Ah, Dominic, this splendid demonstration of 'close reading' takes me back to
what I thought were long gone days of discussing poems in detail with like-
minded readers. It is heartening to think it still goes on. It also brings back
certain misgivings about times when I tactlessly expected young students to be
ready for this sort of strenuous activity.
best from Max
Quoting Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]>:
> (cross-posted from a poetry reading group I've started with a couple
> of other bloggers)
>
> A defunct form of misery, or so we might imagine. Larkin had a couple
> of tries at imagining it so himself, notably in "High Windows" and
> "Annus Mirabilis" ("Sexual intercourse began / in 1963"), which
> pictures the sexual revolution of the 60s as the moment when
> "everything became / a brilliant breaking of the bank, / a quite
> unloseable game". Yet here he is, wanking at ten past three, his
> misery the particular misery of the sexually defunct.
>
> The language of the poem is shocking, not so much in its direct
> obscenity as in its juxtapositions: "love" must live, somehow, in this
> proximity to "wanking" and "breasts" and "cunt". "Breasts" and even
> "cunt" can be said tenderly, but here I think are not: here they name
> the parts on display in the Swedish porn mags sent to Larkin by his
> pal Kingsley, the parts of a woman's body related to as prize or
> property: either one's own or "someone else"'s. This is a poem about
> coming second in a competition between men. Humiliation, "the usual
> pain"; and consolations that do not console ("the drink gone dead",
> flat in the glass).
>
> Why "love", then; and why "drowned in that lash-wide stare" (rather
> than, say, "up to his balls in quim")? The latter is of course quite
> compatible with greedy objectification: women routinely figure as both
> "breasts and cunt" and mysterious oceanic sex-beings in which male
> identity is submerged and dissolved. The speaker's anguish here is
> that of being uncomfortably left alone with his "male identity", his
> deprived and grasping selfhood, rather than "drowned" or "swayed" by
> the disindividuating force of erotic love.
>
> There is a contradiction in how he imagines his successful rival, as
> both masterfully in possession ("surely he's taken her home by now")
> and ecstatically dispossessed ("drowned in that lash-wide stare").
> This contradiction is reflected in his own compensating position,
> which is trying to make up for two incompatible privations at once.
>
> On the one hand, there is the typical Larkin move towards knowledge as
> balm for disappointment, in which what is lacking in direct experience
> is made up for in ironic reflection: the arid satisfaction of being
> "less deceived" in proportion as one is less involved. Here I want to
> supplement Larkin with Lacan's observation that "les non-dupes
> errent": the fantasy of being "the less deceived", of imagined
> aloofness and linguistic mastery, conceals the reality that the trap
> of experience has already been sprung and one is already writhing in
> its jaws.
>
> On the other hand, the poem is an expression of profound ignorance, in
> spite of what it says about being unable "to be ignorant, / Or find it
> funny, or not to care". The ellipsis after "Even...": what was he
> about to "put...into words"? Even, I think, to feel happy for this
> person he says he loves (if that is what he is saying): the sequence
> would then run from ignorance, through amusement and indifference, to
> benevolence. But this step, a first step beyond selfishness, is beyond
> Larkin - or so he insists, in poem after poem.
>
> Instead, the poem turns to the question of "this element // That
> spreads through other lives like a tree / And sways them on in a sort
> of sense". "Unselfishness" might be a good name for it; but even as
> the poem yearns for release from selfhood, it has no name for what
> might open selfhood up from the inside, exposing it to the proximity
> of other selves in which this release might be found. "Love again" is
> something other than love the first time around, the primary erotic
> motive force that "spreads through other lives": it is love
> narcissistically recaptured, as self-love deprived of the object that
> would have facilitated it.
>
> Larkin's answer, here, to the question of "why it never worked for me"
> seems to have something to do with attachment: the implicit narrative
> I think is one of a "violence / A long way back" that detached him
> from the sympathetic weave of "other lives", and a subsequent
> attachment to "wrong rewards" - the satisfactions of poetic craft,
> ironic knowledge, literary fame - that belong to "arrogant eternity"
> rather than the temporal present through which Larkin's imagined tree
> of life spreads its branches. Poetry here is not the sublimation of
> erotic urges, or "emotion recollected in tranquility", but rather a
> usurping power, rooted in privation: the poet as Larkin presents him
> in this poem is not an especially sensitive individual, but rather an
> especially desensitised one (although unwaveringly sensitive to his
> own condition). It is a studiously unappealing portrait, and I am
> rather inclined to take it as a warning; which may after all be how it
> was meant.
>
> --
> Shall we be pure or impure? Today
> we shall be very pure. It must always
> be possible to contain
> impurities in a pure way.
> --Tarmo Uustalu and Varmo Vene
>
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