Parody and performance: Paul Muldoon’s subversive pastoral

ABSTRACT

Although a pastoral strand runs continuously throughout Muldoon’s work, he is infrequently characterised as a pastoral poet. However, ignoring the pastoral in Muldoon’s work is to ignore the very particular function his pastoral serves. Muldoon’s often overlooked pastoral poems not only perform what Oona Frawley has called the “necessarily hybrid” function of memorialising landscape in a space scarred by empire, but offer simultaneous critiques of the upshot of colonialism in Ireland – namely, a commodification of culture and cultural tropes. This essay argues that Muldoon’s pastoral poems rely on subversive performances of “stock Irish” characters, particularly those of child narrators or father figure characters, in order to both push back against and, sometimes, celebrate those expected cultural tropes. These pastoral poems, spanning decades of Muldoon’s career, all work in remarkably similar ways, relying on this narrative “voice throwing,” as Muldoon himself has described it, in order to engage in both politics and play.

KEYWORDS:

• Paul Muldoon
• pastoral
• performance
• Northern Ireland
• poetry
• postcolonial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Muldoon, Poems, 41.

2. In a review of Why Brownlee Left (1973), Gavin Ewart praises Muldoon’s work, but then adds that his aesthetic seems “better suited to light verse” than the political realities of Northern Ireland (115). In a more perceptive review of the same collection, Alan Jenkins notes, “And though it has its moments of anger and menace, Muldoon’s poetry is most memorable for its art of gentleness. Such an art may seem irrelevant, even scandalous, to anyone making a firm stand on the ideological ground from which Muldoon mocked himself (and, implicitly, the stand) in ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa.’ But the actual presence and weight of ‘history’ is everywhere in these slender poems; it is, in fact, all the more powerfully present for being unsaid” (1287).

3. Muldoon, Poems, 42.

4. Muldoon noted during an interview in 1981 that “the trouble of this place is that if you don’t engage in it, you’re an ostrich (whatever ‘engage in it’ means). If you do engage in it … . You’re on the make, almost, cashing in” (In the Chair 5).

5. Longley, Poetry and Posterity, 90.

6. Potts, Contemporary Irish Poetry, 3.

7. In fact, Iain Twiddy’s work on Muldoon’s elegiac pastoral, and its “circular forms” that he compares to “Yeats’s gyres,” is the notable critical exception (202).

8. Frawley, Irish Pastoral, 36.

9. Ibid.

10. McGovern, “The Cracked Pint Glass,” 83–84.

11. Acknowledging, of course, the inherent vagueness of a term like “Irish identity” and whatever such a broad phrase might encompass.

12. McDonald, Mistaken Identities, 5–6.

13. Muldoon, To Ireland, I, 46.

14. Ibid., 73.

15. Of Muldoon’s 2006 collection, Horse Latitudes, for instance, Helen Vendler remarked that for all the collection’s technical prowess, there was “a hole in the middle where the heart should be” (“Fanciness and Fatality,” The New Republic Online).

16. Muldoon, “Interview,” 185–94.

17. Ibid., 188.

18. Ibid., 189.

19. Lucas, “Escape Artist,” 23.

20. Burt, “Rev. of Hay,” 3.

21. An example would be the archetypal father figure throughout his pastoral poems. Sometimes the father figure is illiterate and superstitious – at other time he is educated, powerful, and polished. This multiplicity of voices and roles leaves us hard pressed to draw any firm conclusions; rather, we are presented a whole variety of potential characters and ideas.

22. Muldoon, Poems, 66.

23. Ibid.

24. Muldoon’s generous borrowing from other cultures, particularly Indigenous Americans, could certainly be seen as potentially problematic. It’s an issue Muldoon sidesteps often through his use of naïve narrators – and at other points through his earnest identification with the American Indian Movement. See poems like “Indians on Alcatraz,” “Year of the Sloes, for Ishi,” and “Meeting the British,” for examples from Muldoon’s oeuvre, or articles such as “A Land ‘Not Borrowed’ but ‘Purloined:’ Paul Muldoon’s Indians,” by Jacqueline McCurry or “Playing Indian/Disintegrating Irishness: Globalization and Cross Cultural Identity in Paul Muldoon’s ‘Madoc: A Mystery’,” by Omaar Henna for further examples.

25. See note 22 above.

26. During that same 2008 interview, Muldoon mentioned having recently been back to Duffy’s Circus, which is still travelling up and down Ireland’s coast and shaking out its tents. When I asked him if he enjoyed the performance, Muldoon promptly replied that he “always found [him]self rooting for the elephants” to rampage.

27. O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse, 173.

28. Muldoon, Poems, 47.

29. Ibid.

30. Obvious parallels to Heaney’s “The Early Purges” arise; however, perhaps surprisingly, Heaney’s ode to the little deaths of farm life reads much more darkly than Muldoon’s.

31. Muldoon, Poems, 48.

32. Women’s roles in Ireland have been shaped by a multitude of sometimes conflicting forces, from the Catholic Church (which offers Mary as the ultimate example of female suffering) to Anglo representations of “wild Irish girls” (such as Lady Morgan’s 1806 novel, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale).

33. See note 31 above.

34. Cullingford, “The Stage Englishman,” 287.

35. In addition to refiguring the “Stage Irishman” trope, Cullingford suggests that Boucicault creates the reverse, a “Stage Englishman.”

36. See note 31 above.

37. Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, 79.

38. This complication of the straight forward coloniser/colonised binary is typical of Muldoon and appears elsewhere, including poems like “Year of the Sloes,” “Meeting the British,” and “The Lass of Aughrim.” In each example, the speaker blurs the line between coloniser and colonised, victim and villain, often inhabiting both roles within the poem.

39. Holdridge, The Poetry of Paul Muldoon, 241.

40. Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, 10.

41. The Misfits, released in 1961 and written by Arthur Miller, was critically acclaimed, but not particularly financially successful. It was also the final film for two of its co-stars. Clark Gable died of a heart attack two days after filming ended, and it was also Marilyn Monroe’s last completed film. In many ways, the aura surrounding the film is mimicked in the poem, where a sense of foreboding hangs over the Moy and the young narrator.

42. Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, 10.

43. Ibid, 11.

44. Ibid.

45. In the wake of the molestation scandals that have rocked the Church, there is little problem believing that a priest might be sexually predatory; indeed, that a father might wish to prevent his son from spending an extended period alone with a priest is also not out of the question. Bishops were also sometimes accused of dealing with molestation accusations by simply moving the priest in question to a new parish, rather than dealing with the problem, which could be relevant to the case of the Monk, whom the narrator tells us has spent “twenty-odd years as a priest in South Bend,” before coming to the Moy.

46. Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, 12.

47. Ibid., 19.

48. Ibid.

49. Indeed, the child narrator allows Muldoon an entrée into other cultures that he might not have otherwise. Although the child’s play is presumably innocent, there is something nonetheless jarring in the images of the tepees. At best, the taking of scalps by Native Americans is a troubled image, a site rife with questions of cultural appropriation and dangerous stereotyping. By creating these images in the imagination of a child, Muldoon neatly sidesteps any question of cultural tactlessness.

50. Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, 19.

51. Ibid.

52. Muldoon, Poems, 82–83.

53. Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, 20.

54. Pietrzak, “Death and Possibility,” 312.

55. Muldoon, Poems, 66.

56. Ibid., 79.

57. Muldoon, Writing Irish, 94.

58. Muldoon, Poems, 60.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., 166.

61. Ibid., 152.

62. Ibid.

63. Muldoon, Poems, 153.

64. Ibid., 451.

65. Muldoon, Frolic and Detour, 27.

66. According to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds website, both the corncrake and the curlew are most at home in “grassy peat-bogs and other mossy areas,” and both have populations in Ireland.

67. Ibid., 26.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid., 26–27.

70. Ibid., 26.

71. Ibid., 27.

72. Ryan, “Green as a Grave.”

73. Berensmeyer, “Identity or Hybridization?” 76.

74. Ibid., 73.