[In the following essay, Vice examines the hallucinogenic sequences in Under the Volcano.]

'If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you'll know I'm done for.'

'It's mescal with me . . . Tequila, no, that is healthful . . . and delightful.' (UV 219)

On the other hand there had been until recently several drinks of mescal (why not?—the word did not intimidate him, eh?) waiting for him outside in a lemonade bottle and all these he both had and had not drunk . . . (UV 304)

A confusion between the drink mescal and the drug mescaline seems to lie at the bottom of Under the Volcano, as if it were con gusano, with an agave worm in its gourd:

The worm isn't there for looks. It is meant to be eaten. Because it is believed by many that within the worm lies the key. Some say it unlocks the door to a world of wondrous experiences. Others say it sets free a spirit of celebration. Still others say that eating the worm locks in the enchantment and excitement of Mezcal. . . .^1*

In his article "The Place of Hallucinations in Under the Volcano,"² Thomas Gilmore suggests that the Consul's exaggerated fear of mezcal is thus explicable:

the Consul's (and Lowry's—see Letters, p. 71) apparent assumption that mescal is the liquid equivalent of the hallucinogenic drug mescalin is erroneous. But the assumption explains why the Consul dreaded the great potency of mescal and why, after he begins drinking it in Section X, his hallucinations seem to increase in frequency and intensity. (287, n. 4)

However, it seems rather that the drink, with its unsubtle, smoked-tequila flavour, and high alcohol content, is a symbol to Geoffrey of the point of no return. The guilt he feels in connection with mezcal has a historical origin, when the conquistadores "ran out of their traditional rum, the battle-scarred fighters looked for something else to celebrate with,"* and they developed a method for obtaining mezcal out of the Aztecs' pulque.³ These connotations of exploitation of indigenous culture—"' . . . no, the point is, Yvonne, that the Conquest took place in a civilization which was as good if not better than that of the conquerors, a deep-rooted structure'" (UV 301), as Hugh says—of over-sophistication and greedy consumerism, culminate in the bad press mezcal had in the early days of Spanish rule in Mexico as the means by which Spanish mine-owners were able to pressgang farmworkers into the mines.

As Gilmore notes, Lowry indicated the Consul's apparent inability to distinguish between alcohol and hallucinogen: "It would appear that (he) has fuddledly come to confuse the two, and he is perhaps not far wrong" (SL 71). In itself, such a confusion is not startling; in his essay "The Present Status of Ololiuhqui and the Other Hallucinogens of Mexico,"⁴ R. Gordon Wasson explains that dried peyotl (commonly eroded to "peyote"), a small woolly plant of the amaryllis family, and not a cactus as is often assumed, is the hallucinogen known in the West as mescaline:

For reasons that seem to have sprung from popular confusion, the English-speaking population of the Southwest came to call the dried peyotl 'mescal buttons' . . . Later, when the active agent came to be isolated, the chemists called the alkaloid 'mescaline', thus compounding the mistake. 'Mescal' comes from the Spanish of Mexico mescal, derived in its turn from Nahuatl mexcalli, the name for the agave, maguey, or century plant from which pulque is made, which, when distilled, yields mezcal. Mezcal has nothing to do with 'mescal buttons' or 'mescaline'. (166)

It is a fortuitous coincidence in a work which extends the periphery of hallucination beyond the clinical boundaries of the alcohol-induced, that Oaxaca, site of the terrible hotel and restaurants, the very word sounding like 'the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert' (UV 53), should be at the centre⁵ of the sacred mushroom cult of Mexico.⁶ As Gilmore points out (285), Art Hill's discussion of Under the Volcano as primarily the portrait of a drunkard⁷ makes little mention of the Consul's hallucinations, and Gilmore himself concentrates on Lowry's treatment of them as a means for subverting the division between sober reality and fantasy. As ever, this symbolic purpose is based firmly on a mimetic foundation, thus echoing the nature of the hallucinations themselves. Although Gilmore states that drug-induced hallucinations include abstract elements—perception of colour, geometric shapes—which are absent in alcohol-induced ones, where the emphasis is more on feelings of fear and paranoia, often leading to death, what happens to the Consul seems to fit descriptions of hallucinogenic experiences, which include:⁸

1. "changes in mood (sometimes euphoric and megalomanie, sometimes fearful, panicky, and anxiety-ridden)"—the Consul never reaches heights of unselfconscious joy, but he does experience flickers of sudden hope for his future and his salvation (cf. UV 88,217), counterpointing a host of the "fearful," ranging from vindictiveness and the desire to hurt and provoke, to the longing for a mother and security, and the constant sense of being watched and spied upon.

2. "a sense of threat to the ego"—as Aldous Huxley points out in The Doors of Perception, this is at once the prize and the price of the mescaline experience; liberation from the self can be insupportable. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Clear Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality—anything! (DP 43)

3. "intensification of the other senses so that inaudible sounds become magnified or food tastes better . . ."—Geoffrey's perception of sounds becomes personalized and not quite in tune with their sources:

Tak: tok: help: help: the swimming-pool ticked like a clock. (UV 75)

. . . while from above, below, from the sky, and, it might be, from under the earth, came a continual sound of whistling, gnawing, rattling, even trumpeting. (UV 144)

Yet the place was not silent. It was filled by that ticking: the ticking of his watch, his heart, his conscience, a clock somewhere. There was a remote sound to, from far below, of rushing water, of subterranean collapse . . . (UV 338)

4. ". . . or normally unnoticed aspects of things (such as the pores in concrete) become strikingly vivid"—these unnoticed aspects are, for the Consul, all fierce and unhappy ones: in Laruelle's house he notices on the wall

a terrifying picture he hadn't seen before, and took at first to be a tapestry . . , Down, headlong into hades, selfish and florid-faced, into a tumult of fire-spangled fiends, Medusae, and belching monstrosities. . . plunged the drunkards. (UV202, my italics)

Yet there are also moments of appreciation of a kind of newly revealed beauty:

. . . 'how, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning?' (UV 55)

5. "a sense of depersonalization . . ."—Huxley describes this as an awareness which is "not referred to an ego; it was, so to speak, on its own" (DP 41); the Consul has difficulty in separating himself as perceiver from the intensity of his visions (cf. the vision of swarming insects, UV 152). The fierce flora which surrounds the Consul—the accusing sunflower (UV 148) and phallic plantains (UV 70)—suggests a vision opposite to Huxley's amazed perception of some Red Hot Pokers, "so passionately alive that they seemed to be on the very brink of utterance." (DP 46).

6. ". . . of being simultaneously both within and without oneself, a closely related feeling of merger (dissolving) with the external world and a loss of personality"—Geoffrey contrasts the separateness of the features of his life which he enjoyed when he first met Yvonne with his present state:

And had it not turned out that the farther down he sank, the more those features had tended to dissemble, to cloy and clutter, to become finally little better than ghastly caricatures of his dissimulating inner and outer self, or of his struggle, if struggle there were still? (UV 361)

which is often apparent throughout the day:

The toilet was all of grey stone, and looked like a tomb—even the seat was cold stone. 'It is what I deserve . . . It is what I am,' thought the Consul. (UV 295)

. . . he was surrounded in delirium by these phantoms of himself, the policeman, Fructuoso Sanabria, that other man who looked like a poet, the luminous skeletons, even the rabbit in the corner and the ash and sputum on the filthy floor—did not each correspond, in a way he couldn't understand yet obscurely recognized, to some fraction of his being? (UV 362)

Everything he sees is deranged and doomed; he experiences the world as he experiences himself:

The huge looping-the-loop machine . . . suggested some huge evil spirit, screaming in its lonely hell, its limbs writhing, smiting the air like flails of paddlewheels. (UV 224)

and it is even questionable whether much of what he sees is there at all: "Obscured by a tree, he hadn't seen it before (UV 224).

7. "a perception of ordinary tilings as if seen for the first time unstructured by perceptual 'sets'"—Huxley also mentions the cleansed, childlike vision imparted to the world by mescaline: "the percept had swallowed up the concept" (DP 42). Geoffrey sees things anew, glowing with menace: in his garden are

tools, unusual tools, a murderous machete, an oddly shaped fork, somehow nakedly impaling the mind, with its twisted tines glittering in the sunlight . . . (UV 132)

and without perceptual sets the true nature of what is before him shines out:

. . . on his extreme right some unusual animals resembling geese, but large as camels, and skinless men, without heads, upon stilts, whose animated entrails jerked along the ground, were issuing out of the forest path the way he had come. He shut his eyes from this and when he opened them someone who looked like a policeman was leading a horse up the path, that was all. (UV 342)

Huxley goes on to describe the fear of a mind confronted with a reality overwhelming in comparison with the "cosy world of symbols" (DP 43), "the homemade universe of common sense" (DP 44), which he says is the constant state of the schizophrenic.⁹ In Moksha, Huxley points out the loss of symbolism which accompanies mescaline and is the everyday experience of the schizophrenic: "the meaningful things seem in the mescaline experience are not symbols. They do not stand for something else, do not mean anything except themselves" (M 63). The schizophrenic

can't shut off the experience of a reality he isn't holy enough to live in, which he can't explain away and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolences calling for the most desperate counter-measures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. (DP 44)

This seems particularly applicable to the Consul (cf. his thoughts on the relief of madness—"psychological suicide"—and his propensity for violence: the questionable fate of the German officers in his ship the Samaritan, his machete-wielding in the Farolito); the hallucinations he experiences function simply as intensifications of his own angst.

8. "hallucinations of flowers, snakes, animals, other people, etc., which subjects usually know to be hallucinations though they are powerless to stop them"—Geoffrey inhabits a veritable jungle of snakes, Hugh being one of their number (UV 145), which are never clearly either visions or real reptiles (e.g., UV 131). He almost imagines the sunflower strolling into his room (UV 183), and among the people he sees or speaks to when they are (probably) not there, are the dead man in the swimming-pool, Hugh in the Calle Nicaragua, and Laruelle in the Café Paris.

9. "voices commanding the user to do something"—the Consul is constantly subject to a cacophany of voices berating and mocking him, a chorus of guilt made audible, which belong to his own Good and Bad Angels as well as to the figures of his past.

10. "the release from the subconscious of repressed material, sometimes in the form of terrifying, dreamlike, visual symbols, and breakdown of conscience and superego restraints"—in some ways the whole geography of Under the Volcano is akin to a region of the "subconscious," and all that happens to Geoffrey in it is so elemental, so rawly powerful and significant, that it has some of the qualities of the Kafkaesque vision: the subject is placed, fully conscious and able to record literally, within his own nightmare. Huxley suggests that under certain conditions, such as after ingestion of mescaline, or following deprivation of sugar and certain vitamins, the mind gains access to a way of seeing the world which is "biologically useless," possessing "no survival value" (DP 12), but which "may be extremely helpful to us in so far as we are creatures capable and desirous of understanding" (HH 101). He shares Lowry's image of the land of the heart: "A man may be said to consist of an Old World of personal consciousness, and, on the other side of a dividing ocean, of a series of New Worlds . . . of the subconscious" (M 58).

In earlier drafts of Under the Volcano,¹⁰ the Consul actually did take a drug—at Señora Gregorio's he "sat with his drink for a long time smoking the marihuana,"^10a and when he sees the pelade's hands trembling on the bus to Tomalín he thinks that perhaps, "like the Consul himself, he had been sampling, but not subtly, the mighty marihuana."^10b However, no special effects follow, merely

an opiumish clarity of vision in which each object was in its proper scenical place and touched with a supersensual significance . . . The holy virgin, the pyrene, the advertisement for the Red Cross, the jacket from less than these could a universe be constructed.^10c

The same confusion reigns here in the Consul's mind over what is drink and what is drug—'"The first drink I ever had, Father gave me on the q.t. . . . our old man never called it anything but soma. The curious thing about it is, it's exactly the same as this mescal here, I could swear,"'^10d but he sees more when, in the published version, he only imagines he, or likens himself to one who, has taken a psychedelic.

Markson describes mezcal as "symbolically connected with the hallucinatory drug"¹¹ the Consul's confusion certainly mirrors a more widespread one, allowing him to benefit from the visionary aspects of mescaline without ever taking it. Not only are his hallucinations hybrids of reality and the imaginary, in form and content, but also of drug and drink experience. This is characterized for Geoffrey by what Huxley calls "visionary hell"; for people such as he, everything in the universe,

from the stars in the sky to the dust under their feet, is unspeakably sinister or disgusting; every event is charged with a hateful significance; every object manifests the presence of an Indwelling Horror, infinite, all-powerful, eternal. (HH 49)

It is in this way that the idea of entering the afterlife you deserve when you die has its full meaning: fear and anger, of themselves, make for a hell of unlovely visions. The clear light of understanding becomes a hateful spotlit glare.

References in the text are as follows:

UV: Lowry, Malcolm, Under the Volcano. Penguin edition, 1981 reprint.

DP: Huxley, Aldous, Doors of Perception. London, 1954.

HH: Huxley, Aldous, Heaven and Hell, London, 1956.

M: Huxley, Aldous, Moksha, London, 1980, ed. M. Horowitz and C. Palmer.

^1* This, the title, and all following quotations denoted by an asterisk, are taken from the short leaflet supplied with bottles of Monte Alban Mezcal con Gusano, which is Fabricado y embotellado por Mezcal Mitla, S.A. Libertad Nol 35, Oaxaca, Oax.

² Thomas B. Gilmore, "The Place of Hallucinations in Under the Volcano," Contemporary Literature, 23, no. 3 (1982).

³ According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Consul is in fact correct in his insistence on the healthfulness of pulque, it is "an important and inexpensive source of carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins for Mexico's low income population. Pulque may in some regions provide the major liquid intake during the dry season."

⁴ R. Gordon Wasson, "Notes on the Present Status of Ololiuhqui and the Other Hallucinogens of Mexico," in The Psychedelic Reader, ed. Gunther M. Weil, Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary (New Jersey, 1973).

⁵ Cf. Wasson's essay, especially p. 174, and accompanying maps.

⁶ Wasson's mention of an ancient mushroom religion is corroborated by Albert Hofmann's comment in his Preface to Huxley's Moksha: "Psychotropic substances of plant origin had already been in use for thousands of years in Mexico as sacramental drugs in religious ceremonies and as magical potions having curative effects"—it is instructive to compare abuse of such substances with the Consul's guilt over his abuse of the mystical properties of wine.

⁷ Art Hill, "The Alcoholic on Alcoholism," Canadian Literature, no. 62 (autumn 1972).

⁸ From Richard R. Lingeman, Drugs from A to Z (New York 1974).

⁹ Richard K. Cross, in his Malcolm Lowry: A Preface to His Fiction (Chicago, 1980), notes Geoffrey's "acute ontological insecurity" (37), and quotes from R. D. Laing's study of schizophrenia, The Divided Self.

¹⁰ This and the following four quotations are from the Malcolm Lowry Collection: University of British Columbia, The Library, Special Collections Division. The references are to box, file, and page number: (a) 22 (23) 35, (b) 23 (I) (3), (c) 23 (I)8, (d) 28(5) 18. See also 24(2) 292 and 24(5) 394.

¹¹ David Markson, Malcolm Lowry's Volcano (New York, 1980), 134.