“The Voyage That Never Ends:” Malcolm Lowry’s Taoist Aesthetics of Return/Renewal

Abstract

Malcolm Lowry’s sustained interest in China and in its rich cultural legacy spans nearly three decades until his untimely death in 1957 by “misadventure”. From his first published novel Ultramarine (1933), about a trip hound for the China coast, through his vignette, “China,” his unfinished work, and a typescript named “La Mordida” of 1000-strong pages, to his novella “The Forest Path to the Spring,” we never fail to be deeply impressed by his unflagging efforts to search for knowledge and wisdom from the land of Taoism. Given that scanty attention has been paid to this aspect among voluminous Lowry scholarship, it would not do justice to Lowry’s corpus to examine here all of the Taoist elements therein. However, a concentration on his absorption of the one key concept of return and reversal – an intriguing leitmotif in fact – seems feasible within the constrictions of this paper.