On to Genesis: Malcolm Lowry, Ultramarine and Consequential Modernism

Abstract

This thesis explores the composition, revision and prose structure of Malcolm Lowry’s first novel Ultramarine (1933), examining Lowry’s shifting techniques of paraphrase, metaphrase and direct quotation across a variety of drafts and published versions of the novel. Lowry’s early and deliberate assumption of specific—if objectively misleading—personae in early letters to his desired interlocutors portray the fraught process of presenting oneself in a desired light; Ultramarine, I suggest, enacts the same process not just on the prosaic level of its plot, but more crucially for Lowry, as evidence that he had emerged as an author in his own right. Complicating this process, however, my analysis of Ultramarine demonstrates that the novel contains a profoundly greater accretion of voices than has previously been assumed. Among the dozens of newly identified source texts addressed in the thesis, I have discovered in the novel Lowry’s unacknowledged literal prose translations of no fewer than eleven poems by the Norwegian poet and writer Nordahl Grieg. In light of these discoveries, the thesis proposes a reconceptualised approach to Ultramarine criticism and Lowry studies in general, based first on accounting for the influence of the perceivable signifying factors within a work (the ‘phenotext’), though with a view towards a fuller and more balanced explanation of the work’s generative factors (the ‘genotext’). Lowry wrote much of Ultramarine under the tutelage of Conrad Aiken, whose appreciation for polyphony and structured prose I see as demonstrably influential on the younger writer. Aiken’s early literary criticism and the novel Blue Voyage (1927) bear down strongly upon the short stories and drafts that form the nascent text of Ultramarine, though I suggest Lowry shook off Aiken’s influence as he began to exert his desire for true individuation: for authorial ontogenesis. So too did Lowry write against the work of his second literary father figure, Nordahl Grieg, whose poems Lowry had adopted in Ultramarine as lyrical and seemingly authentic expressions of his protagonist’s struggle. Lowry’s second novel In Ballast to the White Sea (1934–6) presents as a particularly reflective attempt to write himself out of Grieg’s shadow. A congenitally modernist writer, Lowry draws heavily upon the works, words and voices of other writers and poets in the process of composing and revising his own texts. Lowry’s prose has an aesthetic appeal greater than the sum of its textual parts: though a text such as Ultramarine is not created from ‘whole cloth’, understanding the warp and weft of Lowry’s textual weaving is of no lesser value than the annotative work of recognising the disparate threads that make up the text itself. I argue in my final chapter that Lowry’s idiosyncratic brand of late modernist composition is best termed a ‘consequential modernism’. Lowry writes as a consequence of his high modernist predecessors, and the interwoven text that results—cited, recited and enciphered—is of particular consequence as much for his dexterity and originality as for the breadth and depth of his source material.