april warman
Six lines alone, on the shooting of a UDR corporal, demonstrate the unsettling
mixtureof tones through which the basic contrast between distressing subject-
matter and detached reaction is maintained in the poem:
You could, if you like, put your fist
in the exit wound
in his chest.
He slumps
in the spume of his own arterial blood
like an overturned paraffin lamp.The fundamentally affectless tone is built from rapid, mocking forays into various
registers. The first line borrows the affable ‘if you like’ for a punitively tasteless
revitalization of the stock idiom ‘You could’, used simply to suggest possibility. The
reader is discomfitingly implicated by the play on pronouns: the indeterminate ‘You
could’ (used in the sense of ‘one could’) shifts, through the literalizing emphasis
given to the invitation by ‘if you like’, towards an accusatory second person (the
content of the offer casting the reader in the unflattering role of a doubting Thomas).
‘[E]xit wound’ partakes of the semi-official jargon that Muldoon describes as the
‘kennings of the hourly news bulletin’ (which he ‘hoped to purge [him]self of’ in the
poem),^35 a use of language that works to appropriate and redefine events according
to particular interests. The reimagining of ‘arterial blood’ as the poetic ‘spume’
suggests, by contrast, an artistically inclined speaker, and a new appropriation of the
corporal’s death: to creative transformation. The paraffin-lamp simile, however, has
a blank neutrality which contrasts with the previous appropriative redescriptions,
revealing it to be as unsettling that such an event should be endowed with no
meaning, as for its meaning to be skewed. Such an abundance of versions of one
event draws attention to the manipulative power of language, rather than the
events it describes. The kaleidoscopic mode of ‘The More a Man Has’, switching
unaccountably between scenes, and between different possible perspectives on
scenes, drains language of its referentiality, emphasizing instead its creative potency,
as unconfined by the demands of objectivity. Whereas the remarkable brevity of
‘Mink’ works to provoke readers into finding a way to read it referentially, the
minute and extended attention to the details of linguistic usage in ‘The More a Man
Has’ may pre-empt this implicit appeal to factors beyond its own activities: its formal
preoccupations and play among registers provide plentiful material for speculation
in themselves. The potential for a dramatized, referential reading is present, but the
poem’s uncontainable variety means that no interpretation can be comprehensive,
can take into account all possible ways in which it might feasibly be read.
The reception of the poem illustrates this. Even before identification of its
meaning begins, its cumulative tonal blankness permits a variety of emphases, even
within a single reading. McDonald, commenting on another, similar section of
(^35) Muldoon, ‘Paul Muldoon writes...’,Poetry Book Society Bulletin, 118 (Autumn 1983), 1.