Libido and Thanatos in Tobias Wolff's "The Night in Question"

Lucius Annaeus Seneca once said that “All art is but imitation of nature” (Bartlett’s 106) and this has held true for the centuries following him, nature and life reflected in the art and literature of its time. Art shows life in a distilled and refined vision, life perfectly encapsulated in a painting, sculpture, or short story. Tobias Wolff’s The Night in Question follows in this time honored tradition, mimicking humanity’s most basic drives and desires. Sigmund Freud hypothesized that the two most basic drives in all of mankind are the Libido and Thanatos: the will towards life, sex, and high living and the fascination with death, destruction, and entropy. Wolff’s stories are distillations of these motivations and the conflicts between them.

When Freud is asked to describe what is at the base of the libido, he explains that “The pleasure principal long persists…as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to ‘educate’, and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole” (Freud, 4). In other words, humans will go to untold lengths to satisfy their sexual and human needs as a whole. It is also explained as “the drive to experience, to love, to learn and to grow – the instinctual life force that Freud termed the libido” (Arundale, 453). We are ruled by the instinct to propagate the species, the endorphin rush from sex and even good food. We want to be satiated and whole, without the niggling upset that comes from not having enough food to eat, or being cold, or being celibate. When there is something upsetting out equilibrium, we will do anything to right it and remove the irritation from our system and it doesn’t much matter sometimes what we have to do in order to get there. People steal to eat all the time, and in poorer countries or in desperate times, people will even kill to eat. The libido demands that we right the imbalances constructed by lack of food, security, sex, shelter, and all those lovely things that we suffer long hours of work to achieve.

There are six stories in this collection that focus nearly entirely on a character’s drive to enjoy themself. The first instance of the Libido refined is in “Powder” (Wolff 33). In this story, a father is set on taking his son skiing before the holidays and they stay out just a hair too long, getting caught in the blizzard on their way home. And yet the still attempt the drive, regardless of the hazards of driving down a mountain when the road is not even visible. The libido is evident in this story in two ways. Firstly, the father and son have sought out the mountain when the powder is fresh for the adrenalin high of skiing on fresh snow. Secondly, the two of them are trying desperately to avoid an unpleasant scene when they return too late and are thus facing danger head on to halt the prospect of unpleasantness around the holiday table, and, most likely for the father, being cut off from the mother’s bed. As such, these characters play directly into Freud’s analysis that we will seek out pleasure, even unto our own detriment as they were risking the mother’s wrath by seeking out the enjoyment of the fresh slopes and are racing through danger to avoid the onset of said anger. There is no logical reason to risk driving blind down the mountain other then that the mother will be angry.

The libido also has a staring role in “Flyboys” (57). In this story, two young boys are attempting to build a jet from scraps found around the town and purchased by the wealthier of the two boys. They are firmly enmeshed in their imagination and are running about trying to make the jet of their dreams a reality. However, these boys lack the logical reasoning facilities we would have expected in more adult characters such as in the last story, so the entirety of their mind is occupied with thoughts of how to achieve their goal, mainly get their craft into the air. To do this, they are not mindful of other people in their community, including the poorer boy who offers them the windshield they desperately need for their craft. He shines the airplane cockpit to a glittering hue and offers it to the two would-be pilots in exchange for the pleasure of their company. He risks total rejection and being taken advantage of to try and regain the friend that he lost, but the other two boys do not want to have to face the reality and hardship of the poor boy’s family and reject him will still attempting to take possession of the gift. Those two boys are riding on the high of life and do not want to be presented with the reality of thanatos as presented in the poor boy’s family. They care hardly anything for his feelings and the amount of effort he expended trying to satisfy his own desires for companionship, they are focused solely on their own achievements and dreams of building the jet.

The most blatant story involving libido is “Two Boys and a Girl” (Wolff 102). This is a story of adolescent love and attraction, sexuality at a time before a person’s Ego can fully control their Id, as Freud would say. Teenagers are ruled by their hormones and desires, and the lead male of this story is no exception. He has always hung out with his best friend and his best friend’s girl, but when his friend is called away on an extended hunting and camping trip with his father, the main character is asked to “keep an eye” on his friend’s girl. And wouldn’t you know it, but an adolescent male spends long periods of time in the company of an attractive young female and he develops feelings and a sexual attraction to her. It comes to the point where he is actively pursuing a relationship with her, trying to get her to fall for him instead of remaining true to his friend. And he cannot stand that, in the end, she runs full back into the arms of the best friend. He takes his retaliation for being thwarted sexually by instigating actions that will get her in trouble with her father, namely convincing her to paint her house’s fence red instead of the demanded white. This story is libido at its most primary function, the desire and longing for sexual fulfillment and the anger and frustration that results when that desire is blocked.

The libido trend continues with “Smorgasbord” (149) wherein two boys gorge themselves and entertain sexual fantasies both about the mother of one of their friends and the concept of hiring a prostitute. They were invited to dinner with a rich classmate’s mother and when asked where they would like to go, they replied that the all-you-can-eat buffet was their first choice. They never felt full or satisfied with the meals at school and they were going to take this opportunity not for feeding on the best food, but on the most quantity of food possible. They proceed to stuff themselves at the restaurant while their classmate sulked outside and his beautiful mother entertained the two young men and the narrator developed a crush on the woman. As they were being dropped off at the school after satisfying their hunger urges, the mother offers her son money, which he refuses as a way to insult her and voice his displeasure. She then offers the money to the other two boys and they barely hesitate before taking it, their head already filled with dreams about what they could accomplish with the large bill. The reader should not be surprised when it is revealed that the goal for this money is to buy a sexual companion. They are two teenage boys and teenage boys want nothing so much as they want to experience sex. Once again, Wolff’s characters have obsessed over only that which makes them feel good, blatantly ignoring the unpleasant aspects of the situation such as the rift between mother and son and the tension caused by their presence. The fact that they are for once full and have the possibility of sex on the horizon has fully satiated them.

“Lady’s Dream” (166) is another story in which the character’s libido has firmly taken over their life. While the story is Lady and her new husband driving along while Lady day dreams about what her life is like, her motivations for even being in that situation of pure libido. She wanted to get off of her farm, into a good life, with a kind and attractive husband and no need to work to eat and have shelter. She didn’t take into account what the man was truly like, she was taken by the appearance of bettering herself and her prospects in life, thus disregarding the unpleasant aspects that may later present themselves due to her choices. She was content to jump headlong into any situation that allowed for the appearance of being more comfortable than the life she was currently in. Once more, Wolff’s characters made decisions based solely on what they wanted at that moment with no thought as to the negative consequences that their actions held.

The most heartrending picture of the libido that Wolff paints in this collection is that in “Firelight” (185). A mother and son have the habit of basically shopping for a better life. They are unhappy with where they are financially and otherwise and spend their evenings window shopping and visiting houses for rent that they will never be able to afford. One evening they find themselves in a warm apartment on a cold evening and the boy settles in front of the roaring fire and drowsily starts imagining himself in that life. The mother sits and talks with the characters that have the rooms for rent for quite a while before the mother decides it is time to go. But the boy does not want to leave the life he has constructed for himself while basking in front of the fire. He does not want to go outside into the cold, back to the life that lacked stability and heat and a sense of security. He rebels against his mother before she forces him out the door and back into his cold reality where he shivers until his mother realizes that he is so cold. The two of them only want a better life, to not have to worry about food and shelter and everything, but that is not going to happen any time soon, mainly because the mother is a bit of a flake. So while they dream the libidinous dream, they are incapable of achieving it though they may pretend differently.

It is interesting to note that in the stories of this collection, nearly all of the stories that feature children and adolescents fall firmly into the libido category. They are interested in the good things in life, they are exploring what it means to be a sexual being, and they are concerned solely with what makes them feel good, or safe, or loved. They have no concept yet of death and the decay in life, they are fixed on doing what makes them happy. This falls true with Freud’s theories on development and the general trends in a person’s life. Freud hypothesized that a person’s brain is divided into three sections, the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. The Id is a persons base desires: food, sex, shelter, happiness, etc. The Ego is the rules and strictures of society and the Superego is what dictates the balance between the two. In a child, the Id is paramount and what the Id wants causes a person’s libido. Their goals are very similar, the satisfaction and happiness of the individual on a base level. A child does not yet fully comprehend what society asks of him, nor is he particularly adept at resolving conflicts between the Id and Superego, thus they are creatures ruled by their Libido, their Id, and will do whatever they feel is necessary to come to terms with that. Wolff’s characters are certainly no exception. It isn’t until the characters become older that the thanatos instincts begin to show in both the characters and in Wolff himself.

Thanatos is an interesting concept that Freud came to rather late in life. (Freud, xi). In the 1920’s, as his friends and families started to die around him, Freud confronted the humanity dealt with death and loss and came up with the death instinct. Psychoanalyst Arundale claims, “Freud’s most striking idea is of a primal death instinct, an anti-life force in place at the very beginning of infant life that strives to foreclose the terrors involved in survival and being alive by establishing a state of quiescence or death” (453). It is not a death wish, but a fascination with that which is the final event in a human’s life: death. Scientists believe that the whole world is slowly but surely heading towards entropic destruction and chaos, so why wouldn’t a healthy human on some level confront that concept and explore it? It is the loose tooth that we niggle at, the scabs we pick at, people gathering to stare at car wrecks and the urge to just break something when we are furious. Wolff’s stories and characters are no different.