Larkin(g) around: Beyond the pleasure principle?

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to take up Kaplan's challenge, which is an important one for contemporary literary criticism. In recent years textual and sexual pleasure have been so closely linked by a number of influential critical discourses that it has become increasingly difficult to trope the pleasure of the text ‘otherwise’. I argue that feminist criticism has a pressing political interest in deflecting the critical gaze away from the body and finding alternative ways of figuring our textual hedonism. With a view to tracing the direction this discourse might take I draw on Freud's Jokes and their relation to the unconscious to offer the joke as textual paradigm. Via a reading of Philip Larkin's poem ‘Reference back’ I go on to suggest that the mechanisms of the text-as-joke may be disrupted and subverted by feminine ‘fun’ which threatens to purloin the letter of the (Freudian) text.