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This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Different From Himself: Reading Philip Larkin After Modernism Sarah Humayun PhD English Literature University of Edinburgh 2013 ABSTRACT: This thesis addresses the work of Philip Larkin in the light of critical positions, stemming from mainly modernist perspectives, which characterize it as the opposite of what counts as innovatory, experimental and progressive in twentieth-century poetry. It aims to critique this assumption without, however, trying to prove that Larkin’s work is modernist or experimental. Rather, understanding ‘form’ in modernism as an entity that resists subjectivity and ostensibly includes otherness within its self-reflexive boundaries, it aims to offer readings of Larkin’s work that do not begin from these parameters but from an understanding of otherness as relational. Additionally, it gives extended consideration to Larkin’s prose with the aim of initiating a reconsideration of Larkin’s contribution to literature in English from a perspective that includes the essays and the novels. My introduction sets out the reasons and precedents for thinking about otherness in Larkin’s work in a different way from that found in modernism-inclined literary criticism. I show that such criticism diagnoses an aesthetic regression in Larkin’s poems on the basis that they rely on the projection of personality rather than the foregrounding of form. I argue that recent critical work on modernism privileges form because of its ostensible ability to present otherness in art, but that this critical heuristic is inadequate for dealing with Larkin’s work. I then outline an alternative more suited to Larkin’s work: a way of conceptualising otherness that locates it in the relation of the work to subjectivities external to it (such as readers’), which, I argue, is not susceptible of capture through what is designated as ‘form’. The first chapter attends closely to the theme of failure to relate to otherness in Larkin’s two novels; I argue that it is this failure that Larkin’s fictions meditate on by creating fantasized love-objects that their protagonists desire and yet seek to arrest in non-response and self-identity. Building on this, the second chapter examines Larkin’s polemical deployment of the idea of ‘pleasure’ as what the reader coming from a position of otherness to the art is entitled to seek in it. Comparing Larkin’s position with Adorno’s in Aesthetic Theory, a major twentieth-century work on aesthetics in the capitalist age, I try to locate Larkin’s difference from Adorno and develop the perspective he offers in his essays and poems to show that it allows readers to approach literary writing without being constrained by formal prescriptions. The last three chapters are studies of three themes that have been the focus of special attention in Larkin criticism: subjective voice, place and death. In the third chapter, I argue that Larkin’s poetry makes use of (what I identify as) a ‘Romantic’ register that is undercut by a ‘personal’ one. I do this by examining how a Romantic voice – one that constructs the self and projects it into the world in symbolic and lyrical forms – is at odds with a personal voice which sees these forms as prisons. The result, I argue, is an art that explores the idea of being ‘different from oneself’. Chapter four, on the significance of place in Larkin, argues that while he does subscribe to certain notions of belonging to England, and more importantly, to the idea of belonging as a poetic imperative, he also problematizes what belonging means, treating it not as identification with a place, but as an unsettled and sometimes defamiliarizing relation with it. The last chapter, on the theme of death in Larkin’s work, shows that it uses ‘death’ not as a fixed point of annihilation, but one that moves backwards and forwards in life, informing its sense of possibility, and constituting an experience of something that is always present and yet always beyond experience. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION: LARKIN AFTER MODERNISM: 5 II. NEARER THUS: FICTIONS OF NON-RELATION :39 III. ART, IF YOU LIKE: LARKIN’S REASONS FOR ATTENDING TO PLEASURE: 87 IV. THE ROMANTIC AND THE PERSONAL IN LARKIN’S POEMS: 129 V. SENT OUT OF SIGHT: LARKIN AND PLACE: 180 VI. UNRESTING DEATH: THE SENSE OF ENDINGS IN LARKIN: 229 VII. CONCLUSION: 261 VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY: 268 2 I verify that I composed this thesis which consists of my own work and has not been previously submitted for any other degree or qualification. Sarah Humayun 3 Acknowledgements I am immensely grateful to Paul Crosthwaite for the patience, honesty and perceptiveness with which he engaged with my work. Much of what I try to convert into arguments here is a response to conversations with Aaron Kelly: I hope he finds something still recognisable in this project, which owes much to him. I am also grateful to Simon Malpas, Jonathan Wilde, Susan Manning, Bob Irvine, Alex Thomson and other members of the English Department who have given me the benefit of their time or advice. No work would have been possible without the love, conversation and fun that friends bring to my life; in particular I thank Lila, Christos, Silvia, Mark, Feyza, Tanira, Haniya, Zunoor, Nina, Supurna, Crispin, Aya and Roger – and ‘Chandan’. Finally, my thanks, along with my love, to my family; to Ami, my debt goes beyond what can be acknowledged in words. 4 Introduction: Larkin after Modernism Writing in 2002, the poet and critic Peter McDonald repeats and extends what is a recognisable gesture in discussions of British poetry that see its future ‘development’ as being tied to an advance on the ‘Movement style’ that Philip Larkin exemplifies. He offers a characterisation of Larkin’s poetry through a reading of ‘High Windows’. Designating Larkin’s work as an inheritance passed on to the ‘short lyric poem in Britain in contemporary writing’, he enumerates the items of the bequest as follows: Such a poem will be in the first person (at least to begin with);… it will tell some sort of anecdote or story, and point out the irony of the situation it describes; finally, it will find an image or images that transcend the situation, and that constitute an unspecific, apparently secular, epiphany. The poem will cultivate a knowing irony in relation to everything but its own control of language. If such a poem succeeds, the reader will remember most of all the appeal of the personality projected there, and be able to identify with it, as with a character on stage or screen. The poem’s seriousness, as well as its humour, will relate finally to the ‘personality’; the poet will have put him- or herself into words, and the words will bring the poet vividly to life. We will be able to identify with this poetry, and see our life in its life. (9) Against this, McDonald urges the claim of a poetry that calls on ‘form for authority’, and not personality, which brings him up against the question of who might be the acknowledger of form’s authority: ‘Who are “we”? ... When are “we”? (9-10) To place the different ‘us’ that he has in mind, he quotes at length from Geoffrey Hill1 1 From ‘Dividing Legacies’ 27-8. 5 complaining that he is ‘effectively excluded’ by this ‘complacent locution’ of common taste (10). Hill presupposes, McDonald explains, ‘formal qualities in writing to which “the common reader” can indeed respond’, and ‘no intermediary agents of “opinion” through whom alone poems can communicate to the reader: poetry itself, in its own resources of form and expressive language, its ‘intrinsic qualities’, is capable of setting up the resonance with the reader on which all such art finally depends’ (11). Though generous to the common reader in investing in him or her the ability to respond to ‘formal qualities’, McDonald turns the guns sometimes reserved for him on the critics that create ‘“the great consensus of opinion’” and stigmatise poets that are ‘less forthcoming, less complaisantly accommodating and pleasantly affirmative’ than the ‘widely read poets’ (11). Someone, in short, is guilty of the opinion that good poetry allows ‘ease with which readers [can]overlay it with transparencies of their own preference’, although it is no longer certain who that ‘someone’ is, whether he can be confidently located within the academy or amongst the ‘reading public’. This ‘someone’ is intent on enforcing the rules of good literary behaviour by calling poets to account for exhibiting too much learning and high culture, but cannot help showing his blindness to ‘the uncontrollable difficulty and complexity of language’ (14). McDonald’s position is a complex and not untenable one, and it will be one of my aims to show in this study that the ‘question of Larkin’ is an important one for poetry, particularly for British poetry, because it is both an example of and problem for the kind of charge that McDonald lays against it.
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