Malcolm Lowry's <i>Under the Volcano</i> and the Drunken Discourse of Literary Solipsism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel, Under the Volcano, is a lyrically sublime fictional encapsulation of existential nightmares endured in a critical period of world history. While the existential element of the novel might well be downplayed in the decades following postmodernism's ascendancy in prescribing interpretive paradigms for fiction, this article proposes to explore further the existential model, if not as a wholly defensible interpretive strategy, then at least as a motif worth dwelling on and reading alongside (or against) a metarhetorical model more in keeping with a postmodern sensibility in order to see what insights might be generated to illuminate both the novel and Lowry's notoriously un-sober working life as a writer. The novel is thus read as an exemplary instance of what could be called drunken literary solipsism or, more elegantly, an exemplary instance of alcoholically transfigured “pure persuasion,” to borrow a term from Kenneth Burke.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".