Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Here there be spoilers!
Having finished and set aside Orhan Pamuk's Snow, I am reminded most of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano: There are a variety of similarities, although for reasons I'll get to later, one deserves classic status, and the other doesn't. For the moment, I'd like to concentrate on the aspects they share, because in the end, I think that one way to understand the modern work is to look at the old.
First, both novels deal with a protagonist who is an outsider. The case for Geoffrey Firmin in Volcano is fairly clear, I think. Even though he has lived in Mexico for some time as an English Consul, he is still a foreigner, and drink has cut him off from other contacts. His half-brother has only recently come to stay with him, and his wife only returns the day of the novel. Ka, from Snow, is also isolated; visiting the border city of Kars from Istanbul, he has only recently returned to Turkey from exile in Germany. Unfamiliar with his own country after a twelve-year absence, he is doubly uncertain in a city he had only briefly visited as a young man.Both men also hold nominal positions of respect - Firmin is an official of the British Government in Mexico, while Ka is a minor celebrity -- especially in the backwater town of Kars -- due to some published poetry. Yet in both cases, the men will find that any privilege associated with these positions are self-composed illusions. Furthermore, because they believe their rank insulates them from the ordinary dangers by which they are surrounded, there comes a moment when they discover that those who hold the true power in their lives also hold these two in contempt. Geoffrey Firmin discovers this during his fateful encounter with the police, and Ka when the special operative Z Demirkol presents his damning evidence against his lover Ipek.
The reasons for the contempt is much the same also; neither Geoffrey nor Ka have any interest other than self interest. They are not interested in -- and barely cognizant of -- the driving emotions and passions of the competing political ideologies with which the people around them are obsessed. Each man has their own obsession -- a woman, whom each assumes is intrinsic to his happiness. Through the course of events, both relationships end, and each man then hurtles toward his own destruction, one to go on in a sort of living death, one to receive more immediate results, but both consumed by self-pity.
Even the situations surrounding the women they are in love with is similar. Both men are suffering from the particular heart-sickness that comes from betrayal: Geoffrey Firmin was cuckolded by his wife and best friend a year prior to the events in Volcano, and it precipitated his descent into mescal and a chasm of self-pity. Ka has become obsessed with Ipek, a beautiful woman he barely knows, and after she eventually accepts his offers of love and escape, he uncovers a past affair of hers, one that affects his ability to believe that she can ever feel about him the way he does about her. Regardless of whether either man's reaction is justified, both assume the posture of victim and betrayed.
One last note, one more about the tone rather than characterization: Both novels are gloom-ridden and melancholic, with heavy foreshadowing that makes them both emotional reads. Here though, it is a matter of style; Lowry's prose is difficult, stream-of-conscious wanderings that make use of symbols and parallelism to generate a feeling of impending doom, while Pamuk uses an intrusive narrator. Each technique will have its supporters: I prefer Lowry, although I don't object to Pamuk's effort.
Those are the broad descriptions of the similarities I found between these two novels; following the particular thread of the two men's emotional situations, what I notice most is the striking difference in the authors' final pronouncements --or even judgments -- on their characters inability to overcome these problems. In Under the Volcano, Geoffrey Firmin is murdered by a corrupt faction of the police, and his body is thrown into a ditch. In his last sentence,as if in summing up everything that Lowry intended to convey about his Consul, he simply remarks, "Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine."
Pamuk takes a different approach. The narrator, who happens to be a writer named Orhan Pamuk, has reconstructed Ka's days in Kars -- days that could very well be said to be his last as a living man. After interviewing the people who were most important during his friend's stay in the border town, Pamuk boards his train and ends his story. "I sat down and as I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, the shabby rooms full of people watching television, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimneys at last seemed a smudge through my tears."Pamuk is begging us here, hoping that we will accept his narrator's emotional response as something Ka deserves, though in truth, there was little throughout the story that suggested Ka was worthy of such grand, melodramatic tears. Ka, as made obvious through his reconstructed notes of his time in Kars, felt sorry enough for himself, and yet Pamuk wants to legitimize Ka's self-pity as tragedy. It's a neat trick, and it almost works. Lowry, on the other hand, leaves no one to cry for the Consul: he is a small man who dies a dirty death. And although Geoffrey Firmin was also consumed with self-pity, Lowry refuses to put him on a pedestal.
Impressions and Speculations:
Despite the attempt of Stephen Spender, writing in the introduction to the 1965 edition of Under the Volcano, to make Lowry's novel more about the political events of 1938 than about the character of Geoffrey Firmin, I emphatically believe that Lowry's main thrust is getting down the last day of his Consul, and that Firmin is an expression of Lowry's inner opinion of himself. (An idle observation is that Firmin is a near homophone for vermin.)
It is tempting to draw the same conclusion about Orhan Pamuk and Ka -- and by virtue of Ka coming from the consciousness (and sub-consciousness) of his author, it would probably be correct to some degree or another. Still, what really matters to this reader, despite that Snow is labeled a political novel, is that the emotional resonance Pamuk intended for his readers to feel about Ka is, to me, the primary emphasis of the book. Thus, stripped of all the other circumstances, both novels are about the destruction of self-absorbed men who, treated roughly by their affaires de coeur, find it impossible to recover. Pamuk cries for his friend the luckless lover, and, by extension, asks us to also; Lowry throws a dead dog on top of his.
The difference, as I see it, is that one author understands that his character is full of self-pity, and judges that emotion rather harshly, while the other is either unaware of his character's true mental state, or else feels as if it is a valid, worthy emotion. And that is why one reads like a skillfully manipulative melodrama, and the other like a punch in the stomach.
As always, I gladly welcome comments and dissenting opinions.
