Chapter 4 Quoof Quoof presents in the very unintelligibility of its title the importance of lan- guage in Muldoon’s fourth volume of poetry. In an entirely unprecedented constellation of letters, this queer word flaunts its own alterities and sugges- tiveness. It is a quip that traces its own coming into being back to the originary, the decentered and the unidentifiable, to an endless referral of new traces from which new meanings may emerge. It presents adlinguisticism. Absence, play and emptiness appear part and parcel of its very quiddity. Due to, more than despite of, its denial of definitions and a logical or linear heritage, this semiotic specimen takes on aural and semantic currency. The language of Quoof, which differs considerably from ordinary usage, critical expectations and public vocabulary, can be said to extend to larger discourses, too. Contem- porary poetics, Heaney’s in particular but also Kinsella’s, Montague’s and Ma- hon’s, remains a target for parts of Muldoon’s abrasive and dialogic poetics. Poetic form, especially the sonnet, becomes a space to be undermined from within and overwritten from without – a form Muldoon literally executes; he keeps it alive by risking its extinction. His narrative vein, which runs from his early verses to the Byronic whimsicalities of Why Brownlee Left, increasingly undermines the established standards of narratology. In relation to the con- current chaos of its immediate contexts, for example the 1981 Hunger Strike in the Maze, the volume’s illinguisticity, narratricidal structures and flirtations with the incredible help to engender its distinctively skewed semiosis. Not sur- prisingly, the baffling and bewildering dimensions of Quoof did not pass un- noticed among critics. In the review where Derek Mahon questions the language of Quoof – ‘Quaat?’ – he proceeds to praise ‘Muldoon’s exchanges of opacity for opacity’ in verses he deems ‘peculiarly resistant to paraphrase’ and ‘opaque to the point of secretiveness.’1 Mahon is not alone in his complimentary puzzlement. The re- viewing of Quoof certainly suggests a type of poetic language which engenders heterogeneity and signifies by other means, and which puzzles and provokes. Edna Longley admits to the poet’s countering of the language of commonali- ties: ‘Paul Muldoon’s poetry carries its own antibodies against literal-minded critics.’2 ‘Her title, ‘Uncovering the Deadly Depths,’ illuminates the seriousness 1 Derek Mahon, ‘Quaat?,’ New Statesman (11 November 1983), 27–28. 2 Edna Longley, ‘Uncovering the Deadly Depths,’ Fortnight, no. 200 (1983), 31. © RUBEN MOI, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004355118_006 Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 License. from Brill.com10/01/2021 12:58:22AM via free access <UN> Quoof 103 of Muldoon’s narrathanatographies in particular, but also the adlinguistic and alterrative aspects of his poetry. Other writers also testify to the unintelligible character of his work. John Banville concedes: ‘Muldoon’s poetry is hard to grasp,’ seeing a connection with beastliness and apocalypse in Yeats in a review headed ‘Slouching toward Bethlehem.’3 ‘The argot of Quoof is foppish and odd,’ John Kerrigan writes in ‘The New Narrative.’4 He understands Muldoon’s alter- ratives far better. The unprecedented nature of Muldoon’s poetic language also energises much of Aiden Mathews’ review, ‘Coiner of Words,’ which praises the volume for ‘the rich instability of words’ and ‘its language in heat.’5 Peter Porter, in ‘Redskins in Belfast,’ describes the poems as ‘compressed and cryptic’ but confesses: ‘In many of these, one wonders what is going on.’6 Geoffrey Stokes assesses in ‘Bloody Beautiful’ the language as ‘multilayered, kaleidoscopic,’ ‘full of small, precise, surprises’ and ‘verbal felicities,’ and he argues: ‘Muldoon is shifting, allusive, and sometimes downright baffling, but he is never insistent.’7 With a headline capturing the volume’s incongruent tonalities of levity and brutality, Martin Dodsworth finds in ‘Lightly on the Raw’ that the poems in this ‘awkward but absorbing book’ ‘induce a nagging blankness by refusing to say what they’re up to,’ and that ‘this is an art that disdains “art”: not everyone will like it.’8 Dillon Johnston finds the volume, apart from some of Kinsella’s later volumes, the only one ‘we could honestly label avant garde,’ finding the lan- guage ‘to be droll or coy but always carefully and delicately constructed,’ and indicating a preference for the ‘Protean experiences of his poems, often un- pleasant’ when compared ‘to the tired shibboleths and false truths they replace.’9 Johnston’s latter assessment concurs with Muldoon’s own comment on the transmogrifying mêlée of the last long poem: ‘In “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” I hoped to purge myself of the very public vocabulary it employs, the kennings of the hourly news bulletin.’10 Quoof, in its title-word, certainly succeeds in this purgation, as do so many of the other estranging lin- guistic strategies in the volume that challenge its reviewers and critics. Basi- cally all critics notice the shock and spectrality of Muldoon’s language in Quoof, 3 John Banville, ‘Slouching toward Bethlehem,’ New York Review of Books, 30 May 1991, 38. 4 John Kerrigan, ‘The New Narrative,’ London Review of Books, 16–29 February 1984, 23. 5 Aiden Mathews, ‘Coiner of Words,’ The Irish Times, 24 March 1992, 13. 6 Peter Porter, ‘Redskins in Belfast,’ The Observer Review of Books, 16 October 1983, 33. 7 Geoffrey Stokes, ‘Bloody Beautiful,’ The Village Voice Literary Supplement, March 1984, 15. 8 Martin Dodsworth, ‘Lightly on the Raw,’ The Guardian, 17 November 1983, 17. 9 Dillon Johnston, Irish Poetry after Joyce (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 263–272. 10 Paul Muldoon, ‘Paul Muldoon Writes,’ The Poetry Book Society Bulletin, no. 118 (1983), 1–2. Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 12:58:22AM via free access <UN> 104 Chapter 4 but very few of them, if any, explore the hermeneutic possibilities of his adlin- guisticism and alterratives. Despite the piecemeal insights of their evaluations, these critics testify unanimously to a perplexity in the language of Quoof that resists the ordinary apparatus of analytical approaches. A paradigmatic shift in critical thinking can be detected here. The catalogue of professed confusion from diverse re- viewers reveals that the experimental and evasive qualities of the texts in this volume defy comprehension by means of conventional critical hermeneutics. One may surmise that one reason for the critical resistence of the poems to readymade interpretations stems from the ways in which Quoof explodes Ro- manticist concepts of love, language and pastoralism. Another factor in this hermeneutic bafflement, one may suggest, is how Quoof is situated at the nex- us of modernist and postmodernist transition and transformation. If ‘genuine poetry communicates before it is understood,’ as Eliot claims, the unintelligi- bility of ‘quoof’ takes on added significance.11 A third and very likely factor lies in Muldoon’s language, notably its unheimlich lexicon, its formal inspections, its deformation of standard syntax and grammar and its experiments with lan- guistic concepts and philosophy. Its undecidability can cause confusion, curi- osity and contrivance. It can provoke anger, aggression and resignation. Quoof makes manifest a very forceful example of ostranenie. But the word, the poem and the volume are also brimming with other possibilities. Perhaps, ‘quoof’ is not to be read, but rather ‘looked at and listened to,’ as Beckett advised readers to do when approaching Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress,’ which became Finnegans Wake?12 What notes might it sound? Or does Muldoon’s letter cluster assume meaning by alphabetic supplementarity and alliterative association with queen, queer, quaff and quote to hoof, hoop, hoot and huff and the myriad of mutations before, between and beyond these possibilities? Is it an acronym? Does not the single letter, at any rate, assume specific significance in such an alphabetic stumbling block? If ‘quoof,’ in the language of deconstruction and semiotics, acts as an empty signifier awaiting the signified and as a floating signifier in the sea of signifiance, to what extent does it appropriate meaning from, and assign meaning to, the contexts of the volume with its eponymous poem ‘Quoof’? With these far-reaching demands, which stretch the bounda- ries of poetic licence, and which constitute a challenge to literary critics and 11 Frank Kermode, ed. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 206. 12 Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante. Bruno. Vico. Joyce.,’ in Finnegans Wake: A Symposium – Exagmi­ nation Round His Incamination of Work in Progress (New York: New Directions, [1929] 1972), 11. Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 12:58:22AM via free access <UN> Quoof 105 even the theoretical discourses of critical analysis, the recursive title is laden with the same poetic freight as ‘Hedgehog’ in New Weather that risks its own existence by its own denial of surrounding pressures, or the exorbitant title bursts upon the critical arena with superabundant semiosis, like a lexical me- teorite, from the outside of the ordinary bounds of language to clash with the linguistic order, to hint at infinite possibility, and to explore the gradations between them. Quoof shines, shifts and slides with alphaphilia and audio­ fetishism, a typical Muldonic lust for letters, and with his sense for sounds that augment the literary status quo and provide an alternative to customary para- digms in critical practice and habitual thinking. Linguistic licence, tricks and spoofs, such as these, render the world, in the words of ‘Snow’ by MacNeice, one of Muldoon’s favourite forefathers, ‘incorri- gibly plural,’ but also, variegated and diffuse in its ways of being and saying.13 Discovery of new words and idiomatic spectrality are part of Muldoon’s verbal constellations and poetic universe.