THEOLOGY IN ASYLUM. THE FAILURE OF SALVIFIC STORY IN MALCOLM LOWRY'SLUNAR CAUSTIC

Abstract

Lunar Caustic tells a story of a failed jazz player who stays briefly in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Like Under the Volcano, the novella partakes of the quality of Lowry's madly revolving world. The asylum experience of W. Plantagenet, the protagonist of Lunar Caustic, is based on an episode from Lowry's own life.1 During his stay in New York in 1935 his alcoholism became too difficult a problem for his friends who decided to commit Lowry to a psychiatric ward. Later Lowry presented the fact in a different light, claiming that he had made a deliberate pilgrimage to Bellevue in order to gather material for his story.2 Initially, the story was to evolve into a novel which would become the Purgatorio part of the author's drunken Divine Comedy.3 William Plantagenet is shown in the text as the one who makes a pilgrimage to the place of his ordeal. The perspective of a Dantean visitor is blended with that of the Christ-like figure that Plantagenet attempts to be. What seems striking is the fact that Lunar Caustic abounds in remarks and images that yield to theological interpretation. They are signs that seem to have been emptied of their original meaning. The asylum provides a suitable frame for all the strategies of displacement that dissociate the signs from their Judaeo Christian framework and set them afloat. Accordingly, I would like to demonstrate that the theological elements of Lunar Caustic are diffuse traces of a religious system that is no longer available to or salvific for the characters. In my analysis, I will use a midrashic fragment from First Epistle of Peter to interpret the novella. The fragment weaves together two questions that surface as the main motifs in Lunar Caustic. They are: Christ's descent into the abyss and the deliverance of Noah.