An Analysis Of Recurrent Themes In Philip Larkin's Poems From The Prospective Of Lacan's Three Registers Theory

Philip Larkin is a British poet and writer in the twentieth century.Born after the WWI,he made his literary style evolve between modernism and post-modernism.That is why his poems are clear and simple,reserved but never antique.The life-span of his works is not long,extending from the end of the WWII to the next thirty years.There is not so much outrage provoked by the sharp contrast between past and now,than the slight nostalgia for the pre-industrial Arcadia in his poems.What's more,his high myopia forbade him from experiencing the bloodshed in war,which is why he skipped the brutal aspect of the war in his poems,compared with T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound.Meanwhile,Larkin did not pay much attention to the classic works produced before or after Renaissance.Neither did he stuff his poems with endless allusions.As one of the representatives of "the Movement",Larkin made his writing style easy and fluent,which is in fact a reserved response within British society after the WWII,to the obscurity and novelty typical of American modernism.Jacques Lacan is one of the leading figures in modern French psychoanalysis.He systematically learned the basic theories formulated by his predecessors since Freud,and based his ground-breaking "three registers" theory and "the mirror stage" on them.New and precise as his viewpoints may be,they can be pretty difficult to get across sometimes Although he published several academic papers in psychology,the total amount of his works turns out to be scant.And almost all of his "seminar" series books came from the second-hand notes taken either by his students or by his family members.The number of Chinese scholars devoting to Lacan is also limited.Among them,Professor Wu Qiong from Renmin University of China is considered to be the most authoritative one renowned for his book Jacques Lacan:Read Your Symptoms.The majority of Lacan's viewpoints applied in this thesis are from the "three registers" theory,which is considered to be his core commitment in French psychoanalysis.Due to the nonconformity within the school of French psychoanalysis on several terms and or views offered by Lacan,and the insufficient explanations Lacan had given for them,I have chosen the commonly accepted version of these views as the theoretical basis of this thesis.This thesis is committed to scrutinizing the literal texts offered by renowned British poet Philip Larkin in the light of certain viewpoints of psychoanalysis put forward by French psychologist Jacques Lacan.It seeks to delineate the deep psychological scenarios hidden behind lines and stanzas in Larkin's poetry.It strives to answer why and how those scenarios resurface in some recurrent images which triggered some specific sentiments towards some specific concepts,for instance,love,death,pre-industrial complex.This thesis is,as much as the writer hopes,intended to be organic,consistent and coherent,fusing Larkin's poetic depiction,the psychoanalytical explanations related,his living experience that mainly includes his intricate relations with his family members and multiple lovers and his personal comments on people and things of his time.Various efforts are made in associating Larkin with Lacan so as to interpret Larkin in a brand-new manner with the assistance of French psychoanalysis.The thesis consists of an introduction,a main body(from Chapter one to four)and a conclusion.Its main contents are as follows:Introduction part contains several facts about Philip Larkin's living experience and major works.It also introduces the foreign and domestic status quo of the study on Larkin's poems.Chapter One provides the outline of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the explanations for some crucial terms and viewpoints employed in this thesis.It serves as the theoretical foundation of the whole thesis.Chapter Two deals with Larkin's love poems,from which three sub-themes are stretched out:love,sex and marriage.Larkin's attitude towards the three sub-themes is further scrutinized under the Lacanian microscope.Chapter Three searches through Larkin's death poems for the answer of how the poet defines himself in a world of uncertainty.Lacanian terms vital in understanding Larkin's complex feelings toward death subsume death drive,jouissance and the real.Chapter Four focuses on Larkin's poetic depiction of the pre-industrial "good old days" unique to Britain and several other West European countries first stepping into the capitalist stage,and on a succession of discomforts of Larkin himself due to the fact that the good old days were drawing to an end.The discomforts in fact can be seen as a response of the poet as an individual entering "the symbolic",and observing unwillingly the rules set by "the Other".Conclusion part summarizes the viewpoints embodied in the main body of the thesis.Meanwhile,it unites Lacan's three registers theory with Larkin's poems,and emphasizes the inner link of Lacanian psychoanalysis with three core themes in Larkin's poems.