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ABSTRACT
Pastiche grew to become one of the hallmarks of modernist literature in general, and of Irish modernism in particular, one thinks of the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses, Yeats’s explorations of the ballad and the sonnet and more broadly of George Moore, Flann O’Brien as well as MacNeice and Beckett. Pastiche, always on the verge of parody, seems one of Irish specialties. In this article, I focus on a series of works that re-deploy a single line of refrain, embedding it in various narratives: from a story of a cruel lover, through a denunciation of metaphysics to an evocation of poetry as part of a family’s genealogy. Beginning with Muldoon’s “At Least They Weren’t Speaking French,” I explore Yeats’s “The Pilgrim,” a rendition of Jean Richepin’s lyric by Herbert Trench and round up with a mention of Sir Harry Wildair, a 1701 play by George Farquhar. What is revealed in the process of reworking the line is a celebration of continuity of what can be called poetic mischief that seeks, in a characteristically modernist fashion, to amalgamate contraries.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Muldoon, The End of the Poem, 41.
2 Lyotard.
3 See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; and “Realism, Categories, and the Linguistic Turn”.
4 Genette, 81.
5 Ibid., 81.
6 Bakhtin, 411.
7 Jameson, 17.
8 Ibid., 17–18.
9 Hutcheon, 38.
10 Eagleton, 132.
11 Adorno, 21–22. See Eysteinsson, 138–39.
12 Ellmann, 616.
13 Quoted in Jori Johnson, notes to James Joyce, Ulysses, 907.
14 Joyce, 139–40.
15 Ibid., 140.
16 Albright, 63.
17 Knowlson, 109.
18 Gontarski, 19.
19 Muldoon, To Irealand, I, 7.
20 Ibid., 6. Emphasis in original.
21 Ibid., 7.
22 Ibid., 24.
23 Paul Muldoon, interview by Michael Donaghy, Chicago Review 35 (1985): 79.
24 Paul Muldoon, interview by James S. F. Wilson, Paris Review 169 (2004): 78.
25 Paul Muldoon, interview by John Haffenden, Viewpoints (London: Faber, 1981), 133.
26 Muldoon, “Getting Round,” 120.
27 Muldoon, To Irealand, I, 74.
28 Beckett, 113.
29 Muldoon, “Getting Round,” 119.
30 Waters, 103.
31 Goodby, 161.
32 Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, 35.
33 Ibid., 36.
34 Ibid., 37.
35 Ibid., 37.
36 Quoted in Holdridge, The Poetry of Paul Muldoon, 176.
37 Ibid., 176.
38 Foster, 504.
39 Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 313–14.
40 Yeats, InteLex Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 6378.
41 Trench, 79.
42 Farquhar, 318.
43 Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, 36.