Warring Lusts: Eros and Thanatos in Lakdas Wikkramasinha’s Erotic(?) Poetry
“…any woman I lust for, as I lust for death.”
— Lakdas Wikkramasinha, ‘The Muse’.
Lakdas Wikkramasinha’s poetry is full of dichotomies. Warring dualities, conflicting energies, fierce tugs in opposite directions. In my ongoing exploration of the themes, twists and turns of Lakdas’s poetry, an aspect that repeatedly stood out to me was this tug-of-war between opposing forces which seems to birth much of the complexities and nuances in his poetry. For the purpose of this particular article I look at the opposing energies of Eros (life, vitality, sexuality) and Thanatos (death) in some of his poetry with sexual, or erotic, themes. These poems cannot be termed ‘erotic poetry’ exactly, due to precisely this dichotomy — the presence of the death-drive or death-force in their midst, jarring intensely with the purported sexual themes. However, the three poems I look at here — ‘As I Go Down’, ‘Wedding Night’ and ‘The Headman’s Son’ — have been selected for this commonality: a duality of life/sexual impulse warring with death instinct — which I contend portrays a revealing aspect of Wikkramasinha’s poetry as embodying conflicting or complementary lusts for life and also for death.
Although only much later given the denomination of ‘Thanatos’ in post-Freudian thought, the notion of the ‘death drive’ was first introduced by Freud in his 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, theorizing it as an intrinsic force and positing it as “opposite to Eros and Libido and other creative, life-producing drives” (Freud, 1920, p.162). Death drive is often posited as the negative, self-destructive aspect of the psyche, and sometimes as the conscious or unconscious outcome of psychological guilt. Alsalihi in his study Death Wish in Poems of Anne Sexton and Stevie Smith elucidates that:
“The Death instinct or ‘Thanatos’ is a death drive manifested as a desire to return to the previous state, lifelessness and stasis, and the state of non-existence in which individuals no longer experience anxiety, stress or tension… Freud was dedicated to the idea that the human mind seeks a return to an earlier state. This return is a motivation towards annihilation, and it generally leads to suicidal desire and death wish (Mills, 2006)” (Alsahili, 2021, p.19).
Thus, while life instincts (or ‘Eros’) are often equated to sexual instincts or life impulses such as those of survival, pleasure, and reproduction, Freud equates Thanatos as a negative or destructive force where “the instincts of death are an extension of this imperative… that is in direct opposition to their instinct for survival, procreation, and fulfillment” (Alsahili, 2021, p.25). Freudian theory posits that this ‘negative’ energy could therefore manifest in the form of violence or aggression towards others, or else as self-destruction towards one’s self. It is further assumed that in a ‘healthy’ individual, Eros and Thanatos should ideally balance out each other, but in the traumatized or unstable psyche, the two drives may not be harmonious.
Analyzed in this light, Lakdas Wikkramasinha’s poems of inherently sexual themes — such as ‘The Headman’s Son’, ‘As I Go Down’ and ‘Wedding Night’ (among others) — come across as psychological battlefields upon which a powerful war between opposing energies is waged. There is the inherently powerful, ‘life’ or sexual impulse of Eros which is carried through in the sexual imagery, innuendos and metaphors — but grappling shoulder-to-shoulder with it and threatening to overpower it, is the ‘death drive’ or Thanatos; a contradictory impulse towards destruction and death. As such, the themes of sex and death in the poems are curiously, almost inextricably, intertwined. For instance, the impassioned lover-speaker of ‘The Headman’s Son’ reads his mistress’s note inviting him for a sexual rendezvous, with “trembling eyes” with a “heart fevered with your writing”:
And I have your note, love crumpled in my hand —
I will come through your gate
Menike, at dusk, with the kris-knife
… Moisten your lips with your tongue, as in other days,
As my footsteps fall nearer, in the half-light…
The sexual imagery is explicit in the suggestive “comb of plantains [the Menike] has sent” him (plantains as sexually suggestive imagery appears elsewhere in Lakdas’ poems as well), in his directing her: “moisten your lips with your tongue” and his coming “through [her] gate, at dusk, with the kris-knife.” The imagery of Eros is initially strong with nuances of desire, lust and sexual tension in the supposed build-up to a long-yearned-for secret rendezvous between lovers.
However, the death drive — posited by Freud as negative energy pushing towards destruction of self or the other — inserts itself almost seamlessly into the expected sexual scene. What initially reveals itself through the poem to be an illicit sexual meeting between a younger man and a married woman — who presumably has children as well (her husband has purportedly gone “to the Fair… with the elder one”) — engaged in an adulterous affair, takes an ominous turn with the imagery of the knife, footsteps falling nearer, darkening “half-light”: there is death looming on the horizon. The lover-speaker of the poem, we find, is premediating not (only?) sex that evening, but death. Whose, we cannot even be sure by the end of the poem — Menike’s, his own, or of both? (The speaker’s heart, too, “is dead”.) In line with Freud’s theorization of Thanatos, the speaker’s psyche can be interpreted as being in a condition where the death drive has overruled life instincts: where such an individual in a psychological conflict tends to direct this negative energy toward self or others in the form of violence. The poem’s ending remains purposefully inconclusive and enigmatic. But we are left with the eerie feeling that Thanatos will have had its final say over the life instinct’s drive for sex.
Meanwhile, in the poem “As I Go Down”, the title in itself establishes the dual references to sex and death by virtue of the conscious or unconscious wordplay used by Wikkramasinha. The Eros or sexual force is vitally powerful in this particular poem, where the speaker, following an intense sexual encounter with his lover Sandhya, emerges:
From the hut of Sandhya —
Stifling odour of her still
Drugs me; and then, as her breasts
Loomed over my face
The darkness swelled, like now
The dusk — only the blades glitter
But the death drive appears almost immediately, colliding with the visceral — almost tactile and olfactory — sexual imagery. In a characteristic uncanny twist of Lakdas’s erotic (?) poetry, death is lurking just around the corner: unknown persecutors are lying in wait, daggers in hand and cold-blooded murder in mind, for the speaker to emerge from his lovemaking tryst. The most particularly striking and noteworthy aspect of this poem, however, is that the life and death energies mix in a powerful moment where time itself converges: the “blades glittering” in the dusk become the same “opaque glitter of her chain/ dark in my mouth”, the speaker’s blood becomes “an empty pool” which will “thicken with lust” once Sandhya “shows her face in [his] blood.” While supposedly dying from dagger-wounds inflicted by a mysterious ‘they’, with his “blood black now… seeping down [his] side”, the mental image occupying the speaker’s mind is — intriguingly — that of a worse ‘death’ experienced just prior in his sexual encounter with Sandhya:
Her cruel teeth laughed at my groin
Triumphantly; beads dazed me
At my groin
while
They surround me
Stab me like horns —
I returning from an agony more cruel
And white.
Sex and death have converged and merged so inextricably that the speaker cannot differentiate one from the other. It is also intriguing that the speaker shows no fear of death, either of the “daggers” stabbing him “like horns” or the ominous and mysterious “they” that “like wolves surround [him]” and watch him with “hollow eyes” — which implies that this violent death was either expected well in advance by the speaker, or that his death instinct is so strong that physical annihilation does not matter. Even in the throes of his death, what he fears is not death itself but “the empty sky” (How I fear it!) and still lusts for his lover or mistress. Contrary to the poem before, this poem — albeit showing an instinctual death drive that finds death premeditated and does not shy away or flinch before it — nevertheless ends on a note depicting Eros’ vital force struggling to overthrow Thanatos and reclaim life:
Ah, let my blood thicken with lust —
Ahh, that I will stand again.
Finally, we look at “Wedding Night” — yet another poem depicting a potential sexual encounter at “dusk” — Lakdas’s seemingly favoured depiction of time of day for the merging of Eros and Thanatos in his poetry. As life and death forces merge in his poems, so do light and dark; in the “half-light” world where vital instincts and deadly impulses play out their terrible games. “Wedding Night” yet again has as its subject material that is potentially erotic in nature, the first night of a possible sexual union between a newly married couple. Similar to the insinuating imagery of “going down” in the previous poem as well, Lakdas’s masterful language paints how:
The tongue of light goes down
the sea-bed, the fishermen howl the night the crow
Strikingly suggestive of sexual connotations, the “globe of the kerosene lamp shows them [ghekoes? insects?] elongated” and the fishermen, crow and even the night all “howl” when the “tongue of light” goes down “on the sea-bed”. Nevertheless — overpowering the Eros — the familiar death drive creeps in: as the fisherman and crows howl (in ecstasy? in fear?), ominous and dark images of death intersperse the relatively peaceful scene. Channeling Thanatos, an eerie image of suicide appears out of nowhere: “the noose hangs down the eaves”, and death slips in with an almost icy, unnerving smoothness as an “early kingfisher accepts the gift of sleeping river-fish.” The irony lies in the contrast and the carefully-selected language: the sudden, instantaneous death of the ‘sleeping river-fish’ in the kingfisher’s beak could hardly have been a proffered ‘gift’. But death, or physical annihilation, is exhibited as something with peaceful connotations — perhaps something to be yearned for in this situation of unfulfilled sexual potential through an entire night and possibly even for the foreseeable future of married life:
…a woodapple
he’d picked up only yesterday in the garden
..was hollow;
…He looks out of the window. Drums announce
daybreak, dead, coppery, adrift.
By the final lines of the poem we are once more able to see that Thanatos, or the death drive, has taken over yet again: this time through the murder or death of ‘daybreak’, possibly symbolizing hope of a new future ahead — which instead emerges almost like the corpse of the aforementioned river-fish, “coppery, adrift”.
