[메모] Philip Larkin, Deceptions, Fulfilment's desolate attic

출처: Sisir Kumar Chatterjee, Philip Larkin.


※ 발췌 (excerpt):

( ... ... ) The first stanza of "Deceptions" describes the girls's plight after being raped:

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

In the second stanza the speaker proceeds to "console" the girl, even though he is fully aware of the futility of his attempt to offer consolation:

For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfilment's desolate attic.

Feminist critics altogether miss Larkin's message in the poen when they accuse him of sympathizing less with the victim than with the rapist. Kate, a fictitious feminist created by Holderness in his dramatic essay entitled "Reading 'Deceptions'─A Dramatic Conversation," for example, objects to Larkin's readiness "to excuse the violator, by casting him as equally a victim," to the way "the poet prefers to exculpate the man."  ( ... ... )


출처: John Gilroy, Reading Philip Larkin: Selected Poems.


※ 발췌 (excerpt):

( ... ... ) In interview Larkin described how the poem was a way of saying 'how awful sex is and how we want to get away from it' 'Dry-point certainly describes the sexual impulse as a troublesome recurrence demanding fulfilment 'until we begin dying'─that is, either 'Endlessly' (1) until dealth, or perhaps taking the Elizabethan use of the term 'dying' for the sexual act itself, a bursting of that particular 'bubble' (2) The experience of the rapist in Larkin's 'Deceptions', with his 'burst into fulfilment's desolate attic', is one, it seems, universally shared.  ( ... )