and the printed version of Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. It shows that this book is Lowry's first direct experiment with temporal inversions which are used to attempt to reconcile narrative mode with thematic action. Chapter IV demonstrates that Lowry uses an oppositional system as the fictional unifying principle for Under the Volcano, and examines the formal dimensions which Lowry only retrospectively discovers operating in this book. Each chapter focuses upon fictional form and argues that Lowry's themes and narrative techniques grow out of the form he employs. The Conclusion examines Lowry's "new form" in relation to his philosophical outlook, shows how the new form reconciles Lowry's borrowings from Ortega y Gasset and J.W. Dunne and suggests a critical approach that will elucidate the literary and philosophical function of the journal-narrative method. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

It has long been recognized by Sidney Geist and others that Constantin Brancusi's stone work, after 1907, forms a coherent totality in which each component depends on its relationship to the whole for its significance; in short, the oeuvre comprises a rigorous sculptural language. Up to the present, however, formalist approaches have proven insufficient for decodifying the clear design which can be intuited in the language. The resultant confusion can be attributed to the fact that formalism takes only half of the work's significance into account. Yet Brancusi's careful selection of titles, and his insistence on content, indicate that the latter plays an equal part in establishing the relationships between his sculptures. A structuralist analysis which treats his work as a system composed of signs and which takes both form (signifier) and content (signified) into account, and relates each piece to the whole, seems imperative. Various features of Brancusi's work, including his mythological themes (Prometheus, the Danaids) and transformations (Leda, Maiastra), as well as the presence of parallel yet opposing works (George, Princess Xj and reconciled dualities (the Kiss), correspond to Levi-Strauss' observations on the features of "mythic" thought or "concrete" logic. Thus Levi-Strauss' structuralist methodology was chosen from those available for analyzing Brancusi's work. This choice is strengthened by Brancusi's primitive background in Romania, his techniques (la taille directe), and his affiliation with the French avant garde when it was drawing inspiration from primitive art. It is the thesis of this study that Brancusi was a "primitive thinker" working in Paris, and that the structure of his sculptural language functions like a primitive mythology. Language systems do not depend solely, however, on their internal relationships for their significance; they draw much of it from their social context. It is thus necessary to reconstruct the historical milieu from which Brancusi drew his ideas. A structuralist and historical analysis of the Kiss, the cornerstone of Brancusi's stone work, indicates that the sculpture does, in fact, function linguistically like a mythic object, and that it has a highly complex, and densely packed significance. The latter arises from Brancusi's major sources of inspiration: the sculpture of Rodin and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Although these have been noted before, there has never been any systematic study of the influence, particularly of the latter, on Brancusi's work. The structuralist analysis employed here indicates that Brancusi continued to employ Bergson's concepts of glan vitale, intuition, duration, creative evolution, and the oppositions between consciousness and unconsciousness, the continuous and discontinuous, material and spiritual, from the early Kiss to the last Birds in Space. On the other hand, Brancusi transformed Bergson's ideas into his sculptural language and inverted those which did not correspond to the requirements of the mythology. A structuralist analysis of the sculpture after the Kiss confirms the accepted theory that Brancusi developed his works in series, but also supplements it by demonstrating that these series are as much linked by content as by form, that is, they proceed both metaphorically and metonymically. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that the four major series are, in turn, systematically linked to each other. It appears that Brancusi conceived his series in opposing parallel pairs which could be transformed, through mediating elements, into each other. When the series are finally linked the conceptual infrastructure, or metalanguage, which establishes the relationships between the totality and the parts, becomes clear. Various other oppositions, such as those of male/female, sacred/profane, human/animal, can also be seen to relate opposing works and series to each other. The entire structure, however, rotates around the Bergsonian dualism of the material and the spiritual. Only when the final work has been placed in the structuralist matrix can the system be perceived as coherent. Nonetheless, once the basic concepts of Brancusi's early works and their semantic relationships are clearly understood, his system of sculptures can be seen to proceed with such rigor that the existence of certain works can be predicted. This, in turn, validates the application of both the methodology and the analysis. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

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Master of Science