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From the subliminal to the totally ridiculous

<i>To Ireland, I </i>by Paul Muldoon (Oxford University Press, &pound;19.99)

Michael Glover
Wednesday 30 August 2000 00:00 BST
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If someone quite as tricksy as Paul Muldoon had not existed, the Muse of Comedy would have had to invent him. For more than a quarter of a century, this Irish poet from County Armagh has been bemusing, confusing, confounding and dumbfounding his readers. There is no doubting the man's intelligence - does he not hold down three professorships, one at Oxford, the other two at Princeton? But how serious is he? And might he not even be regarded as a self-parodist?

If someone quite as tricksy as Paul Muldoon had not existed, the Muse of Comedy would have had to invent him. For more than a quarter of a century, this Irish poet from County Armagh has been bemusing, confusing, confounding and dumbfounding his readers. There is no doubting the man's intelligence - does he not hold down three professorships, one at Oxford, the other two at Princeton? But how serious is he? And might he not even be regarded as a self-parodist?

He has published eight full collections of poetry with Faber since 1973. He has also edited various anthologies. Now we have something slightly different to puzzle and ponder over: the texts, scarcely tampered with since their delivery, of the Clarendon Lectures he gave at Oxford in 1998 on the subject of the "intertextuality" of Irish writing. Which appears to mean, in short, that many of the great Irish writers - from Amergin, Ireland's first national poet, onwards - seem, almost in some subliminal way, to have been anticipating James Joyce's "The Dead" - that great, concluding story of his Dubliners. This is an eye-bogglingly bizarre thesis, quite as extravagant as anything that Muldoon has ever written in verse. And it is entirely consistent with everything we think we know about him.

What then do we think we know of him? A good place to begin would be at a Muldoon poetry reading. He is short of stature, tousle-haired, bespectacled; the voice is winningly gentle, uninsistent and slyly humorous. He wears a look of mild surprise when he reads, as if he has just turned some brutishly sharp corner and collided with - God spare us - himself. One of his regular comic routines involves a troubled relationship between reader and lectern. (Does all this sound troublingly digressive? All to the good. He's made a fine art of it.)

To continue: he approaches the lectern warily as if it might do him, or his book, a mischief. He sidesteps it, jumps back. I remember one particularly difficult lectern at the Hay Festival which seemed not to have the capacity to hold his pages. After each one was turned, he let it slide down the side of his leg. It is the one thing I recall about that occasion. The rest is lost in a mist of non sequiturs, odd literary byways and outlandish allusions.

As are these serio-comic lectures. The thesis of them is this: the Irish writer is a "liminal" being with scant regard for his own identity, which is shape-shifting in the extreme. One writer mutates easily into another. To be perfectly, if not Muldoonianly, frank, everything seems to be tending towards - or to be an exercise in etymological anticipation of - that story by Joyce that I mentioned.

The argument - if we can bring ourselves to use so routine a word - proceeds hesitatingly, digressively, perpetually backtracking upon itself. There is much super-subtle digging into the etymology of Irish words, many far-fetched suggestions. Muldoon doesn't seem to mind if the evidence isn't all that strong. He is quite happy with the "near version", the "crypto-current". But are we? No. The worst example of this jokey, self-deprecating pseudo-argument is this: "A second ghostly presence here [ie, in "The Dead"] is Alfred Nutt (1856-1910) who appears as the 'nutmeg' on the table at the banquet."

Throughout these lectures, the authorial voice is surprisingly unemphatic - as "liminal" as any of the authors it is considering. The manner of address is highly personal, a world away from the hortatory manner of the public lecture. This is refreshing. It is also troubling. It undermines the seriousness of the argument because it suggests that this whole exercise may, after all, be a tease.

But it is not a tease. Underpinning these talks is a grand, serious theme: the "eternal interim" of Ireland, the fate of a race whose collective identity has been suppressed. Hence the need to be "liminal" in order to survive at all. And Muldoon, being Irish, is surely among those suppressed ones.

This, perhaps, is why he has to play the outrageous, attention-seeking jester at the court of the blasted English language.

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