… writes Geoffrey Firman of the Mexican Day of the Dead in Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano.

Tonight children dressed as vampires will come to UD‘s house, and she’ll give them chocolates.

Tomorrow and the next day Mexico and other countries will celebrate and summon the souls of the dead.

The calm piety of the Mexican attitude toward death stirs Firman, an alcoholic and a depressive for whom the facts of human suffering and death are an intolerable bafflement and outrage. He thinks of his soul as

a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess, and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm… : a peaceful village. Christ, how it heightened the torture … to be aware of all this, while at the same time conscious, of the whole horrible disintegrating mechanism, the light now on, now off, now on too glaringly, now too dimly, with the glow of a fitful dying battery – then at last to know the whole town plunged into darkness, where communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten, ideas stampede –

Under the Volcano is an extended day of the dead on which Firmin, killed in an act of violence he all but invites, is summoned back to life, reanimated as we read. Passages like the one I just quoted describe a person who has nothing to do with his hyper-awareness of being-toward-death but be tortured by it, to want above all to blot it out. The whole horrible disintegrating mechanism sickens him and makes the goods actual human life, such as it is, offers unreal to him. Here are his thoughts as he’s dying:

When he had striven upwards… had not the ‘features’ of life seemed to grow more clear, more animated, friends and enemies more identifiable, special problems, scenes, and with them the sense of his own reality, more separate from himself? And had it not turned out that the further 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? Yes, but, had he desired it, willed it, the very material world, illusory though that was, might have been a confederate, pointing the wise way. Here would have been no devolving through failing unreal voices and forms of dissolution that became more and more like one voice to a death more dead than death itself, but an infinite widening, an infinite evolving and extension of boundaries, in which the spirit was an entity, perfect and whole: ah, who knows why man, however beset his chance by lies, has been offered love?

In his final moments, Firmin’s remorse takes the shape of a dialectic involving reality and unreality. Whether any firm basis for the gesture in fact existed (“the very material world, illusory though that was…”), Firmin nonetheless always had the option to “strive upward,” to create the sort of “spirit” passionate human love represents.

But the compensations of the material world, and of love, were uncompelling to Lowry’s Faust; he preferred exploring infernal realms, which promised the deepest reality, the deepest knowledge, of all.