(from the
Freedom of Association
Review by
To
Paul Muldoon
Clarendon Press,
145 pages
With To
In a
recent interview with Bill Moyers (included in Moyers' book, Fooling With Words)
Muldoon, describing his childhood in a household with little in the way of
reading material, said, "I remember that I ended up reading the
encyclopedia, looking for a plot."
This remark, I take it, is much more than merely a humorous but
ultimately disposable aside. It is, for
one thing, a quite good description of what it is like to read much of
Muldoon's work. And it is an even better
description, I think, of what it is like to read James Joyce--one of Muldoon's
acknowledged masters, and a writer to whom To
Ireland, I pays a great deal of attention.
Muldoon's work, like that of Joyce, shows encyclopedic ambitions,
wanting to get the entire world down on paper--or, perhaps, to construct an
alternative world to the one we think of as ours. These works tend to eschew conventional
structural notions and rely instead on a logic of
connection: the author, a kind of conspiracy theorist, operates by unearthing
submerged linkages and analogies, pointing out the causal, historical,
etymological or conceptual chains which undergird apparently disparate surface
phenomena. (Muldoon's usage of the word
'plot' not only suggests the flow of events connected by the principle of cause
and effect--the etiology at which his etymology is so often aimed--but also
carries darker, more threatening implications which are reflected both in his
reading strategies--which can take a sensitivity to coincidence to the verge of
paranoia--and in the frequent appearance of violent and morbid imagery in his
poems.)
To Ireland, I reflects, in a quite
deliberate way, the structure of an encyclopedia: it is organized into a number
of entries, arranged alphabetically, each of which ostensibly concerns one
particular writer. I say "ostensibly"
because, as Muldoon himself would be the first to admit, his is the furthest
thing from a one-track mind: half the fun of the book is watching the author
allow himself to be distracted from his current speculations and literary
tidbits by other speculations and even more interesting tidbits. "I should say, of course," he warns
the reader very early on, "that I'm likely to be a little promiscuous
myself, referring, when appropriate, to matters other than the one supposedly
in hand". Which
is, perhaps, an understatement. I'll
let the following selection, from the "Beckett" entry, be
representative of the whole:
I want to suggest that both cerb and chraib are both near versions of 'Krapp' and that Beckett is not
only conscious of the meaning of cerb
as 'lacerated' but has read Murphy's gloss on the word, with its suggestion
that the word is cognate with the 'Scottish gallic noun cearb, "rag, tatter . . . imperfect or ragged piece of dress .
. . defect" '. He's conscious, too,
of chraib, 'a branch', so that Krapp,
like his creator, becomes the 'stem' of the punt. If Beckett was indeed familiar with Murphy's Early Irish Lyrics, using them as an
image store for some idyllic world, he must also have delighted here in a
stanza in which his own name, sam,
appears as 'summer'. But
I disgress. The final sense of
the flag or iris, with which this passage is 'pied', is runic in a way Amergin
would have recognized. I should mention,
by the way, that there are two Amergins or Amairgins in Irish literature. We've already met the son of Mil. The second Amairgin is also a poet, the son
of Conall Carnach and the brother-in-law of Connor MacNessa, the
One can only imagine the looks on the faces of the
audience at
When your lobster was lifted
out of the tank
to
be weighed
I thought of woad,
of
madders, of fugitive, indigo inks,
of
how Nerval
was
given to promenade
a
lobster on a gossamer thread,
how,
when a decent interval
had
passed
(son front rouge encor du baiser de la reine)
and
his hopes of Adrienne
proved
false,
he
hanged himself from a lamp-post
with
a length of chain, which made me think
of
something else, then something else again.
Just as the poem, which looks as if it ought to be a
sonnet, overflows the bounds of its own form, the human mind tends to overflow
the conventional logical restrictions imposed on it, making way--if we are
lucky--for a new and more interesting kind of thinking. As Muldoon puts it in the Moyers interview:
Since I don't know what I am
doing, there is a chance that the reader won't know what I am doing also. So it is possible that something interesting
might happen.
I
take it, then, that the digressions in To
The
book ranges far and wide, but comes back again and again to Joyce,
and in particular to the short story, "The Dead." Muldoon reads this story as a palimpsest of
several centuries of Irish literature and history. More generally, one can say of Muldoon that
he reads James Joyce the way some people read the Warren Report: every
available bit of evidence is weighed, every clue, every nuance scrutinized; and
the overall object is not merely the solution to some particular puzzle--the
number of gunmen, the identity of some mysterious Mr. X or other--but something
much more vast and deep and (if attainable) more valuable: a comprehensive
understanding of the worlds and societies in which these particular documents
occurred, and which they aspire to somehow represent.
Donald
Barthelme once wrote of another of Joyce's works:
It is characteristic of the
object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant
naiveté. Joyce enforces the way in which
Finnegans Wake is to be read. He conceived the reading to be a lifetime
project, the book remaining always there,
like the landscape surrounding the reader's home or the buildings bounding the
reader's apartment. The book remains
problematic, unexhausted [...] [it] works its radicalizing will upon all men in
all countries, even upon those who have not read it and will never read it.
I would suggest we allow Barthelme's comments to guide
our reading of Paul Muldoon's reading of "The Dead"--a reading which
extends to (or as he says, "conglomewrites") all of Irish literature,
history, and culture. The book's stylishness,
playfulness and sheer erudition are impressive enough that the question of
whether any particular speculation is convincing (as opposed to merely
provocative and fascinating) hardly seems to matter. (It should be noted that Muldoon offers many
of these speculations with a self-conscious wink, confessing at one point that
"I know you already think I'm totally nuts", and worrying at another
that his claims will set off "a little insurrection".) To
Ireland, I stands as both testament and monument to that most fundamental
of artistic rights, the right to freedom of association (association of ideas, that is.)
Muldoon's books, like Joyce's, are not to be devoured or comprehended
all at once; rather, they are to remain always there, a part of the landscape to which we readers--if we are wise
and fortunate readers--will return again and again.