327
“The Invisible Suction of the Past”:
Paul Muldoon through Samuel
Beckett
BARBARA L. ESTRIN*
“OHRWURM”
Just as I’m loading up on another low carb pork rind snack
I spot on my wing-fuselage connection a fatigue crack.
It bears out my suspicion this low-level hum’s a soundtrack
and everything I’ve seen so far I’ve seen so far in flashback.
Paul Muldoon, Maggot 82
“The Cliff”
Window between sky and earth nowhere known. Opening on a colourless cliff. The crest
escapes the eye wherever set. The base as well. Framed by two sections of sky forever white.
Any hint in the sky at a land’s end? The yonder ether? Of sea birds no trace. Or too pale to
show. And then what proof of a face? None that the eye can find wherever set. It gives up
and the bedlam head takes over. At long last first looms the shadow of a ledge. Patience it
will be enlivened with mortal remains. A whole skull emerges in the end. One alone from
amongst those such residua evince. Still attempting to sink back its coronal into the rock.
The old stare half showing within the orbits. At times the cliff vanishes. Then off the eye
flies to the whiteness verge upon verge. Or thence away from it all.
Samuel Beckett, Complete Short Prose 357
Samuel Beckett’s “The Cliff” (a prose-poem tribute to the painter Bram Van Velde)1 and
Paul Muldoon’s “Ohrwurm” (from his 2010 Maggot)2 are examples of what Jean-Paul
Sartre calls the “Actaeon complex”,3 a psychological condition that conflates the search
for knowledge with a desire to possess. Like Sartre’s inquisitive scientist, the poet
is “a hunter who surprises a white nudity and who violates it by looking at it. . . .
With [the] idea of the hunt as a guiding thread, we discover a symbol of appropriation”
(738–39). Both Beckett and Muldoon phrase the looking relations of the complex as a
* Stonehill College. E-mail: [email protected]
1
“The Cliff,” trans. Edith Fournier, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, ed. Stanley E. Gontarski
(New York: Grove Press, 1996), 357. Future references are cited in the text.
2
Maggot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 82. References are cited.
3
Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 739.
Literary Imagination, volume 15, number 3, pp. 327–344
doi:10.1093/litimag/imt037 Advance Access published July 4, 2013
ß The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics,
and Writers. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: [email protected]
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quest for authorial control. Sartre explains that ambition in terms similar to those of the
Petrarchan tradition characterizing the poetic chase in both poems: “it is not enough that
a certain picture which I have in mind should exist; it is necessary as well that it exist
through me” (736). For Sartre, and in part, for Muldoon and Beckett, “to know is to
have” (740). Central to all is an understanding that the pursuit of the other is concomitant to self-determination. We can find a “guiding thread” for Maggot by linking
Muldoon to Sartre and Beckett first and, second, by seeing how Muldoon pulls away,
“los[es that] thread” (Maggot 100) and, remaining in the temporal and spatial borderland, sides with the spied-upon Diana of the complex.
In the Ovidian story metastasized in the early modern Petrarchan tradition, Diana
avenges her violation by turning the hunter into the hunted. In the case of Beckett and
Muldoon, the “pictured” takes back authority, leaving the “I” uncertain of its capacity to
claim ownership of what it sees. Like the Petrarch-Actaeon of Rime sparse 23, Beckett and
Muldoon reveal their awareness of Diana’s power, feeling themselves, as Petrarch did in a
rare moment of lyrical malaise when he, too, assumed the persona of Actaeon and was
“drawn from [his] own image.”4 As a deer and rendered unable to speak by her, Actaeon
is devoured by his own dogs, his earlier companions in the hunt. Beckett and Muldoon
reenact the transitional moment of the push-back of the appropriated so vividly portrayed by Titian in “The Death of Actaeon” where, still part-man, and not-yet-fully deer,
Actaeon exists in the interval of cognitive loss that involves a prolepsis awaiting his
ultimate dissolution. The oral equivalent of that visual split is the best-known part of
Petrarchan poetics still evident in its late modern variations: the oxymoron—that acoustic space, as Adrienne Janus writes, “where the difference between self and other doesn’t
exist.”5 Both Beckett and Muldoon play with the early modern poetic that pre-speaks
them. Beckett works his way through (and ultimately beyond) it, achieving (in Thomas
Greene’s definition of the Petrarchan “I”) “a self that creates itself out of the self’s own
language.”6 In the end, he is ready to begin again as the inventive orphan of his own life.
Muldoon enjoys the oxymoronic disparities so much that (throughout all of Maggot) he
lets himself be “sucked” back by the undefinable past of “Ohrwurm.” Nonetheless, they
both begin with a sense of loss exemplified through figures of speech where a locution
produces an incongruous effect that cancels the very difference the determinist
Petrarchan formula celebrates.
Comparative Contradictions
Comparing the central oxymorons—“at long last first” in “The Cliff” and “everything
I’ve seen so far I’ve seen so far in flashback” in “Ohrwurm”—suggests both the likenesses
between the two poems and Muldoon’s divergence. In relation to the oxymoron, each
4
Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1976), 66.
5
“In One Ear and Out the Others, Beckett . . . Mahon, Muldoon,” Journal of Modern Literature 30,
no. 2 (2007): 191.
6
“The Poetics of Discovery: A Reading of Donne’s Elegy 19,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (1989): 133.
Barbara L. Estrin
poet takes into account yet another Sartrean affect related to the turnaround in the
Actaeon story. The result of the oxymoronic self-cancellation, that in-between space
Sartre describes as an inevitable result of the desire to appropriate, is a fusion whose
by-product is confusion. Sartre himself uses an oxymoron even to name it, calling it “a
fixed instability” (774). In Sartre’s terms, that interval is a deflation at the intersection of
“destruction-creation” (776). “We are haunted by the image of a consciousness which
would like to launch forward into the future toward a projection of self and which at the
very moment when it was conscious of arriving there would be slyly held back by the
invisible suction of the past” (778). Temporal viscosity hovers behind both poems, an
annoying low-level hum in Muldoon, the ghastly-ghostly “residua” in Beckett. But,
through the process of “The Cliff,” Beckett manages to release himself from, what
Sartre calls, the “sickly sweet feminine revenge” (777) of that suction as he flies “thence
away from it all,” joined with Van Velde in a masculinist “verge upon verge.”
Contrastingly, as he proceeds (in the three poems from Maggot that I will discuss)
from “Plan B,” to the title poem, to “The Humors of Hakone,” Muldoon dissolves
into the very slippery element Beckett escapes. Thus, while the use of temporal oxymorons links Muldoon and Beckett, their spatial references—particularly to what Sartre
indicts as the “feminine”—divide them. Throughout the book, Muldoon “succumb[s]”
(9) to the element Sartre condemns.
Of sexuality and its failures, Sartre is careful to describe romantic disappointment as
gender neutral; to do that, he speaks from the vantage point of the equality he revealingly
(and contradictorily) disparages when he describes the acquisitiveness of the Actaeon
complex. Ventriloquizing the woman, he writes: “Desire is an attitude aiming at enchantment. Since I can grasp the Other only in its facticity, the problem is to ensnare this
freedom within this facticity. It is necessary that he (italics mine) be caught in it as the
cream is caught up by a person skimming milk” (511). In a gesture of equality, Sartre
speaks of a feminine desire parallel to his own. He describes an impulse simultaneously
to appropriate the other, retaining the cream and the milk, and the impossibility of
skimming, of separating the other out from the self to render the self as free as the other
who Diana-like turns the chase around. Beckett resolves the problem in “The Cliff.”
When he pulls away and gives up the chase altogether, he allows a different take on the
oxymoron, finding in the “last-first” a solid ground that resolves the initially provoking
uncertainty.
Despite his wariness, Muldoon slips into the murky zone Sartre disparages and
Beckett escapes. We can see this reversion (or lack of aversion) in “Lines for the
Centenary of the Birth of Samuel Beckett” (Maggot 58–62). Muldoon at first offers
an alternative to skimming, bypassing the milk/cream problem altogether: “churning.”
He prefers the upheaval of mixing things up. Audaciously moving from the bleak
Beckettian landscape to the cityscape of Wall Street, Muldoon turns the love quest
into a financial grab and plays a retaliating and tattle-taling Diana to his financial adviser:
just as it’s revealed our stockbroker
Is creaming off five hundred a week
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“The Invisible Suction of the Past”
While the frog in one bucket thickens the milk. (59)
Churning round and round, the frog of the old folk tale thickens the milk until it forms a
solid so it can hop out of the bucket altogether, thus pairing Muldoon (in his sympathies)
with the amphibious frog who solidifies the cream so that it cannot be spilled. Later,
Muldoon confesses that “it is ourselves who skim” (62) and hints at his own contradictory desire here (as elsewhere) to remain in the bucket, mixing up milk and cream again.
Playing with skimmer and skimmed, Muldoon finally cannot differentiate himself from
the “thief who bilked / us” (60):
Only now do we see . . . How spasm and lull
Are mirrored somewhat by lull and spasm
When the nitwit roars out to the numbskull
Thinking he might narrow the chasm (60)
The back and forth in the half rhyme between, what the reader infers, is the verbal play
of chiasm and the physical distance of chasm reflects Muldoon’s double mirror conflating movement (spasm and lull) and mover (nitwit and numbskull) to depict difference as
unattainable, “roar[ing]” only the echo of a mutual avarice and a louder version of the
“low-level hum” of “Ohrwurm.” For Sartre and for Beckett, Muldoon’s diffusion is a
confusion—a “substance in between two states” (Being and Nothingness 774). Muldoon
revels in the Sartrean “fixed instability” (774), returning always to the indeterminacy
Beckett works through and then escapes from in “The Cliff.”
The essential fissure that characterizes the pause of the turnaround appears (first)
between self and other and (then) as the dividing line revealed as a temporal oxymoron,
the “giving up” in “The Cliff,” the “fatigue crack” that “bears out [a] suspicion” in
“Ohrwurm.” However, the split is different for each poet. Beckett discovers “the shadow
of a ledge” that follows the oxymoron “at long last first”; the “last first” oxymoron
pushes the poem toward the ledge, casting a shadow backward spatially but testifying
forward nonetheless to a solid object graspable eventually. In contrast, Muldoon’s “flashback” locates the poem in an earlier, rather than a projected, place: “everything I’ve seen
so far I’ve seen so far in flashback.” While Beckett’s oxymoron is as simple as Romeo’s
“misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms” (1.1.166) or “loving hate” (1.1.164),7
Muldoon’s repetition of “so far / so far” is similar in style (but opposite in impact) to
that of Florizel’s encomium to Perdita when he compares her to “a wave o’ the sea”
(4.4.141) in The Winter’s Tale and wishes that she would ever “move still, still so”
(4.4.142).8 Florizel’s doubling of “still” in the center links Perdita’s reproductive potential to the enduringly regenerative capacity of a liquid femininity, the cancellation of the
oxymoron in “move still” superannuated by the watery continuity.
Muldoon begins with an extension that emphasizes a more complicated repetition.
His first “so far” implies that there are sights still to be seen built upon the foundation of
what he has already experienced. But, in the repetition ending with the “flashback,” the
7
8
Romeo and Juliet, ed. Bryan Gibbons (London: Methuen, 1980), 73.
The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Henry Pyle Pafford (London: Routledge, 1994), 127.
Barbara L. Estrin
speaker cancels the solidity of the past because “everything” we thought occurred seems
merely the echo of something else; that subtraction forms the oxymoron: the pressure of
an intangible past on an unverifiable present, one that feels like a “soundtrack” of
someone else’s film. The slingshot effect suggests that there never was a future in the
past. Florizel speaks of life yet to be lived. Muldoon suggests that there is an antique
prologue to his history—so far away that it wipes out the reality of what he took to be his
lived life. The future implied by “so far” reveals instead an unexpectedly cinematic past,
one turned visually ungraspable by a Diana whose silencing arrows cause the poet’s
dissolution. Poems placed earlier in Maggot later appear as part of the unrecoverable
writerly life. In “Loss of Separation: A Companion” the poet laments the “Actaeon
complex” itself, repeating the refrain of the title poem (“where I’m waiting for some
lover / to kick me out of bed / for having acted on a whim” [Maggot, 43–56]) and
complaining: “I’ve completely lost the thread / and find myself asking a river / to run
that by me one more time” (100). The Newtonian river of time has no solid bank. The
link between his words drifts away into a confusion that represents everything as moot.
The title of the poem illustrates Muldoon’s conundrum. “Loss of Separation:
A Companion” is a bit like the Marx Brother’s joke from Duck Soup:
Vera Marcal: If you’re found, you’re lost!
Chicolino: How can I be lost if I’m found?9
In Muldoon’s version of the quip, how can you find the separation that demarcates
identity if you are paired? And, if the loss of separation fragments the poetic “I,” then the
“companion” yields to the self that produced the poem and so ends its reason for being.
Further, if this poem is, indeed, a companion to the earlier piece, then the “I” remains his
whimsical self, hanging by the “thread” he claims to be missing. Since he held on all
along, he has not, in fact, lost it. He is still about to be just where he was in “Maggot”:
“kick[ed] out of bed.” The past is yet again his future. By a similar logic, the feeling of an
unreachable experience defines the oxymoron in “Ohrwurm” where the “so,” usually
equated with the “just so” of precision, is instead “so far” away from the very assurance
the exacting word should project. There is no accumulation in the first “so far” because
the flashback pushes the past away, consigning it, like the presumably “lost thread,” to an
indefinable space. The “I” of “Loss of Separation” returns to a beginning whose history is
loss. The “I” in “Ohrwurm” circles round to a beginning that may have no connection to
history at all, at least not to one experienced by the speaker.
If Muldoon’s “flashback” takes away the solid ground of the past, it also yields a
questionable present. Beckett’s “last first” allows him to reach “a ledge,” or the “shadow”
of one, the spatial reflection of “shadow” attesting to a solid in the nether distance rather
than to the spectre of the intangible past. While the synecdoche of Beckett’s “eye”
sustains a body capable of flying away in the end, Muldoon’s ear is devoured by the
worm that leaves him visually dislocated. The present appears as a remote echo, a hazy
9
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/d/duck-soup-script-transcript-marx.html (accessed June
6, 2013).
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concatenation of an earlier drama already lived by someone else or an interior trauma
that recurs in a narrative experienced, but repressed, by the speaker. It functions in the
blank space created by the oxymoron. Beckett moves from mirage to describable solid.
Muldoon reverses from the expected future implicit in “so far” to the retrogressive
mental image that yields no physical ground. Beckett’s shadow points to a solid ledge
somewhere ahead. Muldoon’s flashback goes over the edge into nothingness. The minute
the speaker catches up to the present, he arrives at a space that annuls it. Beckett is able to
“fly” into a satisfying abstraction that frees him. Also obsessed with aerial transport,
Muldoon is delimited by a contraction that traps him. In Beckett, the problem is clear,
the search for an origin a deliberate destiny. In Muldoon, the quest itself surfaces as
haphazard, the result of a previous accident, taking the poet (and the reader) by an
insidious surprise. Everything he has said “so far” arouses a “suspicion” that the poet is
living in a film of someone else’s life. Distanced from himself, he can find neither present
nor future. He is caught in the struggle to define his self, sinking in the bog-like “quag”
(64, 81) at the beginning and end of “The Humors of Hakone.”
Beckett follows the Bram Van Velde painting he visualizes as if he were pursuing a
lover until (in the end) he either turns the chase around and imagines Van Velde pursuing him or escapes the Actaeon complex altogether. The narrative question—do we
have a story?—fuses with the ocular question—do we have a “proof of face”? Both
questions point to Beckett’s task as reader of the Van Velde painting, Van Velde as he
becomes the problem to which the poem is the solution. When Beckett details the scene
anamorphically, he makes out a second vision that erases the first one, moving steadily
through the window frame until, at the end, the cliff disappears. Using the “eye” instead
of the “I,” Beckett gives to the orb a psychological power it otherwise might not have.
When it passes mysteriously through the window, Beckett’s eye is bodiless, suggesting the
virtual absence of self. Similarly, the originally seen cliff is absorbed by the sky: “the crest
escapes the eye wherever set,” the crest of the cliff, an anachrostic opposite of the imposing set. While the eye attempts to find a point of rest in the “crest,” that ending is
elusive, the internal rhymes (crest, rest, and set10), an effort to bridge the failure of visual
closure to “no end.” The landscape refuses to generate “a land’s end,” either vertically as
the border between earth and sky, or horizontally as the border between sea and shore.
The eye can never find a point of rest as the colorless cliff is framed by “two sections of
sky forever white,” floating in an indistinguishable ambience. Is the cliff an uncertainty
like the “far off mountains turned into clouds” (4.1.187) that express Demetrius’s hazy
state as he awakens from Puck’s spell in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?11
Yet, in the middle of the journey, when “the bedlam head takes over,” the picture
turns around as the eye, relinquishing its proprietary fix and forfeiting control, finds a
point of view: “Patience it will be enlivened with mortal remains,” still another oxymoron. “Mortal” suggests a definitive ending; “remains” hints at something still left as well
10
The French has a similar internal rhyme (“crete,” “mette,” and “restes”). See Celui qui ne peut se
servir des mots (Montpellier: Éditions Fata Morgana, 1975), 17.
11
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold Brooks (London: Methuen, 1998), 98.
Barbara L. Estrin
as something still to happen, the vestige anticipatory, like Muldoon’s first “so far” in
“Ohrwurm,” a smidgen implying that the future can come into play simply by holding
steadfast, the noun as a verb in potential. When the cliff becomes a body’s end
(a skeleton), then it ceases to be a land’s end (a crest). “Patience” yields what “setting”
lost. The cliff—a land’s end—is a mound of skulls—body’s ends. Literally man-made,
composed of human remains, the cliff “remains” to be painted, open to both Van Velde
and Beckett. The denuding of the landscape is triumphant, a sense of relief that comes
from passing through the window and leaving behind the house of forms altogether.
“Thence away from it all” takes us back to the beginning.12 A train is set in motion with
the painter reading the writer reading him, a train that allows Beckett to escape, if he
chooses, from the puzzle altogether. The oxymoron shifts ever so slightly colluding after
the collision with the artist in a quest for yet another platform. By pursuing the “proof of
a face,” Beckett finds a visual proof-text, the ledge that gives him the edge into reading
Bram Van Velde.
Muldoon seeks a still picture for the seemingly random words that ring in his ear. In
both poems, we have ekphrasis without a clearly obtainable original. In Beckett, the
original exists somewhere in his memory of the many Van Velde paintings he has seen
over the years. Muldoon is left still trying to reconcile the incorporeal hum in his ear to
an object he can certify and, in that respect, Muldoon parodies the love poetry chase,
projecting himself as deliberately casual, even as he often casts his words as menacingly
causal. The Actaeon of his poems is subsumed by the defiance of the Diana he violates.
Rajeev S. Patke writes that “for Muldoon invocation and subversion of form go hand
in hand.”13 In Maggot, the invocation reveals a speaker less and less prepared to find the
self recorded in the soundtrack no longer his own. Ultimately, the poet is left muddling
in, what Nick Laird calls, the “liminal gap where one thing blends into the other,”14
having failed to ascertain the precise moment of loss which might inspire him to begin
again. Beckett moves toward a remainder that opens both the life of art and the beginnings of a physical reality: the ledge, a starting point that turns the poem around in two
ways. First, the speaker and Van Velde trade places, as “verge upon verge,” they seek the
separation that enables yet another beginning. The poem thus reflects a zero-sum economy. In the second instance, Beckett abandons the Sartrean Actaeon complex altogether
and makes a clean break from the mythological sequence, moving “away from it all” and
absenting himself from its appropriative cycle. With the whitened space in “verge upon
verge”—sea meeting sky—the eye is free to start the blank page of a hypothetically new
poem in Plan A or to fly “away from it all” and into an alternative Plan B. Once the
appropriative impulse and its murderous consequences are acknowledged, the poet can
join with the artist in a quest for the self or leave off altogether. The Beckettian fate is
12
The French original for “thence away from it all” is more obviously circular: “ou se de detourner de
devant,” See Celui qui ne peut se servir des mots, 17.
13
“‘Responsibility’ and ‘Difficulty’ in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 281.
14
“The Triumph of Paul Muldoon,” The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/
archives/2011/jun/23/triumph-paul-muldoon/:7 (accessed June 6, 2013).
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“The Invisible Suction of the Past”
signified by the forward thrust of “thence,” a temporal and spatial departure that presents
itself as a theoretical position: an “if then” proposition with “thence” as a substitute for
“thus,” the apprehended future now replacing (by repressing it) the apprehensive past
revealed in the mound of skulls. The Muldoon of “Ohrwurm” is left already withdrawn
before he begins; the future of “so far” leaves him “so far” from a past certainty. There is
no Beckettian “first” and, hence, no Beckettian last. Beckett’s “thence,” with its promise
of both a new place and a new time, reverts, in Muldoon, to a fatigue crack (82). Sapped
by a past that escapes him and a prospect that eludes him, he is stuck in the fissure of the
in-between and has not the energy to scramble out.
Chasing the “Balefully Carrion” of Paul Muldoon
Beckett uncovers the face of the other even as the other reveals the ineffable; in the mire
of selfhood, the Muldoon of “Plan B” ends where he began. “On my own head be it” (3)
or “[in] my own head be it,” the poem retracting, as so many Muldoon poems do, to an
origin visible only through the mirror that makes it virtual. Because he comes back to his
“own head” where, in the “be it” of “Plan B,” he claims both responsibility and origination,15 Muldoon cannot find the alternative he seeks. The mere existence of a “Plan
B” implies that there might be the direct route of a “Plan A” but nowhere does it appear.
In Muldoon, the obscure meaning is at the center of the visual uncertainty—the blankness of ending turning backward to the self-reflective beginning of the poet’s anxiety
about linguistic potency.
Drifting throughout “Plan B,” Muldoon comes back to himself without end, following an itinerary mapped by the poet’s pursuit of his own word horde. In the course of
“Plan B,” the “I” equates himself with the Vilna “Chazon Ish,” the “wisest Jew alive” (6),
searching for the linguistic origin of “dork,” hinging fool to its slang—“dick”—of
masculinity, and hammering his brain on an etymological quest that links KGB torture
instruments to ancient jewelry (Jewry). If Beckett refuses to exempt himself from twentieth-century history, the twenty-first century Muldoon also acknowledges his collusion
from the outset. The “I” of “Plan B” finds himself the involuntary traveler brought
haphazardly to Vilna, reversing the immigration saga he chronicles throughout the poem
and merging Jewish and Irish history. Skimming over “the dying and the dead” in the
last poem of the series, the “I” ends where he began, his flying too low a failure both to
read their pain and a “taking from the top”—a Swiftian “flaying” of those already
victimized:
given my perfect deportment all those years I’d skim
over the dying and the dead
looking up to me as if I might at any moment succumb
to the book balanced on my head. (9)
15
Of the dual role of poet as conduit and controller of the poem, Muldoon writes, “On one hand I’m
arguing for the Keatsian model of the poet as . . . the ‘belly’ from which the poem is ventriloquized. On
the other, I’m arguing for the almost total ‘knowing’ of the poet.” (“Getting Round: Notes on ‘Ars
Poetica,’ ”Essays in Criticism 48, no. 2 [1998]: 119–20).
Barbara L. Estrin
Having held his head too high “all those years,” he indifferently scraped off anyone’s
meaning but his own. As a result of that “skimming,” an unwillingness to read with care
and a consequent refusal to feel compassion for the other, he simultaneously falls victim
of, and abandons himself to, a lack of responsibility, a theme continued in the rhyme
between “skim” in “Plan B” and “whim” in “Maggot.” With the indicted skimming,
Muldoon admits that, when he substitutes “deportment” (9) and “elocution (3)—the
expansive rhymes of mind games—for the straight and narrow of life lines, he uses them
as a portmanteau for getting away from the world, a going “undercover” to escape what,
in the end, he cannot even defer.
The poem begins with a mea culpa of active responsibility and then immediately
disclaims it as the “I” describes how he was “fetched up” in Vilna, somehow caught there
in the subject position of a KGB prisoner. From the outset, the poet is displaced by his
own “veering,” having changed places geographically as he changes places mentally.
“Fetched up,” the “I” is pursued by what he pursues until, at the end, he flies over
what he may merely have glossed over, ready to fall victim again, overwhelmed by what
he sees even as what he feels is the weight of his book. The maker of words cannot
exempt himself from the random mistake that connects the skimmer of texts to the
sinner in the text. When he circles round to the beginning, he emerges in the end the
equal of the prisoner in Poem II, “perch[ed] / on one leg in the former KGB headquarters / like a white stork / before tripping into a pool of icy water” (4) at the mercy of a
guard’s “pitchfork.”
As in “Ohrwurm,” Muldoon looks down from the fuselage of a bird’s eye view.
Tortured in the last poem of “Plan B” by his invisibility—do the “dead and dying”
see him overhead?—he cannot read his own text. Like Beckett, he surveys a mound of
corpses from above. But Muldoon “skims” over them, indifferent to their fate. The
syntax of the “dead and dying” looking up “to” him (as opposed to “at” him) reveals
a fourfold quandary: (i) Does the pile of corpses appear as the object of his sight, another
text for him to skim? (ii) Is he imminently about to become one of the dead as they,
“looking up,” will bring him down “to” their level, the upward “look” of expectation in
him emerging instead, through the pull of the gaze, the source of his disappearance as a
leveling with them? (iii) Is he spurred on only by his own appropriative quest and so
absorbed by the “invisible suction of the past” (Being and Nothingness 778) that he denies
his own complicity in it? (iv) Or, in still another turn, is he, in the next “to,” already
seduced, as convinced “other,” by his own seduction: “succumb[ing]”? In the reversal, he
closes the book generated by his desire for authority and emerges as a woman falling for
his own words.
The flashback returns him—like the white stork—to the prisoner awaiting his imminent fall into the icy pool. As the KGB prods him in Poem II—like Diana’s arrows did
Actaeon—he remains fragmented, perpetually “about to” in a present that has neither
past nor future, not even the “shadow of a [Beckettian] ledge.” He has still to be created
as other of a self too precariously “balanced” to be real. At best, he will yield as woman to
his seduction and forfeit the possibility of a future poem, the giving in a giving up of his
inventive capacity. About to “succumb,” he is no longer “fetch[ing]” as poetic seducer.
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“The Invisible Suction of the Past”
He is where he was at the beginning: “fetched up” (3). With the book balanced on his
head, he is doubly unable to see face or text, his body forming the stork’s leg, his head
and text connected only to each other, invisible to the self except in the fatal reflection of
fading power. He is locked in the solitary confinement of his own “deportment,” shakily
perched—like the stork—at the edge of an icy pool. The “deportment” of physical
posture returns him to the verbal precision of “perfect elocution” (3) in Poem I, as he
absents himself from moral presence. The flashback at the end of “Plan B” is to the
pitchfork of dismemberment. He emerges Actaeon to his own Diana.
In “Plan B,” the flashback occurs during the poem. In “Maggot,” it is there before the
beginning; all the years of skimming in “Plan B” replaced by the habitual “whim[ming]”
of every sestet in the sonnet series. If Beckett succeeds in reading a Bram Van Velde
painting, so Muldoon finds himself maggoting “Francois Boucher’s Arion on the
Dolphin” (significantly placed before the title poem) a very clear representation with
the poet riding on the dolphin’s back to a safety that, within the portrait itself, looks
dubious. But it is no longer only Boucher’s painting. As he shifts from dolphin’s back to
Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” the poet devours the lover he pursues, the implicit
consumption of the Actaeon chase leading him to eat—by repeating them—his own
words. Hinging Boucher to the butchery-pun of his name, the poet throws himself in the
water. The “raft” that saves Arion merges with that of Géricault’s painting and its
suggested cannibalism (a theme echoed throughout the whole of Maggot), to
Kennedy’s PT 109 which leads the poet inevitably to the assassination:
the connection between the elevator shaft
and the storm sewer where the third of the shooters
waits in the wings for the motorcade. (42)
The conspiracy in the myth and its cover up as related in the story by Herodotus records
Arion’s triumph as, once safe, he can turn on those who betrayed him. But, when the
rafts flash forward chronologically to the Medusa and the PT 109, the idea of safe haven
in the end is short-circuited by the Texan ambush with Muldoon’s third conspirator
“wait[ing] in the wings.” In “Maggot,” the “I” also waits—with the expectant Dallas
throngs on that fateful day in 1963—for the motorcade that leads to the killing ground
as he draws the reader into the sensationalism of the tragedy that has already happened.
About this compression, Peter McDonald argues that “the poetry’s central—and abiding—preoccupation with the complexities of present tenses, into which the past and
future are collapsed . . .”16 dominates all Muldoon’s work. In anticipation of the motorcade, “stretching to the world’s rim,” the poet recalls his past and contrasts it to the
present. The expansive political excitement leads him to believe that—oxymoronically—
he has “spread [himself ] too thin.”
Each octet of “Maggot” begins in the habitual past of what might yet occur. The “I”
waits for a future that opens either to unlimited spatial transport or to women pursued
16
“Introduction,” Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays, ed. Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2004), 3.
Barbara L. Estrin
with the expectation of sexual conquest. Both journeys lead to an imagined perfection:
the image of world and woman constructed as idealized reflections of the self. Yet the
hopefulness is colored by retrospect. Returning to a beginning that led to disaster cannot
be quite the same as starting from a point where the outcome is unknown. The repetition
of “I used to wait” implies that the “I” can no longer expect naively. The comedown to a
slimmer reality in “Maggot” is thus implicit in the opening line and repeated, following
the pattern of “everything I’ve seen so far, I’ve seen so far in flashback” (82) with the
image that cancels the expectation of what we already know.17 The look ahead is a
backward glance because the reversal includes the aftermath. The first stanza of each
poem opens with a vision of a limitless future and each octet closes with the disappointment of the “now” or with a simile, in the “as,” that cuts off the habitual flight of “used
to” with the current reality of descent. The horizontal expectation is therefore always
crossed by the vertical decline in “Maggot,” just as, in “Plan B,” the geographical
excurses round the world are double-crossed by the poet’s being pulled down to the
virtual water’s edge.
The “I” will be punished for the same reason that he was trapped in “Plan B,” the
carelessness of skimming there repeated by the poet’s “whimming,” the lightness of being
that awaits the inevitable gravitas as punishment for its own sleight of hand, a coming
home to roost in the sense that Mercutio meant when he quipped, “ask for me tomorrow
and you shall find me a grave man” (Romeo and Juliet, 3.1.98-99). For the poet who digs
his own grave, “tomorrow” is already yesterday; the moonless night of romance corroborates the darkness of his self-deforming impulses, the high aims of social politics curtailed by the speaker’s lack of commitment:
I
I used to wait on a motorcade
to stretch to the world’s rim.
Now I’ve been left in the shade
With only this slim-jim.
I used to wait for a moonless night
before parachuting in.
Now it’s come to light
I’ve spread myself too thin
where I’m waiting for some lover
to kick me out of bed
for having acted on a whim
when the yarrow opened its two-page spread
and the trout stirred from its hover
17
As Fran Brearton puts it about Muldoon’s “Errata”: “the poem is an invitation to dwell, through
rhyme, in more than one place at the same time (or in the same place twice).” See “For Father Read
Mother: Muldoon’s Antecedents,” Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays, 46.
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“The Invisible Suction of the Past”
under a brook brim. (43)
The poet’s physical slightness in the “slim-jim” at the end of the first quatrain anticipates
his emotional lightness in the non-committal “whim,” combining a play of words with a
play of love that pits the poetry making impulse of the Actaeon hunt, where the chase is
single-minded, against the temptation of action, where the chase is short-changed by a
compromise that physically ends the pursuit and so upends the poem’s reason for being.
Muldoon’s sense of confidence slides downward in each sonnet as he shifts temporally
from past expectation in the octet, with the recurrent “used to,” to present reality in the
prevailing “now” that sets the tone for diminished expectation in the sestet. In the octet,
he waits for the ideal of both the endless quest and the apogee of the unattainable
“world’s rim”; in the sestet, he experiences the dejection of ejection. The last line of
the first poem refers to a two-way vertical expectation: that of the trout eager to come up
for its treat-trap, a reverse mirror to the shooter surfacing from the sewer in “Arion”; that
of the second stanza with the “I” hovering above, his safe landing sideswiped by the
present reality of the second quatrain.
If the first lines of Poem I stretch horizontally around the world, the last lines move
vertically as the “trout”—alternating in the series for the poet himself or the fish the poet
snares—ascends from the safety of its “hover” beneath simultaneously as the poet descends from the plane hovering above, moving from the contradictory “spread” of
“stretch[ing] too thin” until he reaches the “two-page spread” of the yarrow, still
hoping, at the water’s rim, to catch something that will feed his appetite for more. In
the traditional sonnet series, the poet pursues the other, knowing that her “no” will yield
more poems for the effort; Muldoon parodies the tradition with the leaf of poetic shame
suggesting a triple flashback: to Genesis 3, to the woodland grove where Diana is bathing, and to the leafy crown with which Petrarch sublimated the Laura he lost, winning
instead the laurel of poetic fame. He is Eve caught naked in the act, splayed by the
surveillance camera he has set on himself. He is Actaeon turned on by Diana, unable to
achieve the sublimation in the words that will allow him to stay as himself, the hunter.
Finally, he is Petrarch whipping himself with the poetic branch he coveted. The “I”
begins with the oxymoron of “spread[ing himself ] too thin”; he ends with the expansion
of the two-page spread. The heal-all emerges a reveal-all with the poet’s self-exposure in
the tabloid of his own confession. Diana’s revenge uncovers a poet subdued by the
paparazzi he sets on himself.
The spatial movement to another place in the “where” of the sestet disrupts the
dilation of the habitual past and the changing personae—fighter pilot, fish, love—the
“I” chooses to become throughout the various opening stanzas. The octet begins in
specific pursuit; the sestet devolves in amorphous generalities—“some lover.” But that
vagueness is also in anticipation of loss and betrayal, both of the other toward whom the
self is indifferent and by the beloved bent on reprisal. The traditional sonneteer depends
on the difference created between self and other; the “I” here stresses his initial indifference to the other, an indifference that, in turn, precipitates an erasure of the very self
whose diffidence he cites. In poem IX, combining the “glim” (44) of light in poem II
Barbara L. Estrin
with the sharpness of his edge in “shim” (51), he switches surface identity with the
“blade[s]” of Shakespeare’s Henriad (Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym) and gender identity as
he crawls beneath the skin of the woman he pursues. The blade of the first stanza persona
becomes the cutting edge of the knife that opens the woman first to his invasion and
subsequently to his loss of self in an Actaeon turn-around:
I used to wait for another ambuscade
with only my hotwire shim.
Now I’m no less a blade
than Pistol, Bardolph or Nym.
I used to think the partisans wore white
because they were free of sin.
Now I think it only right
to have got beneath her skin
where I’m waiting for some lover
to kick me out of bed
for having acted on a whim
when she herself has taken it into her head
all those who’ve gone undercover
may as well sink as swim. (51)
The rhymes alternate between the expansive “glim” (44) of hope, to the downsizing of
trim (47), to the ambiguous “shim” of poem IX (51), where the “I” is armed by the knife
of his own slim self, as “blade,” even as he alternates (in the “shim”) between male
pursuer and female pursued. The slippery self, trimmed by the shim of the woman’s shift
(as chemise), heralds the announcement in the second stanza that he’s “got[ten] beneath
[the woman’s] skin.”18 So tightly is he interwoven with the other he pursues that his “I”
emerges as the “she” who, in the sestet, determines her indifference to his fate in retaliation for his carefree and care-less “act[s]” throughout the series. She becomes the simile
maker in the end.
Beneath the lover’s skin, he is condemned to a holding pattern that traps him in his
own inability to continue the chase. The “she herself” of the last stanza could as well be
“he himself” here subject to his earlier indifference. The “sink[ing] as swim[ming]” of
her pronouncement amounts to the same thing. Since he has merged with “she,” her
concluding dictum makes him victim of the “whim”(45) she now has taken into her
head. Absorbed by her, the “I” can no longer summon the energy to prevail; the woman’s
simile—“sink as swim”—replaces the expected life-breaking alternatives of “sink or
swim.” If sinking means the same thing as swimming, then the words cancel each
18
Of Muldoon’s tendency to crawl beneath the skin of his own self or horses or women, see “From the
horse’s Mouth: The Other Paul Muldoon,” Critical Survey 21, no. 2 (2009): 115.
339
340
“The Invisible Suction of the Past”
other out. Dead as alive, the poet is cast into oxymoronic oblivion, at the “whim” of the
“she” who traps him in his own guise.
In “Maggot,” the “I” begins by linking his expectations as poet to his haphazard
pursuit of the various women in the poem. He ends up as the object of his own desire to
become the other and so is subjected to an indifference caused by his diffidence.
“Maggot” ends with the “I” condemned to drowning in the waters that flow throughout
the poem. “The Humors of Hakone” situates the poet at the beginning barely bridging
the bog of himself and, in the last poem of the series, merely recovering the temporally
originating space of his own hesitation. In fusing blood and ink and in searching for a
woman from the Rorschach test of a photo, he phrases the quest for a poetical other in
terms of an inquest that aligns body to poem. Whose body is it? Whose poem is it?
While, in “Maggot,” the poet toyed with approximation, settling for a whimsical
moment, here he insists on exactitude as he takes on the role of detective, attempting
precisely to fix the moment of death so that, in “flashback,” he can reconstruct the life he
pursues. In “Maggot,” he is too early, awaiting the expected (but never arriving) motorcade so that the assassination, once over, can achieve a terminal point that marks a new
regime. In “The Humors of Hakone,” he is always “too late.”
From the opening stanza, the poem is feminized. It seems to belong to a woman
despite the fact that the subject of the poem—on the straight and narrow—is also the
poet himself:
A corduroy road over a quag had kept me on the straight and narrow.
Now something was raising a stink.
A poem decomposing around what looked like an arrow.
Her stomach contents are ink.
Too late to cast about for clues
either at the purikura, “or sticker-photo booth,” or back at the Pagoda.
Too late to establish by autolysis, not to speak of heat loss,
the precise time of death on the road to Edo.
Who knew “forensic” derived from forum,
which senator’s sword sealed the deal?
All I had to go on was this clog she’d taken as her platform,
this straight and narrow hair, this panty-hose heel. (64)
In “Maggot,” the “I” becomes the woman he diffidently pursues even as he nonetheless
makes a poem out of his own casualness; in “The Humors of Hakone,” the interior of
the woman’s body emerges as both the space for the weapon that may have targeted her
as subject to be pursued and as container for the liquid ink that preserves her in the very
poem that kills her to produce itself. If the arrow is the source of the ink, then the poet
has penetrated her with the pen later referred to as a quill, an anachronism for the writing
instrument in the way that the twice mentioned Edo is the former name for Tokyo, the
crisscrossing of ancient names and customs and contemporary styles and manners reflecting a temporal stretch that parallels the spatial journey in the series from Kyoto,
Barbara L. Estrin
through the “[new] station at Kazamatsuri” (75), to Hakone. But, while “her stomach
contents are ink,” the instrument shaping the poem only “looks like” an arrow, the poet
unrecognizable even to the self. Diana’s revenge in this poem leaves the hunter uncertain
about his role as the source of transformation. Is there, or was there, a Diana at all? Or
did he invent her as a means of self consolidation that resulted, as it does in “Ohrwurm,”
only in a mirage? If the “I” is still the “slim jim” of “Maggot,” then the “straight and
narrow” becomes (in the arrow), the agent of his single-minded quest for a self who
depends on the death of the woman as independent subject.
The “I” of “Maggot” settled for “some lover.” Here there are composite women—
several of whom the poet encounters—until one decomposes in Hakone and becomes,
like Sir Thomas Wyatt’s elusive “wind in a net,”19 unable to be held in a form to which
he has access. The reverse of the easily winnable “some lover” of “Maggot,” this woman
is so elusive that dead and alive, she is too far away. In chronicling the death of her
various avatars in the poem, Muldoon seeks both to evoke them as offspring of his poetic
desire to find his self and as biological child of parents about whom he speculates. As the
child of the poet, the woman’s blood is ink. As child of the biological parents Muldoon
hypothesizes, she is done in by their participation in the assembly line that manufactured
the bullet train that crashed so disastrously in 2005:
Too late to deduce if the father of this girl in her geisha robe
had met her mother on the main drag
of Waxahachie, Texas, while he worked on the Superconducting
Super Collider. (68–69)
**********************************
Too late to establish if the shorn
head of a mendicant nun might send
a signal back to the father of the girl I glimpsed on the Tokaido line
who had himself worked on the antilock
braking system of the bullet train. (70)
A girl at the threshold of life emerges as the corpse of a poem “that had taken a wrong
turn” (78), both on the same journey to the mortuary at Hakone. Is the “girl” who
arrives in the last poem as a “single maggot puparium” the victim of an undisclosed
crime or did the poet kill his own invention?
She appears almost as a sentient self in the same poem where she is also most the
creation of the poet who—like the self of “Plan B” and the self of “Maggot”—finds
himself upside down in her subject position.
It was far too late to reconstruct the train station bento box
she bought at Kyoto-eki the night before the night she took her vows
and threw up in the hollyhocks.
19
The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Ronald A. Rebholz (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1981), 77.
341
342
“The Invisible Suction of the Past”
Too late to figure out of the Tokugawa clan would refuse
a plainclothes escort
to a less than fully fledged geisha.
Too late to insist that the body of a poem is no less sacred
than a temple with its banner gash
though both stink to high heaven.
Who knew that Budai is often confused with the Buddha?
Too late to divine
that was now merely the air pocket of a capsized boat
had been a poem decomposing around a quill
Too late to chart the flow
Of purge fluid from a skull
that scarcely made a dent in the old buckwheat pillow
despite the metaphor that might have sustained her in her sorrow
as she, too, attempted to buck
this tiresome trend and alighted at the new station at Kazamatsuri
and felt, for the first time in years, the wind at her back. (74–75)
The poem opens with the familiar—the girl who bought a lunch box at Kyoto-eki—and
ends with the plausible, a girl reaching the way station at Kazamatsuri and “[feeling] for
the first time in years, the wind at her back.” She could be a nun taking her vows in
marriage to god or a geisha pledging herself to pleasure. With her body already conflated
with “the body of a poem,” she is also equated with the temple “gash,” the slit both
corporeal and architectural.
Between the early girl buying her lunch at the station and the final girl savoring the
air brushing against her before she (presumably) transfers to the train for Hakone,
Muldoon makes his most audacious move. He connects the “gash” in the temple
banner to the “gash” that joins mouth to vulva, openings at once vulnerable to intrusion
and reproduction as well as able to profess inspirational and linguistic life.20 Affixing the
source of verbal expression to the origin of corporeal vitality as the female prerogative,
and having already rendered the body of the poem as parallel to the body of the temple,
the poet jams everything—with the “gash” as slang for vulva—into the body of the
woman. Like the arrow of the opening and the blade of “Maggot,” the sharpened quill of
the pen is the source of the slash and the poet continues the pattern, established in “Plan
B” and “Maggot,” of double-crossing the horizontal temporal thrust of his poem with
the downward spiraling of the self. Like the upside down “I” of “Plan B,” the “girl” of
20
The forensics in “The Humors of Hakone” and Muldoon’s audacious playing with the Buddhist
temple carry out what he noted in an interview with Lynn Keller: “I think there’s a very fine line
between organized religion and organized crime.” Refer to Lynn and Paul Muldoon, “An Interview with
Paul Muldoon,” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 1 (1994): 17.
Barbara L. Estrin
“The Humors of Hakone” is also inverted. Now somewhere absorbed or decimated by
the multiply ascribed “gash,” the “I” cannot find the self that initiated the process.
At the end of the series, he has only the single “maggot puparium / to help [him]
substantiate the date of a corduroy road over a quag” (81), the place where, at the
beginning, he found—in the “flashback”— the bridge that might allow him to traverse
the muddied self. Trying to ally the end that will enable him to rise out of the bog of his
own inertia and that will keep him “on the straight and narrow” of his earlier pursuit, he
cannot locate himself spatially, temporally, or psychologically. The “girl” of linguistic
subjectivity is reduced once more to a life that has nothing to do with poetics, the “I”
having abandoned in poem VI “the metaphor that might have sustained her in her
sorrow” (75). When the poem “self-digest[s”] (79), the poet can neither substantiate a
starting point in the past nor the path to continuity in the future as the girl, who travels
under various guises from Kyoto to Hakone, disintegrates in collusion with the poem,
her body “a footnote / to the loss of its own heat” (72) and his poem likewise subject to
“its own little meltdown” (78), disintegrating in the dissipation of poetic fervor. In “Plan
B,” the speaker is turned upside down and tortured by the KGB of the self. In “Maggot,”
he is caught taking another tailspin and (in the indictment of his lover) condemned to
the stalemate where “swimming as sinking” are the mark of her indifference through the
simile that portrays one as a surrogate for the other. But in “The Humors Hakone,” the
poem and the banner gash resolve themselves in a capsized boat where poet and subject
are upside down together, poem and temple equated with the gash that links the vulva
opening of the woman’s body, primed always to engender life, to the slit in the poet’s
mouth, competent only to contrive the word. Is the quill of the poem the instrument for
begetting the poem or the weapon used for undoing the girl?
The Beckett of “The Cliff” has a choice: he can begin the chase with Van Velde
joining him or he can fly away from it all. The Muldoon of “The Humors of Hakone”
moves backward, trying to construct self, poem, other from a single “maggot purparium”
and seeking to find the exact moment of coldness that might reawaken the hot pursuit.
In an interview, Muldoon suggests that “we think of [a maggot] as that little grub or
pupa of the fly, but it also refers to a couple of other things: a capricious, whimsical
thought, a piece of music — a dance tune usually”21 and, in all the poems of Maggot, we
can hear the lyrical refrain. The shifting between “the blissfully carefree and the balefully
carrion” (76) that echoes throughout the book reminds us of Yeats’s idea that the arts
(even the tragic arts) are all “the bridal chambers of joy [and that] though Polonius may
go out wretchedly [one] can hear the dance music in Hamlet’s ‘absent thee from felicity
awhile’.”22 In “The Humors of Hakone,” however, it is “too late” for the dance partner.
Already by poem V, the “components of a metaphor . . . must . . . forever remain quite
separate” (73). Aligned with the upside down boat, girl, and temple, the poet has, as in
21
As quoted by Dwight Garner in his New York Times review of Maggot; http://www.nytimes.
com/2010/09/17/books/17book.html (accessed June 6, 2013).
22
Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 448–49.
343
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“The Invisible Suction of the Past”
“Maggot,” gone undercover, sliding through the banner gash of obscurity to a still birth.
Mouth and vulva yield neither poetic nor biological life.
In a typical Muldoonian play with Beckett’s Unnamable (“I can’t go on. I will go
on”23), the poet elides the clue which might solve the crime with the strength that might
enable him to continue: “all I had to go on” (64, 81). At the end of “Plan B,” the “I,” like
the Beckett of “The Cliff,” finds himself hovering over the “dead and dying,” unable to
remove himself, as Beckett did, from the mythological quest of the book balanced
precariously on his head. At the end of “The Humors of Hakone,” Muldoon allies
himself with the victims of his own poetic arrow. Like Estragon and Vladmir in
Waiting for Godot, “[he does] not move.”24 He is Actaeon caught, feeling himself
“[with]drawn from his own image” (Petrarch’s Lyric Poems 66), the poem “[having]
taken a wrong turn” (78), suctioned up by the self-professed cupidity of its
Muldoonian element. Beckett’s final stage directions for Waiting for Godot remove the
playwright from the players, even as they are left wallowing in the their own “fixed
instability” (Being and Nothingness, 776). In “The Cliff,” he joins with the artist and
Sartre in controlling his own destiny. Contrastingly, Muldoon remains with only the
slightest prompt to “go on,” desperately clutching a thread he seems imminently about
to lose. From the vantage point of Muldoon’s “quag,” there can be no Beckettian
“thence.”
23
24
The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 179.
Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 94.