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A Random Blend: The Self in Philip Larkin’s Poems “Ambulances” and “The Building”

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Abstract

In two of his great poems, “Ambulances” and “The Building,” Philip Larkin considers a deep fear about human individuality. The fear is that the human self is contingent and disjunctive, lacking any integrity or unity. The arrival of an ambulance on an urban curb and a visit to the hospital are the occasion of reflection on this form of human fragility. But more significant, the ambulance and the hospital are imagined as contexts in which the contingency of the human individual is brought out and laid before us.

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Notes

  1. I shall refer throughout to the poems as they appear in Collected Poems (1988). “Ambulances” was completed at the beginning of 1961 and published in Larkin’s second mature collection, The Whitsun Weddings (1964). It is widely agreed that his first mature collection was The Less Deceived (1955) (see Thwaite 1988, xvi). A collection of earlier, less mature work, The North Ship, was also published, originally in 1945 but reissued in 1966 (Larkin 1966). “The Building” was completed in 1972 and published in Larkin’s third and last mature collection, High Windows (1974).

  2. Lodge uses the term “metonymic” in the sense adopted by Roman Jakobson, in which it is an alternative to “metaphoric” (see Regan’s note on Lodge’s essay in Regan 1997, 81). See also Swarbrick (1995, 155). However, as one of the anonymous reviewers of this piece pointed out, synecdoche is the correct term for using some part to evoke or refer to a whole. Lodge also uses the term “synecdochic” to describe the way in which elements of a scene are used by Larkin to evoke the scene as a whole, citing “Silks at the start: against the sky/Numbers and parasols” (“At Grass,” Larkin 1988, 29, lines 13–14; Lodge 1997, 75–76). Regan describes this same detail as metonymic (Regan 1997, 81), and I think Lodge would concur, since synecdoche is for both of them a subset of metonym.

  3. See also “Dockery and Son,” where our lives turn out to be “what something hidden from us chose” (Larkin 1988, 153, line 47). The significance of “choice” to Larkin is widely recognized. See Swarbrick (1995, 168–169). The “power of choice” is certainly related to self and to threats to it. Those in “The Building” are at “the end of choice” (1988, 191, line 21), and for the elderly demented patients in “The Old Fools” the “power of choosing” has gone (Larkin 1988, 196, lines 21–22).

  4. One of the anonymous reviewers made a very interesting connection from “Ambulances” to the Joycean notion of epiphany, drawing attention to the description given in Stephen Hero (Joyce 1956). “By an epiphany he [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture, or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (Joyce 1956, 216). Irene Hendry (1946) points out that Joyce spells out in more detail what his character Stephen understands by epiphany. This includes “integrity, a wholeness” (Joyce 1956, 217; Hendry 1946, 449). This is reminiscent of the experience the witnesses to the ambulance’s visit have, as they “get it whole” (Larkin 1988, 132, line 15).

  5. For an early expression of this view see Alvarez (1966). David Lodge writes: “That [Larkin] is an antimodernist scarcely needs demonstration” (1997, 72). Larkin voices his anti-modernist stance in, for example, “Statement” (1983b) and his “polemical” introduction to his All That Jazz collection (1983a). His axis of modernist evil is Pound, Picasso, and Parker, the last being Charlie Parker, the jazz musician (1983a, 292–293). It is worth noting, however, that a new orthodoxy has replaced this older one, in which Larkin’s poetic links to modernism and symbolism are brought out (see Heaney 1997; Ingelbien 2000; Lerner 2005, 48ff; Motion 1997; Regan 1992, 51). Osborne argues that the jazz Larkin loved—that of Louis Armstrong, for example—is no less modernist than the later jazz of Parker, Coltrane, and others that Larkin describes as modernist and professes to excoriate (2000, 144ff). See also Leggett (1999).

  6. Brown’s focus on the secure self of the Protestant Reformation, as found in the work of say Milton, as the source of the pre-(literary)-modernist self may seem to be in tension with the post-modern focus on Descartes’ cogito as the source of the modern self. As Jane Shaw (1997) notes, it is widely accepted that the modern self arises as religious experience declines. Shaw argues, however, that it was partly in the testing of claimed religious experiences (e.g., of supposed miracles) by observation and argument that the rational self emerged. For Miltonic echoes of Descartes see Jonathan Sawday (1997, 44–48).

  7. Reflecting the idea that Larkin was anti-modernist, critics who are well disposed to modernism—Dennis Brown is an example—berate Larkin not merely for not utilising but for altogether ignoring literary modernism’s insights about the self and carrying on as if it had never existed (Brown 1989, 175). Brown says that, in contrast to the “dissolving self” of Eliot’s Prufrock, Larkin’s self, Brown claims, denies “the deepest conflicts” and asserts “a single unproblematical voice” (1989, 175). An important focus of Brown’s criticism of Larkin is his style, the “single unproblematical voice” of his poetry. This paper focuses upon content rather than style, but part of Brown’s point is that these two are not easily prized apart. It is at least in part in virtue of Eliot’s stylistic innovations that Prufrock’s self is dissolved. In contrast, stylistically, Brown alleges, Larkin returns to an earlier coherence and unity that suggests a concomitant coherence and unity of self.

  8. The marginal note is on DPL (Larkin archive) 11 in Brynmor Jones Library, Hull (where Larkin was University Librarian).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the guidance and comments of Lynne Bowyer, Grant Gillett, and the very thoughtful remarks of the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry.

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Pickering, N. A Random Blend: The Self in Philip Larkin’s Poems “Ambulances” and “The Building”. Bioethical Inquiry 11, 163–170 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-014-9521-8

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