Philip Larkin’s Poetry: Themes, Form, Style, Imagery and Symbolism
between literary criticism and fiction. It offers four readings of Larkin’s “Deceptions”
by four fictitious characters in the same university department: a formalist, a Marxist, a
feminist and a post-structuralist critic. Holderness’s parodistic readings have a central
position in the volume for precisely the same reason as Larkin’s “Posterity” does in
High Windows.
In the first place, the poem entitles the reader to see Larkin through the eyes of
Jake Balokowsky, his fictitious biographer, but Larkin also ridicules this young
cosmopolitan scholar. Holderness’s Cleanth, Raymond, Kate, and Colin are both serious
and ludicrous. Holderness has created four possible scholars, and he does not say that
any of them are wrong.
He laughs at them, but does not reject their readings. In a Larkinesque manner,
he wears the masks of four critics to demonstrate the diversity of Larkin criticism.
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