Tradition and critique in Paul Muldoon's “Madoc: A Mystery”

Abstract

Paul Muldoon's “Madoc: A Mystery” remains his longest poem and most thorough vision of an alternative history. This article argues that Muldoon's poem works to stage not only a visionary history of America but also, via the uneasy relations that develop between its two main characters (semi-fictionalised versions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey), a dramatisation of the conflict that obtains between competing modes of historical understanding. Muldoon's Coleridge and Southey represent stances that may be usefully regarded as parallel to positions advanced in the famous debate regarding interpretation between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, thinkers whose names appear in the poem itself. To read the poem in light of this connection between its fantastical transatlantic history and the history of critical theory allows a reading of Muldoon's treatment of both literary and political histories as secondary to the work's playful exploration of struggles between modes of historical interpretation.

Keywords::

• Paul Muldoon
• “Madoc: A Mystery”
• poetry
• Robert Lowell
• Hans-Georg Gadamer
• Jürgen Habermas

Notes

^1. I shall largely refrain from including the subtitle in mentions of the poem. Yet, as the following argument makes apparent, I take the mysteriousness of “Madoc: A Mystery” as central to its project.

^2. Publications relevant to the debate between Gadamer and Habermas began with Habermas's 1967 review of Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode in Philosophische Rundschau. Gadamer's response to Habermas's review is to be found in the essay “Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. Metakritische Erörterungen zu Warheit und Methode.” Habermas replied to the response to his review in an essay entitled “Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik.” These pieces were collected, with supplementary essays by a constellation of other thinkers and a final “Replik” by Gadamer, in Karl-Otto Apel'sHermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. The review is also incorporated as part of Habermas's Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, which is the source for most of the quotations in this article, although I have drawn on more than one published translation of the review, with selection between variants driven by the better illumination of Muldoon's poem and fidelity to my reading of the original.

^3. Instructive in this regard is Edna Longley's comparison of Muldoon's selections for the Faber Book of Irish Poetry with those by Thomas Kinsella for the New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. She declares Muldoon's historical perspective “more intrinsically aesthetic” than Kinsella's “essentialism”. A “creative eclecticism” allows Muldoon “at least” to take an editorial “bet on the music of what happened after Yeats” (Longley, Living Stream, 200–1). The ambivalence with regard to the past that Longley labels “eclecticism” is evident as well in the response Muldoon provides when Neil Corcoran asks whether poetry is “always itself subject to history”: “I don't know. I don't know” (Muldoon, “Paul Muldoon in Conversation with Neil Corcoran,” 176–7). In “Getting Round: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica”, he “insists on the freedom not to espouse directly any political position” and “recognizes that a poem must necessarily effect a change in the world”, but then retreats close to Auden's disavowal of poetry as utile when he “accepts, both reluctantly and with a sense of relief, that such a change can only ever be slight” (Muldoon, “Getting Round,” 127).

^4. Omaar Hena takes steps toward moving past the postcolonial poles of Ireland and America by which critics of Muldoon often navigate to effect “a transnational and cross-cultural reading of global imperialism” in relation to the text (“Playing Indian/Disintegrating Irishness,” 234 n. 6).

^5. What I am calling “the American poems” have apparently been a part of Muldoon's effort since his earliest days as a writer. He recalls a teacher's surprise at his use of “gasoline” rather than “petrol” in a poem written at the age of “about eleven or twelve” (“Art of Poetry,” 65). A broader readership discovered the transatlantic glance in numerous pieces in his first major collection, New Weather. “Lives of the Saints”, for example, employs the sixth-century immram concerning St Brendan (first recorded in the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis) as a vehicle for an inquiry regarding asceticism and travel.

^6. See especially Thomas C. Foster on uncertainty in “Madoc.”

^7. Extant documentary roots of the myth may be more definitely located only in Maredudd ap Rhys's fifteenth-century Cywydd i ddiolch am y rhwyd, although there is little evidence there that Madoc travelled across oceans. Notable among the lost earlier sources is the Flemish romance Madoc, by Willem. This thirteenth-century piece is mentioned by name in several contemporary and later sources, including the prologue to Willem's own Van den vos Reinaerde. Between that time and the later sixteenth century, the portrait of Madoc became entangled with other popular myths, including the Arthurian tales, reaching an early watermark around 1580 (Williams, Madoc, 49–51).

^8. Such notions found their way into print in Sir George Peckham's 1583 True Reporte (ibid., 31–67 passim).

^9. “Finding Welsh Indians became a minor industry” in the eighteenth century, but the last significant advocate was likely George Catlin, who found Welsh traces in the culture of the now-vanished Mandans (ibid., 84, 196). These spurious claims persist as the basis for some rather curious contemporary litigation and, as Charles L. O'Neill explains, monumentalisation: the Daughters of the American Revolution installed a plaque (in 1953, since removed) in Mobile, Alabama, in commemoration of Madoc's landing there in 1170 (“Paul Muldoon's ‘Madoc: A Mystery,’” 55).

^10. The key is treated in detail in Carle Bonafous-Murat's “La Clef et le secret.” While the key largely vanishes from my following consideration, this disappearance is allowed largely as a result of Bonafous-Murat's excellent commentary, which, in its treatment of the key as “critical” in the sense of both important to the poem and to interpretive exercise, calls for no supplement.

^11.Muldoon, Poems, 203–4 (subsequent quotations from this volume will be cited parenthetically in the running text).

^12. Translation mine. “[L]'absence d'origine veritable: dans Madoc, aucun événement ne vient réellement fonder la poursuite conséquente de fins” (Bonafous-Murat, “La Clef et le secret,” 81).

^13.Gadamer, Truth and Method, 384. “[M]uβ er […] zur Geltung kommen” (Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 362).

^14. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 442. “[D]er Sprachansicht als Weltansicht” (Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 419). Gadamer's primary source is Humboldt's posthumously published Über die Verscheidenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. The connection in Humboldt's work between nation and language is in some ways the implicit crux of the Habermasian view of Gadamer's hermeneutic project, a sensitive point that is touched upon by Muldoon in a rather different manner.

^15. Translation mine. “[U]n chef, dans Madoc, n'est rien d'autre qu'un nom qu'on vous donne, qu'on vous retire ou que l'on s'attribue” (Bonafous-Murat, “La Querelle nominaliste,” 246).

^16. Readers of Muldoon'sThe End of the Poem will recall his fondness for identifying the presence and value of poets' names (nomen est omen) and for tracing concealed etymological echoes. The linked growth of Coleridge's interpretive capacity and New World identity, Muldoon's poem may here suggest, might be found in the combination of “cole” and “ridge”. The OED indicates that the former offers its somewhat etymologically mysterious and certainly obsolete meaning of “[t]o cut off (e.g. the head)”, while the latter can signify “[t]he top, upper part, or crest of anything”. Readers might wonder whether Coleridge's prenominal reference to George III advanced through the medium of a blade indicates he has performed his own act of independence with a discursive royal guillotining, or whether he has merely lost his head. I would offer that both senses pertain.

^17. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 474–5.

[V]om Zur-Sprache-kommen des Sinns, auf eine universal-ontologische Struktur hin-weist, nämlich auf die Grundeverfassung von allem, auf das sich überhaupt Verstehen richten kann. Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache. Das hermeneutische Phänomen wirft hier gleichsam seine eigene Universalität auf die Seinsverfassung des Verstandenen zurück, indem es dieselbe in einem universellen Sinne als Sprache bestimmt und seinen eigenen Bezug auf das Seiende als Interpretation. (Gadamer, Warheit und Methode, 450)

^18.Hena, “Playing Indian/Disintegrating Irishness,” 256.

^19. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 102. “[J]a, ein heiliger Ernst”; “[n]ur dann erfüllt ja Spielen den Zweck, den es hat, wenn der Spielende im Spielen aufgeht” (Gadamer, Warheit und Methode, 97).

^20.Frost, Robert Frost Reader, 459. Quoted in Muldoon, End of the Poem, 60. Curiosity about other aspects of Muldoon's relation to Frost will be largely satisfied by a reading of Rachel Buxton's chapters on the two poets in Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry.

^21. Muldoon, End of the Poem, 170.

^22. In 1961's Imitations, Lowell writes of the loose translations for which he is known (in a passage which has been quoted by Muldoon): “I have tried to write alive English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America” (Lowell, Collected Poems, 195 qtd in Muldoon, End of the Poem, 194).

^23. Muldoon, End of the Poem, 185.

^24. Ibid., 181.

^25. Ibid., 201. Muldoon neither cites nor takes credit for the translation of Paz. The portion quoted comes from this sentence: “En un extreme el mundo se nos presenta como una colección de heterogeneidades; en el otro, como una superposición de textos, cada uno ligeramente distinto al anterior: traducciones de traducciones de traducciones” (Paz, Traducción, 9).

^26.Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 175.

^27. Ibid.

^28.Habermas, “Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method,” 360.

Es hat einen guten Sinn, Sprache als eine Art Metainstitution aufzufassen, von der alle gesellschaftlichen Institutionen abhängen; denn soziales Handeln konstituiert sich allein in umgangssprachlicher Kommunikation. Aber diese Metainstitution der Sprache als Tradition ist offenbar ihrerseits abhängig von gesellschaftlichen Prozessen, die nicht in normativen Zusammenhängen aufgehen. Sprache ist auch ein Medium von Herrschaft und sozialer Macht. Sie dient der Legitimation von Beziehungen organsierter Gewalt. Soweit die Legitimationem das Gewaltverhältnis, dessen Institutionalisierung sie ermöglichen, nicht aussprechen, soweit dieses in den Legitimationen sich nur ausdrückt, is Sprache auch ideologisch. Dabei handelt es sich nicht um Täuschungen in einer Sprache, sondern um Täuschung mit Sprache als solcher. (Habermas, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, 287)

^29.Denman, “‘O Mould-Breaker,’” 26.

^30.Cosgrove, “Paul Muldoon's Explorer Myth,” 78.

^31.Habermas, Logic of the Social Sciences, 168.

Gadamer sieht die fortlebenden Traditionen und die hermeneutishe Forschung zu einem einzigen Punkt verschmolzen. Dem steht die Einsicht entgegen, daβ die reflektierte Aneignung der Tradition die naturwüchsige Substanz der Überlieferung bricht und die Stellung der Subjekte in ihr verändert […] Gadamer verkennt die Kraft der Reflexion, die sich im Verstehen entfaltet. Sie ist hier nicht länger vom Schein einer Absolutheit, die durch Selbstbegründing eingelöst werden müβte, geblendet und macht sich vom Boden des Kontingenten, auf dem sie sich vorfindet, nicht los. Aber indem sie die Genesis der Überlieferung, aus der die Reflexion hervorgeht und auf die sie sich zurückbeugt, durchschaut, wird die Dogmatik der Lebens-praxis erschüttert. (Habermas, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, 282–3)

^32. The quotation is from Southey'sThalaba the Destroyer (6.252–3). Muldoon does not preserve Southey's line break.

^33.Heaney, Opened Ground, 82.

^34.Michael O'Neill, All-sustaining Air, 154.

^35.McCracken, “‘Two Streams Flowing Together,’” 70. The point is made in a slightly more specific fashion by Elmer Kennedy-Andrews: “Muldoon reveals homecoming, not as a return to or recovery of a source or centre, but as a combination of here and there, self and other” (“Heaney and Muldoon,” 123).

^36. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 390. “So ist schriftlichen Texten gegenüber die eigentliche hermeneutische Aufgabe gestellt. Schriftlichkeit ist Selbstentfremdung. Ihre Überwindung, das Lesen des Textes, ist also die höchste Aufgabe des Verstehens” (Gadamer, Warheit und Methode, 368).

^37.Peterfy, “Names in Madoc,” 93.

^38.Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 298.

^39. Ibid., 299–300.