Freud,
in his book, 'Civilisation and its Discontents', written after
the catastrophic consequences of the first world war, was
forced to postulate the antipode of the instinct which had
hitherto been the cornerstone of his theory: as a retort to
Eros, Thanatos seemed to be equally valid a statement - a
statement of equal psychoanalytic significance. The negation
of the will-to-live came into existence as the psychological
antimatter that could only happen to the culture-alienated
animal: the human animal. It is a form of being that oscillates
between Eros and Thanatos, belonging to neither of these,
and at the same time being triggered by the impossibility
of fully satisfying either.
The individual, being first and foremost the product of social
realities, reflects in his/her art these social realities.
The fallacy of individuality is never more obvious than when
it comes to works of art and their relation to the time of
their appearance. Of course, the above does not preclude the
peculiarities and idiosyncraticities of a specific human character
that may influence the creative process. What I try to get
at is the impossibility of conceiving a unique psychological
reality in isolation of a general social reality.
Philip Larkin lived in a time when former ideals and touchstones
where falling apart. The death of God in human consciousness,
that still functioned as a moral fulcrum in proto-industrial
times, had been the major catastrophe. The industrial revolution
had been fully ensconced, successfully automating the human
modes of existence. Capitalism had put an emphasis on individual
effort and competition rather than co-operation, thus contributing
to a distancing of one human being from the other. The dreariness
of the post-industrial Northern European landscape, the extremities
of urbanisation, represent a concatenation of forces and events
that alienate humans in further culturalisation.
Philip Larkin reflected the essence of his times in highly sarcastic
tones, never deviating from the primal exigencies of everyday
life. That is why he achieved such a state of popularity:
his primary concern was life and its discontents in a the
specific reality of post-industrial England. His ability to
write in propria persona and still relate to other people's
psyche is unique.
An autobiographical poet as he was, it is hardly possible
to understand his work without a knowledge of his life. We
know that it was quite late in his youth that he managed to
develop intimacy with the opposite sex. His inferiority complex,
his inherent shyness, his interest in 'high-culture' set him
apart from his peers. But that didn't mean that he had chosen
his isolation as a matter of free will, as it transpires in
many of his poems. Freud's portrait of the artist as a frustrated
introvert is quite apposite to Larkin:
An
artist is once more in rudiments an introvert, not far removed
from neurosis. He is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual
needs. He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the
love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these
satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man,
he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest,
and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life
of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis
[1].
According to Freud, artistic activity was a sublimation of
primary instincts, sublimation being the most important vicissitude
which an instinct can undergo, so that what was originally
a sexual instinct finds satisfaction in some achievement that
is no longer sexual but has a higher social or ethical valuation.
Sublimation is thus a technique for fending off suffering
with making oneself independent of the external world by seeking
satisfaction in an internal, psychical processes.
Philip Larkin's apparent misogynism and, in more general terms misanthropism
and pessimism, is nothing but the expression of the pain caused
by the inability to meaningfully relate to human beings. Hate
for people is normally the outcome of an iconolatric love
for people - a love that has been unwelcome. Thus, Philip Larkin
has not been 'emotionally retarded' as some critics have suggested,
but emotionally developed to such a degree that should he
let himself go, he would have been annihilated by the sheer
strength of his own feelings. As we know, people usually shy
away from an unconditional expression of love as it denudes
the other being exposing a deeper vulnerability.
His cynicism about the biological function of love is -paradoxically-
fully compatible with a neo-romantic attitude that declares
the impossibility of living without love. One can be both
cynical and romantic. Or, perhaps, one becomes cynical because
one is romantic. An instantiation of a higher emotional sensibility
in Philip Larkin's work I find in one of his most amazing minor poems,
The Mower, in which he bemoans his carelessness after having
killed a hedgehog with his mower:
we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time
[2].
Such
an extreme expression of sensitivity and sympathy is indeed
something one would not expect from a rampant pessimist and
misanthropist. The structure of the poem, from the particular
event that has nothing exceptional, and in different circumstances
would be perceived as trivial, to the generalisation in the
last three times, is exactly the sort of jewel that only a
craftsman like Larkin can create.
A poem that exemplifies the turn from the cynical to the romantic,
from bathos to pathos, of which I talked earlier, is, Arundel
Tomb. The concept of death is present here but will not be
discussed at this stage. The irony and the cynicism is shown
in the fact that the 'earl and the countess' (probably not
the ideal lovers in their lifetime) have come to be extremely
'close' to each other in their common tomb:
The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon...
[3]
But
the final line has an almost defamiliarising effect, reversing
our expectations of the potential endings. Instead of receiving
another pungent line of grim cynicism we get one of the most
oft-quoted lines Philip Larkin ever wrote:
what will survive of us is love
Love here seems to turn the tables on death and only someone
who has deeply experienced it can share this powerful feeling.
However, I strongly believe that an issue of major importance
concerning the artist's motivation and the particular way
in which the artist is perceives his/her vocation is the omnipotent
concept of death - it would hardly constitute a hyperbole
to state that almost all serious literature can be explained
as a desperate attempt to create the illusion of immortality
through the double function of the work of art as an opiate
and a means of posthumous fate. Indeed, Larkin proved to be
very cautious with his posthumous reputation asking his friend
a few days before his death to destroy his diaries.
Another response to Eros, which is neither a sublimation nor
a fulfilment of it, and quite in keeping with the Neo-Freudian
contentions about creativity, is onanism. It should have been
quite shocking for his times to write a poem with an overt
reference to autoerotic practices, but it is there again where
Philip Larkin deals with life realistically and uninhibitetdly. His
jealous frustration (a common experience) is channelled into
the negation of the fundamental duality of the erotic - in
solitude it becomes desamor
[4]:
Love again: wanking at ten past three
(Surely he's taken her home by now?)
... Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt
... And me supposed to be ignorant [5].
Repeated frustration of the normal erotic functions of a human
being can lead to an apparent negation of life and embracing
of death. Thanatos, in many instances, is nothing but the
biological mechanism which disposes of an individual who is
not sexually (procreatively) efficient. The rationale behind
this is simple: an individual is valuable to its species only
to the extent that he/she can ensure its rejuvenation. This
is subtly reflected in, The Trees, which stands as a metaphor
for the eternal death and rebirth of everything alive. The
triple repetition at the end puts the emphasis on rebirth,
an unusually gay ending for Philip Larkin:
Last year is dead they seem to say
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh [6].
It is evident in Freud's, Essays on Psychoanalysis, that,
not just all serious literature, but all thought is born out
of the instinct about death. The death instinct presupposes
the smothering of the pleasure principle, it simmers somewhere
underneath it, ready to erupt anytime. However, it can still
be justified on grounds of 'pleasure':
But
even when it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest
fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognise that
the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary
high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting
the ego with a fulfilment of the latter's old wishes for omnipotence
[7].
One of the ways the fear of death can be repressed is through
'elegant' repression -if I may venture the neologism- wherein
death is transcended by means of an ostrichal philosophical
detachedness which transcends temporal barriers and bestows
the illusion of omnipotence:
Pour away that youth...
Walk with the dead
For fear of death
[8].
A
prose parallel could be drawn with Kierkegaard, one of the
existentialist precursors to modern psychology, who applies
the same technique:
the
true philosopher is continually aeterno modo... this philosophy
is to be recommended also to practical respects, for it has
been victorious over the most dangerous enemy, death, for
death is obviously tricked when it finds me dead beforehand
[9].
What Kierkegaard means here by talking about experiencing
life aeterno modo is abolishing the accepted temporality of
the present and replacing it with the knowledge of all time
as contemporaneous. 'And all is always now ' [10]
would
be a moto that would equally please Søren Kierkegaard and Philip Larkin.
But for how long can one be an ostrich? Inevitably, even though
some people have art in order not to perish of the truth -
they still 'perish' of the truth.
Another way to explain the 'virile' death instinct inherent
in Philip Larkin, is by means of relating it to the process of sublimation.
Freud always assumed that one of the chief aims of psychoanalytic
theory is to replace repressions with sublimations. However,
this is not a panacea as I) not all libido can be displaced
ii) only a minority of people are capable of creative sublimation
iii) sublimations by virtue of their intrinsic nature are
not capable of complete satisfaction. And we reach to the
crux: 'the dessexualisation intrinsic to all sublimation ...
involves a necessary component of dying to life of the body,
and therefore cannot ever satisfy the life instinct
[11] '.
Thus, what Philip Larkin so insistently portrays, is the reaction
of his id to the stress it suffers through sublimation.
There could be no better example of the 'narcissistic enjoyment'
that is derived from the expression of the death instinct
and its concomitant dessexualisation than the poem Wants:
Beyond all this the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff -
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
Beneath it all desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death -
Beneath it all desire of oblivion runs [12]
[Poem
translated into Greek].
The illusion of omnipotence, which is the only jouissance
in the psychological state that gave rise to this poem, lies
in the ability of the poet to openly negate life and bravely
embrace death. This illusion is further enhanced by indirectly
invoking death as something that should better be come to
grips with rather than repressed (The costly aversion of the
eyes from death). The weariness and the futility of trying
to escape are brought out by the use of unrhymed lines and
repeated syntax suggesting lassitude ( 'however...', 'however..').
Also, each stanza is enclosed between a bare statement reinforcing
the inevitability of any redeeming action. There is a mechanical,
biologistic, view of sex ('printed directions of sex' and
'tabled fertility rites') which divests it from any romantic
overtones. Human rituals as seen as a subterfuge for the truth
which nobody wants to face. The attitude to all received pieties
is iconoclastic. Hope, which has been treated in the poem,
Next Please, does not exist at all in this poem, it has been
already dispensed with as a liar that can only protract one's
sorrows; the only reward is the black ship of death. It is
from that point that, Wants, begins.
In fact, we can draw a parallel here between loneliness and
death. Each of these concepts serves as the topic sentence
to each stanza. Psychoanalysis has shown us that loneliness
is, in a psychological reality, one of the most powerful ways
that death can intimate itself to us, and that fear of death
is nothing but the expression of the terror of loneliness.
In absolute love, one fears not death, one has surpassed death.
The romantics especially have grasped this concept that reached
one of its many climaxes, for example, in Wagnerian music
drama. Wagner's, Tristan and Isolde, has become synonymous
with the concept of Liebestod the amalgamation of the two
German words for love and death.
But where, Wants, ends, Aubade, begins. It is probably the
last poem written by Philip Larkin about death. In it there are many
cliches, but it is still remarkable for the adroit and original
way in which the bare cliched ideas are combined. The themes
already mentioned that relate to the attitude towards death
recur; but this time in a synectic, cumulative way. Aubade
stands for the song before morning of lovers who must part
at first light. Larkin's version becomes a meditation in the
early hours of one who fears separation from what he most
loves (?) - life itself. Once again, the primordial archetype
of Love & Death is evoked. Once again fear of death is
alternated with the negation of the will-to-live. Once again
one falls in love with what one must part with.
According to Camus 'one does not discover the absurd without
being tempted to write a manual for happiness
[13]';
Larkin found a 'manual for happiness' in the Schopenhauerian
justification of his pessimism:
...My
fundamentally passive attitude to poetry (and life too,
I suppose)...believes that the agent is always more deceived
than the patient, because action comes from desire, and
we all know that desire comes from wanting something we
haven't got, which may not make us any happier when we have
it. On the other hand suffering - well, there is positively
no deception about that. No one imagines their suffering
[1].
Like Schopenhauer, he declared that satisfaction of desire
is fundamentally a negative thing, but perhaps, after a psychoanalytic
analysis of his life and work, we know that an element of
sour grapes has been extremely influential in the development
of his Weltanschauung.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Freud: Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis
SE, Vol XVI, Hogarth Press,1963, p.376
[2] Collected poems, p.214
[3] ibid 111
[4] A word existing in Spanish (in Italian as well),
which signifies the condition of lack of love when love is
urgently needed, or the despair of betrayal. Notably, the
English language lacks an adequate signifier to translate
Eros (amor), let alone desamor.
[5] ibid p.215 (Love again)
[6] ibid p.166
[7] Freud: Penguin, Vol 12 p.313 (Civilisation and
its Discontents)
[8] Collected Poems, p.297 (Pour away that youth)
[9] Kierkegaard, p. 529
[10] T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, p.189 (Burnt Norton)
[11] Freud: The Ego and the Id, (SE), Vol. XII, p.60
[12] Collected Poems, p.42
[13] Albert Camus The myth of Sisyphus (1975) p.103
[14] Roger Day, p.90
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Camus Albert: The Myth of Sisyphus, Justin O' Brien
(tr), Penguin, 1975
Roger Day: Larkin, Open University Press, 1987
T.S. Eliot: Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, 1963
Freud: Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis, (SE),
Vol XVI, Hogarth Press,1963
Freud: Complete works, Penguin, Vol 12, (Civilisation
and its Discontents)
Freud: The Ego and the Id, (SE), Vol. XII, Hogarth
Press, 1963
Philip Larkin: Collected Poems, Marvell Press, 1988
Soren Kierkegaard: Either/Or, Princeton Press, 1971
LINKS
Philip
Larkin Home Page
Poems by
Philip Larkin translated into Greek
Philip
Larkin, Complete Poems [Amazon.com
(39 on-line sample pages!)
| Amazon
UK]
Philip
Larkin: Bibliography [Amazon.com
| Amazon
UK]
|