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Chapter 2 Mules If ‘the whole poem is more likely to be metaphor than to contain metaphors,’ as Peter Scupham claims of Muldoon’s poems, than ‘Mules’ holds its own with restive figures in his entire second volume from 1977, Mules, just as ‘Hedgehog’ persists as one of the immalleable metaphors from his first volume New Weath- er.1 Mules can be understood as a meditation upon the fusions of poetic language and its many realities, and as a questioning of the outcome of the artistic process and the resultant artefact, whereas New Weather can be read as a meta- phoric and metamorphic investigation of poetic language and all its caprice and contexts. The first volume offers harsh conditions, demise, survival, hap- penstance and serendipity; the second evokes sterility and stagnation of a fated and pessimistic quality. Where a nocturnal and vulnerable but vital ani- mal, the hedgehog, signifies risk of extinction in the debut volume, the cross- bred offspring of jackass and mare with no powers of procreation embodies moribundity in Mules. If many of the poems in New Weather depolarise divisions – linguistic, discursive, cognitive, poetic and political – the verses in Mules are bent on imagining and charting any possible space between binary con strictions. As a poetic figure these beasts become emblematic of Derrida’s hymen, the postmodernist paradigm of liminality that Edward Larrissy discusses so co- gently in Muldoon’s poetry, but Mules, as the alliterative overlapping with Mul- doon makes clear, also presents itself as an obvious subjective correlative, an idiosyncratic configuration of prosody and semantic uncertainty in which paronomastic mayhem and language estrangement integrate autobiographi- cal aspects and immediate contexts to offer wide interpretative possibilities.2 Likewise, ‘Armageddon, Armageddon’ implies similar paronomastic confusion by implicating Armagh, the troubled home region of the poet, in the title and lines of this closing apocalyptic vision. Clearly, the strong sense of stasis and termination embodied in the title image stems from the intensifying conflict in Northern Ireland, from the disintegration of Muldoon’s first marriage to Anne- Marie Conway, and from the death of his mother of cancer.3 Yet it also reflects 1 Peter Scupham, ‘Learning from the Landscape,’ Times Literary Supplement, 1 July 1977, 80. 2 Edward Larrissy, ‘Muldoon’s Betweenness,’ English 54, no. 209 (2005), 117–133. 3 Published in 1977, the volume responds to the inferno of appalling violence and social disintegration in Northern Ireland. The preceding five years saw the highest death tolls, the upheavals of the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike and the terrors of state militarism, paramili- tary murder campaigns and indiscriminate tit-for-tat sectarian killings. See Paul Bew and © RUBEN MOI, �� | doi:10.1163/9789004355118_004 Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 License. from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:37:59PM via free access <UN> Mules 41 a crisis in Muldoon’s poetic language. The ingravescence from the possibility of death and extinction in most of New Weather to the actuality in Mules exudes a pessimism that reflects upon the conditions of Muldoon’s poetry at the time, not least the functions and effects of his poetic language. In the manner that New Weather introduces Muldoon’s energetic and enigmatic engagements with language and his negotiations with the many claims upon poetic language, Mules continues his obduracy in respect of standard figures of poetry and the familiar dictates of the political, but the point of this recalcitrance now appears darkened and dispirited. The doomed situation of the mules suggests a realisation of and, possibly, a resignation to the possibility that poetic language ultimately might prove incapable of coping with the terror of civil conflict, and the horror of personal loss and bereavement. It is as if the unassaila- ble belief and hope in linguistic solutions and dissolutions in New Weather now, in the title of Mules and the image of the two superimposed mules on the cover of the Faber edition, approach a point of doubt and despair – possibly some sort of Wittgensteinian silence. ‘They end as we end – / Dead in their beds, going round the bend, // In mid-sentence at keys’ (45), states the persona in ‘Cider’ on the ambivalent impasses of roads, life, alcohol and language. This narrathanographic sonnet balances on the brink of demise and departure, a mood that pervades Mules. Its sense of abrupt termination before the sea of silence tends to be more an annulment of ideas of transcendence and poster- ity, as most of the poems in the book gather great vitality and articulation from acts of splicing and interbreeding. How can the art of poetry renew itself and its relevance in a world of brutal violence and implacable hatred? What mean- ing can it bring to the disintegration of love and the losses wrought by terminal disease and sudden death? How can the language of poetry, like hedgehogs and mules, plod on through chaos, confusion and morbidity? Inquiries into language and literature predominate in Mules, from the ques- tions of public rhetoric and metatextual debate of the initial poem, ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa,’ to the apocalyptic debacle of social order and personal relationship in the final ‘Armageddon, Armageddon.’ The first addresses ambi- guously the crux of poetic commitment in a time of civic disturbance, whereas Gordon Gillespie, Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles 1968–1993 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1993); David McKittrick et al., Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Chil- dren Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles. 2nd Revised Edition (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2004); Robert Kee, Ireland. A History (London: Abacus, 1997); Martin Dillon, The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder (London: Arrow, 1989). For bio- graphical information, see Kendall, Paul Muldoon, 7–24; Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, 16–18; Holdridge, The Poetry of Paul Muldoon, 1–9. Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:37:59PM via free access <UN> 42 Chapter 2 the last, much in response to the initial poem, integrates the personal and the cosmic with the public. Meditations in time of civil war carry over, of course, from Yeats’s oeuvre, from the preoccupations of Heaney and many other poets at the time, and from the previous volume, New Weather.4 In a geo-temporal displacement familiar from ‘The Year of the Sloes, for Ishi’ (NW, 44–47), the opening poem sets the stage for these recurrent problems in revolutionary Mexico – a Catholic nation with a war-ridden history and a problematic prox- imity to an imperial power in the second decade of the twentieth century. For- mal specificities sustain the geo-temporal correlations of Mexican-Irish revo- lutions. On a structural level the two sections reconfigure the divisions of 4 In the wake of the shock of the Easter rebellion Yeats ruminates most profoundly on the theme of art and war in The Tower (1929), but ‘The Man and the Echo’ in Last Poems (1939) recounts how the dilemma of political engagement and aesthetic concerns haunted him at the end of his career. Such concerns were inescapable to most poets in Northern Ireland dur- ing the recent conflict. ‘How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?’ Heaney asks famously in, Preoccupations, 13. The Catch 22 of aesthetics and ethics configures the cornerstones of his essay collections: The Government of the Tongue (1988), The Redress of Poetry (1995) and Crediting Poetry (1995). Most poets grapple with the same dilemma, see for example Eavan Boland, ‘Creativity,’ The Irish Times, 13 August 1970, 14; Michael Longley, Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), 9. Derek Mahon and Muldoon also discuss the predicament in interviews: Eamonn Grennan, ‘The Art of Po- etry,’ The Paris Review 42, no. 154 (2000), 150– 178; Haffenden, Viewpoints, 136–137. Frank Ormsby tends to capture accurately the entrapment of the artists throughout the Troubles: ‘It is argu- able that any poem by a Northern Irish poet since 1968, on whatever subject, could be termed a Troubles poem, in that it may, consciously or unconsciously, reflect the context in which it was written.’ A Rage for Order: Potery of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992), xviii. For a selection of volumes upon which the Troubles impinge, see John Montague, The Rough Field (1972); Padraic Fiacc, The Wearing of the Black (1974); Seamus Heaney, North (1975); Michael Longley, An Exploded View (1973); Paul Muldoon, Meeting the British, (1987) and most volumes by Ciaran Carson, particularly The Irish for No, (1987) and Belfast Confetti, (1989). The hermeneutics of violence predicate much of the critical dis- course, see for example ‘The Poetry of War’ and ‘Poetry and Politics: 1970s & 1980s,’ Part 2 and 7 in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lisa Fitzpatrick, Performing Violence in Northern Ireland ( Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2010); Danine Farquharson and Sean Farrell, eds., ‘Shadows of the Gunmen’: Violence and Culture in Northern Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008); Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe books, 1986); The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994); Clair Wills, Improprieties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also Denis Donoghue, ‘The Literature of Trouble,’ in We Irish (California: University of California Press, 1986), 182–197; Peter McDonald, ‘Poetry, Narrative, and Violence,’ in Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (2000), 41–81; Dillon Johnston, ‘Violence in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed.

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