Throughout his career, Malcolm Lowry deliberately used the "self" as an excavation site for revealing those hidden impulses which compel a person to create and destroy. Applying his theoretical knowledge of Freudian depth psychology, which he absorbed during his apprenticeship under Conrad Aiken, Lowry reveals himself as a writer driven by neurosis toward creative activity, striving, ultimately, to circumvent self-destructive tendencies and schizoid and manic-depressive mental states through his work. / Beginning in Ultramarine, engendered under Aiken's tutelage, Lowry brings to light oral, anal, and phallic pregenital sexual conflicts that lead to neurotic and moral anxiety, tormented dreams, sexual phobias, inhibitions, and defense mechanisms which impede maturity. By delving inward, he finds an aggravated Oedipal phase to be at the center of artistic sublimation. / In Lunar Caustic, Lowry attempts to break free of the anxiety of Aiken's influence while examining insanity at close range. Initially blurred in an alcoholic daze, patterns are soon clearly defined: oral dependency, phallic guilt, aggression, regressive infantilism, and, within the clinical situation, principles of "basic trust," transference neurosis, transference defense, and interpretation. / Under the Volcano, his major achievement, permits Lowry to devour Aiken's hovering presence while descending into his alcohol-induced "dark night of the soul." Mexico's infernal beauty operates as the psychological correlative for a people whose birth into the modern age has been fraught with violence, separation anxiety, and lapses into utter solitude. Further, his central characters are burdened by the psychological weight of their pasts--unresolved conflicts stemming from traumatic childhood and adolescent experience. Geoffrey Firmin, particularly, is victimized by the "witty legionnaires" of paranoia and his self-destructive alcoholism, assuredly a sign of chronic suicide. / Finally, Dark As the Grave and Through the Panama explore the psychological entanglements that writing inflicts on personal happiness. While turning to literary solipsism, Lowry feels himself being overtaken by his fiction, and though he had hoped his writing would help him justify himself to himself, instead, his obsessive, perfectionist demands transform it into a vehicle of self-destruction. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-02, Section: A, page: 0502. / Major Professor: David Kirby. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_78174 |
| Contributors | Nordgren, Joseph Everett., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 546 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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