SPIROS DOIKAS:

Eros, Thanatos and the negation of the

will-to-live in Larkins poetry
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
statementa 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.
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 cooperation, 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.
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 peoples 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 didnt mean that he
had chosen his isolation as a matter of free will, as it transpires in many of
his poems. Freuds portrait of the artist as a frustrated introvert is quite
apposite to Larkin:
Spiros Doikas - Eros, Thanatos and the negation of the will-to-live in
Larkins poetry
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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
neurosis1.
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.
Larkins 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 peoplea love
that has been unwelcome. Thus, 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 isparadoxically
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 Larkins 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 time2.
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
1 Freud: Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis SE, Vol XVI, Hogarth
Press,1963, p.376

2Collected poems, p.214

Spiros Doikas - Eros, Thanatos and the negation of the will-to-live in
Larkins poetry
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3
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
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
Larkin ever wrote:

be

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 artists
motivation and the particular way in which the artist is perceives his/her
vocation is the omnipotent concept of deathit 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 Larkin deals with life realistically and uninhibitedly.
His jealous frustration (a common experience) is channeled into the
negation of the fundamental duality of the eroticin solitude it becomes
desamor4:
Love again: wanking at ten past three
(Surely hes taken her home by now?)
... Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt
... And me supposed to be ignorant. 5
3ibid 111
4A 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.
Spiros Doikas - Eros, Thanatos and the negation of the will-to-live in
Larkins poetry
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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 Larkin:
Last year is dead they seem to say
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.6
It is evident in Freuds, 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 latters old wishes for omnipotence 7.
One of the ways the fear of death can be repressed is through elegant
repressionif I may venture the neologismwherein 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 death8.
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.
5ibid p.215 (Love again)
6ibid p.166
7Freud: Penguin, Vol 12 p.313 (Civilisation and its Discontents)
8Collected Poems, p.297 (Pour away that youth)
Spiros Doikas - Eros, Thanatos and the negation of the will-to-live in
Larkins poetry
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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
now10 would be a moto that would equally please Kierkegaard and Larkin.
But for how long can one be an ostrich? Inevitably, even though some
people have art in order not to perish of the truththey still perish of the
truth.
Another way to explain the virile death instinct inherent in 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 instinct11. Thus, what 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 runs12.
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
9Kierkegaard, p. 529
10T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, p.189 (Burnt Norton)
11Freud: The Ego and the Id, (SE), Vol. XII, p.60
12Collected Poems, p.42
Spiros Doikas - Eros, Thanatos and the negation of the will-to-live in
Larkins poetry
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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 ones
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. Wagners, 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 Larkin about death. In it there are many clichs, but it is
still remarkable for the adroit and original way in which the bare clichd
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. Larkins 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 havent 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 suffering14.

13Albert Camus The myth of Sisyphus (1975) p.103

14Roger Day, p.90
Spiros Doikas - Eros, Thanatos and the negation of the will-to-live in
Larkins poetry
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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.

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

Spiros Doikas - Eros, Thanatos and the negation of the will-to-live in

Larkins poetry
http://www.translatum.gr/cv.htm