unavowed engagement features inWhyBrownlee LeftandQuoofsuggests a kind of damage in the poems’
narrators: to respond to brutality so carelessly, even callously, implies a mind
dehumanized by its situation. The speaker comes to seem not just self-protectively
remote from his situation, but somewhat crazed by the circumstances which require
such self-protection. Muldoon can be read as commenting on Ulster’s situation
through his dramatized representations of the damaging effects on the psyche
of living in a time and place of constantly threatened violence, and constantly
demanded moral (which is often twisted towards political) positioning.
‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’,^34 which endsQuoof,isinmany
ways similar to ‘Mink’, but its far greater length (forty-nine fourteen-line stanzas)
gives its bizarre manœuvres a greater range of possible meaning. It is open to being
read dramatically, its sinister, fragmentary narrative suggesting a damaged, even
schizoid narrator; but whereas the provocative brevity of ‘Mink’ virtually ensures
such a reading, challenging readers to neutralize its conspicuous incompleteness
through reference to the extra-textual notion of a dramatized subjectivity, the
extent of ‘The More a Man Has’ provides such an abundance of material that an
appeal to extra-textual factors no longer seems absolutely necessary, or necessarily
to account entirely for the poem.
The similarities to ‘Mink’ lie in the eerily outlandish approach to violence
of ‘The More a Man Has’, and its favouring of imaginative over rational (and,
therefore, moral) logic. Its disjunctive story (loosely, of the acts and reflections
of a turncoat terrorist on the run) veers from scenario to scenario not through
narrative consequence, but through dream logic, ties of equivalence, and arbitrary
connection, rather than rational continuity.
The foregrounding in ‘Mink’ of the material properties of language at the
expense of logical coherence (the pre-eminence given to Nairac/anorak) reappears
throughout the longer poem: for example, ‘skinheads’ inappropriately form a
‘quorum’, largely, it seems, for the sake of the rhyme with ‘aquarium’. The
imaginative liberty that coolly asserts the relevance of the mink to Nairac appears,
for example, when Gallogly, the amorphous protagonist, is transported from the
Belfast area to New York via the assertion that he ‘has only to part the veil|of
its stomach wall|to get right under the skin...||of the horse inGuernica’. But
the significant difference between the two poems lies in the greater length, and
thus variety, of ‘The More a Man Has’. The single juxtaposition in ‘Mink’ of
brutal subject-matter with bizarre response is here repeated through a number
of different registers and scenarios over the course of the poem—indeed, the
affectlessness in the longer poem is partly the product of such variety, as the very
abundance of proffered responses to violence betrays them all as predetermined
and parodic.
(^34) Muldoon, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’, ibid. 127–47.