ESC: English Studies in Canada

AUTHORING LOWRY: THE ROLE OF THE PARATEXT IN THE FICTION OF MALCOLM LOWRY M IG U E L M O T A Simon Fraser University JLN her introduction to a recent collection of essays with the subtitle “New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry,” Sherrill Grace persuasively argues that Lowry’s texts are imbued with life by what she calls a process of “confabu­ lation.” The confabulator, she suggests, is Lowry’s “literary inheritor” : The primary meaning of confabulate is to converse, discuss, talk together with, but in psychiatry confabulation also designates the replacement of a gap in memory by a verbal falsification that the subject accepts as cor­ rect. Lowry’s literary confabulators (beginning with his own eponymous heroes) not only converse with Lowry; they also re-create him. Their confabulations of Lowry fill the gap in their and our memories by adding to the fictions/falsifications that we accept as somehow correct. (12) This is incisive. Yet Grace appears willing (at least explicitly) to allow only those conventionally thought of as “artists” into this process — painter Al­ berto Gironella, composer Graham Collier, writers Robert Kroetsch, Sharon Thesen, Michael Mercer, Victor-Levy Beaulieu, among others. Implicitly, of course, it becomes clear that Grace and the other critics in the collec­ tion are no less literary confabulators, sharers in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry — the fiction by Malcolm Lowry and the fiction that is Malcolm Lowry. Yet traditionally there has been a reluctance to admit to the role of these critic/confabulators in the creation of this fiction. The talk is usually of discovering Lowry, of deciphering or extracting yet another subtlety of language out of the many of which he was undoubtedly capable. Such selfeffacement is emblematic of an enviable disinterestedness that has long been thought the essential characteristic of the critic. It also serves to obscure the political implications of critical interpretation behind a system of hierarchies within which the academic critic is seen as uncomplicatedly responding from below to a prior, already established higher presence. All too often, Lowry functions as a vehicle by which to uncritically exult individualism, subjec­ tivity, humanism, and the “artist.” In this essay, I wish to explore the work performed within Lowry studies by a specific type of literary confabulator, this work perhaps traditionally the most self-effacing of all — that of the E n g l is h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , 22, 4, December 1996 editor and publisher. Following Norman Feltes, Frank Davey has demon­ strated how publishing and marketing practices can establish an author as “a brand-name, offering the reader a text that is presumably producible by no other writer” (97). A “brand-name,” though, is capable of variant readings, multiple associations. It is my intent here to show how a significant number of publishers and editors of Lowry’s works have invested the “brand-name” of “Malcolm Lowry” in a broadly liberal, romantic discourse that highly values the figure of Malcolm Lowry as autonomous author, writer of self-enclosed autonomous works and sole originator of an authoritative Lowry voice. Traditionally, it has been the figure of the individual author that has most often functioned as the source of final intentions and textual meaning. Jerome McGann, however, has begun to challenge such editorial methodol­ ogy by arguing that such a tradition clings to “ideas about the nature of literary production and textual authority which so emphasize the autonomy of the isolated author as to distort our theoretical grasp of the ‘mode of ex­ istence of a literary work of art’ (a mode of existence which is fundamentally social rather than personal)” (8). Opposing such assumptions, McGann has argued for a collaborative view of authorship and authority: “the production of books, in the later modern periods especially, sometimes involves a close working relationship between the author and various editorial and publishing professionals associated with the institutions which serve to transmit literary works to the public” (34-35). And it is not only the literary work of art, of course, but the figure of the author itself that is socially constructed — that is, generated out of the social production and interpretation of textual...