Larkin and Philosophy: Existentialism

Abstract

The central contention of this volume is that Larkin responded to fifty years of unparalleled slaughter, much of it in the name of utopian certitudes, by creating at the mid-century a literature of radical scepsis. Not only do his novels and poems sabotage conventional pieties regarding church, state, nationality, marriage, gender, race and capital, but in the process they play a central role in the cultural transition to Postmodernist indeterminacy. That this formidable achievement should have passed largely unhonoured is the result of it having suffered an interpretative expurgation more disabling than Dr Bowdler’s amputations. In particular, Larkin’s attempt to maneuver incredulity into the inherited fields of certitude lends his work a philosophical dimension which has been entirely overlooked. This chapter will seek to counter the prevalent view that Larkin is a hopelessly naïve thinker best placed in an English empirical tradition suspicious of continental abstraction. Instead, it will propose that his 1950s poetry advances briskly from an apparent acceptance of Existentialism (‘Next, Please’), via a deliberate embrace of the mauvaise foi demonized by Kierkegaard and Sartre (‘Church Going’), to a penetrating critique of that philosophy (‘Poetry of Departures’). In the subsequent chapter, it will be claimed that Larkin was constantly attracted to that which he rejected, so that across even his most ardently asserted opinions there regularly falls the brightening shadow of heresy.