Humanism in M. Lowry

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.

And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit.  And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.

And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes.
--Sophocles Antigone


I ran across this passage as an epigraph to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, a text that one critic details not as the drunk writing literature but "the drunk as literature".  (This description is certainly apt - the majority of the plot is immersed in some kind of bottle.)  The phrasing is interesting in relationship to the Sophocles text because it calls attention to an alliance (albeit full of discord) between the inebriation of texts and the inebriation of the bodies (including a minds).  This liquidated text seeps into the lines from Antigone.

Yet Sophocles here speculates about a humanist techne that always manages to salvage humans from the wreckage of the tired and weary god (Mother? Earth).  The resistance to death (or the drive to it) is a consequence of flying-machines, nets and yokes.  Animals also sway in and out as theoretical tools utilized by humans.  Horses fall into the cyclical patterns of agriculture and submission.  The result is not only an exaggerated claim to human greatness but also an excessive gesture at what defines humanism: other beings.

What does the drunk as literature tell us about the supposed masters of on top of the old god?  Lowry suggests a two-fold process in his novel.  First, there is a deficiency in the vision -- an inhibited blur of words, facts, faces and films.  These objects becomes multi-faceted and obscure.  On the other hand, this inhibition also works in the text to de-emphasize a world created for a hyperactive human awareness. In its place, the Mexican environment is vacant but also enchanting:

How continually, how startlingly, the landscape changed!  Now the fields were full of stones: there was a row of dead trees.  An abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to heaven in mute supplication; another planet, he reflected again, a strange planet where, if you looked a little further, beyond the Tres Marías, you would find every sort of landscape at once, the Cotswolds, Windermere, New Hampshire, the meadows of the Eure-et-Loire, even the grey dunes of Cheshire, even the Sahara, a planet upon which, in the twinkling of an eye, you could change climates, and, if you cared to think so, in the crossing of a highway, three civilizations; but beautiful, there was no denying its beauty, fatal or cleansing as it happened to be, the beauty of the Earthly Paradise itself.  (10)

The activities of one locality stray away from the observer.  Drunk literature has to pause, re-read and re-locate the writer in this entanglement.  Such a sentiment should be extended beyond the question of drunkenness to consider a variety literary modes and tools that link up any humanism explicitly to its milieu.  In this case, a de-emphasis on the uniqueness and (pure) activity of human consciousness draws our attention to other actants in the story (booze, for Lowry).