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Chapter 6 Madoc, Muldoon's Ad Hoc Nomen Confusum and Nom De

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Chapter 6 Madoc, Muldoon's Ad Hoc Nomen Confusum and Nom De Chapter 6 Madoc Madoc, Muldoon’s ad hoc nomen confusum and nom de guerre, de theatre, de plume, de Dieu, de vente, de tout for his sixth volume of poetry in 1990, sports another quoofian title that demands attention to its bisyllabic phonetics, its pentagrammatic belletristicity and its hermeneutic mystery. The title certainly connects with the previous volume in its consonance with Meeting, and allit- eratively also with Mules; Moy, Sand and Gravel, Maggot and the author’s own name. M appears as the leading cipher in Muldoon’s alphabetic correlative. Madoc is perhaps the summit of Muldoon’s alternations in language, in many ways a superlinguistic and hybrid monstrosity of earlier hedgehogs, quoofs and yetis, crossing the lines and slouching towards dictionaries, encyclopedia, readers, writers and the critical formations to be born. Does the title celebrate its own creative concept beyond conventional references? Does the word radi- ate atomistic intricacies and valences? What, who, when, where, why will Ma- doc be? Do we hear apocalyptic echoes of Magog and Gog? Is it merely an an- glicised form of meadóg, Irish for eel? Does the undecidable misname a French district or call into play a linguistic mellowing of the new French wine from Parisian philosophy – a hangover from the sushi semantics and the meta- aesthetic international thanksgiving dinner, ‘7, Middagh Street,’ in Meeting the British? Does it spell an Amerindian tribe redivivus, a revival of the loaded lin- guistics and murderous intentions of ‘Meeting the British’ and Muldoon’s pro- tracted engagement with the indigenous Americans? Does the term interiorise the sounds and letters of (Muldoon’s own) terrorist tales, paramilitary mad dogs and their linguistic reverberations? Does the name announce unasham- edly more Muldonic language play and profundity? Derrida could probably not have invented such a poetic monstrosity as Ma- doc. Horkheimer and Adorno regarded holocaust as the logical outcome of in- strumental thinking and the dehumanisation wrought in the wake of bound- less industrial progress.1 Madoc instigates revaluations of idealism, Western philosophy and Romantic visions. Madoc also bristles with Shklovsky’s os- tranenie. The volume is flagrantly language-obsessed and also includes the other hallmark of Shklovsky’s defamiliarisation technique, a speaking horse: Robert Southey’s Bucephalus (named after one of the most famous horses of 1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jeph- cott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1944] 2002). © RUBEN MOI, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004355118_008 Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 License. from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:27:00PM via free access <UN> 166 Chapter 6 antiquity, Alexander the Great’s war horse). Muldoon’s Madoc certainly alien- ated many critics. The critical puzzlement with which Madoc was received, not unlike the reception of Quoof, affirms the unassuageable qualities of the vol- ume. ‘I have to confess that I really do not know what to make of Madoc, I can- not help feeling that this time he has gone too far,’ John Banville states, and assigns the task of making sense of it to coming Ph.D. students.2 Michael Hoff- man finds the Collins Dictionary of Philosophy massively inadequate to deci- phering Madoc.3 Eve Patten concludes her very illuminating review: ‘Muldoon has produced a masterful literary conundrum. Let’s hope he will soon be pub- lishing the answers.’4 Muldoon’s Madoc continues his ability to challenge the mind of critics with his defamiliarising engagement with ethics, literature and language, and with his poetic monstrosity that assumes its most beastly and hedgehogy form in this volume. As if to pre-empt expectations, to assist in answering or to suggest a method of investigation to the title and its mystery, the volume introduces ‘The Key’ at its very beginning. But just as language can often constitute part of the prob- lem it intends to solve, in negotiations and philosophy and in religion and rhetoric, ‘The Key’ tends to be part of the mystery as much it contributes to its solution. It tends to set the key of the texts and the tunes which are to follow much more than providing a tool for unlocking them. Above all, this pre-text points to the problems of language and mediation, language and representa- tion. The opening prose poem with the promising title, a well-filed stylometric reduplication of ‘Ontario’ at the beginning of Meeting the British, fails to con- nect image and sound in film: ‘Foley was having trouble matching sound to picture’ (3). The film itself and its surrounding terminology anticipate many of the plots and puns to come: ‘He was half-way through post-production on a remake of The Hoodlum Priest’ (3). The prefix ‘post’ signals the predominant hermeneutic paradigm at the time of the volume’s construction and produc- tion, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘post-structuralism;’ ‘remake’ suggests a scepticism towards peremptory proclamations of the shock of the new and signals the numerous replays in ‘Madoc;’ ‘Hoodlum’ proves an almost perfect palindrome of Muldoon and casts the author of Madoc as the street gangster to the laws of language and poetic governance. The persona loses himself in language, in ‘the etymology of “tuxedo”’ and in ‘savouring the play between “booth” and “bathy-,” “quits” and “mesquite,”’ to the extent that he ‘began to “misquote” myself’ (3). Italicised lines screen a debate on the origins, functions and commitment of 2 Banville, ‘Slouching toward Bethlehem,’ 37–39. 3 Michael Hoffman, ‘Muldoon – a Mystery,’ The London Review of Books, 20 December 1990, 18. 4 Eve Patten, ‘Clever, Comic, Liberating,’ Fortnight, no. 291 (1991), 27. Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:27:00PM via free access <UN> Madoc 167 language reminiscent of ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’ in Mules and ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ in Quoof. ‘My footfalls already pre-empted by their echoes’ (4), the final line rings, with what sounds like a poetic rehearsal of the inescapabil- ity of what is already foregone. In its meditations and activations of language, more than in its temporal transitions, transatlantic interchanges and oblique references to violence, the ambivalent strategies of the initial poem anticipate the preterlinguistic construction of this volume. Convoluted and complex, ‘The Key’ appears to reduplicate as much as to unlock the codes and mysteries of Madoc. Then again, as a poem à clef, a Yale key to literary criticism, these language-focused lines certainly help to open up these texts.5 Linguistic keyhole investigations are also conducted by the other six shorter poetic preludes to ‘Madoc: A Mystery.’ The seven propaedeutics, ‘of forbidding difficulty’ according to Lachlan Mackinnon, connect directly with the poeti- cally predominant number in Meeting the British.6 ‘Is this a New York poem or what?’ read the (auto-) acrimonious acrostics of ‘Capercaillies’ (6–7). ‘Take it. Drink’ (5), sounds the final omnibibulous imperative of the theory-cooking ‘Tea.’ In Levi-Straussian imagery of the raw and the cooked, ‘The Panther’ sim- mers with the wild and domesticated spirit of poetic creativity. ‘Asra’ takes Col- eridge’s poems inspired by his love for Sara as a point of departure for corpo- real inscription and carnal love in a couplet of duelling lines. A distorted sestina, ‘Cauliflowers,’ ponders on the patrilinearity of poetry. ‘The Briefcase,’ a Muldonic sonnet for Seamus Heaney, discombobulates in its eel imagery the semiotic seas between the two poets to such an extent that Fran Brearton states that ‘those Lough Neagh eels have had as many critical lives as a cat.’7 5 For a showcase of the Yale keys of literary theory at the time, see Harold Bloom et al., Decon- struction and Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). For a de Manean reading of Muldoon’s poetry, see Richard Kirkland, ‘Ways of Saying / Ways of Reading: Materiality, Liter- ary Criticism and the Poetry of Paul Muldoon,’ in Last before America, ed. Fran Brearton and Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001), 69–79. For a reading along postmodernist lines, see Wilson, ‘The Grotesqueries of Paul Muldoon,’ 115–132. For a performative enact- ment of Muldoon’s methods, see William Scammel, ‘What’s up, Doc,’ The Poetry Review 81, no. 1 (1991), 60–62. Tim Hancock makes an (unconvincing) attempt to salvage Madoc and Mul- doon from postmodernist theories in ‘Mad Images and a Very Fixed Landscape: Paul Muldoon and the New Narrative,’ The Critical Review 37 (1997), 133–140. Steven Matthews conducts a well-argued but debatable attempt along similar lines in Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negoti- ation, 1–45 and 186–207. 6 Lachlan Mackinnon, ‘A Dream Diffused in Words,’ Times Literary Supplement, 12–18 October 1990, 1105. 7 Fran Brearton, ‘For Father Read Mother: Muldoon’s Antecedents,’ in Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays, ed. Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), 50. Coded references to Heaney constitute a solid frame in most of Muldoon’s poetry, and vice versa in parts of Heaney’s later work. For one concrete example of this interpoeticality, see Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:27:00PM via free access <UN> 168 Chapter 6 Various keys and briefcases reappear throughout Madoc, as do the words, rhythms, concepts and cross-references of these initial poems, with their extremely intricate linguistic patterns. These poems reveal the extremely language-oriented characteristics of the entire volume. The enigmas of Madoc have prompted a diversity of interpretations. ‘An Irishman of Gaelic background is, in a sense, a White Indian,’ John Montague argues and Kathleen McCracken and Jacqueline McCurry contemplate its Am- erindian connections and post-colonial implications.8 Shane Murphy unravels its many valencies and intertextualities.9 Kevin P.
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