"Absolutamente necesario": The Express Train in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Chapter Twelve

Abstract

In Under the Volcano, Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, despairs over a failed marriage in the bars of Quauhnahuac, Mexico. On this day his former wife, Yvonne, returns to save him, hoping to lure him away from Mexico to an Elysian cabin. Stagnant failures of the past coalesce with apocalyptic visions when the narrative engine of a lifetime comes to a halt and all the boxcars of a lifetime collide with the present.2 The Consul is physically killed by an Indian’s runaway horse that is frightened by the storm, so the express train is only the figurative cause of his death. On the Day of the Dead, November 2, 1938, from seven a.m. to seven p.m., a lifetime is contained in a day that speeds towards death in a stream-of-consciousness narrative with the accelerating structure of an express train. Typographically, we are on a swift course winding through the Mexican terrain. From the figurative broken track ending Chapter 1 to its continuation in Chapter 2, Under the Volcano makes it clear we have boarded a speeding narrative that conveys death: Pam Fox Kuhlken finished her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, in 2005 and currently lectures at the University of San Diego and Perelandra College. Her essay is part of a projected book on the poetics of time in modern novels and films that are set in a day.