Fables of Asylum: Malcolm Lowry's Lunar Caustic

Abstract

In Malcolm Lowry's Lunar Caustic (1963), a situation exists in which the story's protagonist – failed jazz musician Bill Plantagenet – feels an obligation to counsel his companions in the psychiatric institution they find themselves confined to, and even to rescue them from it. Yet Lowry's narrative also exposes a certain level of complicity among the hospital's patients: attempts to “save” them from their fate must never, it seems tacitly acknowledged, take precedence over the personal fictions they have devised to protect themselves from the world, both inside and outside the institution. Indicative of a certain postmodern capacity, the patients might be thought of as engaged in a type of reality making that is both discursive and narrational. According to theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard, entering into social debates over the shape of the world involves trading stories and offering contending narratives of this kind. Yet for Plantagenet his continuing aim seems to be an overarching “grand narrative” that he also envisions as a project for liberating humanity, or freeing the humanist individual.