Larkin’s Travelling Spirit

The Place, Space and Journeys of Philip Larkin

Alex Howard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030534714
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030534721
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines Larkin's evocation of place and space, along with the opportunities for self-discovery offered by the act and thought of travel. From his canonical verse to his lesser-known juvenilia and dream diaries, this title unveils a new Larkin; a man whose religious, political and ontological affiliations are often as wide-ranging and experimental as the very form and symbolic licence used to express them. Whether exploring Larkin's fondness for deictics ('pointing' words, like here/there), his fascination with death, or his interest in the sexual opportunities of an itinerant lifestyle, this monograph provides fresh critical approaches bound to appeal to established Larkin scholars and newcomers alike.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. HowardLarkin’s Travelling Spirithttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53472-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Alex Howard¹

(1)

University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Abstract

This chapter examines Roger Snyder’s assertion that ‘consider[ing] the significance of place in Philip Larkin’s oeuvre’ is a ‘foredoomed endeavour’. It argues that ‘place’, as a critical term, comes freighted with a large back-catalogue of attendant literary concerns. Larkin, I claim, experimented assiduously with place and space poetics: by priming our critical approach to their presence, we see an array of new commitments in his work. His juvenilia becomes the sounding board for new types of style experimentation, his fondness for train travel exposes a manifesto for radical political thinking, while the cosmos becomes a metonym for his incessant musing on death. Travel—as both a physical and conceptual act—emerges as a uniting theme; a process which sees Larkin’s spirit moving not only in trains and cars, but across the misty plain of dream, the universe and even across the syntactical distances of language itself.

Keywords

PlaceSpaceGenius lociTravelPoetics

End Abstract

It is little wonder that Robert Lance Snyder, writing in 2007, opens his discussion of Larkin and ‘place’ with the rather exasperated assertion that ‘consider[ing] the significance of place in Philip Larkin’s oeuvre may seem a foredoomed endeavour’ (115). The reasons behind Snyder’s assertion are complicated and far-reaching and direct us more towards deficiencies besetting the critical school of place and space than they do any particular shortcoming in Larkin scholarship itself. Therefore, I wish to begin our exploration of Philip Larkin, place, space and journeying by outlining a series of critical issues and oversights which, I believe, may have prevented Larkin’s poetics of place over the last 20 years from receiving the full breadth of critical rigour it deserves.

For me, these issues were no better outlined than in the introduction of a series of collected essays, published in 2008. In the introduction to Literature and Place 1800–2000, Peter Brown exposes a terminological inchoateness underlying the very concept of ‘place and literature’. The ramifications of this act extend beyond a mere lesson in the importance of phraseological attentiveness and serve, additionally, to highlight several key problems besetting how one thinks about literature’s relationship with ‘place’ in general. While, for Brown, ‘place and literature’ offers an opportunity for the critic to regroup his or her understanding of, and approach towards, literary appropriations of place, at the same time Brown remains seemingly oblivious towards the lexical uncertainties that prompt such a paradigmatic rethinking of ‘place’ criticism in the first place. In attempting to make sense of the question of ‘literature and place’, Brown bifurcates the phrase into two divergent critical approaches: an ‘outside’ approach (which looks at ‘literary places’), and an ‘inside’ approach (which addresses ‘places in literature’). The first approach Brown deems ‘empirical and quasi-antiquarian’ given its focus upon, and inclusion of, ‘real’ places in literature; the second approach he considers ‘theoretical’ owing to its focus on place’s function as a literary topos (13).¹ In attempting to develop his twofold critical approach further, Brown’s reasoning takes on an unconvincing air of extemporisation: ‘Practitioners of the outside method’, he suggests, concern themselves solely with the author’s life, and ‘quarry relevant written material—letters, diaries, and biographies [&c.]’ in order to pander to ‘general literary enthusiasm [and] curiosity about authors [lives]’; a process which Geoffrey Hartman famously states, with some scorn, reduces a text to a mere ‘tourist guide and antiquarian signpost’ (208). In contrast, the practitioner of the ‘inside’ critical approach appears to be held in considerably higher esteem by Brown, owing to the approach’s inherent focus on text rather than the author; thus, channelling the ‘proper’ literary critic towards the ‘complex dynamics of literature and place’. Indeed, through an ‘inside’ approach, the ‘idea of place is more important than the identification of topographical correlatives’ (Brown 13). Crucially, this means an ‘inside’ approach for Brown eschews all interest in the possible role of locational verisimilitude, and the stylistic or aesthetic advantages that this approach could offer by including real locations and geographies in the text.

While this attempt to split the phrase ‘literature and place’ into two divergent critical paradigms may be useful in helping us organise critical thought within the field, one cannot help feeling that Brown’s logic gives rise to a dangerous false dichotomy here. After all, it is difficult to ascertain how the poetry of Philip Larkin might benefit from this critical model; poetry which, much like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, often creates ‘an imaginative construct in geographical reality’, or, to put it another way, fuses fictional places within, or proximate to, real places (Millgate 332). On the contrary, the model runs the risk of obstructing avenues of critical exploration owing to its inherent prejudices and reductiveness.

And yet Brown’s view that the study of real places in literature is somehow a lesser pursuit is not without precedent: as well as Hartman’s aphoristic denunciation mentioned above, Leonard Lutwack in 1984 castigated the decision of the author to include real places in his or her work by advancing the rather damning indictment that ‘fidelity to geographic realism … exact[s] a price that the writer cannot afford to pay’ (29). Gillian Tindall, a little later in 1991, views the authorial decision to include real places with equal wariness, deeming the act to be largely futile owing to the notion that the verisimilitude of a real place invariably has its presence overpowered by the ancillary symbolic agenda it is forced to inhabit:

[T]he specific, real place [becomes] so entirely subsumed by what it comes to represent that it ceases to be an identifiable place at all, at once a triumphant consummation and a defeat. (ix)

Indeed, both the critical attitude towards the analysis of real places and the circumspection with which critics address authors who integrate real-life locales in their work are enough to make one doubt whether critical scrutiny is being fairly attributed. The disinclination of such critics to establish a working critique for the incorporation of real places in literature is further testament to this and makes us consider whether aspects of place theory, in general, may have endured a degree of critical ostracism over the last 20 years.² While a small amount of defence has persisted,³ one wonders whether an altogether new critical idiom of place needs to be cultivated in order that writers who feature high levels of loco-specificity in their work receive a just amount of critical scrutiny. A re-examination of this nature may well benefit poets who, whilst fond of the incorporation of loco-specific elements, nevertheless remain mindful of the symbolic, stylistic and representational capacity of ‘imagined’ places as well; an undertaking that would invariably dismantle the false dichotomy that sits at the heart of Brown’s critical approach.

A further issue with these critics’ theorising is their relative lack of focus on the important distinction between ‘place’ and ‘space’—with the latter receiving comparatively scant attention. Although Franco Moretti comes close to a working definition of ‘space’ in the outset of his monograph Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900,⁴ the investigative line is ultimately sacrificed for an (albeit necessary) argument advocating an interdisciplinary approach to literature and place via geography.⁵ A symptom of this reluctance to provide a critical glossing for ‘space’ is expressed through the never-ending obfuscation and slippage that seems to exist between the words ‘place’ and ‘space’. Indeed both Moretti and Brown use place and space interchangeably, and it is down to Michael Irwin to settle upon a convincing set of rules to govern the separation of the two nouns critically.⁶ No more an advocate of consistency (moving freely and without explanation between capitalisation and italicisation of both ‘place’ and ‘space’), Irwin nevertheless offers a compelling working definition of ‘place’: it is, for Irwin, ‘any fictional map’ applied in literature to ‘authenticate the reality of a real-life locale or the pseudo-reality of a fictional one’ (25; emphasis Irwin’s). Conversely, ‘space’ for Irwin concerns literature that is ‘occupied, or seemingly occupied, by a “conception” or “ideal” [= abstract] form’ (qtd. in Brown 27). Beyond these attempts, little headway has been made towards establishing a solid set of critical definitions for place and/or space suitable for application within literary studies. Consequently, ardent literary scholars in this field have been forced to revisit the teachings of Heidegger and Husserl⁷ or, more commonly, to borrow critical apparatus from neighbouring disciplines; notably that of human geography, where Yi-Fu Tuan’s edict of place ‘as one unit among others … subsumed under the geographer’s concept and analysis of space’ holds sway, pulling critical reasoning away from the arts, and in the direction of ‘thought, quant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Daydreams and Night Dreams: The Oneiric Informants Behind Larkin’s Evocation of Contemporary and Mythological Englands in The North Ship
• 3. A ‘Modern’ Flâneur: Larkin’s Journeys and the Travelling Spirit
• 4. War and Weather: Memory, Symbol and Estrangement in A Girl in Winter
• 5. Staring Death in the Eye: Deictics, Spacing and Growing Old in High Windows
• Back Matter